It’s great to see another European government, this time Belgium, using the Matrix open standard as the foundation for digitally sovereign communications. Matrix enables digital sovereignty through decentralisation, self-hosting and interoperability. As a result, it gives governments full control over their data and operations. 

By choosing Matrix, Belgium ensures it can work with any Matrix-based provider, switch vendors if needed, and avoid the long-term lock-in that plagues traditional communication platforms. Even European communications vendors, such as Wire or Threema, are built around vendor dependency. And yet vendor lock-in is the very opposite of digital sovereignty.

Whereas with Matrix, a government can create its Matrix-based communications solution solely in-house by building on FOSS components. Belgium is doing exactly that, which is testimony to just how much independence a government has over its Matrix-based communications.

With great sovereignty comes great responsibility

When a government standardises on Matrix, it is building critical communications infrastructure on open source software. It’s therefore imperative that the same government does its part to ensure the open source project on which it relies is healthy and sustainable. The open source project doesn’t sustain itself automatically. It relies on funding, active participation and collaboration. 

A government that spends millions on in-house development forking an open source project is far from an open source champion. Nor is it favourable for tax-payers or the local industry, as much of that development is reinventing what already exists in the commercialised product. Three or four years down the line, a government is left with a bespoke stack that’s hugely expensive to maintain and several steps removed from the ‘digital commons’ that was so appealing in the first place.

Working with the commercial upstream vendor is far more cost effective than building from FOSS components, particularly over the medium and long term.

Mindful procurement

With European governments scrambling to free themselves from vendor-locked systems, the exuberant embrace of open source software can see some parts of government struggle to maintain pace. Senior officials from a non-technical background, and public sector procurement processes, are often fairly unfamiliar with open source software. Fuelled by the strategic imperative of technological independence, procurement teams and others can adopt a seemingly independent ‘vendorless’ approach without fully understanding the implications - that they are sawing off the very branch they are sitting on by not ensuring the health of the underlying open source project, and thus the code they rely on.

It’s quite an irony that some governments who want to free themselves from proprietary platforms are simultaneously starving the upstream vendors that develop and maintain the open source alternative on which they intend to rely - incentivising it to become more and more closed source to survive - and preventing it from keeping up with the proprietary competition.

Organisations like the Open Source Business Alliance have already published guidance to help governments appreciate the complexity of responsibly procuring open source software - ensuring that upstream vendors who maintain the overall project are suitably financed to ensure the underlying software is developed and maintained.

Learning from others

In Germany ZenDiS - which is building the digitally sovereign openDesk office productivity suite - ensures that upstream projects are directly involved and properly funded via subscriptions to the vendors’ commercial offerings; paying for what they use, to keep the overall open source healthy. Projects like BwMessenger and BundesMessenger, both developed by BWI GmbH, also demonstrate strong collaboration with the Matrix ecosystem.

Sweden’s SAFOS initiative, the European Commission’s Element deployment, the Dutch Ministry of Defence and many others all show a similar pattern; governments embracing open source while actively supporting the vendors and communities behind it.

Working with upstream vendors doesn’t just support the overall open source project. Vendors provide more experience of the technology, enterprise-grade scalability and high availability, Long Term Support distributions, well-maintained integrations, and crucial features such as identity management, group-synchronised access control and audit capability. There is a significant difference between free-of-charge software for community use and software that’s designed for a nationwide government deployment. That’s precisely where an upstream vendor adds demonstrable value, and lower total cost of ownership. And it’s that revenue that helps, in turn, fund the overall open source project.

The hybrid ideal

As one of our European government customers said to us recently: “It’s not about FOSS vs paying for subscriptions. It’s not buy vs build. It should be a hybrid approach that works for all parties.”

Sovereignty is about choice, and by adopting open standards like Matrix governments will preserve sovereignty and interoperability. Open standards give governments an ecosystem of vendors to choose from. And that is far more sovereign than locking an organisation into a multi-million a year team to maintain an in-house fork. Besides, working with commercial vendors provides the support, stability and assurance that the upstream project needs to improve and compete with proprietary incumbents.

Through ready-to-use products, operational expertise and accountability, a vendor relieves a government of considerable complexity, cost and risk. With the combination of open source and professional software, a government ensures complete digital sovereignty, and can yet still customise its solution to suit its exact requirements; a level of bespoke customisation that a software vendor typically wouldn't deliver.

Solutions like Element’s enterprise offerings provide exactly that balance; cost-effective, secure and professionally maintained - and yet ensuring the openness and flexibility that guards against vendor lock-in.

The strategic importance of digital sovereignty and the interoperability provided by an open standard revolves around a government having complete control of its data and visibility on the technology stack used. Requirements of that magnitude deserve investment, for both the solution itself and the wider open source project that is there to benefit everyone.