Software

Open source gains urgency as Europe reassesses reliance on US tech

OPEN SOURCE POLICY SUMMIT 2026 European tech leaders are waking up to the risk of the US simply turning off their IT services.

The Register FOSS desk attended the 2026 Open Source Policy Summit in Brussels last week. The tone of the event was distinctly different to that of the same event three years ago. We encountered new notes of determination, expressed forcefully by Finnish MEP Aura Salla:

In case some listeners didn't see the problem with that:

The Reg has quoted Salla before. She has been making this point for a while, with increasing directness, but just over a year into Donald Trump's second term as president of the United States, it continues to grow in importance.

As we covered in October last year, one of the leaders in this effort is the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, which switched away from Microsoft Exchange Server and Outlook to Open-Xchange and Mozilla Thunderbird. The head of Schleswig's Chancellery and Minister for Digital Transformation, Dirk Schrödter, gave a keynote saying: "We are free; now everyone must follow."

He noted that although it had saved the state government money, it wasn't without cost. The process had required significant expenditure, but that was good for European businesses that had helped the state in its transition. We liked his summary of the status quo:

In a later panel on "Open Source and Economic Security," he noted that digitization in Germany can be difficult, partly due to its state-level IT management and strategy. He recommended a pragmatic approach:

So, for now, Schleswig is still running Windows, but has replaced Microsoft Office with LibreOffice on "nearly 100 percent" of machines. It's using Thunderbird for email, calendars, and contacts, talking to Open-Xchange on the back end, alongside the Matrix-based Element for chat and Nextcloud for collaboration.

Other speakers on the same panel made the point that FOSS doesn't mean free of charge, but spending money with European companies means benefits to European economies – keeping more of the EU's vast public spending inside the EU. As Leontina Sandu put it: "We spend 0.4 percent of EU money on software licenses. It's a lot – public sector spending is half of the EU's GDP." Blogger Markus Sandelin estimates that the EU spends over €200 million a year just on Microsoft 365 licenses.

Companies working on open source in Europe, of course, stand to profit significantly from this. Thales's Daniel Glazman put it more bluntly: "Open source will succeed when we forget the word 'cost.'" IBM's Jochen Friedrich shared a pithy one-line summary of how Europe needs to transform its economies away from old heavy industries and into open source:

The Eclipse Foundation's Mike Milinkovich echoed Salla's earlier point that Microsoft effectively had a kill switch over Office 365, but pointed out that the company has more such controls: it also owns GitHub. As he put it, "more or less every company and organization in Europe pulls from GitHub, because it uses JavaScript and Maven, so this applies to them too."

Portuguese professor Mario Campolargo flipped the equation around. Any part of the EU paying for software should be sharing the code it's paying for:

Of course, this isn't just a European problem. It applies just as much to the nearly 200 countries of the United Nations. A short item, oddly described as an "intervention," talked about the upcoming UN Open Source Week 2026 and the UN Open Source Principles – including that the city of Barcelona just adopted them.

To most people working with FOSS, they probably seem simple and reasonable, but having the UN on board adds considerable clout, and spelling them out is the sort of thing that reassures technophobic politicians:

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