Europe Already Has the Cards and Open Source Is the Ace

Recently, former Commissioner Thierry Breton reflected on the state of the digital sovereignty debate in Europe. He noted that the story most commonly told about Europe and digital technology is one of strategic absence. No cloud platform at scale. No consumer technology giant. The narrative has been repeated so consistently that it has acquired the quality of received wisdom, shaping how European policymakers frame their ambitions and, at times, how they limit them. At its core, this debate is not just about capability, but about digital sovereignty and Europe’s ability to break free from foreign influences in the systems it depends on.

I agree that the narrative is incomplete. Europe did not fail to compete in the first phase of the digital economy. It competed on different terms, building regulatory architecture, industrial infrastructure and foundational technological capabilities rather than consumer platforms built on personal data. 

That approach has positioned Europe considerably better for the infrastructure phase of digital that is now arriving: sovereign cloud, industrial AI and the critical software systems on which both depend. If approached correctly, this moment represents an opportunity for building a future-proof digital sovereignty strategy grounded in resilience and control rather than dependency.

Within that infrastructure layer, Europe holds an asset that policy discussions consistently underestimate: a mature, capable and commercially-proven open source software ecosystem. It is, in many ways, open by design, sovereign by choice.

The ecosystem is real and operating

Europe produces more open source developers per capita than either the United States or China. It is home to SUSE, Europe’s largest open source company, which has spent 33 years building and maintaining the foundational software layer on which European governments, financial institutions, energy utilities and healthcare systems operate. 

Across the stack, from cloud infrastructure and operating systems to AI platforms and security tooling, there is a generation of European open source companies that are not prototypes or research initiatives but operating businesses delivering sovereign, production-grade technology to public administrations today.

The problem is not that these assets are absent. It is that procurement, public and private, has not been organised to deploy them at scale. And scale at speed is what open source is best at. Without that shift, many organisations remain open, but not sovereign, relying on architectures that expose them to external control despite surface-level flexibility.

The evidence from France

We know with some precision what happens when procurement policy changes to favour open source, because France ran the experiment. In 2012, Circulaire 5608 required government agencies to prefer open source software over proprietary alternatives. A Harvard Business School study by Frank Nagle measured the effects: an increase of nearly 600,000 open source contributions per year from France: value that would have cost paid developers roughly $20 million annually to replicate. The spillover effects on national competitiveness were substantial: a 9% to 18% yearly increase in IT-related startups, a 6.6% to 14% yearly increase in IT employment, and a measurable increase in the adoption of open source across French companies more broadly.

These outcomes were not the stated goal of the policy, rather, the directive’s intent was cost reduction. These competitiveness effects were spillovers from the demand signal, applied consistently, that reshaped market incentives across the French technology sector, which led to compounding national competitiveness effects over time while strengthening national digital resilience.

The demand-pull problem

That evidence clarifies what has been missing from Europe’s broader open source strategy. The investment case has been made. The economic returns have been documented. The Commission’s own 2021 study found that EU companies’ roughly €1 billion annual investment in open source generated between €65 and €95 billion in economic impact. And yet the public sector, the largest single technology buyer in Europe, continues to default to proprietary procurement, not because open source alternatives are absent but because procurement frameworks were built around proprietary software logic and the default has never been formally revised.

This is a demand-pull problem. In order to jump-start the missing pieces of the stack to production-readiness, institutional buyers must be willing to adopt them at an early stage. SUSE has scale already, but we are everywhere part of large ecosystems of partners. The talent, the code and the commercial models exist. What the European market lacks is the demand signal that makes scaling economically rational.

An Open Source First requirement in the EU Cloud and AI Development Act would provide that signal, both to the builders and the capital markets. At the very least, a requirement that public administrations assess open source alternatives before renewing proprietary contracts, that those assessments are documented and auditable, and that the burden of justification falls on the proprietary choice rather than the open source one, would change procurement behaviour across the European market at a scale no subsidy programme can match. Critically, organisations must also assess their real risk exposure when making these decisions, rather than defaulting to legacy vendors.

The Ace in Europe’s hand

Europe is not in the position of needing to create a digital sovereignty capability from nothing. The capability exists. Open source is not the only card Europe holds in this hand. But it is the Ace. It is the infrastructure layer that determines whether digital sovereignty is operationally real or merely declaratory. The question for CAIDA is whether Europe will finally organise to play it.

The power of the purchase order 

Recognising open source as a strategic asset is a necessary step, then comes the implementation. How do IT leaders and procurement teams change their buying habits to reflect this new reality?