Europe's New Tech Strategy Puts Open Source Front and Centre

The European Commission has just released a major strategy on technological sovereignty, and it’s placing open source software squarely in the spotlight. The message is clear: open source is key to true digital independence.

Right now, Europe depends on non-EU tech providers for over 80% of critical digital infrastructure, and that’s a problem. The EU’s new approach to open digital ecosystems aims to change that by backing open source solutions across the board. Open source code is transparent and auditable, and being able to see what is running provides better security and real control. More practically, it also breaks the lock-in that proprietary systems create.

Their strategy focuses on a few core tenets, which we fully support: building functional alternatives to non-EU platforms, creating more space for open source communities to thrive, supporting the developers doing this work, and pushing for open standards that give people and institutions control over their own digital destiny.

We’re particularly delighted to see the Commission include a call to “strengthen the open source social media space by supporting open and decentralised social media solutions and platforms. The Commission currently runs a Mastodon instance, which hosts the Commission’s presence and plans to extend the users basis to EU institutions." In case you didn’t know, the European Commission is a customer of our Managed Hosting offering: ec.social-network.europa.eu.

For Mastodon and projects like us, this is validation that what we’ve been building matters at a policy level. The EU is reinforcing that the best way to get genuine independence is through decentralised, transparent, community-driven technology. We’ve known this for a long time, but we’re excited to see the movement grow. To be explicit: tech sovereignty and openness aren’t opposed, they reinforce each other.

We look forward to seeing the positive outcomes of this work, and continuing to be part of the conversation as Europe continues to embrace open, fair, and collaborative development.