Open source powers Europe’s digital economy, contributing €65–95B annually to GDP. From energy (Baltic RCC) to cloud (NUBO), finance (Deutsche Bank), and mobility (EV charging), real-world use cases show how it boosts resilience, innovation, and sovereignty. By Paula Grzegorzewska.
More detailed feedback is provided in the accompanying document, while the key points are summarised as follows:
- Open source is a basis of successful business ventures and is widely used across industries, with most modern software built on open source components, whether proprietary or not. It is a diverse ecosystem spanning multiple governance, sustainability, and commercial models, and the Linux Foundation welcomes the Call for Evidences acknowledgment of this reality and its pursuit of pragmatic, evidence-based approaches to strengthen EU competitiveness and technological autonomy.
- Europe should build on and influence the global open source commons rather than pursue isolated notions of European Open Source, as existing global projects already underpin cloud, AI, and emerging digital infrastructure. Strategic upstream investment and participation in these commons - alongside scaling local commercial open source companies through funding instruments, market-access initiatives, and updated procurement practices - offers the most realistic path to technological sovereignty, innovation, and talent retention.
- Critical open source infrastructure should be hosted under neutral governance to ensure balanced decision-making, mitigate single-vendor and lock-in risks, and foster rapid de facto standardisation.
Europe’s commercial open source scale-up pipeline remains underdeveloped, making it difficult to turn strong open source projects into globally competitive product and services companies, as well as retain talented European founders, especially when compared to the US. Good read!
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