The European Commission has launched a fresh consultation into open source, setting out its ambitions for Europe’s developer communities to go beyond propping up US tech giants’ platforms.
In a “Call for Evidence” published this week, Brussels says the EU’s reliance on non-European technology suppliers (read: US tech giants) has become a strategic liability, limiting choice, weakening competitiveness, and creating supply chain risks across everything from cloud services to critical infrastructure. The consultation, which will run from January 6 to February 3, is an early move toward a formal strategy on “European Open Digital Ecosystems,” which would treat open source as core infrastructure rather than a nice-to-have.
According to the Commission, dependence on foreign vendors makes it harder for Europe to control its digital stack, potentially opening the door to security and resilience issues in sensitive sectors. Open source offers a way out of that bind by underpinning “a diverse portfolio of high-quality and secure digital solutions” that can act as viable alternatives to proprietary platforms, the EC said.
Man, this is a must! EU media/entertainment is just too dominated by The USA products!
They need to stick the landing. America will threaten and bully. I’ve also heard some are afraid of the cost and complexity of doing something like this. Hopefully they do realize the necessity of it and stay the course despite all of that.
And in 10 years they’ll agree to a small website that suggests that maybe Europe might want to open a place to store source code that’s European hosted… In another five years.
You are not wrong. Methinks a lot of Europe’s lack of digital infrastructure is related to the mountains of red tape every person and company in the EU has to face. It’s really discouraging.
The reason for a lack of development is basically entirely economics. expensive to make, and difficult to make money on since the established players can already operate for cheap and even economically bully new players
Feel like they have been talking about this forever, maybe Trump will finally be the push they need.
This is absolutely massive for the FOSS community. A sovereign nation has resources that dwarf anything that the FOSS community has ever had access to.
Now, they just need to repeal the anti-circumvention laws. That’ll cut the US tech sector deeply by allowing us to use the products that we pay for in the ways that we want.
This is tinkering around the edges. Just fine Twitter millions a day for child sexual imagery. End of story. What are they fucking about for? Seriously, why the delay?
Millions. Millions a day. That will get their attention. Lord knows the actual law hasn’t.
Many battles. One fight.
That sounds more like tinkering around the edges to me. Whipping companies like Twitter into behaving, while it absolutely needs to happen, won’t fundamentally change anything about the dependency of Europe to those companies and the pressure the US can exert through that dependency.
