The EU Open Source Strategy is one of the measures of the Tech Sovereignty Package, published by the European Commission with the ambition to strengthen Europe’s digital autonomy and resilience. The Strategy recognises open source as a strategic enabler for European competitiveness, technological sovereignty, innovation and cybersecurity. Building on 1600+ contributions to the call for evidence, the Strategy considers open source crucial for building EU alternatives and proposes four objectives targeting the EU open source ecosystems, public administrations, the link with digital standards and international outreach. Special attention is placed on the industrial sector, where EU open source companies struggle to access capital for scaling up solutions and compete in public procurement.
The talk will provide an overview of the EU Open Source Strategy, highlighting its expected outcomes and the actions and instruments required to achieve them, including: facilitating the uptake of EU sovereign solutions, fostering open source in industry and scaling up startups, supporting open source stewardship, supporting maintenance and sustainability of open source projects, improving open source software skills, incorporating open source in public procurement, and investing in empowering open source communities and governance.
The talk will present details of ongoing actions to implement the Strategy, particularly the conceptualisation of a voluntary self assessment framework for open source projects, which will be co created with open source communities and will evaluate, among others, quality aspects from a sovereignty perspective, e.g. maturity, popularity, transparency of governance, licensing, alignment to relevant EU policies, use of standards and European presence.