In many aspects, the European Commission’s OS Strategy is an Open Source advocate’s wet dream. It finally recognizes our work of the past decades as the fundament for a sovereign Europe, and Open Source as a major strategic lever to achieve digital sovereignty.
Still, both CADA and the OS strategy leave a lot to be desired.
So there is a lot to do for the Open Source ecosystem in the next months, while the Package makes its way through the European institutions. We need to up our game massively when it comes to lobbyism. We need to move from amateur league to major league.
But it’s not only about lobbyism.
With the Tech Package, the European Commission is asking for the solutions required to break away from dependencies on authoritarian countries.
Now we have to live up to the promise of Open Source. But let’s get this straight: Most of our solutions are not mature. And besides the lack of maturity, our offerings lack key parts required to build a sovereign stack, namely powerful AI models, and mobile operating systems.
Taking all of this into account, my second plea is to start mapping out concretely what needs to be done from our side to become able to deliver.
No single company can manage this on their own. We need to talk about consortia, mergers, interoperability and a joint action plan.
Funding lobbyists means that we have 11 players on the lawn, not only one.
Being able to deliver means we have a ball that actually flies – and scores.