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.
They aren’t even shying away from the quiet part, huh? So the EU finances commercial, EU-based FOSS vendors, which have to comply with EU regulations, in order to be allowed to conduct business. These vendors will in turn pressure “as is” software to comply with regulations inapplicable to them, as they threaten to migrate to alternatives which are compliant. We’ve already seen this with KDE implementing pretentious environmentalist propaganda in their power settings. Because my god, the world would come the a screeching hold when PCs aren’t sleeping enough…