There is a thrilling and mesmerising corner of the internet, that I just can’t keep my filthy little peepers away from. May I introduce you to the indelible, infatuating, intoxicating Wikipedia page – ‘Adoption of free and open-source software by public institutions’. Bonjour mon amore.
Try to contain yourself.
This page is a collection of mostly European governmental bodies who are embracing open source software – and maybe more importantly – upsetting the US big tech hegemony, and building what you will no doubt be hearing more and more about. Digital Sovereignty.
I am a free and open source (FOSS) zealot, I think it represents the closest version to the democratised tech utopia we were promised in the early days of the internet. So you can treat my excitement with some scepticism. But you can’t ignore reality – and those big tech firms have really been rubbing that reality into Europe’s face.
For consumers who go and buy food to feed their families, pay for work on their car, buy flights, train tickets, bus tickets all rely on American tech. In fact – try to think of an act of consumption that doesn’t involve Visa or Mastercard. Two American companies. A huge chunk of the consumer financial infrastructure is controlled by two American companies. You buy a currywurst in Germany – for some insane reason we have decided to let that transaction be dependent on financial corporations in America.
Then think about enterprise. You need a spreadsheet? Text document? Cloud infrastructure? Are you picking between Microsoft, Google or Amazon? Which of your all American options is the operational capacity of your company dependant on? Or your local hospital? Or your local primary school?
We don’t even have to think about the US as a hostile actor to be shown why this dependence on foreign controlled infrastructure might be a problem. In fact, they keep showing us. In 2025 a Microsoft outage took out 365 and caused chaos at Heathrow Airport and the Royal Bank of Scotland to name just two. Amazon Web Services keeps breaking the internet. Seriously. In late 2025 (another) AWS outage took out streaming platforms, banking, office apps – you probably remember it because it took down a meaningful chunk of the internet, and it keeps happening. Bahrain’s cloud data zone has been down since March – because of a war – but still! March! And that brings up another thing…
We don’t have to think of the US as a hostile actor – but really we easily could. Trade wars, hot wars, a flitting, absurd foreign policy. I’m not a foreign policy person so I will keep my observations limited to the extremely obvious – America is acting without care or regard to the degree that the world is reordering itself in response. Even sticking to just the actions of tech companies – Open AI attacked (amongst many, many entities) the Australian Government. I will not entertain any talks of AI going rogue, or superintelligence or any other embarrassing buzz words that are meant to disentangle Open AI from the actions of its own product doing what they made it to do. The media hype around these incidences are – to borrow an apt phrase from younger generations: ‘cringe’.
Open AI developed a piece of software, then they pumped probably millions of dollars worth of computational power into it, and the software did what it was programmed to do. That Open AI (and all of these companies) were not sufficiently competent to isolate sandboxes is the terrifying part. Anything about ‘rogue AI’ is marketing spiel and an attempt to distract from the fact that many organisations should be criminally liable for these attacks. If I leave my garden gate open, and my dog escapes, my dog did not go rogue – I am just an incompetent, negligent idiot.
OK…I’ve returned from my rage induced fugue state…and my point remains! A consolidation of vital infrastructure is bad, even if it’s not consolidated with a hostile actor. And now the world is facing the US’s mask off moment and is edging towards the door – laughing nervously like the Veep meme.
We shouldn’t ignore that it was bad we let the situation develop this far. We could have been supporting native digital infrastructure, and growing businesses domestically, giving us more control and a more prosperous economy. But maybe governments are doing something about it now.
As I confessed earlier. I believe in the spirit of FOSS software (for the most part). Wider, more mainstream adoption will bring innovation and attention – leading to an even more vibrant and diverse ecosystem of freely available and transparently developed software that actually delivers on the promise of the early internet. Of democratisation of access and production, and a richer more purposeful digital experience for everyone that wants it. Or at least I hope so.