Europe‘s €2 Trillion Budget Risks Digital Dependence by Neglecting Open Source
The European Union’s recently proposed €2 trillion budget, channeled through tools like the European Competitiveness Fund, faces criticism for a important oversight: a lack of dedicated investment in open source technology. This omission, argues Daniel Stenberg, co-founder of cURL and president of the European Open Source Academy, risks Europe’s digital sovereignty, competitiveness, and security.
Stenberg points to the success of initiatives like the German Sovereign Tech fund, which actively supports global open source collaboration, as a model for the EU.Without comparable investment, Europe faces potential dependence on foreign technologies and increased vulnerability to external threats. Open source, he contends, empowers Europe to build its own secure and transparent tech infrastructure, fostering greater control over its digital future.
This isn’t about isolationism, Stenberg clarifies, but about building resilience and autonomy in a global context. A robust open source ecosystem offers a crucial option to the dominant technology models of the United States – characterized by platform monopolies – and China – defined by state-directed, centralized control and surveillance. Europe’s approach, emphasizing openness, interoperability, and public value, requires sustained investment in the global open source projects it relies upon.
The proposed European Competitiveness Fund, intended to drive innovation and digitalization across the continent, currently fails to prioritize open source, even within its digitalization initiatives. This is a “glaring but reversible oversight,” according to Stenberg, and a short-sighted decision that could undermine Europe’s digital transformation in an increasingly complex geopolitical landscape.
He urges EU leaders to rectify this by explicitly incorporating open source into the fund’s digitalization focus within the new seven-year budget. Alongside dedicated funding for open source, the creation of an EU Sovereign tech Fund would be “critical in delivering on their goals.”
This opinion piece is based on the views of Daniel Stenberg, co-founder and lead developer of cURL, and president of the European Open Source Academy.
