On July 16, the European Commission A proposed € 2Tn seven -year budget – the largest in the history of the EU – to promote autonomy, competitiveness and resilience. However, the starting plan deals with cyber security, innovation and other important digital columns, but leaves a crucial component: open source.
Open -Source software – built and maintained by communities and not alone and not alone and free of charge – is the basis for today’s digital infrastructure. Since the nineties, it has been in general in the digital infrastructure on which the institutions of European industry and the public sector are dependent on and creates enormous dependencies on open source applications and libraries.
From commercial devices and services to government systems and research projects, Open Source participates on the Internet and countless platforms that we rely on every day. Open source offers transparency, security and flexibility with which proprietary software cannot match. With the investment in open source, Europe can support small companies, universities and public institutions and give them tools to compete with global tech giants.
Despite this meaning, the budget proposal does not contain any specific financing for open source. This is blatant in the face of prominent open source in the latest legal regulations such as the Cyber Resilience ActThe You have a documentand the proposed Cloud and AI development law. The omission is alarming when Europe urges to increase digital sovereignty, strengthen cybersecurity and increase competitiveness.
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If Europe wants to remain competitive and self -sufficient in the digital world, it has to support open source strategically and efficiently. Public investments have to marshal resources that the private sector, the philanthropy, the volunteers and the market alone cannot provide.
The case for an EU sovereign tech fund
Innovation financing based on the EU was the basis for the modest open source investment of the EU. As a result, the focus on scaling these technologies has shifted into the digital core infrastructure.
The maintenance financing offers something different and has already been tested. In A Youngest milestoneThe Open Technologies Think Tank Openforum Europe called for a committed “EU Souverign Tech Fund” to support European technology projects that are essential for digital sovereignty – with open source in the heart. This builds on the German sovereign -tech fundwhat the global open source cooperation supported.
Such a fund would be welcome. Without investing in open source, Europe risks the dependence on foreign technologies, susceptibility to external threats and minimal competitiveness in global markets. Open Source enables Europe to develop its own technical infrastructure and to offer more control, transparency and security.
This is not an isolationist version of digital sovereignty. It is an investment in autonomy and resistance to digital infrastructure worldwide. It has long-term advantages for Europe, but also supports other challengers for dominant technology visions that are offered by the United States on platform monopolies and market-oriented control of the digital core infrastructure and china and by state-oriented, centralized models of monitoring and the strict surveillance of the government.
In contrast, the open source approach of Europe offers a pluralistic and collaborative alternative that emphasizes transparency, interoperability and public value, and investing in the global open source ecosystem, on which it depends, is in harmony with these values.
A missed opportunity in the European Competitity Fund
That suggested European competitiveness fund – One of the most important financial instruments of the EU as part of its new budget – leaves Open Source neither at a high level nor in detailed measures such as digitization. This is a serious omission. Since the fund is supposed to support innovation and digitization all over Europe, Open Source is a blatant but reversible supervision.
Every lack of open source financing is viewed as short-sighted and undermined digital transformation in Europe in an increasingly multipolar and overcrowded geopolitical landscape. EU managers should prioritize open source in their new seven-year budget by expressly becoming part of the digitization focus of the European Competitus Fund. The creation of an EU sovereign Tech Fund as well as other intended investments in open source is crucial for achieving your goals.
This is an opinion of Daniel StenbergThe co -founder and senior developer of LureA command line tool for retrieving or sending data, including files, with the URL syntax. Daniel is also president of the European open source academy.
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