Europe is moving decisively away from U.S. tech giants toward open-source alternatives, driven by concerns over digital sovereignty and reliability of American companies[1]. At the 2025 OpenInfra Summit Europe, industry leaders emphasized that this shift isn’t about isolation but resilience.
“What we’re really looking for is resilience. What we want for our countries, for our companies, for ourselves, is resilience in the face of unforeseen events in a fast-changing world. Open source allows us to be sovereign without being isolated,” said OpenInfra Foundation general manager Thierry Carrez[1:1].
This transition is already happening. The German state Schleswig-Holstein has replaced Microsoft Exchange and Outlook with open-source email solutions. Similar moves have been made by the Austrian military, Danish government organizations, and the French city of Lyon[1:2].
European companies are stepping up to fill the gap with open-source alternatives, including:
- Deutsche Telekom’s Open Telekom Cloud
- OVHcloud’s sovereign cloud services
- STACKIT and VanillaCore’s European-based offerings[1:3]
The movement gained additional momentum when the European Commission appointed its first executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security, and democracy in 2024[1:4].
Oh people are donating money to them, and there are regular donation drives on other instances which include funds going to Lemmy development.
My main focus is that I have the choice to donate to them, and that there’s not some third party I’ve spent money on donating to them, hence my Framework mention. I can choose wether or not to donate to Lemmy devs, or an instance that supports them. But, if I buy/support something, especially something OSS or in the spirit of small tech, and then they turn around and donate the profits to Nazis, I’m gonna be sad and stay away from the project after that. I couldn’t make the choice of where my money goes after they got it, so I have to place my trust in them to not fund shit I hate.
It’s like how people are dumping Spotify because they’re investing in drones for Israel.
I’m just trying to minimize my dependency and connection to bigots as much as I can, service by service, step by step.