columnists
Trump's unpredictability is pushing governments and businesses toward open source while Britain remains glued to US tech
OPINION Sick of relying on proprietary programs and American software giants and hyperclouds? Join the digital sovereignty revolution.It really is the smart thing to do. Honestly, with Donald Trump calling the shots, who knows what he'll do next? Demand that American companies stop providing services to European companies unless Denmark surrenders Greenland? Order Microsoft to disable Windows 11 unless the International Criminal Court is dismantled? Force Anthropic to lock down Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for international users? Oh, wait. They already did the last one.Wake up, sheeple! You can't trust American tech, and I speak as a US citizen whose ancestors first arrived in the States in the 1770s. Finnish MEP Aura Salla put it well at February's Open Source Policy Summit: "The EU runs on Microsoft. The US could turn us off inside one hour."
The same is true for the UK and pretty much every country in the world. If that doesn't scare you, it should.
Some people get it. When I was at the United Nations Open Source Week recently, it wasn't just European Union countries beating the drum for digital sovereignty. Speakers from Tanzania, Vietnam, Morocco, and elsewhere argued for greater control over their technology futures.Many of them aren't just talking a good game. They are actually doing something now. Finally!For example, the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is dumping Microsoft SharePoint for Nextcloud and OpenProject. Bavaria is also moving toward digital sovereignty. Neither state is jumping from Windows to desktop Linux yet, but, hey, baby steps.Ireland was preparing to pull the trigger on a Microsoft procurement potentially worth €1 billion when the government called a halt. Opposition politicians then asked why open source alternatives had never made it onto the shopping list.Ireland's Minister for Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalization, Frankie Feighan, said the agreement for Microsoft software and services had been canceled after "matters of concern were raised by an interested party."At the UN Open Source Week, Ireland's Government CIO, Louise McKeever, said that as far as she was concerned, digital sovereignty is "the ability of a government to maintain control over its digital infrastructure, data, and technologies" in a world of cross‑border data flows, AI, and geopolitical risk – and that makes it "a national security concern" as much as a tech one.Cian O'Callaghan, deputy leader of Ireland's opposition Social Democrats, would agree. He said that, for value-for-money reasons and to avoid US technology dependency, Ireland should at least consider alternatives including "LibreOffice, Linux, Thunderbird, and Open-Xchange."It's not just governments getting into the sovereignty act. Airbus is migrating its most critical applications from AWS to French cloud provider Scaleway. Why? For much the same reason as governments. Scaleway made a competitive commercial offer, and, as Catherine Jestin, Airbus's executive vice president of digital, said: "I need a sovereign cloud because part of the information is extremely sensitive from a national and European perspective. We want to ensure this information remains under European control."
