Europe likes open source but contributes too little to it
On Computable I read a summary of the Linux Foundation's 2026 report State of Open Source in Europe, now in its fifth edition, presented at Open Source Summit Europe in Prague. The main message is clear: using open source alone does not give you control. You also have to contribute and help steer.
The numbers show where it chafes. For 94 percent of European organizations, digital sovereignty matters to their technology strategy, and for 61 percent it matters a lot. European developers make almost 40 percent of the contributions to infrastructure projects such as Kubernetes and OpenStack, yet many organizations limit themselves to using them. And 31 percent have no formal framework for open source management. Those that do report returning more than four times their investment, against 3.6 times for those without one.
AI coding tools come up too. 94 percent use or are testing generative AI coding tools, three quarters think they increase the value of open source, and 48 percent therefore use more open source. Nearly half maintain internal forks, which costs an average of 311 hours for 9.5 forks per release cycle.
What stands out to me is that the top of the Agentic AI Foundation is mostly American companies, such as AWS, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. At the Gold level, only Suse and Ericsson come from Europe. Meanwhile the European Commission is working on a Tech Sovereignty Package of about 2 billion euros.
Thierry Carrez of Linux Foundation Europe argues that open source helps reduce dependence, but only with active participation in open governance structures. As a developer I take that to heart: a pull request sometimes has more influence than a policy paper. How is it for you?
Source: Computable
The numbers show where it chafes. For 94 percent of European organizations, digital sovereignty matters to their technology strategy, and for 61 percent it matters a lot. European developers make almost 40 percent of the contributions to infrastructure projects such as Kubernetes and OpenStack, yet many organizations limit themselves to using them. And 31 percent have no formal framework for open source management. Those that do report returning more than four times their investment, against 3.6 times for those without one.
AI coding tools come up too. 94 percent use or are testing generative AI coding tools, three quarters think they increase the value of open source, and 48 percent therefore use more open source. Nearly half maintain internal forks, which costs an average of 311 hours for 9.5 forks per release cycle.
What stands out to me is that the top of the Agentic AI Foundation is mostly American companies, such as AWS, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. At the Gold level, only Suse and Ericsson come from Europe. Meanwhile the European Commission is working on a Tech Sovereignty Package of about 2 billion euros.
Thierry Carrez of Linux Foundation Europe argues that open source helps reduce dependence, but only with active participation in open governance structures. As a developer I take that to heart: a pull request sometimes has more influence than a policy paper. How is it for you?
Source: Computable
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