The EU's €2T Budget Overlooks a Key Tech Pillar: Open Source

On July 16, the European Commission unveiled a monumental €2 trillion seven-year budget—the largest in the EU’s history. This ambitious spending plan aims to bolster the continent's autonomy, competitiveness, and resilience. While it addresses critical digital areas like cybersecurity and innovation, a fundamental component has been conspicuously absent: open source.

Open source software, characterized by its community-driven development and maintenance, and its freely editable and modifiable nature, forms the bedrock of modern digital infrastructure. Since the 1990s, it has been an ubiquitous presence in the digital systems that European industries and public sector institutions rely upon, creating substantial dependencies on open source applications and libraries.

From commercial products and services to governmental systems and pivotal research initiatives, open source underpins the internet and countless platforms essential to our daily lives. It provides levels of transparency, security, and flexibility that proprietary software simply cannot match. By strategically investing in open source, Europe has the opportunity to empower small businesses, universities, and public institutions with the tools needed to effectively compete with global technology behemoths.

Despite its undeniable importance, the proposed budget lacks specific provisions for open source funding. This omission is particularly striking given the prominence open source has recently achieved in key legislation, including theCyber Resilience Act, theAI Act, and the proposedCloud and AI Development Act. As Europe strives to enhance digital sovereignty, fortify cybersecurity, and boost its overall competitiveness, this oversight is profoundly concerning.

Strategic Investment for Digital Sovereignty

For Europe to maintain its competitive edge and self-sufficiency in the digital realm, it is imperative to support open source with strategic and efficient investment. Public-led funding must allocate resources that the private sector, philanthropic organizations, volunteers, or the market alone cannot adequately supply.

Historically, the EU's modest investment in open source has largely stemmed from grassroots innovation funding, leading to efforts focused on scaling these technologies into core digital infrastructure.

However, maintenance funding offers a distinct approach, which has already seen trial implementations. A recent landmark report by the open technologies think tank,OpenForum Europe, advocated for a dedicated "EU Sovereign Tech Fund." This fund would be designed to support crucial European technology projects vital for digital sovereignty, with open source at its very core. This concept draws inspiration from the successfulGerman Sovereign Tech Fund, which has already fostered global open source collaboration.

Such a fund would be a welcome development. Without targeted investment in open source, Europe risks increasing its dependence on foreign technologies, becoming more vulnerable to external threats, and diminishing its competitiveness in global markets. Conversely, supporting open source enables Europe to cultivate its own robust tech infrastructure, thereby securing greater control, transparency, and enhanced security.

This vision of digital sovereignty is not isolationist; rather, it represents an investment in the global autonomy and resilience of digital infrastructure. While offering long-term benefits for Europe, it also supports alternatives to the dominant technological paradigms offered by the United States—which often center on platform monopolies and market-driven control of core digital infrastructure—and by China—where state-directed, centralized models prioritize surveillance and tight government oversight.

In contrast, Europe’s open source approach champions a pluralistic and collaborative alternative, emphasizing transparency, interoperability, and public value. Investing in the global open source ecosystem, upon which Europe itself depends, is entirely consistent with these core values.

Reversible Oversight in the Competitiveness Fund

Regrettably, the proposedEuropean Competitiveness Fund—one of the EU’s primary financial instruments under its new budget—does not prioritize open source as a strategic investment area, either at a high-level policy or in detailed actions related to digitalization. This constitutes a serious lapse. Given that the fund is specifically designed to bolster innovation and digitalization across Europe, overlooking open source is a significant, albeit reversible, oversight.

Any continued absence of open source funding will undoubtedly be perceived as short-sighted, ultimately undermining Europe’s digital transformation within an increasingly multipolar and competitive geopolitical landscape. EU leaders must prioritize open source in their new seven-year budget by explicitly integrating it as a key component of the European Competitiveness Fund’s digitalization focus. Furthermore, establishing an EU Sovereign Tech Fund, alongside other earmarked investments in open source, will be crucial for achieving their stated goals.

This is an opinion piece by Daniel Stenberg, the co-founder and lead developer ofcURL, a command-line tool for getting or sending data, including files, using URL syntax. Daniel is also president of theEuropean Open Source Academy.

Daniel Stenberg is the founder and lead developer of the curl project, one of the most widely used software components in the world. A Swedish Internet protocol expert with 30 years of dedication to Open Source, he has made lasting contributions through software development, protocol work within the IETF, and authorship of key texts on curl, Open Source, HTTP/2, and HTTP/3. Daniel currently serves as President of the European Open Source Academy, where he advocates for increased European leadership and investment in Open Source. A frequent public speaker and team member at wolfSSL, he was honored with the European Open Source Achievement Award—a recognition he describes as both humbling and significant beyond the engineering community.