Opinion Europe is famous for having the most tightly regulated non-existent tech sector in the world. This is a mildly unfair characterization, as there are plenty of tech enterprises across the continent, quite a respectable smattering if it wasn't for the US doing everything at least ten times bigger.
Quite the problem, sighed the EU’s 2024 Draghi Report on European competitiveness. Those regulations regressively hit startups and SMEs the hardest, there's no central capital market for funding innovation, while Uncle Sam's wallet opens wide for the ambitious and talented. It looked bad in 2024, when tech deficit was primarily an economic matter. Mix in the changes since then, and you can apply the five word version of all Russian history — "And then it got worse."
Which is why the EU is now eagerly looking to open source as part of digital decolonization. It wants to end dependency on American software and services, not just for a healthier and more influential home sector, but to protect itself from hostile leverage.
The EU being the way it is, it wants to think big, and there's no doubt that FOSS has an infinite appetite for resources and relevance. FOSS is also mostly immune to EU regulations, which exist to protect citizens from systematic abuse. That possibility barely exists in open source development. You don't have to tell a bird not to rob banks.
It's just that you couldn't find a bigger culture clash between top-down and bottom-up if you invested a billion euros on a 27-nation research project. Finding the sweet spot where EU involvement can make the biggest difference to FOSS enterprise adoption, while maintaining the essential spark of agility and freedom that brings FOSS alive, that's where technical, economic and cultural engineering needs to happen. Fast.
Open source by itself is no guarantee of independence. Linux is the giant hogweed of European open source, even if it started four years before its home nation of Finland joined the EU. It has kept the internet and supercomputing free of commercial or state monopoly. The best it could do in mobile, though, is maintenance of an American OS duopoly. In the enterprise and public sector, it has done nothing to crimp Microsoft's tendrils. Which is where the EU most desperately needs it to succeed.
And this is not for want of technical prowess, nor interoperability. In fact, there is far too much. Linux desktops have been enterprise-class for more than a decade, and of late the options for integration with Windows apps and functionality have flowered like fridge contents in a midsummer power cut. As Windows has got worse, the interoperable Linux choices have become better.
There are many options. Wine just gets better and better, no matter what distro you use. Windows-focused distros like Zorin OS come with lots of ways to look and function like Windows, including web app integration so online Word and Outlook integrate with the desktop. Products like Winboat offer highly optimized containerization to bring Windows apps to near-native Linux behavior. High performance specialized emulations like Winlator can run native x86 games — the good ones — on Android.
What all these show is that small teams, even one-man bands, can use the very high quality software components freely available to almost completely remove old ideas of performance and functionality as batteries to platform-independent computing. The skills, the tools, the hardware and the whole production chain have been democratized. Given motivation and modest resources, FOSS designers can work miracles — and will. The downside is that there are too many good choices, making selection and support untenable in most organizations. Windows is Windows is Windows. Or it would be, if Microsoft stopped mucking about.
What FOSS per se is bad at, is synchronizing with specific needs. It can do it with the right people, see Red Hat, but those people can also take it into darkness. Stare too long into the abyss, and the enterprise stares back at you. Focus, alignment, the disciplines of documentation, support and detail, get harder the more complex a system becomes.
This is where the EU could start to make an immediate difference to open source. It can say that it wants an open source desktop system that has explicit Windows migration support through a mix of technologies that will remain stable and supportable, and that reflects the particular needs of the EU's public and private sectors. This will be a state requirement that absolutely does not need state resources to meet.
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Then comes the support structure. Whatever team builds the distro will be the top tier of support, with everything else handled elsewhere. The EU's job will be to co-ordinate support for states, doing so in as transparent a way as possible so that the private sector can create and integrate support for itself. It's no different in the broadest terms to how support should work with departmental, company, and contracted support tiers, but with many more options, no secrets, and resources flowing into FOSS development as requirements evolve.
This whole process can be argued as necessary for EU state security and sovereignty, arguments we already hear loudly from Europe's erstwhile allies as reasons for far more than a new desktop OS. The initial migration will be as incremental and non-disruptive as possible, the aim being to demonstrate and sustain a new model of infrastructure evolution, one that can go on to power a roadmap of accelerating replacement and renewal.
It is very difficult to force the evolution of FOSS if the environment is wrong. It is very difficult to stop it, or even slow it down, when the environment is right. The EU knows what it wants and why it wants it. It also knows it can't force it. What it can do is create the right conditions and step back. Open source asks for no more than that. ®