AI and digital sovereignty dominated this year's Open Source Summit Europe. But beyond the AI noise, the sovereignty discussions offered something useful: practical plans for putting open source to work.
The recurring theme of digital sovereignty started right from the first day's keynotes, with Geopolitics, Sovereignty, and the Fight to Stay Open, by the Linux Foundation's Nithya Ruff and Johan Linaker from Research Institutes of Sweden, whose name is considerably longer than its URL: ri.se. This isn't just some European issue. Ruff stressed that it mattered "from Canada, to Sierra Leone, to Trinidad and Tobago."
This was followed by Open Source Security as the Foundation of European Sovereignty, focusing on OSS supply chains. Then ORBIT Launchpad: Building the Due Diligence Bridge Between Manufacturers and Open Source, with speakers from Dell and Microsoft discussing OpenSSF's efforts to build catalogs of open source components to help companies achieve CRA compliance, such as CRABFOSC – the CRA Baseline For Open Source Consumption.
The EU's Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is now starting to bite: reporting obligations for actively exploited vulnerabilities and severe security incidents began last month, with its main requirements applying from December 2027. Hearing Dell and Microsoft discuss how to meet those requirements, rather than simply why they matter, was encouraging.
Éléonore Daxhelet presented the 2026 report from the EU's Open Source Observatory, or OSOR. Emphasizing that this isn't just an EU matter, she highlighted Diaa, from the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, as well as the Swiss EMBAG legislation we recently covered. The slides are online [PDF].
Then, as if to emphasize that further, Kazuki Imamura from Japan's Innovation Platform Agency (IPA) presented the Japan-Type OSS Model. The IPA looked at hundreds of companies in seven countries, and more than 30,000 GitHub repositories, and found that while a lot of organizations are talking about open source, few are actually doing it. Japan has its own three-axis approach, where the public sector attempts to plant seeds and cultivate efforts by local commercial vendors, with a strong emphasis on the need for machine-readable legislation and rules. Again, the slides are online [PDF] and contain some uncomfortable numbers.
To pick out the single talk with the most information, it might be Strategic Approach To Demonstrating the Value of OSS Efforts by Dr Dawn Foster of Fast Wonder. She started with the Linux Foundation's report on Measuring OSPO Value, examining open source program offices, and then presented a remarkable amount of guidance and info from the CHAOSS Project. It stands for Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software, and Foster's dense slide deck [PDF] linked to multiple different guides from the CHAOSS Practitioner Guides. There is a lot of reading here, including a series on viability metrics, a guide on demonstrating organizational value, and a guide on how to research software impact.
To our eye, this looks like pragmatic stuff: info on how to introduce and run FOSS programs, on how to talk to users, and, perhaps most importantly, on how to explain it to executives.
Many talks made reference to Schleswig-Holstein's moves away from the US cloud. One was from two of the people behind Berlin's Strategy for Digital Sovereignty. Berlin is both a city and a German state, with more residents than Schleswig-Holstein. The city government is working with PwC to manage its migration – not the first name that springs to mind in FOSS, but a sign that the giant consultancies see business here too. We were not surprised to see the only mention of KPIs at the entire summit here; we were slightly more surprised by the timescales, which aim to make 70 percent of the software stack on administrative workstations open source by 2032. The slide deck [PDF] reveals a rather bureaucratic planning process, but that's not a big surprise; nor is quite a lot of discussion of Governance, Dependencies, and Measures.
Executives, in our experience, tend to like numbers they can measure and targets they can aim for. Emiel Brok from SUSE talked about the State of the OSS Union: Assessing Your Stack's Autonomy Under EU Law. This covered the European Commission's proposed Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) and how organizations can measure their readiness for it. Some of this revolves around the EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework [PDF], and its definitions of eight Sovereignty Objectives (SOV-1 to SOV-8) and Sovereignty Effectiveness Assurance Level, the SEAL scale, from SEAL-0 (No Sovereignty) to SEAL-4 (Full Digital Sovereignty), defined as "complete EU control, subject only to EU law, with no critical non-EU dependencies."
Brok mentioned SUSE's online Cloud Sovereignty Framework Self Assessment, which lets you get an idea of where your organization stands in ten minutes.
All this may sound dry beside the kernel GPU driver discussions happening elsewhere at the event. But plans, targets, and measurements are signs that organizations are treating open source as infrastructure rather than an experiment.
Sometimes, being bureaucratic is a win. ®