Open source's new mission: Rebuild a continent's tech stack
- Reference: 1768815011
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/01/19/open_sources_new_mission_rebuild/
- Source link:
Quite the problem, sighed the EU’s [1]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 aversion of all Russian history — "And then it got worse."
The plan for Linux after Torvalds has a kernel of truth: There isn't one [2]READ MORE
Which is why the EU is now [3]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.
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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.
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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. [7]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.
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What all these show is that small teams, even one-man bans, 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.
[9]The world is one bad decision away from a silicon ice age
[10]Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it
[11]Vibe coding: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing (Sorry, Linus)
[12]From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world
[13]Big Tech's control freak era is breaking itself apart
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.
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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. ®
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[1] https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-report_en
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/14/the_plan_for_linux_after/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/eu_open_source_consultation/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aW4O0qy3IhlD6cYrxJ7DzgAAAss&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aW4O0qy3IhlD6cYrxJ7DzgAAAss&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/15/wine_11_arrives_faster_and/
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aW4O0qy3IhlD6cYrxJ7DzgAAAss&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/12/silicon_shield_versus_silicon_winter/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/05/smart_tv_surveillance_opinion/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/24/opinion_column_vibe_coding/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/03/from_intel_to_the_infinite/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/10/three_most_important_factors_in/
[14] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aW4O0qy3IhlD6cYrxJ7DzgAAAss&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Crocodile tears
India aren't threatening to tear up NATO just because a tango nonce wants his predilections to remain unnoticed by the American public.
Re: Crocodile tears
They are BOTH bad, but you seem deternimed to deflect attention to just one - why?
It's not just the software
It's the unholy alliance with the hardware manufacturers as well. The great unwashed don't buy Windows. - they buy a computer, which almost always has Windows pre-installed.
Re: It's not just the software
I thought Windows is a tool that you use to download the flavour of Linux you want.
Like IE6 used to be a tool to download Firefox.
Re: It's not just the software
At present, that's mostly fixable in competition legislation. It's more of a problem as we move away from x86 to platforms that don't have a common, documented pre-boot environment. I suspect, though, one could emerge quite quickly if it became a procurement requirement.
It's a bit of a longer-term plan but one thing they could start doing is exposing students to Linux at school so they have some familiarity with it when they potential encounter it in the workplace later on.
I think, thankfully, that is happening. Albeit via the Raspberry Pi and Scratch.
Problem is that any EU involvement is a double-edged sword - it's absolutely true that the EU has the ability to create the right environment for the evolution of an EU-wide "EUnux" ecosystem with open-source equivalents of Desktop, Office, and Exchange, then hopefully leading to a stable platform with long-term support that other vendors can start to buy into. It's also true that in such regards, the EU operates at a glacial pace, as there are too many fingers in the pie.
It would take years for any proposal to be agreed and longer for any standards to be put in place. There would be geopolitical arguments over which countries had the most input and control over development, you'd then get interference from law enforcement trying to build in backdoors and privacy activists wanting the exact opposite to bog everything down, and then forks for different versions to end up exactly where you started but with one more Linux to add to all the existing Linuxes. (There's an XKCD on "standards" knocking around about exactly this)
The dream is good, but I think the reality is a world apart
Fortunately, the EU doesn't necessarily have to do those things.
It can start with some general principles in the public sphere, such as mandating a genuine preference for open source software in the evaluation of tenders and introducing a licensing system for cloud computing that would require the ability to operate independently of foreign infrastructure within a designated territory and provide mechanisms for providers to be under effective local control in the event of an emergency.
It wouldn't require (at this stage) any investment of anything, but it would transform the market overnight.
I can't see how you can "mandate a preference" - it's either mandatory or it's subjective. Foreign infrastructure is irrelevant - the US CLOUD Act operates regardless of where any infrastructure is located, therefore control is already in someone else's hands.
"General principles" are not going to transform anything - see Greenland as an example...
"You don't have to tell a bird not to rob banks."
You obviously never met my ex.... although I guess technically that'd be me being robbed :D
And round and round we go...
Repeat after me: clever is not the same as useful.
This is the problem Cambridge has faced for decades - yes there are lots of clever people and lots of smart solutions, but none of that makes a great business. And the key here is that providing this stuff to institutions - whether they're European, American, the UK or anywhere else in the world - is a business, not a technical exercise.
The EU can attempt to regulate this into existence, but so long as there are no service providers with call desks, support sites, 24/7 callout, migration tools, consultants for integration and all the other bells and whistles, there is no reason to move away from platforms that have all of those things. Sure, some council or university might have a vague desire to 'decolonise' it's software, but when it comes to signing a purchase order, the usual suspects win every time because they have the salesman who can promise all of the bells and whistles that aren't software (or even hardware).
I'd argue the way to make this stuff happen is to address the impediments to business, not mandate software. If a new tool can be made and sold across the continent, without additional barriers at every border, without regulatory burdens designed for global corporations yet applied to one-man businesses, without complicated tax and reporting requirements that change with each new country, then there is reason to adopt or write software that can be sold. Innovation comes when there is a customer, and for now America provides the single easiest customer base on the planet, with the least state intervention and least punitive financial environment, so that's where innovation goes.
And the same applies to the UK, that *still* fails to address the business environment that would allow local innovation to flourish.
Open source is a tool, not a end goal in it's own right. We want people to be able to use those tools to achieve goals, not for the sake of using the right tool.
Don't shoot the messenger
> FOSS is also mostly immune to EU regulations, which exist to protect citizens from systematic abuse. That possibility barely exists in open source development
That statement is a very close relative to that favoured by the gun lobby. That guns don't kill people.
FOSS is easily (and cheaply) leveraged for evil as well as good. Whether that is using free software for mass spamming, or open source databases of hacked personal data. Not to mention nefarious uses of "network debugging tools" and the most obvious of all: using readily available web server software for phishing scams.
We could also include FOSS being perverted by autocratic regimes to monitor and suppress their citizens
And guns are heavily regulated in every civilised country simply because they can be used for harm as well as sport and possibly self-defence.
"I'm from the government and I'm here to help..."
How come there's not a single large public sector organisation (less for the French Gendarmerie and they are still 3% MS) which has successfully moved off Windows?
This is not true if you've been keeping your eye on this subject. E.g. from last October:
[1]Good News! Austrian Ministry Kicks Out Microsoft in Favor of Nextcloud
The article also mentions three other recent migrations in Germany, Denmark, and Austria.
[1] https://itsfoss.com/news/austrian-ministry-kicks-out-microsoft/
Obviously ....
nobody remembers Munich's flirt with Linux ?
Crocodile tears
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.
But I guess being dependent on Indian consultancies, to the point of actively destroying domestic businesses by hostile policies, it's absolutely fine.
Talk about hypocrisy.