EuroStack

The Document Foundation, creator of LibreOffice, urges Europeans to adopt open source solutions and reduce dependence on proprietary software and major technology platforms.

Germany has mandated the Open Document Format (ODF) as the standard for public administration documents within its new sovereign digital infrastructure framework, the Deutschland-Stack.

Published by the Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernisation, the framework sets technical standards for a unified, interoperable digital environment across all government levels. It explicitly requires ODF and PDF/UA as document formats, excluding proprietary alternatives from official use.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency announced a new and expanded Sovereign Tech Fellowship program that is now open to community managers and technical writers, beyond just FOSS maintainers from the prior round.

Announced back in 2024 was the Sovereign Tech Fellowship program to support open-source maintainers, especially those that may be supporting multiple open-source projects. Over 2025 they successfully ran the program and are now opening up applications for the next round of the program.

I was hoping for thousands of responses. The EU Commission better not dismiss it all.

The European Open Source Awards 2026, an annual program recognizing outstanding contributions to open-source software, has announced this year’s winners.

The awards were presented on January 29, 2026, in Brussels by the European Open Source Academy, an EU-backed initiative promoting open source across Europe.

The top honor, the Prize for Excellence in Open Source Software, was awarded to Greg Kroah-Hartman, a long-time Linux kernel maintainer known for overseeing stable kernel releases and contributing to core subsystems. The award recognizes his decades of technical leadership and stewardship in one of the world’s most widely used open-source projects.

Eight satellites from five different member states are currently being pooled as part of GOVSATCOM. The Commission hopes this is the first step towards less dependence on the US - whose own communication systems are a lot more mature. #EuropeNews

At the same time, the "World Wide Web," composed of the HTTP protocol and the HTML format, was invented by a British citizen and a Belgian citizen who were working in a European research facility located in Switzerland. But the building was on the border with France, and there’s much historical evidence pointing to the Web and its first server having been invented in France.

It’s hard to be more European than the Web!

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Some are proud because they made a lot of money while cutting down a forest. Others are proud because they are planting trees that will produce the oxygen breathed by their grandchildren. What if success was not privatizing resources but instead contributing to the commons, to make it each day better, richer, stronger?

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."

The European Commission recently launched a call for evidence on a newer initiative about the importance of open source, and their reliance on non-EU countries. As covered by CADE, the initiative is called "Towards European open digital ecosystems", and it sets out how they're trying to sort their approach towards the open-source sector across the European Union.

From the official EU document they note how the new strategy will "address the economic and political importance of open source, as a crucial contribution to a strategic framework for EU technological sovereignty, competitiveness and cybersecurity" and that it will "set out actions to strengthen the broader EU open ecosystem of solutions and products in critical sectors, including internet technologies, cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), cybersecurity, open hardware, and industrial applications (e.g. automotive and manufacturing)".

As we had predicted late last year, the push for digital sovereignty is starting strong in 2026. This is not something that has appeared out of thin air; the European Union seems to be finally understanding how vulnerable their digital infrastructure is if they continue relying on foreign providers.

While progress on this appears commendable, their Chat Control bill makes me doubt what they actually want to do going forward.

The European Commission has opened a public call for evidence on a forthcoming European Open Digital Ecosystems Strategy. The consultation, which runs from January 6 to February 3, 2026, invites feedback from developers, companies, public administrations, academia, and civil society.

The initiative is expected to culminate in a Commission communication to the European Parliament and the Council, with adoption planned for the first quarter of 2026