Building the Eurostack: Can Open-Source Save Europe’s Tech Future?

In March of 2025, some of the largest European tech companies and lobbying groups signed an open letter to the leadership of the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union (EU). In response to political trends in the United States and increasingly divergent global frameworks for technological governance, the signatories called for "radical action" to ensure European technological independence by developing a "EuroStack."

Lexically blending European identity with the concept of a "tech stack"—the set of digital tools and technologies used to build software products—the EuroStack Initiative promotes industrial policy that cultivates European alternatives to American digital infrastructure. In keeping with the principles of the EuroStack movement, developer and policy analyst Robert Riemann proposed the development of a Linux-based EU OS as an alternative to Microsoft Windows or Apple macOS. Although Riemann’s proposal was more narrowly focused on addressing the system administration challenges associated with managing operating system (OS) deployment in the public sector, his proposal piqued the interest of the global free and open source software (FOSS) community. The EuroStack began as a technocratic and somewhat self-serving industrial policy lobby initiative. However, with the right approach, EU policymakers can transform the EuroStack into a catalyst for digital rights and technological innovation across the globe by fostering the interest and ethos of the FOSS community.

On the surface, EU OS and the EuroStack are tech sovereignty projects. Tech sovereignty describes a nation's ability to develop, control, and govern its digital and technological infrastructure. How best to achieve greater tech sovereignty remains an unsolved problem among legislators and policy analysts. As digital policy expert Mark Scott described, restricting data flow across borders and limiting the use of foreign software can trend towards an isolationism that undermines the open information exchanges driving economic growth, protecting personal freedom, and fueling innovation. At best, Scott argues, tech sovereignty policy manifests as a digitized version of existing models of international trade, which hold that nations can develop comparative advantages, economies of scale, or other specializations that allow their enterprises to compete in select sectors productively.

However, the EU’s commitment to interoperability, privacy, user-focused design, and—most importantly—open-source development, creates the opportunity for a third way between the camps of isolationism and national competition. Community-driven open-source projects can bypass new and existing barriers to international information exchange while building development capacity outside the jurisdiction of any single nation or company. By promoting open-source solutions, the EU can create a tech stack that serves the interests of EU citizens, EU companies, and tech users worldwide. In an era when both the digital and physical worlds are increasingly balkanized by export restrictions, tariffs, geoblocks, and censorship, the EuroStack should be a tech sovereignty project with a global and communal perspective.

What is Open Source and Why Does it Matter?

If you've opened a web browser recently, you have almost certainly used open-source software. Practically every browser today is built on one of three open-source engines—Gecko, WebKit, and Blink. When software is open source, anyone can freely view, modify, and redistribute the software's code. More often than not, open-source projects are developed collaboratively, allowing users to submit updates and patches that add additional functionality or fix bugs. The concept of open-source software development has amalgamated with ideologies and communities of practice concerned with transparency, privacy, interoperability, and user freedom. This emergent alliance of privacy activists, tech enthusiasts, and interested users can broadly be described as the FOSS community. Making generalizations is dangerous, but FOSS values broadly align with those outlined in EU legislation like the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), making the FOSS community a valuable stakeholder for EU policymakers.

The EU's frequent regulatory scuffles with Big Tech show that FOSS and EU values often run counter to the imperatives of commercial software companies. But open-source software is entirely compatible with—and arguably essential to—many corporate technology projects. For example, the Android Open Source Project, developed largely by Google, powers all Android phones. The open-source Apache HTTP Server drives countless commercial websites. And those Apache instances often run on computers using one of the most visible and successful open source projects—the Linux kernel and the operating systems (known as “distributions”) built around it.

While individual developers play a role in the development of the Linux ecosystem, the majority of contributions—paradoxically—come from developers employed or funded by Big Tech companies.. As innovation scholars Eric von Hippel and Yochai Benkler have argued, the FOSS community challenges the commitments to private property and individual profit motives that underpin modern capitalism. Yet, as the contemporary digital landscape shows, the FOSS principles of free modification and reuse allow open-source to coexist peacefully alongside Big Tech. Returning to the example of browsers, we see that open-source can create core digital infrastructure that may serve as the foundation for proprietary software (e.g., Google Chrome) or develop into fully open-source software products that continue to embody FOSS principles (e.g., Ladybird browser).

EU OS and the Third Way to Tech Sovereignty

Of all the EuroStack-aligned tech projects proposed in recent months, EU OS has the greatest potential to align EU values and the FOSS community in developing open-source software with global reach. For years, widespread adoption of a Linux-based operating system has been the holy grail of the FOSS community. Various European localities have already dabbled with Linux to reduce technological dependence on Microsoft's Windows operating system. If EU policymakers and the FOSS community overcome their initial trepidation, EU OS can leverage the transparency, interoperability, and "forkability" of open source to deliver European tech sovereignty without the negative side effects of isolationism and protectionism.

The value proposition for the EU in developing an EU OS is clear, but the FOSS community voiced concerns about the proposal to base the new OS on the work of Fedora Linux. Fedora is a community-driven open-source project, but it is primarily backed by Red Hat, a subsidiary of IBM, firmly rooting the software in US jurisdiction. But this critical perspective ignores the greatest benefit of FOSS: the development is completely transparent. Downstream users can remove unwanted code while still benefiting from upstream development. If development priorities sharply diverge, developers can "fork" open-source codebases and build independently from that point of departure. Undoubtedly, Red Hat employees have led the modernization of the Linux desktop in recent years by developing key systems and technologies, such as Wayland, systemd, Pipewire, and containerization tools. Ignoring the collaborative and iterative elements of international FOSS in an effort to create something developed entirely within Europe would, as the EU OS proposal noted, confound sovereignty with protectionism.

Even if major trade barriers emerge between the EU and the US in the future, FOSS effectively circumvents traditional international boundaries. Using current US sanctions on Russia as an example, it's unclear what legal requirements open source projects have in working with Russian maintainers and contributors. Some larger open-source projects, such as the Linux Kernel Organization, have demonstrated sensitivity to this issue. The law is complicated and debated, but as a practical matter, countless companies worldwide use software developed and maintained by people from Russia, despite the sanctions. In 2023, the sad saga of Denis Pushkarev, a coder based in Russia, highlighted the degree to which the Internet depends on the work of individual open-source developers who may not reside in Western developed nations. American developers continue to use Pushkarev’s open-source core-js library on countless websites.

EU OS would not be the first attempt by a nation-level actor to use FOSS as a foundation for tech sovereignty, but the EU can approach this project with a novel lens. Russia's Astra Linux and China's Kylin have largely replaced Microsoft Windows in those nations' public sectors. That Astra Linux is based on Debian—a globally developed Linux distribution with organizational roots in the US—highlights how FOSS defies international borders and barriers. While the nation of Russia may not be using these capabilities for good, the EU can harness this power to build transparent, user-respecting, and private software to be used by people around the world.

By eschewing purity tests and isolationism in favor of global cooperation based on a community's shared technological values, the EU can carve a third path to tech sovereignty that combats increasingly prevalent attempts to fragment global networks. In doing so, the EU would free itself from dependence on foreign software while maintaining its position as a worldwide beacon for human rights, democracy, and international cooperation.