Op-ed - EU’s Digital Sovereignty Depends On Investment In Open Source And Talent

Europe is falling behind the U.S. and China in building and maintaining strategic digital infrastructure, largely due to underinvestment and fragmented support for open technologies. In a recent TechPolicy.press op‑ed, co-authored with Amandine Le Pape, Nicholas Gates Peter Neuhäusler, and Dr. Denilton Darold, we leverage fresh data from Fraunhofer ISI and the OSAwards.eu project, and highlight how Europe’s contributions to open source infrastructure are lagging and is fragmented, with development concentrated in a few countries such as Germany and France, which together account for over 40% of Europe’s output. Many other Member States contribute only marginally, and the same uneven pattern appears in firm participation across the continent.

Meanwhile, the U.S. maintains a dominant position through sustained investment by its Big Tech industry, giving it a repository base far larger than any other country, while China has become the strongest individual challenger by treating digital infrastructure as a strategic public good backed by coordinated industrial policy and long‑term funding. No single EU country matches the scale of either the U.S. or China; Europe only becomes comparable when contributions are aggregated at the EU level. Measured this way, the EU’s open source workforce is a major strength, historically representing about 23% of global GitHub contributor accounts, similar to the U.S. and well above China’s 12%. This indicates that Europe has the talent it needs, but without an EU‑wide strategy to mobilize it, fragmented national efforts are unlikely to meet Europe’s digital policy goals.

This makes the development with the upcoming sovereignty package including the Cloud and AI Development Act, and EU open source strategy, an interesting evolution. Will this help create the collective push needed? Can it have a comparable effect as the Chinese 5 year open source strategies? Still to be found out.

A disclaimer is that the data is based on GitHub data only, i.e., not, e.g., Gitee where much of Chinese development is happening. Including this data would probably create a darker picture from a European perspective.