Open source culture is fundamental for a successful European tech industry 🇪🇺

Ploum (Lionel Dricot) makes a good case for pushing open source culture in Europe.

We don’t want a European Google Maps! We want our institutions at all levels to contribute to OpenStreetMap (which was created by a British citizen, by the way).

Google, Microsoft, Facebook may disappear tomorrow. It is even very probable that they will not exist in fourty or fifty years. It would even be a good thing. But could you imagine the world without the Web? Without HTML? Without Linux?

Those European endeavours are now a fundamental infrastructure of all humanity. Those technologies are definitely part of our long-term history.

I see open source as a necessary cultural tool in building Europe’s technological sovereignty. You don’t fix the over-dependence on tech giants by creating new tech giants to depend on.

Free citizens and institutions depend on the freedom to choose the digital tools they prefer. An open source software tech stack reduces the reliance on centralised solutions; which enables more people to benefit from it.