Europe is moving decisively away from U.S. tech giants toward open-source alternatives, driven by concerns over digital sovereignty and reliability of American companies[^1]. At the 2025 OpenInfra Summit Europe, industry leaders emphasized that this shift isn't about isolation but resilience.

"What we're really looking for is resilience. What we want for our countries, for our companies, for ourselves, is resilience in the face of unforeseen events in a fast-changing world. Open source allows us to be sovereign without being isolated," said OpenInfra Foundation general manager Thierry Carrez[^1].

This transition is already happening. The German state Schleswig-Holstein has replaced Microsoft Exchange and Outlook with open-source email solutions. Similar moves have been made by the Austrian military, Danish government organizations, and the French city of Lyon[^1].

European companies are stepping up to fill the gap with open-source alternatives, including:

Deutsche Telekom's Open Telekom Cloud
OVHcloud's sovereign cloud services
STACKIT and VanillaCore's European-based offerings[^1]

The movement gained additional momentum when the European Commission appointed its first executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security, and democracy in 2024[^1].

[^1]: ZDNet - Europe's plan to ditch US tech giants is built on open source - and it's gaining steam

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[–] BenjiRenji@feddit.org 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Well, you can't expect the whole net of dependency to be torn down that quickly when it took decades to be established. Especially if you want a somewhat normal life.

Even before the latest acceleration into fascism I kept looking for alternatives of almost everything I use and the pain is something I've just got used to when it started with switching to Linux only over 20 years ago. Of course I still get envious when iPhone users just quickly AirDrop some pics, so I get why it's not always easy to switch to alternatives.

But alternatives exist. Exploring them has become a lot more mainstream and they get more funding and support.

[–] semperverus@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

When you and your wife send pics over KDE Connect instead is a powerful moment. Still requires one phone to connect to the other over hotspot or be on the same network at home, but its slick otherwise.

[–] meekah@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Wait, KDE connect can go straight from one phone to another? That sounds awesome. I know it's a great piece of software, but that makes it even greater.

[–] semperverus@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Yep, just make sure to set the permissions so you're not sending notifications to the other phone (if it's someone else's) or allowing remote control of yours. Just enable file sharing or whatever you want, and maybe allow them to do the find my phone ring thing.