How open source software can meet the challenge of European digital sovereignty

Speech given by Stefane Fermigier, CEO of Abilian, in Brussels at the [Euclidia Now!] event (/en/news/euclidia-now-2022/).

Open source software is an asset that is still too often overlooked when it comes to meeting the challenge of European digital sovereignty.

This is not only because of the legal guarantees provided by open source licences, but also because of the values that underpin them - openness, transparency, inclusiveness, autonomy, etc. - and because they are an essential part of the European identity. -And because it is a catalyst and accelerator of innovation, open source software is a guarantee of technological autonomy and economic dynamism for our continent.

It is these theses that I am developing, in particular, in a book which is currently being written and should be published in a few weeks' time.

In concrete terms, if we look at the consumption habits of cloud software in Europe, whether by businesses, public authorities or individuals, we can draw up a list of the most commonly used software. For example, in the area of collaboration, you'll find services like Confluence, Trello, Slack and Yammer. For office automation, there's Office 365 or Google Suite. And so on.

What is less well known is that for most of these - proprietary, often American - software packages, there is open source software that offers equivalent services. Many of these open-source products have been developed in Europe, in whole or in part.

For example, proprietary SaaS collaborative tools such as Confluence, Trello, Slack or Yammer have open-source equivalents such as XWiki, Wekan, Matrix or Abilian SBE (a corporate social networking solution developed by my company, Abilian). In the field of office automation, we have Cryptpad, DeckDeckGo and others. Or, to give a final example, Peertube software, which is a distributed alternative to centralised video-sharing sites like Youtube.

That's where my thesis comes into line with that of [Euclidia] (https://euclidia.eu/): the vast majority of the software needed to regain our digital sovereignty exists in Europe, we just need to take the trouble to implement it.

While it is necessary to repeat this message until it becomes audible, we must not minimise the operational difficulties either: the cloud of the GAFAMs and American SaaS publishers is attractive, both because of the network effects and anti-competitive activities that need to be combated, but also because it is so easy to implement (which is often offset, let's not forget, by the difficulty of getting out of it).

In order to make existing open source alternatives more readily available and to democratise their use, several months ago my company launched an open source software project, which we have named Nua, that enables the main open source software competing with the SaaS giants to be selected, deployed and maintained in operational condition, by managing the entire life cycle of this software, as shown on the slide. This project should be completed in a few months' time, and we hope that it will play its part in building European sovereignty.