Over the past months, headlines about digital dependency have become harder to ignore. Statements about how quickly a country’s digital infrastructure could be affected. Growing debates about how much of Europe’s critical systems depend on technologies controlled outside the EU. Even without following every detail, the underlying message is clear: a large part of our digital society is built on infrastructure we don’t fully control.
That raises uncomfortable questions. Not only about suppliers, but about how we, as organisations and as societies, think about risk, responsibility and long-term resilience in a world that can change quickly. In that conversation, one term keeps coming up: open source.
For some, it still brings to mind technical debates, strong opinions, and an almost ideological stance. That’s not where this text starts. Because open source is not about rejecting specific vendors. And it’s not about assuming there are perfect replacements for everything we use today. It’s about something more fundamental: being willing to challenge how we think about digital infrastructure, dependency and control.
Asking the difficult questions
Talking about digital dependency can sometimes sound like distrust or unnecessary pessimism. But in reality, it’s the same kind of responsibility we apply in many other areas of life: thinking things through before something goes wrong. People don’t write prenuptial agreements because they plan to get divorced. They do it because life changes and because difficult situations are much harder to handle if no one has thought through the rules in advance. The same logic applies to digital infrastructure.
Discussions about open source and digital sovereignty are not about assuming that today’s partnerships will fail. They are about acknowledging that political, economic and technological conditions can change, sometimes faster than we expect. When a country, a public organisation or an authority builds critical services on technology it cannot fully understand, influence or move away from, a dependency is created. That dependency may be manageable in stable times, but much harder to deal with when circumstances shift.
Seen from that perspective, open source is not a technical preference. It is a way of asking more mature questions.
- Have we actually assessed the risks we are taking?
- Do we understand what we depend on and what alternatives we have?
- Have we built digital systems that can adapt over time, or only systems that work as long as nothing changes?
So what is open source, really?
At its core, open source means that the source code behind a system is openly available. It can be reviewed, understood, improved and reused, rather than being entirely hidden and controlled by a single vendor. That does not mean the software is free. And it does not mean there is no commercial model. It means transparency, choice and the ability to understand what your digital infrastructure is actually built upon.
For a long time, that distinction didn’t feel particularly important. Large vendors offered stability. Cloud services made things easier. Responsibility could be outsourced. Open source often felt optional – interesting, perhaps, but not necessary. What has changed is not the technology. It’s the context.
Read more: Open Source – Transparency is Key to Secure Data
But, why does this matter now? Today, digital infrastructure is no longer just an internal IT concern. It is tied to societal resilience, long-term public value and the ability to act independently when circumstances change. Public organisations rely on systems that are expected to support critical services over decades, not just procurement cycles. At the same time, many of those systems are built on technologies governed far outside the organisations, and sometimes outside the region, they serve.
This has shifted the conversation. Open source is no longer just about how software is built. It has become part of a broader discussion about control, resilience and long-term choice. Not as an ideology, but as a strategic consideration. The change is not limited to theory. At EU level, the European Commission has recently launched a call for evidence ahead of its upcoming European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy, a framework explicitly linked to strengthening technological sovereignty in Europe.
The initiative reflects the same underlying question: how can Europe reduce structural digital dependencies while maintaining openness, innovation and long-term resilience?
A question of responsibility, not ideology
Open source does not automatically solve everything. There are areas where alternatives do not yet exist. Situations where proprietary solutions are the most realistic option. Trade-offs that must be made between functionality, cost, maturity and risk. Acknowledging that is important.
The value of open source lies elsewhere: in its ability to challenge assumptions and reduce single points of failure over time.
From a public-sector perspective, it is less about tools and more about options:
- the option to understand how systems work
- the option to change direction without losing control
- the option to keep information usable even as technology changes
- That doesn’t remove the need for vendors or partners. But it changes the balance.
Where this leaves us
Open source does not offer certainty. What it offers is visibility. It makes assumptions explicit instead of hidden. It exposes dependencies instead of smoothing them over. And it forces conversations that are easy to postpone when systems appear to work.
That is why the current discussion matters.
Not because every organization should switch technologies overnight. Not because there is a single “right” model to adopt. But because the questions themselves can no longer be ignored.
How much control do we need over the systems that support critical public services? What risks are we willing to accept and which ones are we not? And how do we build digital infrastructure that remains viable when political, economic or technical conditions change?
Read also: Open Source – Unlocking New Public Sector Collaboration
Open source is one way of engaging seriously with those questions. Not as a statement of ideology, but as a signal of intent: to understand what we depend on, to reduce blind spots, and to design for change rather than permanence. In that sense, the growing focus on open source is less about software and more about how ready we are to take responsibility for the digital foundations we rely on every day.
It’s also worth being transparent about our own position. At MetaSolutions, our work is built on open-source principles, and EntryScape itself is open source. Not because open source is a goal in itself, but because it supports long-term adaptability, shared responsibility and informed decision-making in public digital infrastructure. For us, open source is a practical way to reduce blind dependency and keep options open over time.
