Europe’s Open Source Hangover
Circling the word sovereignty like a drunk who can’t remember where he left his keys.
Europe keeps circling the word sovereignty like a drunk who can’t remember where he left his keys. Every year, the speeches get louder, the promises get cleaner, and the base underneath gets a little more moldy. You can smell it if you stand close enough: that sweet, metallic scent of something important quietly rotting.
Just using open source software isn't radical anymore. Europe needs to dig deeper.
The suits talk about “strategic autonomy,” but they say it with the same tone a gambler uses when he swears this next hand will fix everything. Meanwhile, the maintainers — the real ones, the ones who patch the leaks at 3 a.m. — are ghosts drifting through GitHub issues, unpaid, unseen, and one burnout away from disappearing for good.
Europe wants control, but it doesn’t want the mess that comes with it. It wants open source without the open wounds. It wants independence without the insomnia. It wants to believe that infrastructure maintains itself if you just believe hard enough.
But the world doesn’t work that way. Not in tech, not in politics, not in anything that matters.
The geo-political situation in recent years has triggered significant demand in Europe for the region to be independent of what happens in other areas of the world.
The CLOUD- & Patriot Act loom like a long shadow across the cobblestones. American platforms hum with the quiet confidence of empires that don’t need to raise their voice. And Europe — old, proud, tired Europe — insists it can build a future on borrowed scaffolding and volunteer labor.
Maybe it can. Maybe it can’t. The truth is nobody’s steering anymore. Everyone’s just hoping the engine holds together for one more quarter.
Open source isn’t a movement now. It’s a power grid. And power grids don’t explode in cinematic fireballs. They fail the way people do — slowly, silently, and at the worst possible moment.
By the time the lights flicker out, everyone will swear they never saw the warning signs. But the cracks were always there. You just had to be willing to look.
More here.