Felix Reda, Nicholas Gates – We need a European Sovereign Tech Fund! #FOSSBack

This talk discusses the advocacy for an EU Sovereign Tech Fund, building on a feasibility study initiated by Open Forum Europe. The speakers, Felix and Nick, outline the need for funding to maintain open-source technologies that serve as foundational infrastructure. They reference a report published in July 2025 that emphasizes the importance of pooled financing, transparency, and low bureaucracy for the fund's success. Key design criteria for the fund are presented, alongside recommendations for a more flexible European Digital Infrastructure Consortium (EDIC) as a managing structure. The campaign for the initiative has gained support from various organizations and emphasizes the role of open-source in improving technological sovereignty and competitiveness within the EU. The session concludes with discussions around future steps and the evolving perception of open-source software among policymakers.

Okay, thank you everyone for coming to our talk. I see a number of people in here that I've seen at a number of other presentations of this talk over the last year. So this might not be new information for some of you, but we're going to provide some context and updates on kind of some of the latest thinking around our advocacy for an EU sovereign tech fund

talking about the report we published last year. Um and yeah, we're looking forward to to talking to you. So this is me and Felix. Um Open Forum Europe had this idea for a sovereign tech fund feasibility study several years ago. Felix was very involved in the setup of the original German sovereign tech fund and now we've kind of come together. GitHub was very generously providing funding for

this report to help make this case and then kind of start kind of a series of kind of advocacy and kind of policy initiatives that'll help us advance the implementation hopefully fingers crossed of an EU sovereign tech fund. So everything we're presenting here today is kind of illustrative. It's kind of what we're calling for, but this is not kind of an ongoing initiative. It's kind of a

policy proposal. So think about it that way. Um here are all of the authors. So Felix and I are only two of the authors. I helped stitch everything together on the OFE side, but we also had a lot of contributors including folks from the European University Institute, Jennifer and Rosa Maria and Thomas who provided kind of legal insight. We had Carsten and Andreas and Knut from the

team at Fraunhofer who provided economic insight and then my former boss Astor. He also was a contributor as well. So very quickly, here's what we're going to cover today. We're going to talk about the study. Felix will cover that. I'll cover the campaign and then Felix is again going to come back to to some of the next steps. Um here is our report. It was published last

summer in July right around the time that the MFF negotiations started, multi-annual financial framework for those uninitiated. Please take the time to yes, scan the QR code and go access the report. If you go to eu-stf.openforumeurope.org, you'll also find our mini website that we put up and that includes a policy primer which has a kind of condensed and more visual summary of the findings if you don't

like reading 90-page reports. And then we also have a kind of very digestible two-page public letter with a number of endorsements or supporters that expressed interest in this campaign. So, yeah, over to you Felix and we're looking forward to hearing your feedback at the end. Yeah, thanks Nick. So, trying to convince policy makers to do something for open source, we figured the first step that's really important

is to explain what exactly is it that we want the European Union to do in this space. And just quick question for the audience, who of you has heard of the German Sovereign Tech Agency? Think that's almost everybody, so that's great. So, I don't have to explain to you why we think it's a great idea, but the the basic idea is to provide investment for the maintenance

of open source basic technology. So, the kind of at the lower layers of the stack that we all rely on. And looking at at the success of the German Sovereign Tech Agency, we were thinking about, okay, how can this success story be scaled up to the European level? So, to make more funding available for investments, to get more countries involved than just the German government, and also

to get industry involved. And we came up in this study with seven design criteria that we used to evaluate what kind of legal form such an European Sovereign Tech Fund could take. And I want to run you through those uh design criteria quickly. So, the first one is uh pulled financing and coordination. So, we want to make it possible uh to have a legal instrument that cannot

just be fed from one country's federal budget, like we have with the sovereign tech agency, but we also want the EU budget to be able to contribute to it, and we want industry to be able to contribute to it. Uh second criterion is uh transparency. So, we want um of course, uh since uh spending of taxpayer money is involved to um have a really transparent structure so

that people know why this investment is being made on their behalf. Low bureaucracy is really important, especially when uh dealing with uh European institutions. You might be aware of or maybe have participated in something like uh a Horizon Europe research funding grant or something like that. Often, um when money is involved from the European Union, there's quite a lot of paperwork. There are also good examples of

how open-source projects can be shielded from that, for example, like with NGI Commons, um where a lot of this bureaucracy is kind of taken away from uh the uh final recipients of um the support, and that is something that's really important for the European sovereign tech fund to become a success. Um political independence means that we want this to be a long-term initiative, because unlike sort of

innovation funding that follow certain trends, like one year it's maybe blockchain and the next year it's quantum computing, open-source maintenance is really something that's here for the long term. It's the the roads and bridges um that we all rely on. So, uh this should be something that's sort of set up for the longer term. Um it should be flexible. That means um it shouldn't really matter how

exactly an open-source project is governed. Of course, it should be it should have a governance, it should be transparent, and so on, but it could be in the context of an open source foundation, it could be a loose collective, it could be a not-for-profit association, it could also be within a company. All of these possibilities be accounted for. It should be developer-friendly and community-focused. I think these

two are closely associated. So one thing I think that has made the German Sovereign Tech Agency really successful is that they are from the community and in close contact with the community. So it's not just that you kind of put out a call for applications and hope that somebody is going to find out about it, but whoever is running this fund needs to be closely involved with

the community, have knowledge about the open source ecosystem, and that's can sometimes also be lacking in a more sort public service environment where people maybe have different qualifications than that are available in the open source community. And finally, in order to convince the EU to invest in this, we need to show that it's aligned with things that the EU wants to do anyway. So um for example,

improving cybersecurity, improving technological independence, which is something we're going to mention later, and also European competitiveness, so kind of economic growth. Um and finally, in terms of the size of the EU investment, we recommend in this study 350 million euros in the next EU's multi-year budget, which would be kind of looking at how much Germany has been investing into the Sovereign Tech Agency here and scaling that

up kind of based on on a per per capita basis. This is what the EU budget should put into, and this should be kind of complemented by investments from industry and from individual member states. This is our minimum. We recommend it is higher if possible. >> Of course. It's the minimum that we're calling for. Yeah. So based on these design criteria, the question was, well, what could

this actually look like in practice? And maybe the most obvious first idea, if you want to set something up like this, would be, well, we're going to create a new EU institution, a centralized fund. This was sort of the option one. But, what we actually ended up recommending after studying the various options in detail was not to go for this more centralized option, and instead to recommend

a more hybrid shared management structure. And some of the reasons for that is setting up an EU institution is a very long-term thing. It takes quite a lot of time. It's much harder to make it flexible in all of the ways that we've described in terms of low bureaucracy, community focus, and all of those things. And um it also makes it harder to scale up what is

already working with the German sovereign tech agency, which is not an EU institution. And of course, we would like them to be really involved in this effort. So, what we ended up proposing is a so-called EDIC, a European digital infrastructure consortium. This is a pretty new legal mechanism at the EU level. It's The basic idea is that different national governments of EU member states get together to

undertake an initiative in the area of digital infrastructure, which of course open source basic technologies are part of. And they are the voting members of this new legal entity, but other actors can be involved in it as in an observer capacity. And this structure is quite flexible. It can give itself its own rules, its own statutes, and can define what exactly sort of the parameters of this

cooperation should be. And crucially, this European digital infrastructure consortium can then apply for EU funding. So, there can be part of the budget earmarked for open source maintenance, and this EDIC would then be able to apply for that funding and sort of also be that shield from the bureaucracy between sort of the EU on the one side and the final recipients of investments, the open-source maintainers, on

the other side. So, that's kind of the brief rundown of what we found in the study and what we recommend. Great. Um so, you know, I'll share like some personal reflections, which is to say that, you know, OFE we try and maintain a close close relationship with uh European institutions cuz we're based in Brussels, and we want to have constructive relationships to help uh inform them on

policy matters, help explain matters related to open source and openness in computing. So, we don't often take, you know, very loud stances and really kind of push for for these types of positions, but what we saw with the EU sovereign tech fund uh was an idea that had uh kind of wide consensus within the open-source community of this is a good idea, and something that we could

really uh make a difference by throwing our weight behind. So, what we've chosen to do on the basis of this report, and maybe we can do more of it going forward, uh is really to kind of launch an advocacy campaign. And so, really what we've been doing over uh the last kind of months is kind of really taking uh you know, kind of a a road tour

of uh a Europe, and really speaking about this uh initiative at various conferences, presenting it in online forums as well. I even went all the way to Brazil for a conference we organized uh a research symposium where I presented uh some some findings from this research. Um and really what we've been trying to do is kind of uh advocate for uh the adoption of this proposal and

kind of uh making it or in socializing it uh to policy makers. Um so, yeah, this idea began all the way back in 2024. Um uh I think as early as the beginning of 2024, and then really what Felix and I uh kind of did last year was we kind of launched the idea at FOSDEM, we started gathering contacts, um and and really kind of uh inputs

from the community. Uh we kicked off the study formally in March of 2025, um and then we eventually published this um, pretty quickly, um, in the summer of 2025. As I alluded to at the beginning, um, of, uh, kind of this, uh, presentation, uh, that publication, uh, was specifically timed for July because that's when the multiannual financial framework negotiations began. So, that's the negotiations of the next

EU budget. Um, that's still ongoing, um, but what this kind of timing helped us to do was to kind of get this idea into kind of the, uh, lexicon of policy makers, uh, in advance or or in tandem with those kind of negotiations. Um, a lot of the proposals are developed before July of 2025, but then we, you know, kind of learned right around the time the

study was being published, "Oh, there's going to be a European Competitiveness Fund." Well, we can start talking about what the value of a kind of, uh, EU Sovereign Tech Fund would be in terms of a Competitiveness Fund and actually how the budgets would, um, kind of be comparable, uh, in terms of, you know, less than 1% of the proposed EU European Competitiveness Fund could be allocated towards

an EU Sovereign Tech Fund. Things like that. So, all of this kind of like policy, um, process actually really helps us to kind of position the findings of our report. Um, what we've seen since then, uh, is kind of, uh, yeah, a number of different, uh, organizations coming on board to support this initiative. So, we put out a call for support to our kind of, uh, ecosystem

and we launched a cohort in, uh, October of 2025 of 40 organizations that are kind of supporting our proposal. Um, I sometimes use the term endorsement interchangeably, but it's not just endorsing the proposal specifically. It's really accessing support for the initiative and being glad that it's out there. Um, if you're interested, please get in touch with Felix or myself and we'd be happy to add your logo

to the website. Um, you can find all of the endorsing, uh, or supporting, uh, organizations at eu-stf.openforumeurope.org. On the basis of that coalition letter, we sent it to Henna Virkkunen, uh, who is the Executive Vice President, I always get the name wrong, uh, for Technology, Democracy, and Sovereignty, Um and uh Mr. Virkkunen's office uh replied uh in uh December of 2025, um basically expressing kind of interest

in our proposal and thanking us for uh for submitting it. Um we have seen some allusions at events throughout the last kind of 6 to 8 months around talks of support for open source developers um at things like Euro Sec events um and sometimes it was expressed in relationship to the Cloud and AI Development Act. Um and then what was really promising for us was at the

beginning of January uh 2026 after our um kind of uh winter holidays, we came back and found that they were launching this new call for evidence on an EU uh open digital ecosystems strategy. Um what is going to be being referred to in short as the open source strategy. Um and so we mobilized to get a lot of people to uh feature uh the EU Sovereign Tech

Fund proposal as part of their submissions to the call for evidence. And I forget the exact number, Matthias who might be in the room might know. Um but we got uh I think it was like over 30 uh organizations that expressed support for this as part of that initiative and all that kind of uh makes a difference because there'll be a version of the open source strategy

released um in May, I believe. They just delayed it today. Um and then yeah, we had a breakfast at the parliament. We also did briefings with uh members of uh the um uh European Commission and we're also talking to kind of the permanent representations as well. Um so really quickly, yeah, here's just some color to everything that I just described. So we've been kind of supporting this

through like mainstream um kind of media coverage. We talked about this in in Euractiv. We got them to cover it. Um we've been trying to get big names to step up and express support for our proposal, folks like Daniel Stenberg who's involved with the European Open Source Cat Academy and is the maintainer of curl. Um we again are kind of yeah, showing up at these various conferences

uh in various fora to talk about this uh report. Um here's some color from kind of our uh public letter that we put out in um October. Uh and then here's just a sample of the organizations that um have expressed support for our initiative. Uh we have since expanded this, so I think there's like five or six organizations that have come on board since uh we last

talked about this report at FOSDEM. Um and yeah, here's just a some great uh what we're doing. Um and here's the response from uh Ms. Věra Jourová's office. Um and yeah, we are uh you know, going around and doing these policy events uh in a way that's been uh very beneficial. So, uh next steps, uh Felix is going to talk about what comes next, and then we'll

take a few brief questions. Right. So, obviously, since we had this idea in 2024, the world has changed quite a lot, and so has uh the public perception of open source. Uh when I started talking to policy makers about open source software in uh Brussels, maybe, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago, the number one question was what is open source. That has changed quite a lot,

and sort of ironically, to some extent, it's thanks to the Trump presidency, because suddenly um the uh open source software has been very closely associated with this idea of uh digital sovereignty or technological sovereignty. And that means a lot of people are paying attention to open source software who previously considered it to be somewhat of a a nerd or niche topic, uh and not high politics. So,

if you just look at kind of open source events in Brussels, the attention and the seriousness of the discussion has uh increased substantially, and I guess to some extent, that's sort of the positive uh side of the coin, but what is more challenging in this sort of digital sovereignty framing of open source software is that it has also become a lot more protectionist. So, there are a

lot of more questions about which country are the maintainers of this open source projects coming from. And so, part of our mission and also one thing that has made the sovereign tech agency so successful in Germany is that it does not require you to be a German citizen or to have a German tax ID to be able to benefit from the program because they really understand that

investing in open source software that may not be written in Germany, but that is used in Germany by a German public administration, by German companies is ultimately benefiting the digital sovereignty of Germany. And so, that's kind of part of the challenge that we have to deal with now. Um as Nick mentioned, there was this consultation in January, which is going to lead to the publication probably 1

month from now of an EU open source strategy. And the fact that this is part of the so-called digital sovereignty package also gives you an idea that this is kind of the lens through which policy makers are looking at open source. And sort of from the initial documents and speeches that have come out of the European Commission, what we can say is on the positive side, this

is going to be much more ambitious than past open source strategies of the EU, which basically just looked at how open source is used inside of public administrations. To the contrary, this strategy is supposed to be really more of an industrial strategy. It's looking at the value that open source brings to the EU economy. It's not just looking at sort of the the public sector. This I

think is great. And it's also echoing a lot of what we have said in the study about how open source is positive for cybersecurity, for competitiveness, and for digital What is a little bit more challenging, and this is I think somewhat connected also to this nationalist maybe lens is that the focus is very strongly on productization. So, the European Commission wants to see open source projects to

be turned into successful European open source companies, which is, of course, a great thing, but there is sort of the danger that, uh, the open source projects that are, uh, not conducive to becoming a product might fall through the the cracks and there the value might not be as visible. And the strategy is also quite sector-specific. So, like, there are questions in there about, like, which industrial

sector benefits from open source the most and quite often there are these transversal technologies that really benefit different sectors. Um, at the same time, though, uh, I think the the instinct of the European, uh, Commission is right here that the EU is kind of leading in open source software. So, these are just some statistics of public code contributions, uh, to, uh, public repos on GitHub. And there

you can see that, uh, EU developers are contributing, um, the most compared, uh, to other, uh, major regions. And this is despite, for example, the US actually having more developers on GitHub, um, than, uh, the EU does. Um, but what is also, I think, really evident from the data is that there is no such thing as German open source or EU open source. Uh, you might have

a project that is, uh, hosted by a European organization or that a repo that is started by a European developer, but there is lots and lots of cross collaboration. So, this is a visualization of, um, the contributions of EU developers to open source projects in other parts of the world and vice versa. And, uh, you can see that there is really this huge long tail of contributions

from all over the world. Of course, sort of the link between EU and US is the strongest here, but, uh, the rest of the world is also contributing really strongly to European open source projects. And so, whatever support mechanism there is going to be should really take account of that global nature of open source. So, as as I mentioned, not all open source projects can become products.

And so, our challenge now is to convince the European Commission that as part of this open source strategy, there should also be room for something like a European sovereign tech fund, which doesn't focus on products, but focus on what they called open digital basic technology. So, these are technologies that are transversal, that are low in the stack, and that where the value is at the point where

you sell a product to somebody, but at the point when that project is being used. So, here are some examples of that, programming languages, libraries, cryptography, and so on. And you could kind of summarize this as tech to build tech. So, everything that is below the surface, that is not necessarily an end user application, which unfortunately is often what policy makers outside of digital spaces are the

only examples of open source software that they know. Another, I think, interesting developments, you may remember our feasibility study recommended that the sovereign tech fund should be realized in the form of an EUDIC. Since we published the study, there has actually been the launch of such a European digital infrastructure consortium, the so-called digital commons EUDIC. Germany plays an important role in that. Netherlands, France, Italy are other

founding members, and other countries are coming on board. And this could be a vehicle where a European sovereign tech fund could be realized. This was started, I think, in December. And um the uh sovereign tech agency is actually one of the members of this consortium. So, we're quite hopeful about this maybe being uh a potential uh space to to realize such a thing. So, I think we

have maybe 2 3 minutes for questions, but thanks a lot uh seven, fantastic. Um thank you. So, ROUND OF APPLAUSE. UH HI, THANKS SO MUCH FOR YOUR PRESENTATION. Um and thanks also for mentioning the cool idea around not every open source project can become an open source product. I know at the um EU policy summit earlier this year, there was also a lot of talk about that

specifically. And so, I wanted to ask do you see um that specific framing with your report being at odds with something like the EU Inc. proposal that's coming out? I wouldn't say it's at odds necessarily. So, the EU Inc. proposal, for those who do not know, is basically like a company law proposal that's supposed to make it easy to found a company in the EU that can

operate EU-wide. I would say we need the same thing for open source uh maybe nonprofits as well. Um because like there are lots of things that are standing in the way of successful open source projects. And I've seen a lot of foundations that might have their base in uh Belgium, but if they want to hire a developer in Germany, it's quite expensive because there are different labor

laws and things like that. So, I do think the EU Inc. proposal is addressing a real need, but it's maybe too narrow if it's only focusing at companies because uh well, open source is developed in many different ways. And I'm not saying that there shouldn't be uh you know, support mechanisms for uh European open source companies. I just think it's too narrow of a lens. Yeah, I

would only add that um our proposal covers the fact that open source is global and we need uh an EU vehicle that held and help get funding to developers all across the globe. There's some practicalities of how that could actually be worked out. The German sovereign tech agency has been able to do it though and they're a founding member of this consortium. So for example, if we

could get funding into this edict that could support maintenance funding, you could conceivably think of the the German sovereign tech agency in the short term playing that kind of role of helping to get some of that money out the door, but yeah, there is some kind of logistics that would need to be worked out. that proposal is beneficial because it adds to the the debate around like

how can we do this in a way that supports different kind of legislative frameworks. Cool. Yeah, thank you for your talk and for your initiative. I really welcome the thought of building bridges in these times and to say we support open source wherever it comes from. We don't say we want to build an island here and be like protectionist of our our our region of the world.

Um, but my question is more like open source needs to win. Yes, we can fund it with these kind of new new structures, but there's the other problem of public bodies and governments. They need to run the open You need servers. You need people that maintain these that run kind of these services in the long run and that's a bigger and a harder problem to solve. Do

you have thoughts on this as well? Like what can we do? What can we do to fix this? I would just briefly note like our report isn't about open alternatives and it's it's not about dynamics related to to switching or running open source based infrastructure. Really what we're calling for is to support the projects that have dependencies in existing and which are kind of most foundational for

digital supply chains globally. We're not really specifically focused in our report on those dynamics. That being said, I share your concern. I think this is a big issue and I think it's something that um, we can try and address complementarily not kind of in contravention of our proposal. So, my question is I think everybody here is convinced that this is a great idea, but what's your ideal

timeline to achieving this? What are you hoping for? So, yeah. Last year, no. I uh When can we get the money? So, the the updates on this front like are basically that right now there is a something called an ITRE committee. I won't go into the the details of this acronym. It's a committee that's focused on kind of a subsection of the negotiations and they're drafting a

proposal for the European Competitiveness Fund. So, we're kind of focused. We got some outreach from one of the MEPs offices on trying to understand what that process is like and if we can provide input or kind of help shape that process in some way that's favorable to our proposal. Um and then we're also trying to understand what's going on with the Digital Commons Edict and if there's

some possibility for this type of funding to happen through that existing kind of edict rather than having to start up a new structure. So, they just had their first strategic meeting since their new executive director was hired like yesterday, I think, and they haven't even announced that director. They're probably going to announce them in the next couple weeks. So, those are ongoing conversations. So, the short version

is like my timeline would be like hopefully by the summer we'll have more information about those two developments and also about kind of this tech sovereignty package that Felix alluded to and then hopefully we'll have more information to know what we need to do next to make sure that the the EU steps up in this way. Yeah. I I understood the question more in terms of like

when is the money going to start flowing? Is that right? Or So, ideally if our plan is successful, 2028, because that would be when the new So, this multiannual financial framework, the current one goes to '27 and then the next one would be 2028 to 2034. So, that is the budget that we are targeting with So, everyone, a round of applause for Felix and Nick. Woo!