Europe's Microsoft tenders are open to any bidder. The product, however, was already chosen before the first bid. What the latest tenders in Austria, Italy and Hungary show about who competes, and why the decision is made long before anything reaches the tender portal.
Kai A. Hartung
Ecosia added Chinese open models alongside Mistral, Europe's AI champion. A defeat for Europe? Open weights remove the off switch, not the supplier. Where Europe holds the AI chain, where it doesn't, and why its money belongs where control is won.
Switzerland's CHF 7 billion government cloud tender, read against the goals Parliament set in 2024. The goals written as conditions survived; the ones left as wishes faded. And the right to take over the private cloud is only worth the team inside government that could use it.
Logistics platform for dispatch, fleet management and live tracking on your own servers, under AGPL-3.0-or-later.
Browser-based video conferencing for private calls and small groups, with media sent directly between participants, under AGPL-3.0-only.
Browser-based video conferencing for group meetings, classes and webinars, with media relayed by its own server, under AGPL-3.0-only.
Agile project management tool for Scrum and Kanban teams, with backlogs, sprints, boards, issue tracking and a wiki, under MPL-2.0.
Decision-making tool where groups discuss proposals, vote and record outcomes, with elections and weighted voting, under AGPL-3.0-only.
Web and product analytics that measures site visits without cookies, with funnels and session replays, under AGPL-3.0-only.
A Big Tech lobby study says Europe's cloud sovereignty law will cost €115 billion. Most of it is the cost of undoing lock-in, and it grows every year you stay. Why Washington's pressure is nothing new, where buy-European falls short, and why open standards are the export worth building.
Almost four years after a free fix shipped, about one in eight Log4j downloads was still a vulnerable version. Now AI has bank regulators counting the days. Why private copies slow the fix down, what the banks' new alliance changes, and the question to ask your IT team.
The Dutch government has a Linux desktop on trial, no new money for its digital autonomy plans, and no total for what it pays Microsoft. Leaving shows up as line items someone must sign for. Staying hides in budgets nobody adds up.
Germany spent public millions on a "Sovereign Open Source" AI, then gated it and let a vendor sell it. Switzerland and the Netherlands show the difference: real openness is a mandate, not a label.
The year's most hyped AI model arrived with 40 million dollars and a wall of attention. Within days, open versions you can download and run yourself already existed. Here is what the celebration missed, and why it matters for digital sovereignty.
AGPL, self-hosted drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange: mail, calendar, and groupware with full Outlook and mobile compatibility, under EU jurisdiction. Free tier caps at 5 users.
Turns your coding agent into a design engine that outputs prototypes, slides, and UI as local files. Bring your own model, cloud or fully local via Ollama. Early-stage.
Browser-based video editor that runs on-device: no uploads, no watermark, no account. A local-first alternative to ByteDance's CapCut. Still early-stage.
An Apache-2.0 cloud platform (IaaS): build a multi-tenant private cloud on your own hardware, across KVM, VMware, and Proxmox hypervisors. The vendor-neutral answer to VMware Cloud Director.
An offline, open-source Markdown editor for researchers, with Zettelkasten note-linking and citation management. It stores everything as plain .md files, a GPL-licensed alternative to Obsidian.
An offline-first, open-source note app with end-to-end encryption and plain-Markdown storage. A self-hosted alternative to Evernote; sync to your own WebDAV or Nextcloud, with team features paywalled.
The vendor-neutral CNCF standard for traces, metrics, and logs. Instrument once and route your telemetry to any backend, ending the agent lock-in that makes Datadog and New Relic so sticky.
A distraction-free desktop Markdown editor with live preview that works directly on local .md files, with no account, telemetry, or cloud. A fully offline, MIT-licensed alternative to Typora.
MIT-core LLM observability for tracing, evals, and prompt management. A self-hosted alternative to LangSmith, with enterprise compliance controls gated behind a paid license key.
Self-hosted assembly and voting platform for parliaments, parties and associations: agendas, motions, elections and live secret ballots. SAML SSO and every feature ship under MIT, no paid tiers.