It is a stack of unglamorous decisions about where your data lives.
If you want to know how free you really are from your vendors, don't look at the apps. Look at the layer underneath them, the one nobody puts on a slide.
I have spent the last year building OpenTechHub, a platform that helps organisations navigate the open source ecosystem and take back their digital sovereignty. And the deeper I go, the clearer one thing gets. The exciting tools, the open source answer to your CRM or your Notion, are not where your freedom actually lives.
The questions that matter are quieter. Where does my data physically live? If a provider disappears tomorrow, what do I really own?
So in June I went down a layer and spent the month on the boring foundations underneath the nice tools. Where your files are stored, instead of renting space on Google Drive. Where your code lives, instead of leaving it on one company's servers. The format your documents are saved in, so they still open a decade from now. How you get everything back when something breaks. Forty new open source solutions, almost all of them in the plumbing nobody thinks about until the day it fails.
Sovereignty is not a product you buy. It is a stack of unglamorous decisions about where your data lives, and the best time to make them is before you have to.
Making those decisions well takes more than a list of names. So every tool on the hub carries the context that actually decides it, in plain language a CFO and an engineer can both read. Who is behind it. What its licence really commits you to. Whether the project is genuinely alive or has quietly gone still. Recommending a beautiful but abandoned tool is worse than recommending nothing.
Reading that last signal got harder this year. The most sovereignty-minded projects are doing exactly what you would want: leaving GitHub, the Microsoft-owned platform most of the world's code sits on, for independent homes like Forgejo and Gitea. This month I rebuilt the hub to follow a project's health wherever its code lives, so the ones doing the right thing stay visible.
So far the hub has answered one question: what. What the credible alternatives are, and what you need to know before you trust them. Now it answers a harder one: who. The consultancies, the integrators, the hosting and managed-service providers who move organisations off locked-in systems and onto ones they own.
This is the pilot of our service provider program, and it is not pay to play. Every company passes the same two checks. Trust, real due diligence on who they are. And credibility, reference projects we review and publish. During the pilot, it is free.
Getting free of lock-in was never a solo project. June was about the tools. This part is about the companies that do the work.
If that is your company, I would be happy to hear from you, here on LinkedIn or through the early bird sign up at the top of OpenTechHub. The link is in my profile, and I will personally walk you through the onboarding.
