“Buy European” won’t set you free. The option to leave does.
Swapping American software for European software feels like taking back control. Skype felt European too.
Digital sovereignty is finally a serious priority. Governments are starting to leave Microsoft, and "where does our software come from" now has real budget. Over time, though, the answer narrowed to two words: buy European. Buy European software, rebuild AWS on home soil. I hear it on LinkedIn and in the mandates I sit in. It's half a good answer. The missing half decides whether any of it holds.
"European" is not a property of software. It's the current state of a company. Skype was the poster child: Scandinavian founders, Estonian engineers, a Luxembourg head office. Then it was sold, and sold again, and Europe's flagship ended up an American asset. No scandal. Just a change of owner. Buy European today and you can own a foreign supplier by next quarter.
But what about infrastructure, the reach of US law over European data on AWS, Google, or Microsoft? Last year Microsoft admitted it under oath to a French Senate inquiry: it cannot guarantee French data in its cloud stays out of US hands. So the reflex is to build a European AWS. But you don't escape a hyperscaler by cloning it: you won't out-spend it, and a copy is the same cage under a new flag.
The lock buy-European keeps missing is a different one. Not where a tool comes from, but whether you can leave it. Proprietary you rent, wherever it's based. Open can't be taken from you. When Redis, a database used by millions of companies, moved to a restrictive license, a Linux-Foundation-backed fork called Valkey appeared eight days later. Maybe you run the fork, maybe it's too big and someone else does. Either way the door exists. No proprietary product, European or not, gives you one.
The same holds one layer down. Sovereign infrastructure isn't a bigger champion to depend on. It's systems you actually control because they're open, modular, and portable: run on-premise, in a private cloud, or moved between providers that share open standards. No one owns the whole stack, silicon included. Not even the giants. Europe sits between the US and China and cannot win by copying either. It can build in the open, invite everyone who honors the rules, and hold something no one can quietly buy out from under it.
This was never about purity. A US cloud is fine for what doesn't matter, if you choose it on purpose. Some data stays home because the law demands it. Everything else meets one question: if this supplier turned on me tomorrow, how fast could I move, and to what? Open source usually gives you an answer. Proprietary asks you to trust the one you're given.
So before the next "buy European" pitch reaches your desk, run that question over your own stack. Sooner or later a supplier you depend on gets bought, or turns on you. When it does, can you move, or do you just hope for the best?
