As European Governments Combat ‘Digital Sabotage,’ Open Source Startups Stand to Benefit
As European Governments Combat ‘Digital Sabotage,’ Open Source Startups Stand to Benefit
As European Governments Combat ‘Digital Sabotage,’ Open Source Startups Stand to Benefit
cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/4062240
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Back in July, Germany’s healthcare system, Gematik, went live with TI-Messenger [which is built on Matrix], a long-gestating project with the goal of providing secure, standardised messaging across the country’s myriad healthcare entities, including hospitals, clinics, and insurers.
Unlike a single proprietary platform run by one company, TI-Messenger is an open, federated standard that lets multiple certified providers interoperate, avoiding lock-in and keeping data under local control.
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Schleswig-Holstein [Germany's most northern state] has been looking to phase out Microsoft software for a while, replacing Word and Excel with the likes of LibreOffice, supplanting Outlook’s email and calendars with Open-Xchange, and ditching SharePoint for Nextcloud.
And now, the state is replacing Microsoft Teams with open source alternatives such as Jitsi.
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The City of Lyon in France recently revealed that it’s replacing Microsoft Office with OnlyOffice; Windows with Linux; and Microsoft SQL Server with PostgreSQL. And it’s a similar story across Denmark, where several cities are reducing their dependency on Microsoft.
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This movement could prove a boon for open source-aligned startups, such as Germany’s Nextcloud, which offers an array of open source, self-hostable tools across the productivity and collaboration spectrum.
Nextcloud founder and CEO Frank Karlitschek told Resilience Media that around 25 percent of its customers hail from the public sector, though demand (i.e. in-bound inquiries) has tripled in the first-half of 2025 across all sectors.
“We are seeing the greatest demand from European countries, but also a significant increase in global inquiries, for example from Canada, Latin America, India and the US,” Karlitschek said in an interview. “Many organizations we talk to are specifically asking for a migration from Microsoft or Google.”
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“Smaller public sector organizations, more often, opt for hosted offerings from a local, trusted provider,” Karlitschek said. “Larger, federal agencies tend to prefer to keep data in their own data centers. For example, we see a fair bit of interest in the US for deploying Nextcloud in air-gapped [i.e. isolated offline network] environments. Those are, by their nature, self-hosted.”
This emphasis on self hosting is something echoed by Emily Omier, open source startup consultant and co-creator of the Open Source Founders Summit. She notes that while some governments do have mandates to use open source where possible, the stronger driver behind such shifts is the desire to control where and how systems are hosted, rather than the specific license attached to the software.
“To be completely fair, I think this is often not just about open source, but about on-prem — often open source companies offer the only option in their ecosystem to self-host,” Omier said in an interview with Resilience Media. “Many open source companies have dedicated sales organizations for the public sector.”
Of course, open source software comes with many additional perceived benefits beyond the ability to self-host, such as transparency, interoperability, cost savings, and — many argue — security. However, Omier insists that the core benefit sought by public sector entities is control — over both their infrastructure and their data. Whether it makes them more secure, she cautions, depends entirely on their ability to maintain and protect the systems themselves; without the right skills and resources, open source can expose as many risks as it helps mitigate.
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Passbolt, an open source password management provider based in Luxembourg, also counts a number of public sector customers, including France’s Ministère de l’Intérieur. Remy Bertot, Passbolt’s co-founder and CTO, said that while most of the company’s conversations with the public sector tend to be with people who are already open source advocates within their respective institutions, there has been a marked shift in terms of their influence around procurement decisions.
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Recent attempts to weaponise US technology against global institutions and foreign allies has added weight to a broader conversation in Europe about digital sovereignty, not just concerning who operates critical services, but the open source infrastructure itself (e.g. operating systems, frameworks, databases), much of which is maintained by small, often overstretched teams.
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