European Innovation Needs Healthy Open-Source Communities

This is my personal answer to the European Commissions Call for Evidence on Towards European open digital ecosystems

Perspective and background

I am writing as a private individual. I have contributed to open-source software (OSS) working for different companies and I have long-standing hands-on experience with the Robot Operating System (ROS) ecosystem.

Open source as a foundation for sustainable innovation

In my experience, open source software is a fundamental contributor to any quick software-based innovation. Its primary effect lies in leveling the playing field: openly available implementations of state-of-the-art software allow innovators (individuals, startups, or established companies) to build products and business models on a solid technological foundation. This significantly lowers entry barriers and shortens time to market, while avoiding the unnecessary reinvention of the wheel.

European sovereignty in a global landscape

European digital sovereignty should not be understood as being in conflict with global open-source projects. On the contrary, many critical digital infrastructures are global by nature. And so are the OSS prohects that build them.

For example, ROS is governed by the Open Source Robotics Alliance (OSRA), which is legally based in the United States. Aiming to recreate such ecosystems in parallel within the EU, purely for reasons of sovereignty, would be a strategic mistake. It would fragment communities, always compete with the global counterpart, and ultimately weaken Europe’s influence.

A more robust approach is to strengthen the resilience of existing global open-source projects through strong, visible, and sustained European contributions. Open source enables a shared base of knowledge and technology that counteracts domination by single commercial or geopolitical actors, thereby increasing global and European resilience alike. This perspective is well aligned with sociotechnical analyses of open-source communities as institutionalized forms of collective invention¹.

Health and sustainability of open-source ecosystems

At the same time, many open-source projects face serious structural challenges. Maintainer burnout is a widely documented issue, and I have personally witnessed its effects in my professional work².

An EU-specific approach to open digital ecosystems should therefore be explicitly value-based. In particular, the health and well-being of individuals who maintain OSS projects must be recognized as a strategic concern. These maintainers are often highly skilled, deeply knowledgeable, and intrinsically motivated. Many do this work in their free time.

Exploiting this motivation without adequate support is not only ethically problematic, it also undermines the long-term stability of the projects themselves. A strong European support network for maintainers (financial, organizational, and social) would directly translate into more resilient open-source infrastructures.

Individual know-how and retention within the EU

Open-source ecosystems also play a crucial role in retaining knowledge within Europe. Based on my observations in the ROS community, individual contributors are often more stable and continuous members of an open-source project than their employers.

As I have discussed previously³, open source thus functions as a career-building mechanism for engineers. Supporting individual contributors helps retain highly educated engineers, and with them critical know-how, within the EU.

Recommendations

From this perspective, I would strongly encourage the EU to:

• Avoid creating parallel, EU-only open-source projects solely in the name of sovereignty.
• Support existing European contributors so they can attain stronger, more influential positions within global open-source projects.
• Encourage and educate companies to use and contribute to open source as part of their innovation strategy.
• Explicitly recognize individual contributors and maintainers as key carriers of strategic know-how that should be supported and retained within Europe.