EU accelerates switch from Microsoft to open source
Plus: A new API for OSI-approved licenses, & more
In this week’s edition of Forkable, I look at Europe’s continued transition from Microsoft’s locked-in ecosystem to the open source realm.
Elsewhere, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) launched an API that serves direct access to a canonical list of OSI-approved licenses. Plus, there’s a trio of funding stories, a new open source GUI for Claude Code, and much more.
As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.
Paul
Open issues
“We’re done with Teams!”
Europe has made no secret of its desire for a sovereign tech stack free from the clutches of Big Tech. This push has included investing in sovereign large language models (LLMs), not to mention a constellation of satellites to rival Elon Musk’s Starlink.
In the more immediate term, however, two more governments in the EU bloc have revealed plans to remove Microsoft software from official workplaces, making way for open source programs such as Linux.
As per a report in the AFP, Schleswig-Holstein — the northernmost of Germany’s 16 states — is phasing out Microsoft’s communication and collaboration platform Teams, replacing it with an un-specified open source alternative. “We're done with Teams!," the state’s digitalisation minister, Dirk Schroedter, told the AFP.
In truth, the Schleswig-Holstein government has been phasing out Microsoft software since last year, starting with its Office suite of software. So rather than Word and Excel, staff will have to use LibreOffice, while Open-Xchange is usurping Outlook for email and calendars.
Longer term, the state plans to switch entirely from Windows to Linux.
Elsewhere, Denmark is also reducing its dependency on Microsoft’s omnipresent software. The country’s Ministry of Digitalisation this week revealed the department would start using LibreOffice in place of Microsoft Office 365, which follows similar announcements from Danish cities including the capital, Copenhagen.
While the current political climate is surely accelerating these efforts, the Interoperable Europe Act, which came into force last year, mandates that public sector bodies across the bloc have to ensure that their vast array of national IT systems play ball with each other — and what better way to do that than embrace open source.
Some institutions are actually well ahead of the curve. The French Gendarmerie (national police) began migrating from Microsoft to open source alternatives back in 2004, starting initially with applications before gradually transitioning all their PC software from Windows to Linux (Ubuntu) from 2008.
And as I reported back in March, the French and German governments have collaborated to create a new open source alternative to Google Docs called — somewhat unimaginatively — Docs.
Read more: 'We're done with Teams': German state hits uninstall on Microsoft [AFP via France 24] & Danish department determined to dump Microsoft [The Register]
Open source license data? There’s an API for that!
The folks at the Open Source Initiative (OSI) — “stewards” of the open source definition — launched a new API this week, serving direct access to a definitive list of OSI-approved licenses.
In real terms, this means that companies can integrate their development and software composition analysis tools directly with the API to automatically verify that dependencies or projects use OSI-approved licenses, or fetch metadata to accurately identify licenses.
The API basically serves as a single, machine-readable source of truth for open source license data, one that can improve compliance and transparency.
“The list of OSI Approved Licenses is a critical reference point for developers, legal teams, companies, and communities around the world,” the OSI’s head of community Nick Vidal wrote in a blog post. “The OSI Approved Licenses database is a comprehensive, structured, and up-to-date database of approved licenses and their metadata. This new API service builds directly on that work.”
Read more: Introducing the new API for OSI Approved Licenses [OSI blog]
COSS Corner
Datalab develops small AI models to power 'document intelligence' in the enterprise
In this week’s edition of COSS Corner, I caught up with Vik Paruchuri and Sandy Kwon, founders of an open source startup developing “AI for document intelligence.”
The problem is this: large language models (LLMs) are great for general-purpose reasoning and text generation — but in business, not every problem needs a resource-intensive, billion-parameter model that may hallucinate on more domain-specific tasks. Small language models, custom-built for specific tasks, can offer greater benefits in terms of speed, cost, accuracy, and efficiency versus their LLM counterparts.
And this is why Paruchuri and Kwon launched Datalab, a company that trains smaller, specialized foundation models capable of transforming complex documents into machine-readable structured data at scale.
“LLMs are incredible general-purpose tools, but most companies building on top of them are building a thin UX layer over someone else’s technology,” Paruchuri, Datalab’s CEO, told me. “By training our own models, we solve challenges LLMs weren’t built for, while unlocking speed, cost efficiency, and long-term independence.”
Datalab’s two core tools — Surya and Marker — have garnered more than 40,000 stars on GitHub at the time of writing. Most of the code is available under a GPL license, but the underlying model weights, while ‘available’, are licensed for non-commercial use only.
Founded in June last year, it’s still early days for Datalab, but the Brooklyn, New York-based company has alread secured some notable customers, including $61 billion AI giant Anthropic. And investors now want in on the action — Datalab announced that it has raised $3.5 million in a seed round of funding led by Pebblebed, an early-stage fund launched by some of the founding members of OpenAI and FAIR (Facebook’s AI research team). Other participants in the round include Peak XV, which is Sequoia Capital’s investment vehicle for India and Southeast Asia.
Read more: Datalab develops small AI models to power 'document intelligence' in the enterprise
Patch notes
Open wallet
There’s a trio of open source-aligned funding stories to highlight this week:
Polar has a somewhat novel goal: to serve as the payment infrastructure for “one-developer unicorns.” And to help drive its growth, the open source monetization platform raised $10 million in a seed round of funding led by Accel — less than a year after it launched.
Fleet, meanwhile, raised a $27 million Series B round for an open source device management platform used by companies such as Uber, Snowflake, Reddit, and Dropbox.
Finally: ZeroRISC, which is developing an open source silicon security product built atop OpenTitan, closed a $10 million round of funding.
OpenBao moves next door
The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) has a new sandbox project under its stewardship — OpenBao, an open source identity-based secrets and encryption management system. OpenBao was forked from HashiCorp Vault after Terraform announced its big license change back in 2023, and while it was originally developed under the LF Edge Linux Foundation project, it’s now moved next door to the OpenSSF.
“The move from LF Edge to OpenSSF reflects a strategic decision by OpenBao’s Technical Steering Committee to better align with its contributor base and project mission,” the OpenSSF wrote in a blog post.
Read more: OpenBao joins the OpenSSF [OpenSSF blog]
A GUI for Claude Code
Anthropic’s agentic coding tool Claude Code is great, but what’s even greater is an open source graphical user interface (GUI) that helps developers work with Claude Code without relying entirely on its terminal interface.
And that’s exactly what Y Combinator-backed startup Asterisk has built. Claudia, as it’s called, it pitched as an “elegant desktop companion for Claude Code,” one that solves “terminal chaos” via visual dashboards, session history, real-time usage tracking, and more.
Read more: YC startup unveils open-source graphical interface for Claude Code [Analytics India Magazine]
Open secret
MongoDB, the $16 billion ex-open source database company, this week launched Kingfisher — an open source (Apache 2.0-licensed) secret‑scanning and validation tool built in Rust.
“Kingfisher is a high-performance, open source secret scanning tool that combs through code repositories, Git commit histories, and file systems,” MongoDB staff security engineer Mick Grove wrote in a blog post. “Kingfisher performs this to rapidly uncover hard-coded credentials, API keys, and other sensitive data.”
Read more: Introducing Kingfisher: Real-time secret detection and validation [MongoDB blog]
Free of charge
ChargeLab, a company building the “operating system for electric vehicle (EV) chargers,” this week debuted OpenOCCP, hardware-agnostic embedded software for EV chargers.
Read more: ChargeLab launches open source EV charger software [The EV Report]
And finally…
The Humane touch
You’re probably well aware of the disastrous AI hardware project developed by a company called Humane: in short, they raised a tonne of cash to create a wearable nobody really wanted (read all about it here).
Those who saw its potential and doled out $700 for the device were quickly left with an expensive paper weight, as all the software and services it relied on was shut down.
However, a developer going by the name of Adam Gastineau has launched PenumbraOS, pitched as a “developer-friendly resurrection of the Humane Ai Pin.”
And of course, it’s fully open source.
As per a report in Yanko Design, Gastineau spent some 400 hours reverse-engineering Humane’s AI Pin to create PenumbraOS, which could help resurrect the wearable in some form. However, the project by its own admission is “extremely experimental and currently is usable by developers only.”
Read more: Humane AI pin gets resurrected thanks to a new free open source platform [Yanko Design]