The EU just made its biggest open source bet ever
Plus: Europe's answer to Microsoft Office to go live, IBM and Red Hat commit $5bn to open source security, and more.
Hi folks,
This week’s lead story looks at the European Commission’s landmark tech sovereignty package — and what it means for open source specifically.
Elsewhere, Euro-Office is set to launch as a European alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Docs; IBM and Red Hat commit $5 billion to securing the open source supply chain; Supabase raises $500 million at a $10.5 billion valuation; and much more.
As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, corrections, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.
Paul
<Open issue>
Europe bets on open source to cut the cord from US and Chinese tech
On Wednesday, the European Commission (EC) published its European Technological Sovereignty Package — a bundle of legislative proposals covering semiconductors, cloud, AI, and, most notably for Forkable, a full Open Source Strategy.
Europe procures more than 80% of its key digital products, services, and infrastructure from non-EU suppliers — a dependence that reared its head last year when China curtailed semiconductor exports, pushing the European car industry to the brink. Add to that the question of what happens if a US administration decides to lean on American cloud providers, be it to cut off services or hand over sensitive European data.
Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s vice-president for tech sovereignty, said that the EU cannot allow any foreign government or company to hold what she called the “kill switch possibility.” She pointed specifically to the 2018 US Cloud Act, which gives US federal authorities the power to reach into data held by American providers on foreign soil, as something fundamentally at odds with European rules.
As for the open source component of the package, well, some €2 billion over seven years to fund alternatives to proprietary software; a target of 30 million active users of open source collaboration tools by 2030; and a mandate that the EU Digital Identity Wallet be built on open source.
OpenForum Europe, a Brussels-based open source advocacy group, welcomed it as "a defining moment for open source in Europe" — the culmination of more than two decades of work to have open source treated as a foundation of Europe's digital future.
“This is Europe's most ambitious commitment to open source to date,” said Nicholas Gates, senior policy advisor at OpenForum Europe. “The devil is always in the details, but this is a remarkable step forward for open source in digital policy, and the Commission should be lauded for getting us this far.”
Even within the open source camp, there are doubts about some of the specifics of the sovereignty package: €2 billion spread thinly across seven years looks modest set against the Commission’s own figure of €264 billion spent annually on largely proprietary IT. Open source hardware barely features, too.
On the cloud provisions specifically, the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) — whose members include Amazon and Google — called the proposals a “dangerous recipe for progressive market shutdown,” arguing the move was “discriminatory.”
“By excluding trusted international technology providers based on their headquarters location and organisational structure, the Commission forces users to rely on a much more limited selection of digital products,” the CCIA wrote.
The proposals still require agreement from EU member states and the European Parliament, so there is a long way for this to get over the line. But Brussels has now, for the first time, placed open source at the centre of how Europe intends to take back control of its own digital infrastructure.
Drupal founder and project lead Dries Buytaert called the new open source strategy “a big step forward.”
“It treats Open Source as infrastructure, ties it to technological sovereignty, and backs it with real funding,” Buytaert wrote.
Read more: European Commission | Tech Policy Press | The Guardian
<Patch notes>
Europe's answer to Microsoft Office to go live
Speaking of sovereignty, the first stable version of Euro-Office is set to launch on June 9, courtesy of a coalition of European companies which have built an open-source office suite designed as a direct alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace for governments, public sector bodies, and regulated organisations.
Read more: ZDNET | Euro-Office
Tokenomics Foundation to tackle AI cost chaos
AI token costs are rising fast and nobody agrees on how to measure them. With that in mind, the Linux Foundation this week announced the Tokenomics Foundation, a new body tasked with building open standards, benchmarks, and best practices across the AI token economy, backed by Google, Microsoft, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, and Salesforce. Notably absent: Anthropic and OpenAI, the frontier model providers whose pricing sits at the heart of the problem.
Read more: The New Stack
JetBrains open-sources Mellum2
JetBrains has released Mellum2, an open-source coding model built to run entirely on your own infrastructure — a direct counter to coding tools that depend on third-party APIs.
Read more: The New Stack
IBM and Red Hat commit $5 billion to open source security
IBM and Red Hat launched Project Lightwell, an enterprise clearing house for securing the open source software supply chain, backed by a $5 billion commitment.
Read more: Red Hat
Netflix engineer open-sources AI cost-cutting tool
A senior Netflix engineer has released Project Headroom, an open-source tool that promises to cut LLM costs by stripping redundant tokens before they reach a model. Since its January release, the project has reportedly saved users around $700,000 and freed up 200 billion tokens.
Read more: The Register
Rayfin lands to bridge vibe coding and enterprise production
Microsoft has released Rayfin, an open-source SDK built to take apps created with AI-assisted vibe coding tools and make them fit for enterprise deployment, with security and governance baked in.
Read more: Microsoft
Cloudflare acquires VoidZero
Cloudflare has acquired VoidZero, the team behind Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, and Oxc — some of the most widely used open-source JavaScript build tools in the ecosystem. Cloudflare says Vite will remain open source and vendor-agnostic.
Read more: Cloudflare
Supabase raises $500 million at $10.5 billion valuation
Open-source Postgres development platform Supabase (previous coverage here) has closed a $500 million series F round of funding, doubling its valuation to $10.5 billion.
Read more: CNBC
Yugabyte launches Meko, a memory layer for AI agents
Open-source database company Yugabyte launched Meko, a shared memory layer designed to give AI agents persistent, consistent context across tasks and sessions.
Read more: Forkable
OpenTelemetry hits general availability
Seven years in the making, OpenTelemetry — the open-source observability framework that has become the telemetry standard for cloud computing — formally reached general availability. The project is now also positioning itself for the AI infrastructure era.
Read more: The New Stack
Gas Town comes to the cloud
Gas Town, the open-source AI agent orchestration project created by developer and writer Steve Yegge, has received a cloud-hosted version via Kilo. The new Wasteland feature supports running a thousand Gas Town instances simultaneously.
Read more: The New Stack
Ex-Block CTO goes all in on open agentic AI infrastructure
Manik Surtani has left his role as head of open source at payments company Block after eight years, to become CTO of the Agentic AI Foundation, a new organisation focused on keeping the next layer of AI infrastructure open.
Read more: Substack
<Final commit>
Open skies
Researchers at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania have published MIGHTY, an open-source trajectory planning system for autonomous drones that can avoid unexpected obstacles in real time while keeping to a smooth, time-efficient flight path.
The system runs entirely on the drone’s own onboard hardware, negating the need for the commercial solvers that currently underpin most high-performance alternatives — software that can carry price tags running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. In tests, MIGHTY cut computation time by 9.3% and travel time by 13.1% compared to existing approaches, with a 100% success rate. Potential applications include search-and-rescue in collapsed buildings, last-mile delivery in cities, and infrastructure inspection.
The code is available on GitHub.
Read more: MIT News | Mighty (GitHub)