European companies have been called on to play a more active role in developing open source technology to help sovereignty flourish.

This was one of the key themes emerging from the Open Source Summit Europe, which took place in Prague, organised by the Linux Foundation, a non-profit consortium that supports the development of open source software.

The summit covered issues such as European sovereignty, geopolitics, the virtues of open source technology, agentic workloads, and AI model hallucinations. Speakers said that sovereignty is now a key priority for many European organisations. It comes amid long-standing concerns about Europe being too dependent on technology developed in the US.

Thierry Carrez, general manager, Linux Foundation Europe, highlighted how open source technology can drive further sovereignty. He said: “Open source gives organisations a way to reduce dependence on any single vendor or country.”

The conference took place as new findings from a Linux survey revealed that digital sovereignty is now a strategic priority for European organisations.

It found that more than nine in ten organisations consider digital sovereignty important to their technology strategy and that European organisations are relying heavily on open source technology to help them get greater control of their technology stack.

Startups do play an active role in developing open source software, sharing code, and developing open source software. Despite this, the foundation said there was a divide between open source use and the management structures needed to oversee it.

It said that companies with advanced open source governance reported an average return of more than four times their investment, compared with 3.6 times among those without formal governance structures.

Carrez continued: “Consuming open source alone doesn’t give you effective control over the technology. By contributing upstream and participating in open governance, European organisations can achieve greater autonomy, efficiently leveraging the global open source technology commons.”

The foundation urged European organisations to move beyond using open source software and participate in the communities that develop and maintain it.

The findings come as the EU makes policy bets on open source through the Tech Sovereignty Package and Cyber Resilience Act.

Christopher Robinson, chief security architect, Open Source Software Foundation, described the benefits of open source software to companies.

He said: “It requires an investment in skills and expertise. But if you do make that investment, you have the ability to go in and mould this software that might be 90 per cent of what you do and then tailor it to your organisation.”

Johan Linåker, a senior researcher at the RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, stressed the importance of open source to governments. He said: "Open source enables governments to share underpinning digital public infrastructure components and technology even though they politically don’t align at the top.” He pointed to examples of governments sharing information on things like political bribery.

Robinson also spoke about how AI was changing the role of the software engineer. He said: “AI has drastically changed the practices of software development. We have a lot of people today who are non-traditional developers; they aren’t trained software engineers, they are able to write software, to customise things very easily with these agents.”

The topic of AI agents was also discussed at length, with speakers saying that open source technology helps agentic workloads safely connect to tools, data and other agents within security boundaries.

October data from GitHub showed the rise in AI agents, showing that one in three pull requests-a review of code changes- now involves an AI agent, compared to fewer than one in ten a year ago.

Laura Tacho, senior principal technologist, AWS, said: “Things are moving really, really fast. But what is not increasing at the same pace is our trust in our tools.” She pointed to data, showing that over 80 per cent of developers had concerns about the accuracy of the data emanating from AI models. But she also pointed to data showing developers saying AI had helped them innovate and increase quality of software.

Image: ChatGPT