Who owns the stack? Why Europe writes the open source but doesn't govern it
Europe talks about digital sovereignty a lot. But the meaning of the word has shifted this year, and came into focus on day one of the Open Source Summit Europe in Prague.
It used to mean "pick open source software instead of proprietary software". Now it's closer to: do we actually understand and participate in the open source we're using, or are we just consuming someone else's work and calling it control?
Stephen Sopko, Practice Lead at HyperFRAME Research, told a story during a sovereignty panel for media and analysts that shows what this looks like in practice. Years ago, during a long contract negotiation, he insisted on source code escrow, and the clause took weeks. When the vendor eventually went out of business, the source code arrived on his doorstep and nobody on the team had ever touched it. He recalled: "I'm sure I'm glad we waited an extra...
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