No digital sovereignty without European money for Rust, Python and Maven

Heavyweight infrastructure providers from the open-source world, such as the Eclipse Foundation (Open VSX), the Python Software Foundation (PyPi), the Rust Foundation (Crates.io), and Sonatype (Maven Central), have issued a joint statement calling for the funding of their services to be based on new structures. European companies, organizations, and EU authorities not only have a moral obligation to participate here—what's more, they should not miss the opportunity to increase their influence to fundamentally strengthen Europe's digital sovereignty.

A commentary by Wolf Hosbach

Wolf Hosbach is an editor at iX. His area of expertise is software development.

So far, the picture of where the funds are coming from has a clear bias: in a blog post, the Rust Foundation names a small group of companies that are currently bearing costs: Fastly, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Huawei, and AWS. Except Huawei, all are US giants. Many users, including large commercial companies, simply help themselves without contributing anything.

The EU institutions in particular, which are committed to digital sovereignty, could do more here. So far, their main contribution seems to be regulation. “New regulatory requirements such as the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) have increased compliance obligations and documentation requirements,” reads the joint statement from the open-source projects.

However, organizational and financial participation would also open up a great opportunity to gain formal and informal influence on the design of an important digital infrastructure. This in turn serves to strengthen European digital sovereignty. After all, those who pay can usually have a say, especially if this happens within a structural framework, which, in the current case, can even be co-designed from the outset. Europe should not miss out on this.

We are also living in times in which the US government is withdrawing from open-source projects on the one hand but explicitly promoting open source on the other if it fits in with its proclaimed goals. The decree on the AI Act plan contains a separate chapter on this: “Encourage Open Source and Open Weight-AI.” Donald Trump comments on his decree with, “America will win the AI race.” Europe should not let that happen.

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