Amid escalating geopolitical tensions and growing dependence on foreign digital infrastructure, digital sovereignty has become an urgent priority for governments, public institutions, and scientific organizations in Europe. Despite marketing terms like sovereign cloud, legal frameworks such as the U.S. CLOUD Act and FISA 702 continue to expose European data to extraterritorial access, revealing a structural mismatch between political ambitions, geopolitical threats, and technological reality.

This talk explores how open‑source geospatial ecosystems offer a practical, scalable pathway toward genuine digital autonomy. Open source provides transparency, auditability, and the ability to self‑host and adapt tools to local needs and jurisdiction. It enables reproducible analytics, secure handling of sensitive geodata, and long‑term independence from vendor lock‑in. The presentation also discusses viable business models for commercial open source, showing how companies can sustainably build services, consulting, hosting, and innovation on top of open foundations without compromising user sovereignty and by contributing to open source communities.

However, achieving sovereignty is not only a technical challenge, it is also a procurement and governance challenge. Current public‑sector tendering practices often unintentionally exclude open‑source solutions through over‑specification, popularity bias, certification requirements, and tight timelines. These structural barriers limit innovation and reinforce dependency on proprietary ecosystems or vendors who market themselves as “open” without adhering to open‑source principles.

To address this, the talk argues for the development of a certification or trustmark for genuine open‑source companies, helping public institutions distinguish between truly open providers and those using “open‑washing” to lock customers into non–big‑tech proprietary ecosystems. Organizations such as OSGeo, national QGIS and OSGeo user groups, and broader open‑source communities can play a crucial role in defining such standards, raising awareness among procurement officers, and supporting fair, transparent, sovereignty‑aligned procurement processes.

Ultimately, the talk argues that sovereignty is not a checkbox but a long‑term commitment, and that open source is not merely an alternative, but a strategic necessity for Europe’s digital future.