European companies need to contribute more resources to the open source community as they lean on open projects for Europe’s digital sovereignty push, according to the general manager of The Linux Foundation Europe.
Thierry Carrez told The Stack at the foundation's Open Source Summit Wednesday that many European companies still did not recognise the return on investment from open source contributions, as governments embrace open source alternatives to software like Microsoft Office.
During an interview at the Prague event, he said that while many open source code contributions came from Europe in recent years, there has been a governance gap: “Europe is not necessarily strategically investing in the governance of those open ecosystems, and so from the outside if you look at those ecosystems, they are going to be dominated by companies from the US and from China.”
According to the foundation’s 2026 State of Open Source in Europe report, 59% of European organisations surveyed contributed open source code upstream, but only 37% participated in project governance.
Around 38% of contributions to Linux Foundation projects came from Europe, while 15% of governance activity came from the continent, Carrez added.
