Europe Looks for Homegrown and Open-Source Alternatives
France has decided to boot U.S.-made videoconferencing services out of its public sector, to be replaced by a homegrown alternative called Visio.
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It’s the latest episode in an accelerating push for technological “sovereignty” across the continent, fueled by the aggressive foreign and trade policies of the second Trump administration in United States. Open-source software is integral to the effort, playing out within international bodies as well as national and local governments.
Visio, not to be confused with Microsoft’s similarly-named diagramming software, was developed by the French government’s Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs. A pilot deployment began a year ago and it has already amassed 40,000 users across 15 ministries and public-sector bodies, although many still use American-made services such as Teams, Zoom and WebEx. Now Visio will be rolled out across the board.
The idea is to make Visio the sole videoconferencing tool for around 200,000 state employees by 2027, and at an ambitious pace too. The mammoth French National Center for Scientific Research – it has 34,000 employees and 120,000 associated researchers – is set to make the switch in the first quarter of this year, as will the French National Health Insurance Fund, the Directorate General of Public Finances and the Ministry of Armed Forces.
As is often the case with French public procurement, the line between sovereignty and protectionism is a little blurry. The government is clearly using the abandonment of U.S. services as a chance to promote French companies: Dassault Systèmes subsidary Outscale will handle Visio’s secure hosting, Parisian startup PyannoteAI is providing the speaker-separation tech for meeting transcriptions and the AI research lab Kyutai – also located in Paris- will power an incoming real-time subtitling feature.
“We cannot risk having our scientific exchanges, our sensitive data and our strategic innovations exposed to non-European actors,” said David Amiel, France’s minister-delegate for the civil service and state reform, in a Monday statement rendered using machine translation. “Digital sovereignty is simultaneously an imperative for our public services, an opportunity for our businesses and insurance against future threats.”
Europe’s sovereignty drive is also in many ways a push for the adoption of open-source software – free from vendor lock-in, auditable, made for modification and often substantially cheaper to use than proprietary alternatives.
Visio is a case in point. It’s based on open-source AI-voice-and-video infrastructure software called LiveKit. The same software powers ChatGPT’s voice mode and the eponymous business behind the project just raised funding at a $1 billion valuation. According to the French government, the use of Visio will save 1 million euros, or $1.2 million, for every 100,000 users switching over from licensed videoconferencing services.
Last year saw several significant moves towards open source. In June, the French government became the first to endorse the United Nations’ Open-Source Principles, which aim to promote the use and development of such software. The government also released a secure open-source software platform called La Suite Territoriale for small municipalities, while the major city of Lyon began migrating from Microsoft’s offerings to the open Linux, OnlyOffice and NextCloud.
The Danish government in 2025 announced a shift from Microsoft Office to open-source LibreOffice while the regional government in the neighboring German state of Schleswig-Holstein – which had already made the same switch – announced a successful migration from Exchange and Outlook to the open-source Open-Xchange and Thunderbird.
“We want to become independent of large tech companies and ensure digital sovereignty,” said Schleswig-Holstein state digitalization minister Dirk Schrödter in the October statement announcing the migration.
As in France, the German government is putting a great deal of effort into reducing its reliance on U.S. software. A few years ago, it founded the Center for Digital Sovereignty of Public Administration, or ZenDiS, which in 2024 released the first iteration of an office and collaboration suite called openDesk. ZenDiS spokesperson Lutz Niemeyer said Tuesday that nearly 100,000 public-sector workers now use openDesk and contracts for 60,000 more licenses have been signed. The company is also preparing to meet industry demand by opening up sales through private IT service providers.
The Austrian Armed Forces jumped from Office to LibreOffice in September. Italy’s government is also enthusiastic about open source, at least in theory – a 2012 legal change urges public-sector organizations to prioritize open-source over proprietary software, but Microsoft’s services are still widely used. According to targets set a few years ago, at least 3,000 Italian public bodies should be using open-source software by the end of this year, and at least 150 of them should also be releasing software that others can then deploy.
The European Commission has started to provide coordination of these efforts, last year approving a consortium through which member countries can jointly develop and deploy sovereign, open-source digital infrastructures. France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy were the founding members of this “DC EDIC” group. Its unwieldy acronym stands for Digital Commons European Digital Infrastructure Consortium. Belgium, Luxembourg, Slovenia and Poland are currently participating as observers.
Earlier this month, the commission also opened a consultation about boosting support for open-source projects in order to “support the E.U.’s tech sovereignty and competitiveness agenda.” A separate consultation on reforming Europe’s public procurement rules has just closed, and many in the open-source movement hope to see a benefit coming out of that as well.
Political and industrial leaders are promoting the development of sovereign European cloud infrastructure (see: Europe’s Quest for a Domestic Alternative to US Hyperscalers).
At Davos last week, former eBay privacy chief Anna Zeiter caused a minor splash by announcing an X rival called W Social that will be “built, governed and hosted in Europe.” Details remain scarce apart from the fact that it will use the same AT Protocol as Bluesky, but W’s advisory board is stacked with figures like former German vice-chancellor Philipp Rösler, former Club of Rome chair Sandrine Dixson-Declève and Cristina Caffara, one of the driving forces behind the EuroStack tech-sovereignty initiative.
European countries also now have access to their own secure satellite communication system known as Govsatcom, the European Commission announced Tuesday. Defense commissioner Andrius Kubilius said the new Starlink rival was available for military and government applications, adding that it was “built in Europe, operated in Europe, under European control.”