geteilt von: https://feddit.org/post/31252728

Dear Fedi friends, I need your help.

If by any chance any of you have saved the video of #WSocial CEO Anna Zeiter's presentation at the Monaco AI conference (uploaded to YouTube on May 21) I would be ETERNALLY grateful.

OG URL: https://youtu.be/xDNGHaISqs4

The 35 minute video included priceless quotes like: "Yes we have a business model, it's not a philanthropy, we are not a B corp, we actually want to make money."

Following the publication of my exposé, the video has been removed from YouTube!

The European Commission published its Technological Sovereignty Package on 3 June 2026, containing the new "Open Source Strategy". If implemented, it could mark a paradigm shift by adopting the Free Software Foundation Europe’s “Public Money? Public Code!” principle. Its success will depend on binding rules, long-term funding, and meaningful civil society involvement.

On June 3, 2026, the European Commission released the EU Tech Sovereignty Package. Taken together, its constituent measures represent an effort to reduce reliance on US and other non-EU technology and digital services and to ensure the development of a domestic, low-carbon lifecycle for cutting-edge digital technology. Currently, the EU is heavily reliant on non-EU digital products, services, infrastructure and intellectual property. Among other things, the package aims to further onshore semiconductor manufacturing in the EU, incentivize the development of a domestic European AI industry, provide incentives, including on the demand side, for chips and other technology, and reduce reliance on foreign countries for critical infrastructure and technologies. The package is composed of two legislative proposals (the Chips Act 2.0 and the Cloud and AI Development Act) and two initiatives (the EU Open Source Strategy and Strategic Roadmap for Digitalisation and AI in Energy).

Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency (Sovereign Tech Fund) has provided critical financial resources to open-source software projects and maintainers the past several years. This has proven to be an incredible effort and today they announced their newest initiative as the Sovereign Tech Standards.

Sovereign Tech Standards aims to support open-source maintainers working on open standards and improving interoperability. Sovereign Tech Standards covers standards via the IETF, W3C, and ISO.

The Document Foundation, creator of LibreOffice, urges Europeans to adopt open source solutions and reduce dependence on proprietary software and major technology platforms.

Germany has mandated the Open Document Format (ODF) as the standard for public administration documents within its new sovereign digital infrastructure framework, the Deutschland-Stack.

Published by the Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernisation, the framework sets technical standards for a unified, interoperable digital environment across all government levels. It explicitly requires ODF and PDF/UA as document formats, excluding proprietary alternatives from official use.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency announced a new and expanded Sovereign Tech Fellowship program that is now open to community managers and technical writers, beyond just FOSS maintainers from the prior round.

Announced back in 2024 was the Sovereign Tech Fellowship program to support open-source maintainers, especially those that may be supporting multiple open-source projects. Over 2025 they successfully ran the program and are now opening up applications for the next round of the program.

I was hoping for thousands of responses. The EU Commission better not dismiss it all.

The European Open Source Awards 2026, an annual program recognizing outstanding contributions to open-source software, has announced this year’s winners.

The awards were presented on January 29, 2026, in Brussels by the European Open Source Academy, an EU-backed initiative promoting open source across Europe.

The top honor, the Prize for Excellence in Open Source Software, was awarded to Greg Kroah-Hartman, a long-time Linux kernel maintainer known for overseeing stable kernel releases and contributing to core subsystems. The award recognizes his decades of technical leadership and stewardship in one of the world’s most widely used open-source projects.

Eight satellites from five different member states are currently being pooled as part of GOVSATCOM. The Commission hopes this is the first step towards less dependence on the US - whose own communication systems are a lot more mature. #EuropeNews

At the same time, the "World Wide Web," composed of the HTTP protocol and the HTML format, was invented by a British citizen and a Belgian citizen who were working in a European research facility located in Switzerland. But the building was on the border with France, and there’s much historical evidence pointing to the Web and its first server having been invented in France.

It’s hard to be more European than the Web!

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Some are proud because they made a lot of money while cutting down a forest. Others are proud because they are planting trees that will produce the oxygen breathed by their grandchildren. What if success was not privatizing resources but instead contributing to the commons, to make it each day better, richer, stronger?