Energy and Software Without Permission
First Posted: 2026.11.02, Revision History, Author: Tom Brown
Europe's dependence on proprietary software resembles its dependence on fossil fuels: it spends hundreds of billions of euros a year on foreign suppliers, and disruption threatens daily life. But for both there are now great alternatives: open source software on one side, renewables and electrification on the other.
A 2025 study by Asterès put the annual spending on proprietary IT services at around 264 billion EUR from the US alone. After US President Donald Trump sanctioned the International Criminal Court in February 2025, its chief prosecutor reportedly lost access to his Microsoft email. In June 2026, foreign nationals were barred from using Anthropic's latest AI models. Do we want this kind of dependency when we might have serious foreign policy disagreements with the White House? We are living in an age of weaponised interdependence.
In 2025 the EU spent 335 billion EUR on fossil fuels, mostly imported. Besides the enormous climate and health damage they cause, we are extremely vulnerable to supply interruptions. The gas crisis after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the aftermath of the US-Israeli attack on Iran showed this.
Fortunately there are solutions at hand for both problems.
There are now universal technologies for cheap electricity that every country can deploy: solar, wind and batteries. With electrification technologies like low-cost electric vehicles and heat pumps, oil and gas imports can be rapidly reduced. Some of these technologies may be imported, but they can in principle be produced anywhere, and they continue working even if there's a supply disruption.
For software, open source packages like LibreOffice, Nextcloud and Ubuntu have matured to the point where they can be widely deployed to replace proprietary alternatives. Mistral offers open-weight AI models. The EU's Tech Sovereignty Package has put Open Source at its centre, next to chip production and accelerating the building of domestic data centres. Cloud software can be hosted by independent providers and you can choose your own support. If the original supplier withdraws, the software can still be run and maintained by someone else. Open formats and interfaces make it easier to migrate to another tool if you don't like the current one. In 2022 Europe had 3 million open source contributors.
Finally, the benefits of Europe switching to open source have huge positive spillovers for the whole world. Just like solar deployment in Europe drove down the costs of solar for everyone and pioneer countries like Denmark found innovative solutions for renewable integration, wider adoption of open source can bring more funding and contributions to improve the code. Europe can use its purchasing power to fund improvements that flow back into a shared code base.