Open source and digital sovereignty: Europe must be able to stand on its own feet

A lot has happened since we wrote in July about why we own our own data. Back then it was mostly about law: the CLOUD Act, Schrems II and the question of who really has access to data on an American server in Europe. Today it is about something more basic. Can Denmark and the EU stand on their own feet, if it comes to it?

Being able to do it yourself

For twenty years Europe has increasingly rented its digital infrastructure. Email, documents, calendars, collaboration, cloud and now artificial intelligence come mostly from a handful of American companies. It has been convenient and often cheap, and as long as the transatlantic relationship was stable, it was easy not to think about it.

That relationship is no longer stable. Trade wars, sanctions and American legislation that gives the authorities access to data held by American companies, wherever the server stands, have made the dependency visible. When the service a company, a municipality or a court works in every day can be switched off, made more expensive or closed by decisions taken somewhere else, it is no longer an IT question. It is a question of who decides.

We believe Denmark and the EU must learn to stand on their own feet. Not by closing themselves off, but by being able to do it themselves: developing their own platforms, owning the code and the data, and choosing suppliers because they are good, not because there is no way out. That goes for the state, it goes for the individual company, and it goes for us.

When an email account became a security question

In spring 2025 the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague lost access to his Microsoft email. It happened after the United States imposed sanctions on the court's officials. Microsoft first said it was the court itself that had cut the access. In February 2026 the company had to ask the UK Parliament to correct its account: Microsoft had been in contact with the court throughout the process that ended with the prosecutor being disconnected. (The Register)

The court is now moving to openDesk, an open source office suite developed in Germany. (heise)

The point is not whether you agree with the sanctions. The point is that one of the world's most important legal institutions discovered that its daily work depended on a service that a government in another country could switch off.

Denmark has started to move

It has not gone unnoticed here. In summer 2025 the Danish Ministry of Digital Affairs began replacing Microsoft Office with LibreOffice, and both Copenhagen and Aarhus have said they want to move away from Microsoft's systems. The reasons given were cost, market dominance and the political tension with Washington. (The Record)

Germany is further ahead. The state of Schleswig-Holstein has moved more than 44,000 mailboxes and 110 million emails and calendar entries from Microsoft to open source, and expects to save more than 15 million euros in licences in 2026 alone. (heise) The state is also piloting an AI assistant for 1,000 staff, built on an open model instead of a closed one. (OSOR)

And in June 2026 the European Commission presented, for the first time, a standalone open source strategy as part of a wider package on technological sovereignty. Open source is no longer a procurement question. It is infrastructure that Europe must be able to own, maintain and build on itself. (European Commission)

Why open source is the core

Sovereignty is not about which flag flies over the server room. It is about three things: being able to see what the software does. Being able to fix it yourself, or have someone else do it. And being able to move it if the supplier, the price or the politics change.

Open source gives you all three. Closed software you rent gives you none of them, wherever it runs.

How we do it at broberg.ai

We have drawn the conclusion in our own house. The platforms we run our business on, we build ourselves: the CMS that runs all our sites, Trail, our shared memory, HelpDesk, where our support lives, and the fleet of AI agents that develops all of it. We own the code, we own the data, and we can move both.

We should also be honest about where we are today. Our sites run on machines in Stockholm, but with an American hosting provider. That is a deliberate choice for now, because we can move whenever we want: our code and our data are not locked to that provider. That freedom is exactly what sovereignty is about. Not that everything is already European, but that nothing ties us to staying where we are.

We offer our clients the same. Not a licence to renew every year, but a solution they own, can look inside and can take with them.

It is not free, but it is cheaper than standing without

Building yourself takes more than renting. It takes people who can, and a willingness to maintain. But the arithmetic is turning. Schleswig-Holstein's 15 million a year is one number. The day a service is switched off is another.

We believe Denmark and Europe should be able to do more themselves. That is what we build by.

Want to know what it means to own your own solution? → Let's talk.