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Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →“World of Open Source: EU 2025” is the Linux Foundation’s Europe-focused 2025 study of open-source software (OSS). Its formal title is Open Source as Europe’s Strategic Advantage: Trends, Barriers, and Priorities for the European Open Source Community amid Regulatory and Geopolitical Shifts. Published in August 2025, it finds that European organisations depend extensively on OSS, but many have not yet built the governance, security funding, upstream contribution and executive alignment needed to make that dependence a durable strategic advantage.
The word “EU” is shorthand: the study examines European organisations and the European OSS ecosystem, not a census restricted to the 27 EU member states.
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What the 2025 World of Open Source Europe report is
The 46-page report was written by Cailean Osborne and Adrienn Lawson, with a foreword by Canonical’s Cédric Gégout. It combines a survey of 316 European participants with 14 interviews involving private companies, government agencies and nonprofit organisations. Respondents represented organisations ranging from micro-enterprises with fewer than 10 employees to corporations with more than 20,000 staff.
The sample comprised 39% IT product and service providers, 42% industry end-user organisations and 19% academic, nonprofit or governmental entities; 66% held IT-related roles. The full methodology, charts and questions are in the official PDF. The Linux Foundation report page provides the publication details and download.
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These are self-reported survey results, not market-share measurements or an EU Commission statistical series. The report was produced by Linux Foundation Research and Linux Foundation Europe, with Canonical involvement; that institutional context is relevant when weighing its perspective.
The headline finding: adoption is broad, strategic maturity is not
European organisations commonly run open-source operating systems, cloud platforms, databases, development tools and AI components. Yet usage often exists without a formal policy for ownership, licensing, vulnerability response, upstream participation or long-term funding.
Only 34% of respondents said their organisation had a formal OSS strategy, and 22% reported an Open Source Program Office (OSPO). Forty-two percent actively contributed to projects they depend on, while 30% used OSS without contributing back. Just 28% employed full-time OSS contributors or maintainers for dependency projects. Among organisations that made that staffing investment, 81% reported high or very high value.
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The practical diagnosis is therefore not that Europe lacks open source. It is that many organisations consume open source without yet developing the capability to govern and sustain it.
Where European organisations use open source
Participants selected the areas in which their organisations use OSS. The percentages are multiple-choice responses, not estimates of the share of all European technology spending or companies.
| Use area | Respondents reporting use |
|---|---|
| Operating systems | 64% |
| Cloud and container technologies | 55% |
| Web and application development | 54% |
| Database and data management | 53% |
| CI/CD and DevOps | 52% |
| DevOps, GitOps and DevSecOps | 51% |
| Artificial intelligence and machine learning | 41% |
| Cybersecurity | 36% |
| Data science and advanced analytics | 33% |
Operating systems lead the list, but the pattern extends through the entire software supply chain. A company can therefore have hundreds or thousands of OSS dependencies even if it does not market an “open-source product”.
What respondents say OSS delivers
The survey asked about benefits organisations experience from using OSS. The leading answers were:
| Reported benefit | Share selecting it |
|---|---|
| Higher productivity | 63% |
| Reduced vendor lock-in | 62% |
| Lower software-ownership costs | 58% |
| Improved software quality | 53% |
| Facilitated innovation | 48% |
| Lower IT operating costs | 45% |
| Improved workplace attractiveness | 44% |
| Reduced time to market | 44% |
| Improved security | 29% |
Other questions measured beliefs rather than direct operational outcomes: 75% said open-source development leads to higher-quality software, 69% said their organisation’s OSS engagement makes it more competitive, and 56% said OSS benefits exceed or greatly exceed costs. These perceptions should not be read as independent benchmarks. “Lower ownership cost” also does not mean zero total cost: integration, internal engineering, support, training, hosting, upgrades and incident response remain budget items.
The capability gap behind the numbers
Strategy and OSPO coverage
Europe’s 34% formal-strategy rate and 22% OSPO rate were below the report’s global comparison figures of 37% and 28%. That comparison indicates a maturity gap in this sample, not that Europe is behind on every dimension of open source.
Executive alignment
Sixty-two percent of C-suite respondents recognised OSS’s strategic value, compared with 86% of other employees. This difference can leave engineers carrying dependency and maintenance risk without matching board-level funding or authority.
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Contribution and maintenance
Using a project and maintaining it are different activities. Contributions can include code, documentation, tests, issue triage, security fixes, governance participation and financial support. Full-time maintainers are especially important for projects that are operationally critical. The 81% high-value response among organisations employing such contributors is an association reported by participants, not a guaranteed return on every hire.
An editorial maturity model
The following five levels are an interpretation of the report’s findings, not a framework published by the Linux Foundation:
- Passive consumption: teams add packages and platforms without a central inventory or owner.
- Controlled usage: dependencies are inventoried, licences are reviewed and vulnerabilities have an escalation path.
- Formal governance: an OSS policy or OSPO coordinates engineering, legal, procurement and security.
- Upstream contribution: the organisation budgets fixes, documentation, testing, sponsorship or maintainer time for critical projects.
- Strategic ecosystem leadership: the organisation helps shape standards, funds infrastructure and treats upstream resilience as part of business continuity.
Digital sovereignty: control, not autarky
The report links OSS to Europe’s digital-sovereignty debate. In operational terms, sovereignty means being able to inspect and modify critical technology, change suppliers without losing essential functionality, maintain systems if a vendor exits a market, influence upstream projects, interoperate across suppliers and retain local skills.
Open licensing can support those capabilities, but it does not guarantee them. A project may be open while its most important maintainers, hosting, expertise or commercial support are concentrated elsewhere. A company can also use open software through one cloud provider and remain commercially dependent on that provider.
The report warns that national or regional sovereignty measures could fragment a globally collaborative ecosystem. “European” requirements should therefore be tested against portability, open interfaces, contributor diversity and realistic exit plans rather than treated as proof of autonomy.
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What respondents want governments to fund
These are priorities selected by survey participants, not binding EU policy:
| European investment priority | Share selecting it |
|---|---|
| Build OSS alternatives to technology monopolies | 55% |
| Accelerate government adoption of OSS | 52% |
| Invest in digital public goods | 31% |
Preferred technology domains included operating systems (43%), AI and machine learning (38%) and cybersecurity (34%). Within their own organisations, respondents most often wanted more sponsorship of dependencies (45%), upstream collaboration and contributions (37%) and developer training (37%).
Government adoption has to include procurement flexibility, maintenance funding, local operational expertise, accessibility and language requirements, security response, data portability and a policy for contributing improvements upstream. Buying an open product without funding its maintenance simply transfers the risk to an under-resourced project.
Cyber Resilience Act: awareness is not compliance
Sixty-two percent of respondents reported low familiarity with the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). That figure measures awareness in this survey; it does not establish that 62% of organisations are non-compliant.
The legal analysis depends on the organisation’s role:
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- Component user: an organisation incorporating an OSS library has dependency, security and documentation responsibilities, but its obligations differ from those of a product manufacturer.
- Project maintainer or publisher: the project’s governance, vulnerability handling and release practices matter, with legal treatment depending on the project and activity.
- Product maker or distributor: a commercial product containing OSS may trigger product-security, support and documentation duties.
- Service provider: cloud or hosted delivery can change which party distributes a product and which controls are required.
Teams should verify the current CRA text and implementation timetable in EUR-Lex and European Commission materials, rather than treating the report as legal advice. Practical preparation includes a software bill of materials, named dependency owners, licence records, vulnerability-disclosure procedures, patch evidence, support horizons and clear maintainer contacts.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Open-source AI is several different things
Thirty-eight percent of respondents prioritised investment in OSS AI and machine learning. The report presents this as an opportunity for European competitiveness and AI aligned with European priorities, but “open-source AI” is not one legal or technical category.
- Open-source frameworks and libraries may have conventional software licences.
- Model weights may be downloadable while imposing restrictions on use, redistribution or commercial deployment.
- Training data may be unavailable, partially documented or licensed separately.
- Datasets, evaluation tooling, documentation and hardware can each have different openness conditions.
- Reproducible training and deployment may require infrastructure that is not publicly available.
Before claiming that an AI system is open source, check the licence for code and weights, access conditions, training-data disclosure, commercial rights, evaluation evidence and reproducibility.
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- Inventory dependencies: identify direct and transitive OSS in applications, images, devices, data platforms and AI systems.
- Classify criticality: rank components by business impact, exposure, replacement difficulty and maintainer concentration.
- Assign ownership: name engineering, security, legal and procurement owners for critical projects.
- Create governance: establish an OSPO or equivalent cross-functional function with executive sponsorship.
- Review licences: check compatibility, notice obligations, source-availability terms and distribution models before release.
- Strengthen supply-chain controls: produce and maintain SBOMs, monitor advisories, verify provenance and rehearse vulnerability response.
- Plan upstream work: reserve engineering time for fixes, tests, documentation and issue triage rather than maintaining permanent private patches.
- Fund key projects: use sponsorship, contracts, audits or maintainer employment according to the project’s needs and your procurement controls.
- Train every relevant role: developers, security teams, lawyers, buyers, executives and maintainers need different OSS and CRA knowledge.
- Measure resilience: track patch time, dependency concentration, maintainer diversity, migration options and recovery capability—not licence fees alone.
How to read the report responsibly
- Use “European organisations” unless discussing a specific EU law or institution.
- Say “respondents reported” rather than presenting percentages as the behaviour of every European company.
- Separate experienced benefits from beliefs about what open-source development produces.
- Treat security and sovereignty as capabilities that require people, funding and processes, not automatic properties of an open licence.
- Do not equate public model weights with fully open-source AI.
- Remember that the study’s sponsor and institutional setting may shape which questions receive emphasis.
The report’s durable message is straightforward: Europe does not need to discover open source. It needs to participate in it deliberately—governing dependencies, funding maintainers, contributing upstream and aligning those activities with security, procurement and sovereignty goals.
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