The EU looks to be getting more serious about software independence, often under the branding of “sovereignty”. India has been taking this path for a while. (A Wikipedia article on that needs a lot of love.) I don’t have coherent thoughts on this yet, but prompted by some recent discussions, two big questions:

First: does software sovereignty for a geopolitical entity mean:

1. we wrote the software from the bottom up
2. we can change the software as necessary (not just hypothetically, but concretely: the technical skills and organizational capacity exist and are experienced)
3. we sysadmin it (again, concretely: real skills, not just the legal license to download it)
4. we can download it

My understanding is that India increasingly demands one for important software systems, though apparently both their national desktop and mobile OSes are based on Ubuntu and Android, respectively, which would be more level 2. (FOSS only guarantees #4; it legally permits 2 and 3 but as I’ve said before , being legally permitted to do a thing is not the same as having the real capability to do the thing.)

As the EU tries to set open source policy it will be interesting to see whether they can coherently ask this question, much less answer it.

Second, and related: what would a Manhattan Project to make the EU reasonably independent in core operating system technologies (mobile, desktop, cloud) look like?

It feels like, if well-managed, such a project could have incredible spillovers for the EU. Besides no longer being held hostage when a US administration goes rogue, tudents would upskill; project management chops would be honed; new businesses would form. And (in the current moment) it could provide a real rationale and focus for being for the various EU AI Champions, which often currently feel like their purpose is to “be ChatGPT but not American”.

But it would be a near-impossible project to manage well: it risks becoming, as Mary Branscombe likes to say, “three SAPs in a trenchcoat”. (Perhaps a more reasonable goal is to be Airbus?)