A new Open Digital Ecosystems Strategy, discussed in the EU, will most certainly give a boost to open source development. Yet consultations on the planned strategy revealed another key theme for the strategy: the Digital Commons. The idea shows up across a striking range of responses — and not just from the usual suspects. Some come from organizations active in open source development - they use it to highlight the collaborative nature of their work. And to say: open source is not just about adding an open license to code; it's about productive communities that need to be supported and sustained. And then there are organizations working on other types of commons - projects like Wikimedia, Open Street Map, Zenodo, Wikidata, Open Food Facts. As one response notes, Europe is a powerhouse of Digital Commons initiatives - only they go unacknowledged in European policy debates. The latest Open Future Foundation analysis, by Aditya Singh and me, digs deeper into the results. https://lnkd.in/dYHbJMUQ
Serkan Holat
2d
Thank you for the overview! Regarding funding sources, tax breaks could be really interesting to experiment with, and should be raised more often. An alternative/complementary option is to introduce new taxes (Open source tax / Digital commons tax). Given all the digital sovereignty concerns, I believe the EU could adopt a much more progressive strategy regarding open source software / digital commons. From the summary of my input (focusing on open source software, but can be expanded to cover all other digital commons): - Implement a 1% Open Source Tax on proprietary solutions, and use the revenue to fund the European Sovereign Tech Fund. - Distribute funds back into the EU's open source sector in a data-driven, transparent, and reliable way. - Gradually increase the tax rate to shift resources from proprietary to the open source side. https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/16213-European-Open-Digital-Ecosystems/F33370097_en
excellent work. Here in Canada, we have the right building blocks for this, too, and I'm also not seeing government traction this issue should be receiving; wrote about it here: https://www.cigionline.org/articles/sovereignty-is-not-solitude-open-source-as-canadas-third-path-in-ai/
Ida Kruczek
1d
Alek Tarkowski I think - this proposed raises a structural question that remains insufficiently addressed. At present, we lack an articulated public methodology for limitation, separation, degrowth, loss assessment, and systemic risk evaluation with regard to digital technologies as such. There are no widely agreed social or regulatory frameworks defining when a technology should not scale, when it should be separated from market incentives, or how cumulative infrastructural risk and long-term maintenance liabilities should be measured. In this context, the role of Digital Commons remains conceptually ambiguous. Are Digital Commons entities expected to participate in growth competition, serving industrial scaling objectives under a different governance model? Or are they to be treated as critical infrastructure analogous to water systems, transport networks, or urban utilities whose primary logic is stability, resilience, and public continuity rather than expansion? If the strategic objective remains framed primarily in terms of competitiveness and scaling, commons risk becoming instruments of geopolitical catch-up, defaulting to the same growth-oriented logic they are implicitly meant to rebalance.
Thanks for the analysis. It is very important to remind everyone why open source and the idea of Digital Commons requires long-term, recurring investment beyond not just project grants. I especially liked the focus on procurement reform and stewardship incentives. One area where this issue is particularly visible is the research infrastructure and FAIR+Open data ecosystem. Much of Europe’s (and also rest of the world's) evidence-based policymaking depends on scientific data platforms, models, and open-source workflows, yet these are still largely funded through short-term projects rather than sustained operational support. It sometimes feels like this: we fund a bridge for three years, stop maintaining it, and then fund a new bridge next to the old one. Given their growing role in public decision-making, should the Open Digital Ecosystems Strategy explicitly recognise research data and scientific software (including ESFRI/ERIC-type infrastructures) as critical digital commons requiring lifecycle funding? Not sure if EU (and also national) Research Infrastructures are explicitly mentioned as part of the commons.