European companies urged to play more active role in open source software development

European companies have been urged to play a more active role in developing open source software to foster European sovereignty. This message was echoed at the Open Source Summit Europe, held in Prague by the Linux Foundation. The summit addressed various issues, including digital sovereignty, open source technology, and AI model hallucinations.

Digital sovereignty has become a strategic priority for many European organisations, with over 90% considering it crucial to their technology strategy. European organisations rely heavily on open source technology to gain greater control of their technology stack. However, a divide exists between the use of open source software and the management structures required to oversee it.

Companies with robust open source governance report an average return of over four times their investment, compared to 3.6 times for those without formal governance structures. To enhance autonomy and efficiently leverage the global open source technology commons, European organisations are being encouraged to contribute upstream and participate in open governance.

The EU is also making policy commitments to open source through the Tech Sovereignty Package and Cyber Resilience Act. Christopher Robinson, chief security architect at the Open Source Software Foundation, emphasized the benefits of open source software, stating that investing in skills and expertise enables organisations to mould software and tailor it to their specific needs.

Johan Linåker, a senior researcher at the RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, highlighted the importance of open source for governments, enabling them to share underpinning digital public infrastructure components and technology, even if their political alignment is not aligned at the top. Open source technology also plays a crucial role in enabling agentic workloads, such as AI agents, to safely connect to tools, data, and other agents within security boundaries.

Recent data from GitHub shows a significant rise in AI agents, with one in three pull requests now involving an AI agent, compared to fewer than one in ten a year ago. Despite the rapid advancements, there is a lack of trust in tools, with over 80% of developers concerned about the accuracy of data from AI models.