The Linux Foundation, LF Europe, LF Research and NeoNephos released the fifth annual 2026 State of Open Source in Europe report at Open Source Summit Europe, finding that 94 percent of European organizations consider digital sovereignty important, including 61 percent who call it very important, with security and privacy the leading drivers. Organizations with advanced open source governance reported an average return of more than four times their investment, against 3.6 times for those without formal governance, and European developers account for nearly 40 percent of contributions to foundational projects such as Kubernetes and OpenStack. The report also documents strain: 94 percent use or pilot generative AI coding tools, 48 percent maintain private forks, and those maintaining forks report spending an average of 311 hours per release cycle patching 9.5 forks while 28 percent cannot track that cost at all. It says 31 percent of European organizations still lack a formal open source governance framework, and LF Europe general manager Thierry Carrez argued that consuming open source without contributing upstream does not give organizations effective control over the technology.
Linux Foundation Europe finds digital sovereignty drives open source strategy
The Linux Foundation, LF Europe, LF Research and NeoNephos released the fifth annual 2026 State of Open Source in Europe report at Open Source Summit Europe, finding that 94 percent of European organizations consider digital sovereignty important, including 61 percent who call it very important, with security and privacy the leading drivers. Organizations with advanced open source governance reported an average return of more than four times their investment, against 3.6 times for those without formal governance, and European developers account for nearly 40 percent of contributions to foundational projects such as Kubernetes and OpenStack. The report also documents strain: 94 percent use or pilot generative AI coding tools, 48 percent maintain private forks, and those maintaining forks report spending an average of 311 hours per release cycle patching 9.5 forks while 28 percent cannot track that cost at all. It says 31 percent of European organizations still lack a formal open source governance framework, and LF Europe general manager Thierry Carrez argued that consuming open source without contributing upstream does not give organizations effective control over the technology.
Source: Linux Foundation