Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference + OSPOCon 2021

In March 2021, the European Commission presented its 2030 Digital Compass, a set of specific targets for Europe to become a leader in the digital space over the next decade. The document acknowledged Europe’s vulnerabilities and its increased dependency on critical non-EU technologies. The European Union has agreed to invest at least 20% of its 672.5 billion EUR “Recovery and Resilience Facility” to strengthen its own cloud infrastructure and capacities and to develop critical technologies. One of the specific actions to achieve that objective identifies Edge Computing as a strategic technology in which Europe needs to invest heavily: the target is to have 10,000 climate-neutral highly-secure edge nodes deployed across the EU by 2030. In October 2020, the European Commission acknowledged not only that open source impacts the digital autonomy of Europe, but also that, against the hyperscalers in the cloud, it is likely that open source can give Europe a chance to create and maintain its own, independent digital approach. In this presentation, we will analyse the role that Edge Computing and initiatives like GAIA-X are expected to play in the process of building Europe’s digital sovereignty, and both the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead for open source companies.