A CTO at a mid-sized European company searches for “alternatives to Microsoft 365.” The first page of results: ten listicles, eight with affiliate links, all recommending the same five tools with the same star ratings. None of them mention that Nextcloud’s collaborative editing is not yet at Google Docs level. None explain that openDesk integrates six independent projects and the seams show. None ask the question that actually matters: what specific problem are you solving, and at what cost?

This gap — between the marketing and the engineering reality — is where bad decisions get made. Organisations switch from one dependency to another. Migrations fail because nobody mentioned the document compatibility edge cases. Pilot projects stall because the total cost of ownership was calculated with licence costs but not operational overhead.

What this site is

digital-independence.org is a non-commercial project. No affiliate links, no sponsored content, no advertising, no tracking beyond anonymous page-view counts.

We write long-form analysis of the technologies, policies, and strategic decisions that determine whether European organisations can reduce their dependency on a small number of non-European vendors — or whether that dependency will deepen.

The framing is strategic, not political. We don’t argue that US software is bad or that European software is good. We argue that concentration risk is a management problem: when your entire administration runs on one vendor’s platform, under one country’s jurisdiction, governed by licence terms you cannot negotiate, you have accepted a single point of failure. Whether that concerns you is a rational calculation, not an ideological position.

What we cover

Each article follows the same structure: what exists, what works, what doesn’t, and what to do about it — with concrete timelines and cost estimates.

  • The Sovereign Workplace: openDesk, LaSuite, MijnBureau — what’s deployed, what’s still maturing, and what Microsoft’s sovereign cloud response means.
  • Cloud Sovereignty: European providers at 3–5x lower cost, the Data Act eliminating switching fees, and the managed services gap that keeps organisations on hyperscalers.
  • Identity Sovereignty: The DigiD controversy, eIDAS 2.0, Keycloak vs. Okta — and why identity is the infrastructure nobody thinks about until it’s too late.
  • AI Sovereignty: Open-weight models, European compute, the AI Act, and why you can run a sovereign AI stack for €150/month.
  • Linux in the Public Sector: Munich, Schleswig-Holstein, the French Gendarmerie, the Italian military — what worked, what didn’t, and why the urgency is real.
  • Digital Sovereignty in Europe: The political landscape — Merz’s speech, the Berlin summit, the Parliament vote — and what it means for procurement decisions.

Who this is for

  • CTOs and IT directors evaluating alternatives to proprietary infrastructure — who need the honest assessment, not the affiliate pitch
  • System administrators planning migrations — who need to know what breaks before they start
  • Procurement officers writing tenders — who need the technical depth to evaluate vendor claims
  • Anyone who wants to understand this landscape through engineering analysis rather than political rhetoric

Principles

Honest about trade-offs. Open source is not always cheaper. Self-hosting is not always better. European providers have real gaps in managed services. We say so. We also wrote an entire article about where digital independence stops making sense — because credibility requires acknowledging limits, not just making the case.

Strategic, not ideological. The question is not “US vs. Europe” — it’s “how much concentration risk is acceptable, and what does reducing it actually cost?” Every recommendation on this site is framed as a risk/cost/benefit calculation, not a political statement.

Technically specific. We name versions, costs, timelines, and limitations. “Consider open-source alternatives” is useless advice. “Deploy Mistral 7B on a Hetzner GPU server at €150/month for a team of 20–50” is actionable.

Get involved

This is an open project. If you have expertise and want to contribute, get in touch.