Thesis 12 of the manifesto names a structural mechanism: “as long as European providers position themselves as distributors of bricks under foreign governance, they deprive sovereign alternatives of the customers, capital and critical mass that would let them exist.” This dynamic is cumulative and self-reinforcing: every individual purchasing decision that favours the dominant option (by default, by habit, by network effect) reinforces the dominant position at the expense of the alternative. Reversing the direction of the dynamic — preferring, at functional equivalence, bricks under European governance or held in a neutral foundation — is the central commitment that makes alternatives credible.
Five commitments organise this preference at different levels of the chain.
On the providers side (see commitment pub-003), favouring in one’s catalogue, at functional equivalence, bricks under European governance or held in a neutral foundation — Valkey rather than Redis Inc., OpenTofu rather than Terraform under IBM, PostgreSQL rather than MongoDB Inc., OpenSearch rather than Elastic NV — and making this preference readable in the commercial catalogue. This is not dogma: the preference applies at equivalence, not at functional inferiority. But the absence of any preference is default alignment with dominant options.
On the developers side, three complementary commitments. Hosting new projects on European forges (see commitment dev-001) — Codeberg, self-hosted European GitLab, Forgejo, SourceHut — for projects that nothing requires to be hosted on GitHub. Actively contributing to European projects (see commitment dev-003) — Valkey, OpenTofu, OpenBao, Forgejo, Garage, etc. — through code, testing, documentation, issue triage: this is what turns a credible alternative into an effective one. Explicitly recommending European or neutral-foundation alternatives in architecture reviews and stack choices (see commitment dev-004) — an experienced architect’s recommendation often weighs more, in a technical decision, than a thousand blog posts.
On the users side (see commitment user-003), favouring options under European governance or held in a neutral foundation in the choice of internal tools and in everyday technical trade-offs. This preference does not make the difference on a single decision; it makes the difference at the scale of hundreds or thousands of decisions.
These five commitments share a logic: they are small individually, structuring collectively. None demands forgoing an essential feature; all demand a shift in the direction of the default preference. It is this default reversal which, at scale, gives alternatives the critical mass they have been waiting for for years.
For documented positive counter-examples — European projects that have become mature and adopted at scale — see the annex Family 5 — Positive counter-examples.