Short manifesto#

For a real European technological autonomy. Condensed version of the long manifesto.

The end#

Technological sovereignty serves one purpose: to allow an organisation — a business, an administration, an individual — to continue operating its data and conducting its operations, whatever happens. A provider failure. A geopolitical conflict. Sanctions. A hostile takeover. A unilateral flip by a publisher. What must remain accessible is the data, and the capacity to use it.

Everything else — licenses, contracts, certifications, labels — is only a means to serve that end.

The diagnosis#

Europe confuses the means with the end. You can be fully open source and fully dependent. You can also buy European proprietary and be just as dependent.

The license — open or closed — is not a guarantee. It is a legal attribute of the software. Sovereignty, by contrast, is an attribute of the entire chain that produces, maintains, and distributes that software: code, tools, registries, foundations, maintainers, infrastructure, capital, jurisdiction, hosting.

No single link is enough to guarantee it. Each one is enough to break it.

The equivalence#

For open source, the continuity guarantee is structural: public code can be forked, hosted, modified without depending on the publisher. For proprietary, it must be contractual: software escrow or a public release commitment under a free license, reversibility clause, notice period before discontinuation, operational continuity arrangement, statutory protection against hostile takeover, audit right for sensitive clients. Seven mechanisms to declare one by one. Without them, a proprietary publisher cannot claim the same guarantee — not from illegitimacy, but from a default of formulation.

The requirement#

To measure sovereignty is to evaluate separately the code, the governance, the funding, the distribution, the skills. To refuse any score that aggregates these dimensions to the point of masking their weaknesses. To refuse any label that would substitute for readability.

For providers: adopt a public self-declaration format that makes the chain readable — third-party components, jurisdictions, contingency plans, hosting, continuity, capital, assumed blind spots.

For buyers: require this declaration as a prerequisite. Prefer those who publish it. Treat the absence of a declaration as a negative signal as explicit as its presence is a positive one.

The instrument#

The Sovereignty Profile: a single, public, free file, at a standardised location on the declarant’s domain. Not a label. Not a certification. Not a ranking.

It does not distinguish open source from proprietary: it distinguishes providers who make their chain readable from those who obscure it.

Read the full manifesto: long manifesto.