Open-Source Software and Digital Sovereignty

EU’s vision of digital sovereignty conflicts with tools and platforms used in modern working life. We are dependent on software controlled by global technology giants. The dependence on commonly used services and platforms provided by Microsoft, Google or Amazon must be removed to achieve digital sovereignty. Open-source software has been readily available for a long time, but studies looking into excluding all proprietary software from working life are scarce. This paper investigates the feasibility of replacing proprietary software as a step towards digital sovereignty. The ability to self-host services is key to ensuring independence, and the ability to verify software code is key to ensuring integrity. Therefore open-source code and transparency are transient properties for sovereign software. We present problems by mapping the problematic software used by teachers, researchers and student assistants at Arcada UAS with a varied set of requirements on the digital tools of their daily lives. We research alternatives and deploy a suite of software compatible with EU policies on digital sovereignty. We rely on many services offered by tech giants in our professional lives. There are several open-source software suites that can be self-hosted and that have permissive licenses for business use. Extensive technical knowledge is required for the deployment of software. Most daily tasks can be accomplished by using sovereign software, although not all needs of the test group were met. Companies can deploy sovereign software for most daily tasks, reducing dependency on tech giants. However, software adoption was low. Arcadas IT-support does not host, enforce or endorse the usage of sovereign software. Public code repositories enable independent code verification, in contrast to proprietary software. Some software cannot be easily replaced, and digital habits are hard to change.