Sovereignty, Autonomy, Independence

There are many ways to discuss the same theme, namely freeing oneself from excessive dependence on the United States and its tech companies. This is a topic that has been advocated for decades by the open-source world. Therefore, it is no surprise that at the Nextcloud Summit 2026, these points were addressed extensively with discussions on how open source can help Europe become more independent and able to stand on its own feet in the technology world. But that’s not all: topics included possibilities for software choice, regulatory compliance, and real implementations demonstrating that, as Gene Hackman emphatically exclaimed in Young Frankenstein, "YES, IT CAN BE DONE!"

Ten Years of Open Source

Nextcloud was founded ten years ago, in 2016, as a fork of ownCloud. Differences in opinions on project management led the more uncompromising wing regarding open-source principles to split off and establish a company, known as Nextcloud, which has seen significant success over time. Approximately 150 people now work at Nextcloud, distributed across Europe but mainly in Germany. Over time, the company has established itself as the leading open-source cloud storage platform and has expanded beyond, becoming a comprehensive collaboration platform that includes email, video calls, kanban boards, calendars, and integrations with various services.

The underlying philosophy has remained, one might say, “surprisingly,” the same: to guarantee total control over the platform to its users, whether they are paying customers or not. Nextcloud is indeed available for free to everyone, including private users (the author has been using it for over five years on his personal server) as well as businesses and public entities. As is often the case in the open-source world, support services can be purchased to develop new features, fix bugs, or receive assistance with problems.

The model works quite well, as the company continues to grow rapidly. Despite its small size, at the Nextcloud Summit 2026, it managed to gather 600 participants from literally all over the world: in addition to Europe, which was predominant, there were also participants from South Korea and Australia, and even the Secretary of Digitalization from the Ethiopian Prime Minister’s office. Perhaps the most interesting aspect was that he was not the only government member present, even if he was the most distant and possibly unexpected.

The reason is that, as the Ethiopian government representative told us, governments recognize the importance of technological sovereignty and see in Nextcloud—and in open source more generally—a possible answer.

The Issue of European Technological Sovereignty

One striking figure provided during the conference caught our attention: every year, the European Union sees €260 billion leave its economy in the form of payments to non-European tech companies. This is a staggering amount, equivalent to about 10% of Italy’s GDP. It is also a largely avoidable figure: Europe possesses the capabilities that would allow it to reduce a significant portion of this spending, at least regarding software.

However, Europe has often relied on US companies and their proprietary formats and services, often for convenience (just think about the problem of proprietary formats used in public administrations, a theme that has been debated for over two decades and still sparks heated discussions) and to externalize many responsibilities.

Thus, a theme emerges that goes beyond Nextcloud and concerns the entire open-source world, which the German company strongly advocates for both principled and geopolitical strategic reasons: that of technological sovereignty, meaning the ability to control the platforms on which our society is built—the public services, digital infrastructures, systems for managing the data of citizens and businesses. And open source is the answer to Europe’s increasingly evident need to regain its digital sovereignty.

Open source allows for independence from any vendor or third-country, as ownership of the code ensures that licenses or access cannot be revoked, nor can artificial limits be imposed. If you own the code, you have control and can continue updating the software or create derivatives without needing to ask for any permission. One only needs to consider the numerous cases where various companies have acquired open-source projects and attempted to impose limitations: a notable example is LibreOffice, which was born after Oracle tried to take complete control of OpenOffice; the community took the code and created the new suite of applications without Oracle being able to intervene.

And this is precisely the point. Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud, tells us very frankly that “there is a significant communication problem and misunderstandings; it’s often questioned whether people don’t understand or don’t want to understand. It’s said that yes, you can abandon Microsoft and switch to Nextcloud, but then you depend on Nextcloud. That’s not how open source works: with open source, you simply don’t have dependency phenomena anymore. From my experience, sometimes it’s something people don’t want to understand because it’s also very convenient not to do anything and then find a reason for having done nothing.”

It is often heard that open-source platforms are not reliable or well-tested and that adopting them is like taking a leap into the void; however, the results of proprietary platforms are not encouraging either: just think of the costs associated with the migration of the Birmingham City Council’s ERP system from SAP to Oracle, which is five years late and more than seven times over the initially allocated budget, to get an idea of how relative everything is.

Lars Neumann, SVP of T Cloud, tells us that “this can happen to both proprietary software projects and open-source ones; one is not necessarily better or worse than the other.” Indeed, there are numerous success stories in open source, starting with Nextcloud itself. An example was given on stage during the conference: the French Ministry of Education is gradually migrating from proprietary cloud storage services (specifically Microsoft OneDrive) to Nextcloud. Currently, 400,000 users utilize the platform monthly, and the intention is to cover all users, who number 1.2 million, by next year. The transition is proceeding smoothly and to the satisfaction of all parties involved. Another example comes from Magenta Cloud, a service by Deutsche Telekom based on Nextcloud with four million users.

These are examples of how open source is not merely the domain of a few tech-savvy individuals locked in their rooms, but products and services used by a very broad and non-specialist public with the ability to return control to those who use it, rather than keeping it in the hands of a few companies (and, moreover, non-European ones). The conference aimed to highlight how the use of open-source platforms helps increase control of businesses and public entities over their tools, and how the theme of sovereignty often discussed is incomplete if the discourse does not include open source; otherwise, one simply shifts from one dependency to another. To give an idea of how central the theme of sovereignty was, there were three different stages for presentations, one of which was dedicated exclusively to digital sovereignty, with contributions from public entities, academics, and representatives of various European companies.

A mention could not be missed of the recent Cloud and AI Development Act (or CADA for short), a proposed European law still under discussion, which aims to set limits on the development of cloud and artificial intelligence and, at least in drafts published before June, contained strong pushes for the adoption of open source as a support measure for sovereignty: for instance, it mandated that public entities adopt open-source solutions and could only adopt proprietary ones if absolutely necessary. The use of the past tense is due to a change that has occurred in the meantime, so it currently only suggests adopting open solutions. However, the bill also contains proposals to fund the development of open-source software with public funds. It should be noted that it will take time before the law is approved, and there may thus be further changes.

Along with CADA, there is also what is called the “EU Open Source Strategy”, in which the European Union identifies open-source software as a primary tool for achieving digital autonomy and sees it not only as a development mode but as a tool for governance and industrial policy that can help reduce costs, accelerate innovation, and reduce dependence on foreign suppliers. As part of the Strategy, there are not only the promotion and strengthening of open-source software and standards but also the use of open and interoperable ecosystems for public administration, following the logic of “public money, public code.”

Many Challenges Remain

Particularly when looking at areas where Europe seems to have fallen behind, like artificial intelligence. However, there is reason for optimism: the wind seems to be changing direction, and there seems to be a waking of European consciousness around the necessity to do more and utilize open tools. As China has demonstrated in the world of AI, one does not need to be closed and proprietary to succeed: China is betting everything on open-source models, and despite this, or perhaps because of it, they are able to compete with American ones. Europe can do the same.

New Features in Nextcloud 26 Spring and the Arrival of Euro-Office

The celebration of Nextcloud’s first ten years of activity comes with new functionalities for the platform: in addition to a redesigned and more user-friendly graphical interface, tools to manage permissions and access in large organizations are also arriving. But perhaps the most significant new features are two: AI agents and Euro-Office.

With Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring, announced during the 2026 Summit, improvements have arrived in Nextcloud Assistant, the built-in AI assistant on the platform, which can now search across all present documents, emails, forms, and various other applications and components. This is made possible thanks to the "Context Agent" functionality, which provides agents with tools to interact with the platform and carry out actions according to user instructions, such as sending emails or creating calendar events. It is possible to use AI models hosted on one’s infrastructure, or to rely on those from third-party companies like Anthropic, Mistral, or OpenAI; Nextcloud leaves the choice to its users on which AI provider to use without imposing limitations, even though using proprietary models from American companies may be seen as conflicting with sovereignty goals or the open-source spirit (but it should be remembered that Nextcloud is also a platform usable by private users, who have fewer limitations compared to businesses and public entities, and who do not always have the ability to host their own open-source model). Interaction occurs from both the Nextcloud web interface and the mobile app for Android and iOS.

An important new feature is Euro-Office, a suite of tools for managing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that resembles Microsoft Office and offers very high compatibility with its formats. However, let’s step back: an office suite was already present in Nextcloud and was provided by Calligra, which developed it based on LibreOffice. Its compatibility with Microsoft formats was relatively limited, and this was reported as a problem by many users. Nextcloud has thus chosen to create Euro-Office together with other entities like IONOS to circumvent this issue.

Euro-Office was born as a fork of ONLYOFFICE and has sparked quite a debate: initially due to the license applied by ONLYOFFICE, which seemed to prevent the creation of a derivative project like Euro-Office, but was later found to be invalid; subsequently, during the official presentation at the Nextcloud Summit, a very aggressive statement was launched by the Document Foundation, the foundation overseeing the development of LibreOffice.

In the statement, the Document Foundation accused Euro-Office of not being the first European open-source suite and of calling into question the ideals of open source due to the priority support for Microsoft formats. The foundation later had to backtrack, admitting that “after carefully reading the announcement, we did not see that the coalition [behind Euro-Office] made such a statement [that it was the first European open-source suite]” and recognizing that Nextcloud is committed to supporting the OpenDocument format, created and supported by the Document Foundation.

Thus, there is work to be done on the communication front, as we said with Frank Karlitschek. On one point, however, the Document Foundation is right: “the only destination consistent with the sovereignty that Euro-Office invokes is ODF [the OpenDocument format, ed.], as the native format for documents. A genuinely European and genuinely sovereign suite cannot treat the open standard as a concession to outsiders; it must speak ODF as its mother tongue.”

Because, after all, what sense would it make to spend all this time talking about sovereignty, control, and technological independence only to continue using formats controlled by a private entity that answers only to itself?

A Look to the Future

Nextcloud has decided to be ambitious and aims to tenfold the number of applications for its platform over the next year. To this end, it has launched its program for third-party developers (ISV): Nextcloud will promote the applications on its marketplace and manage the sale of subscriptions, as well as providing documentation and technical support for development. Tenfolding the number of applications in a year appears to be a very optimistic goal, but the company firmly believes in its platform and in its growth.

Indeed, optimism was a key point. The Nextcloud Summit 2026 left us very impressed due to the positive energy that emerged from every presentation, every interview, every interaction. The challenges are many, and there is concern about the increasing tight control that large US companies, or Big Tech if you prefer, seem to have over increasingly broad areas. But there is also hope that things may change, and there is the will for them to do so. The most interesting aspect is how strong the feeling is that, at this conference, there is a search for change that is positive for everyone, not just for a few.