EOLE 2026

Europe has rediscovered “sovereignty” through a wave of new regulation — Cyber Resilience Act, AI Act, cloud sovereignty tenders. EOLE 2026 takes the opposite starting point: Free Software, Open Source and open AI have been pursuing digital autonomy for forty years, long before the word “sovereignty” entered the policy lexicon. The 2026 cycle is therefore not a compliance forum on the new regulations. It is a year-long community effort — a kick-off webinar in late June, a shared working space, a flagship event in Q4 — to map the tools, licences, governance practices and communities through which openness already delivers sovereignty, and to reconnect the lawyers, technologists, public actors and academics who quietly sustain that infrastructure.

Sovereignty is not a compliance issue

Over the past two years, “digital sovereignty” has moved from the margins of European policy to the centre of nearly every legislative file: the Cyber Resilience Act, the AI Act, the EUR 180M Commission tender on cloud sovereignty, the rise of digital commons initiatives such as the French EDIC. The natural reflex is to treat sovereignty as the next compliance brief, and to gather lawyers around the new rulebooks.

EOLE 2026 takes the opposite path. Free Software, Open Source and now open AI have been building digital autonomy for forty years — through licences, standards, shared infrastructures, OSPOs, foundations, public-administration adoption, and communities of practice. Sovereignty, in any meaningful sense, has always been their working object. The most urgent task is not to map yet another regulation onto open ecosystems, but to re-anchor the conversation in the tools and practices that already deliver autonomy, and to make them legible to the wider legal and institutional community.

The 2026 cycle is built around that inversion. A public kick-off webinar in late June will frame the different meanings of sovereignty — autonomy, resilience, institutional control, epistemic pluralism — and show how each is already operationalised in open ecosystems. Between sessions, a lightweight community space (Matrix or Discourse) will let contributors from FSFE, Eclipse, Software Heritage, the OSPO Alliance, academia and public administrations co-build a cartography of existing tools, licences, governance practices and communities through which openness produces sovereignty. The cycle closes with a flagship event in Q4 2026, in Brussels or Barcelona, hosted with institutional anchors such as DG Connect, the EC OSPO or the Cloud Sovereignty initiative.

In keeping with EOLE’s tradition, the goal is not to host another expert forum but to bring together — and make visible to one another — the people who collectively sustain this movement, and to reorient the European debate around what they already build.

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