From a digital sovereignty perspective, the answer is: No, not right now, but maybe later. The real case for open-source software today is resilience and the freedom to act alone, but not sovereignty. The sovereignty case is in the future, and it is up to Europe to build it.
It's a common mistake to think that EU digital sovereignty requires switching to open source, particularly when debating public sector IT. But they are not the same thing. The current situation is that if governments want to switch to open source in general, that just means putting their dependency on a small group of enthusiasts distributed across Europe (or even across the world) maintaining a system. If they're purchasing open-source distributions from a commercial company, it can look like the same dependency as before, just with a different supplier, who might happen to reside in the EU.
You can watch this happen in the tender documents. "Open source" appears as a requirement, a box is ticked, and the sovereignty question is treated as closed. Nobody asks who maintains the thing, or where it will actually run, or what happens to the support contract when the supplier is acquired by a company headquartered somewhere else.
Open source is a long-term necessity for digital sovereignty. But in the short term, it could be argued that it is more of a virtue signal than something that makes you more sovereign. Open-source-ness doesn't rub off on your organisation, and at best it's sovereignty theatre; an arrangement that changes where the applications or data lives without changing who controls the keys to the building. The code may be open, but if you lack the capacity to maintain, secure, and evolve it, you've merely swapped one form of dependency for another. Open source was not created to solve the digital sovereignty problem, and it shows.
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