Most open source software (OSS) can be used without a fee. By supporting its development, governments favour the growth of software that can be reused, thus avoiding costly duplications. And when governments adopt OSS in the everyday running of public administrations, they free themselves from proprietary vendor lock-in.

For example, CKAN, or the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, is an open-source data management system which powers the open data portals and data hubs of local, regional and national government agencies and enterprises in the EU, the USA, Singapore, Australia, and Canada.

A study in India measured the economic impact of using OSS in public and private sector organisations, finding significant cost savings of hundreds of millions of dollars. In addition to these tangible benefits, when the Indian state of Kerala replaced all its primary school computing with OSS it resulted in all the teachers (and subsequently students) gaining programming expertise that resulted in intangible but significant benefits: a highly technically competent teaching staff, and students entering university with programming skills.

By releasing open government data and encouraging the release of open data by private actors, governments can ensure data is reused to create data-driven services and to adopt data-driven decisions. This reduces time and costs in the provision of services as data is readily available, rather than needing to be collected. For example, the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro organised hackathons for people to build apps for City Hall using open government data. Similarly private actors can reuse open government data to build data-driven services. For example, open data on bike sharing can support the efficient planning of public transport.

Although firms such as Google and Microsoft are major contributors to open source development, they typically only fund projects that support their products. Because digital commons are public goods, many other firms do not contribute at all: they are engaging in ‘free riding.’ This means that ongoing maintenance or timely application of new security patches is sometimes lacking. Consequences of firm lack of support have global impacts, such as the Heartbleed bug in 2014 or vulnerabilities within a Java logging library, Apache Log4j, in December 2021.

Governments can provide financial support to digital commons to enhance security. For example, Germany created the Sovereign Tech Agency to fund OSS development. OSS relies on community development. Well-supported OSS communities result in increased transparency, independence from Big Tech, and enhanced security through community supervision of code development and troubleshooting.

The EU has built programmes to support OSS such as the EU Open Source Observatory seeks to establish OSPOs in government.

A recommendation of the European Working Group on Digital Commons report in 2022 was to establish a European Digital Infrastructure Consortium.

The European Commission’s Next Generation Internet Initiative develops long-term support for digital infrastructure.

The Free and Open Source Software Solutions for European Public Services project is mapping OSS dependencies in European public institutions.

After the economic and social success of its OSS in schools program, the Indian state of Kerala is now a world leader in implementing and supporting digital commons internationally.

Digital sovereignty mandates conducting periodic audits of all public and private stakeholders in critical sectors, in addition to the possibilities of the Digital Services Act and to strengthen its applicability, by mapping (EU) government dependence in sectors not covered by European regulations. With a view to a DSA V2, governments can anticipate European developments by experimenting with expanded digital sovereignty criteria. This audit would assess several criteria complementary to the DSA, e.g. (a) Reversibility of solutions and data portability; (b) Absence of extraterritorial laws applying to suppliers; (c) Data hosting in the European Union; (d) Open source nature of critical solutions; (e) Strengthened compliance with the GDPR and European standards. The audit would also include an assessment of the tangible benefits associated with migrations to sovereign digital commons solutions: reduced legal risk, operational efficiency gains, societal benefits, and local economic spinoffs. These indicators would guide budgetary choices and serve as tools to convince stakeholders.

Governments can draw inspiration from counterparts which have created Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs). Examples include the Free Software Unit within DINUM (France), Digital Iceland, and Red.es (Spain). The purpose of these OSPOs is to define and operationalise a strategy for the use and maintenance of open source software in public administrations. Other governments would do well to set up such an entity and provide it with adequate resources in order to enable their public services to achieve digital sovereignty.

Additionally, governments can also create a national software repository for the hosting and collaborative development of public sector open source software projects, and they can foster increased awareness of networking opportunities amongst public servants.