From 7th to 8th of November over 1,000 programmers, activists, academics and business leaders have gathered in Bolzano, South Tyrol, Italy for the 25th edition of the South-Tyrol Software Freedom Conference (SFSCON). Given the huge dependency of European businesses and administrations on American Big Tech companies, which the current US administration is not hesitant to use as leverage in international relations, Digital Sovereignty has been one of the key topics1 of the conference. Discussions ranged from how Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) can make communities resilient in times of crises, efforts to put existing interoperability requirements into practice, how Free Software communities can assist policy makers in switching to FOSS, to funding opportunities for Free Software by means of * regulatory requirements of the European Union’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), * effective public procurement policies which favor Free Software while preventing open washing, or * direct public investments into innovative ecosystems. In addition to attending the informative conference talks, we’ve used the opportunity to connect with our fellow NGI Zero consortium members from OW2 and FSFE, who were both present with booths at the conference, and discuss recent European developments in the realm of Free Software like the upcoming Digital Commons European Digital Infrastructure Consortium (DC-EDIC) and what one can expect from them. Our main takeaway from this year’s SFSCON is a somewhat surprising concurrency of encouraging and discouraging developments in Europe when it comes to the role of Free Software: On the one hand European institutions cut funding for important and successful FOSS projects and increase their dependency on US Big Tech in, e.g., schools, while at the same time making provisions for Free Software in landmark legislation like the CRA or institutionalizing FOSS efforts in, e.g., the European Open Source Academy or the aforementioned Digital Commons DC-EDIC. This situation shows that there is more advocacy work to be done to realize the full potential FOSS offers to achieve Digital Sovereignty. The (unfortunate) fact that we were the, to our knowledge, only Swiss organization at the conference is symptomatic of the – with few laudable exceptions – low importance Swiss policy makers and businesses assign to FOSS. We’re convinced that Swiss administrations, businesses and society at large would stand to benefit from engaging with and learning from the experiences our neighbors make with Free Software. 1. The others being: Health, Engineering, Cybersecurity, Open Hardware, Automation, Fediverse, Skills & Training, Culture, Data Spaces, Community Building. ︎ The post SFSCON 2025: The ever-growing importance of Free Software appeared first on ISOC Switzerland Chapter.