digital sovereignty. Who controls your data, your infrastructure, and your ability to leave with your data intact when things stop working in your favour?
That question feels modern. It isn’t.
Twenty years ago, choosing something like Joomla wasn’t just a technical decision; it was a statement of intent, and, depending on your audience, either enlightened or naïve. You were aligning yourself with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS): transparency, community ownership, and the promise of freedom from vendor lock-in. In some circles, that was political. In others, it was dismissed as unrealistic idealism.
That world is gone.
Open source didn’t lose. It won so completely that it disappeared into the background.
Today, the internet runs on it. Linux runs most of the servers. Apache HTTP Server and Nginx quietly serve most of the web. MySQL (and its forks) hold everything together. PHP powers platforms like Joomla and WordPress. Even the so-called proprietary giants, Google, Microsoft and Amazon, are built on, and dependent on, open source.
So no, open source is rarely the deciding factor anymore. Not because it stopped mattering, but because it is now assumed.
What has changed is not whether it exists but where the real decisions are made.
Back then, you chose open source instead of something else. Now you are choosing between ecosystems, platforms, contracts, and convenience. Whether something is open source is often a checkbox, not a decision.
The questions have shifted:
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Can I deploy it quickly?
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Will it scale until I hit someone else’s ceiling?
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Is there a talent pool I can afford?
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What is the real cost once the subscription trap tightens?
Open source does not answer those questions on its own anymore. But it never really was meant to.
It still matters just in more uncomfortable moments. When a vendor pivots. When pricing doubles overnight. When a product quietly dies and takes your workflow with it. Open source is the escape hatch that you only appreciate when you are already looking for it.
It matters for governments who don’t want their infrastructure living on someone else’s goodwill. It matters for education and public services that can’t afford “terms and conditions may change”. It matters when you want control without asking permission.
And now, in 2026, something else is surfacing that looks familiar, but sharper.
Call it digital sovereignty.
Not the polished phrase used in policy decks, but the blunt reality underneath it: who owns your data, who controls your systems, and who gets to decide when you are no longer welcome.
It is the same argument open source made twenty years ago.
Back then, the question was: Do I trust this software vendor? Today, it is: Do I trust this entire stack, this cloud, this platform, this jurisdiction—and the people running it?
And once you ask that honestly, the answers stop being technical. They become political. Economic. And often, uncomfortable.
Look at SaaS.
For all its polish, SaaS is built on a simple premise: convenience now, dependency later.
You do not control the roadmap. Features appear when they want, vanish when they don’t, and are rarely negotiated with the people paying for them. Pricing starts attractive and ends strategic. Your data is “portable” in the same way a hostage is “free to leave”—technically true, practically expensive.
Integration is not openness; it is controlled access. APIs are throttled, monetised, or quietly restricted once you rely on them. Accounts can be suspended. Services can be discontinued. Platforms can be restructured, sold, or simply abandoned. Entire workflows disappear not because you made a bad decision but because someone else changed theirs.
None of this is rare. It is routine.
Add jurisdiction into the mix, where your data lives, which laws apply, who can compel access and SaaS stops being a tool choice and starts looking like a dependency chain you may not fully understand until it breaks.
This is not an anti-SaaS argument. It is a reality check. SaaS can deliver enormous value but it also demands trust at a level most organisations never explicitly agreed to.
And that is why the conversation is shifting.
Governments are pushing for local hosting. Organisations are quietly reassessing cloud dependency. Self-hosting, federated systems, and open source are returning. Maybe not as radical ideology, but as something much more boring and "grown up" - insurance.
Digital sovereignty is, in many ways, open source thinking after it grew up and got a budget. Less about ideology in theory, more about risk in practice.
And that is where it gets interesting again.
Because the original promise of open source was freedom to build.
The emerging promise is freedom to decide: where your data lives, who touches it, and how easily you can leave without asking permission.
But don’t confuse that with ideology disappearing.
It hasn’t.
It has sharpened.
The ideology that once argued for freedom of code has expanded into something less polite and more practical: freedom over data, systems, and exit paths.
Because the real question in 2026 is no longer “Can I see the code?”
It is: If I leave, what do I actually take with me and what gets to keep me hostage?
That is the new fault line.
Not open versus closed source.
Control versus dependency.
Ownership versus tenancy.
