OSS + ELC EU 2026

The open source sustainability conversation has revolved around three primary actors: corporations with engineering resources and product dependencies, individual volunteers and communities building and maintaining software, and foundations providing organizational homes for projects and events. It's a big and diverse landscape, but there are some gaps.
This talk makes the case for a fourth actor: government agencies investing in open source as public infrastructure. Not as regulators, not as occasional grant-makers, but as structural investors with a public mission, and a mandate to consider the health of open source ecosystems over a longer time horizon and beyond the strictures of a product roadmap.
What makes this model distinct from philanthropy, corporate sponsorship, or community engagement? What can it do that the other three can't, and what does it depend on them for? Drawing on the work of the Sovereign Tech Agency, a German federal agency that invests in critical open source projects and the ecosystem infrastructure sustaining them, this session examines what public investment in critical open source actually looks like in practice and why it belongs in the sustainability conversation.