The rise of national digital sovereignty policies created a fundamental conflict with the borderless, collaborative ethos of open-source software.
Mitch Ashley, VP and Practice Lead at The Futurum Group, warns that this clash could lead to a fractured future, with splintered, incompatible versions of essential technologies.
Ashley also identifies the risk of a “proprietary pullback” from open source and argued that enterprises must now re-evaluate their dependency on single vendors.
The open-source software that underpins the modern digital world has always been driven by a simple, powerful idea: collaboration without borders. For decades, individuals and corporations have contributed to shared projects without regard to geography, creating a global foundation for innovation. But the rise of digital sovereignty as a policy and a market priority now threatens to fracture that very foundation.
As nations increasingly seek to control the technology operating within their borders, the borderless ethos of open source faces a fundamental challenge. The new reality is forcing vendors to navigate incompatible regional requirements, accelerating proprietary pullbacks, and ultimately threatening to slow the pace of global innovation. The conflict is no longer just about where data is stored; it’s about who controls the entire software stack.
We spoke with Mitch Ashley, VP and Practice Lead, Software Engineering Lifestyle at The Futurum Group. Drawing on over 30 years of experience as a CTO, CIO, and technology strategist, Ashley has guided companies through major technological shifts from the move to the cloud to the rise of AI. From his vantage point, he sees a storm gathering at the intersection of geopolitics and code—one that could reshape the future of software development.
Knows no bounds: “Open source doesn’t know geographic or political or country-nation boundaries,” Ashley says. “It’s about individuals and corporations supporting projects under licensing schemes that are very open, are very flexible.” The foundational principle is now colliding with the realities of a world where national interests and project governance are increasingly at odds.
The most immediate threat, Ashley explains, is the fragmentation of the open-source ecosystem itself. If a nation-state’s requirements conflict with the direction of a global project, it could lead to regional “forks”—splintered, incompatible versions of essential technologies.
A fractured future: “Instead of one main Kubernetes version, you could end up with 20 or 30,” Ashley warns. “For companies like AWS, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, or Salesforce running a cloud, you now have to support multiple versions based on geographic location. Those versions could start to diverge in functionality and capability, and they don’t stay in sync once they fork.”
This potential fracturing has ignited a fierce debate. Some argue that open source is a key enabler of sovereignty, offering the transparency and control nations desire. Others contend the opposite, arguing that the legal and political pressures of sovereignty could undermine the collaborative nature of open source, particularly in the context of AI. Beyond forking, Ashley identifies a second, equally potent risk: a strategic retreat from open source by the very companies that sustain it. Faced with geopolitical uncertainty and a desire to retain control, companies may be tempted to pull key capabilities back into proprietary commercial licenses.
The proprietary pullback: “There’s potential for the situation to change the dynamic of open source quite substantially,” Ashley says, citing recent licensing shifts by companies like HashiCorp and Red Hat as precedent. “If you saw companies rolling back from open source into proprietary licenses, you could argue it might even lessen the creation of new open source projects because of conflicting interests.”
Yet, even as these risks loom, the market is adapting. Rather than retreating, leading open-source vendors like SUSE and Red Hat are packaging digital sovereignty as a product, turning a complex challenge into a commercial opportunity. This highlights the difficult calculus facing enterprise buyers today. The threats of fragmentation and vendor lock-in force a difficult trade-off between strategic resilience and operational complexity, making dependence on a single provider increasingly dangerous.
The end of single-sourcing: “The need to multi-source solutions is back on the table, and that’s what people are grappling with: How far do I take this?” he notes. “There’s an advantage to it, but it costs a lot to maintain multiple paths. The vendors aren’t compatible, or how they integrate is not the same, so you have to set up different operational procedures. It raises the question: how much do you hitch your wagon to one vendor anymore?”
For now, the open-source world has not fractured. The digital walls have not been fully set in stone, and the worst-case scenarios remain hypotheticals. But the questions are becoming more urgent, demanding attention from leaders before they become irreversible crises. “There are a lot of questions, and not many answers. But that’s actually good, because it hasn’t happened,” Ashley concludes. “We don’t need answers yet, but it’s time to think about it.”
