Open-Source Geopolitics
Open-Source Geopolitics
Table of contents:-
When Code Becomes a Political Act
The Hardware Frontier: Open Silicon and the Chip Wars
Securing the Commons: Trust, Transparency, and the Road Ahead
There was a time, not so long ago, when open-source software felt refreshingly apolitical. A developer in Helsinki, a student in Shenzhen, a sysadmin in São Paulo — all pulling from the same repositories, contributing to the same kernel, building something together that no single government or corporation owned. That spirit hasn't gone away. But the world around it has changed enormously, and the open-source ecosystem — Linux, BSD, Unix-derived systems, independent distributions, and open hardware alike — now sits squarely in the middle of some of the most consequential geopolitical contests of our time. If you run a free and open-source stack anywhere in the world, this story is yours.
When Code Becomes a Political Act
Open-source software powers most of the modern world, from the Linux servers running the internet to the Android phones in billions of pockets. Once seen purely as a software development model, open source is now a geopolitical topic, with governments and companies alike recognising that whoever controls key technologies gains strategic advantage.
That shift from "neutral commons" to "contested terrain" has been accelerating for years, but recent events have made it impossible to ignore. In October 2024, a patch was quietly merged into the Linux 6.12-rc4 kernel that removed a number of maintainers from the official MAINTAINERS file. The Linux Foundation confirmed the removal of eleven Russian-affiliated maintainers and programmers from the Linux kernel project, a move indicating the intersection of open-source software development and global politics, affecting developers working on drivers for hardware from companies including Baikal. The reason cited was "various compliance requirements" — a phrase that, though initially opaque, came down to sanctioned individuals and organisations under US government requirements, with Linux infrastructure and many of its maintainers being in the US, making it impossible to ignore the requirements of US law.
The Linux project's announcement said the removals were due to various compliance requirements, adding that the Russian contributors can come back in the future if sufficient documentation is provided. Linus Torvalds himself — Finnish, and pointedly unsympathetic to Russian state aggression — was unambiguous about the decision being correct and irreversible. The episode triggered fierce debate across mailing lists and forums worldwide: not because anyone seriously expected the outcome to change, but because it laid bare a structural reality that the community had long preferred not to examine too closely. A project that prides itself on borderless collaboration had just been reshaped by US sanctions law.
Open source software is at the heart of the internet, largely maintained by a handful of volunteers, and that makes it a major security risk for corporations and governments alike. This underfunding problem intersects with geopolitics in a deeply uncomfortable way. The 2024 XZ Utils backdoor (CVE-2024-3094) brought this home with frightening clarity. The XZ attack used social engineering to take over an open-source project from the inside over multiple years, in contrast to SolarWinds, which targeted a commercial product — XZ targeted volunteer-maintained infrastructure. The campaign to insert the backdoor was a culmination of over two years of effort by a user going by the name Jia Tan to gain access to a position of trust within the project, including a period of apparent sock puppetry to pressure the original maintainer into handing over control. The attack is widely regarded as an advanced, multi-year, and likely state-sponsored operation. Had it not been caught, computer scientist Alex Stamos observed that it could have become the most widespread backdoor ever planted in any software product, potentially granting access to hundreds of millions of machines worldwide.
The lesson isn't that open source is broken. It's that open source — precisely because it underpins so much critical infrastructure — has become worth attacking at state level. Open source projects are attractive targets for state actors because the code is public; while this openness is great for collaboration, it also gives attackers easy access to study the code and its updates.
The Digital Sovereignty Push
Governments have noticed. The response varies dramatically by region, but the direction of travel is surprisingly consistent: nations want more control over the technology their public institutions, industries, and citizens depend upon.
In Europe, the term "digital sovereignty" has moved from academic papers to legislative chambers with remarkable speed. In a confluence of events between 2020 and 2025 — pandemic-era supply chain anxieties, the war in Ukraine, and deteriorating transatlantic relations — the European ideology of digital sovereignty gained prominence, with governments, businesses, and individuals making software choices consciously motivated by a desire for the State to have sovereign control over technology. The practical results are tangible. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein began its transition in 2024, phasing out Microsoft Office in favour of LibreOffice and adopting Open-Xchange to replace Outlook, with Linux set to replace Microsoft Windows as the primary operating system for 60,000 public servants and an additional 30,000 teachers. Estonia took things further still: in 2024 the Estonian government released all state-developed software under open licences, building on its existing use of X-Road, an open-source data exchange layer connecting public and private services across institutions.
The legislative backdrop to all of this is the EU's Cyber Resilience Act. The CRA entered into force on 10 December 2024, published as Regulation (EU) 2024/2847, with some requirements becoming mandatory in September 2026 and full application due by December 2027 — obligating all products with digital elements placed on the European market to follow the regulation. For open-source projects, the picture is nuanced. Open source is broadly out of scope from CRA regulations, but the devil is in the details: if a developer maintains a project that someone else sells, or charges for services related to the software, scenarios arise where individual developers may face liability, making it, in the words of one commentator, "super nuanced." Organisations including the Linux Foundation Europe, the Eclipse Foundation, and the Open Source Initiative spent much of 2024 lobbying hard to ensure that the compliance burden did not unintentionally crush the volunteer-driven projects that underpin so much of Europe's digital stack. The Act introduces a two-tier structure of liability for open source, with the December 2025 EU guidelines stating that "special attention should be paid to the nature of the different development models of software distributed and developed under free and open-source software licences."
Across the Atlantic, the dynamic is different but equally strategic. The US government uses its role as a purchaser of open-source software to shape governance expectations, attaching requirements to how software is maintained, audited, and licensed — effectively turning spending into a mechanism for adjusting the incentives of open-source ecosystems. Meanwhile, discussions have highlighted the extraterritorial reach of US laws like the CLOUD Act and FISA, the risks of relying on Chinese technology, and the need for Europe to chart its own course. This tension is not abstract: it affects which cloud services European hospitals use, which operating systems run in government ministries, and which development tools are acceptable for defence contractors.
Building resilience against undesirable scenarios calls for more locally run critical infrastructure and services, with open-source software playing a key role for three reasons: it is made available to everyone and can be used for any purpose, it allows building on top of an existing commons rather than starting from scratch, and it does not have a kill switch in the hands of a country or company that could use it against others. That argument, advanced by the Open Source Initiative and others, has found genuine political traction — not because politicians have suddenly become Free Software advocates, but because they have concluded that sovereign technology infrastructure is, plainly, in the national interest.
The Hardware Frontier: Open Silicon and the Chip Wars
Software is not the only battlefield. The semiconductor industry — long dominated by a handful of Western-controlled instruction set architectures — is being reshaped by open-source hardware in ways that carry enormous geopolitical weight.
RISC-V, the open, royalty-free instruction set architecture originally developed at UC Berkeley, has become the focal point of what many are calling a new "chip war." RISC-V has emerged as the primary challenger to the decades-long hegemony of ARM Holdings, with an estimated 20 billion cores in operation by the end of 2025, as industries seek to insulate themselves from rising licensing costs and geopolitical volatility. Its appeal is not merely economic, though the savings are real: where ARM typically charges royalties per chip, RISC-V is free. The deeper draw is strategic. In an era of trade restrictions and chip wars, RISC-V has become the cornerstone of "architectural sovereignty" for regions like China and the European Union.
China's embrace of RISC-V has been particularly decisive. On 29 March 2025, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Cyberspace Administration of China published draft guidelines mandating that all new domestic IoT chips adopt the RISC-V ISA by 2027, sweetening the deal with tax breaks for server-grade designs. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has been advancing its XiangShan open-source processor project, with the stated goal of eventually becoming "the Linux of processors," and Alibaba unveiled the C930, a 96-core, 3.2 GHz server-class RISC-V CPU, in April 2025. By 2025, Chinese firms had become some of the most prolific contributors to the RISC-V standard, ensuring that their domestic semiconductor industry could continue to innovate even in the face of potential sanctions.
This has not gone unnoticed in Washington. The US Commerce Department opened a probe in April 2024 into China's use of RISC-V for advanced chips, and a bipartisan bill floated in May 2025 would restrict US participation in the standard. The irony is hard to miss: RISC-V was born in American academia, nurtured by American universities and companies, and is now being considered for restriction precisely because it has become too successful as a globally shared resource. RISC-V International itself relocated its headquarters to Switzerland partly to signal its neutral, global character — a pointed gesture in a world of hardening digital borders.
The open-hardware question extends beyond RISC-V. DeepSeek, the Chinese AI model released as open source, illustrates how easily open source can become a strategic tool for influence, depending on how it is governed, by whom, and towards what purpose — its training data, documentation and deployment infrastructure remain centrally controlled, with a governance model that reflects national objectives. True openness, in other words, is not just about releasing source code. It is about who controls the ecosystem around it.
Securing the Commons: Trust, Transparency, and the Road Ahead
For everyday users of Linux, BSD, Unix, and independent distributions — whether you're running a home lab on FreeBSD, managing enterprise infrastructure on RHEL or Debian, or contributing to a niche distro — the geopolitical currents described above land in very practical ways. Supply chain security, licensing obligations, export controls, and questions of long-term maintainability are no longer abstract policy concerns. They are concrete risks that affect patch cycles, procurement decisions, and contributor communities.
Modern software applications rely overwhelmingly on free software components, with various studies finding that these make up 70% to 90% of total code, including deep layers of indirect dependencies — making the first issue one of visibility: in any supply chain, especially those involving critical infrastructure, it is essential to know where each component comes from, how it is maintained, and what risks it carries. The Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) has moved from a niche developer concept to a regulatory expectation in both the US and EU, and for good reason.
Governments are getting increasingly concerned with the cybersecurity implications of open source software, and with risks of accidental vulnerabilities and manipulation of code by criminals and foreign agents — and this involvement is not only pragmatic but increasingly politicised, serving to uphold governments' ambitions for national security, international influence, and digital sovereignty. The dilemma this creates is real: heavy-handed government engagement risks encroaching on the horizontal, decentralised nature of open-source development that makes it valuable in the first place. Over-regulation could drive contributors away; under-regulation leaves critical infrastructure exposed.
If open source stops being global, it stops being open — geopolitics is pushing technology toward national control, but open source preserves sovereignty precisely because code is user-controlled and global. That framing, from Google's Open Source blog, captures the central tension well. The very qualities that make open source a tool of sovereignty — freedom to inspect, modify, and redistribute — only hold if the commons remains genuinely shared. Fragmentation into national forks, sanctions-driven contributor exclusions, and strategically "open" projects that are actually closed in practice all erode the foundation.
For those of us in the BSD, Linux, Unix, and independent distribution communities, the response is not despair but engagement. Participating in your distribution's security processes, understanding the dependency graphs of the software you ship, supporting the maintainers of critical upstream projects financially and with code, and engaging with policy consultations — these are not bureaucratic chores. They are the means by which a global community of peers keeps the commons intact against forces that would partition it for narrow advantage.
Conclusion
Open-source geopolitics is not a future problem. It is the present reality for every developer, sysadmin, enterprise architect, and hobbyist who builds on a free and open stack. The removal of Russian Linux kernel maintainers, the near-miss of the XZ Utils backdoor, the EU's landmark Cyber Resilience Act, Europe's determined push for digital sovereignty, and China's systematic embrace of RISC-V as national policy are not isolated incidents. They are data points in a coherent and accelerating pattern: nation-states have concluded that software infrastructure is strategic infrastructure, and they are acting accordingly. The open-source community's best response is to remain what it has always been at its finest — transparent, collaborative, technically excellent, and stubbornly global — while developing the security practices, governance frameworks, and policy literacy to defend those qualities against the pressures now bearing down on them.
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References
EuroStack Directory Project — The Year 2024 in Review: Open Source and Digital Sovereignty in Europe
Real Instituto Elcano — Can Open Source Secure Europe's Digital Infrastructure?
Open Source Initiative — Open Source: A Global Commons to Enable Digital Sovereignty
Phoronix — Some Clarity On The Linux Kernel's "Compliance Requirements" Around Russian Sanctions
HackRead — Linux Kernel Project Drops 11 Russian Developers Amid US Sanctions Concerns
OpenSSF — Predictions for Open Source Security in 2025: AI, State Actors, and Supply Chains
Datadog Security Labs — The XZ Utils Backdoor (CVE-2024-3094): Everything You Need to Know
Linux Professional Institute — The Cyber Resilience Act and Open Source
The New Stack — What the EU's Cyber Resilience Act Means for Open Source
Electropages — Open Source RISC-V Chips Fuel China's Tech Ascent
Computing.co.uk — Open Source in 2025: What Changed in the Second Half?
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