BeLibre’s impressions of Trefdag Vlaanderen Digitaal 2026
On 22 October, more than 4,000 people from government, business and research institutions gathered at Flanders Expo in Ghent for Trefdag Vlaanderen Digitaal, the Flemish government’s annual digital conference. The theme was “Sovereign in a connected world”. That subject is close to BeLibre’s heart, so we went with high expectations. Most of them were met, and in a few places we saw room to go one step further.
# A plan is not independence
Jan Smedts, head of Digitaal Vlaanderen, opened the day by asking who is at the wheel of our digital future today. His answer was sharp: if you only have a plan A, what you really have is a dependency. Even a plan B is not enough. It is no more than a spare tyre in the boot, and if you don’t know how to change it, it is of no use to you. Sovereignty requires a migration path, and you have to prepare it before you need it. He pointed to the recent experience with Anthropic, where access to several AI models was suspended for almost three weeks in June. Restored access to Fable was no relief. It confirmed how arbitrary the conditions are that we depend on.
At BeLibre we have been calling for two years on organisations to map their critical dependencies and to provide a fallback for them. When planes around the world stayed on the ground in 2024 because of CrowdStrike, they could still take off at Brussels Airport. There was a plan B, and it had been tested: pencil and paper. It does not always have to be high-tech.
In his keynote, Jan Smedts went on to talk about ownership. Government must evolve from customer to co-owner and co-investor in the technology it builds on. We have to own the infrastructure, and with it have the final say over capacity, security and even the direction of further development. According to him, that does not mean doing everything yourself. Once you reach that point, you hold a strategic position and get a seat at the negotiating table.
Here too, BeLibre is entirely on the same wavelength. And as Smedts points out, that co-ownership also implies a commitment on our side. After two critical vulnerabilities in PHP were announced last week, many organisations worldwide chose to take their websites offline as a precaution. In Belgium, Smartschool, DPG Media, hospitals and several government services made the news. They could do that because they owned their website. The question that needs asking: did they also take ownership in recent years of the programming language their site was built on? Did they contribute to PHP, in code or in money?
The contrast with the series of SharePoint vulnerabilities in July this year was stark. Anyone affected could only hope that Microsoft would fix the problem quickly and thoroughly. There we are not co-owners, but at best customers: depending on the negotiated contract, we may or may not be able to claim compensation for the damage.
# Open source alone is not enough
This brings us to Smedts’ argument about open source, which BeLibre also supports: open source is no guarantee of autonomy. The code has to be carried by a community, and ideally you are part of that community yourself. Technically. Financially. Software you can download for free is not software you can use for free. Code that nobody wants to take ownership of is what Smedts called a dependency without a phone number.
The implicit suggestion that nobody is willing to take ownership of open source did leave a sour taste. In the same exhibition hall stood open source companies, each with their own services and solutions, all of which work with and on open source, and invest in it.
Bert Boerland made this concrete on LinkedIn with a timeline going back to 1991, the year a Finnish student announced he was working on a hobby operating system. A year later SUSE was founded in Nuremberg, and it has delivered European enterprise support for open source for more than three decades since. Red Hat went public in 1999 and was acquired by IBM in 2018 for 34 billion dollars. Open source with a phone number has existed for a long time. Anyone who uses open source today without a number has chosen to do so.
The same timeline shows how deep open source already runs in the rest of the sector. Since 2017, all 500 of the world’s fastest supercomputers run on Linux. Windows can run a real Linux kernel through WSL2, shipped by Microsoft itself, and Microsoft has its own distribution in Azure Linux. Whoever chooses a closed vendor is also using open source indirectly, only through an intermediary. In other words, open source is solid and everywhere. The real question is whether you have a seat at the table for the components you run on.
The logical next step is to give that dependency a phone number. For a government that uses open source, ownership means contributing to the projects it relies on. That can be done with code, by returning improvements to the project instead of letting them disappear into a private copy. And it can be done with money, by paying for development, maintenance, support and security of the software itself, alongside the consultants who install it.
Elsewhere in Europe, this direction has already been taken. In the Netherlands, government source code has followed the principle of “open, unless” since 2020, and in June the European Commission proposed a European open source strategy as part of its technological sovereignty package. Flanders can align its own plans with that.
Smedts also brought up the idea of a Flemish Government OS again: a common base of platforms, standards and agreements, built in a modular way. Modularity is exactly what makes a plan B possible, because if one component fails, you replace it. That works best on open standards and open building blocks, where improvements flow to everyone who uses them, including citizens, businesses and other governments. Linux has shown for decades how that kind of shared ownership works in practice. The Dutch government is building its workplace DAWO on NixOS, and the French DINUM is moving 250 staff to NixOS workstations.
# Hardware, software and the layer in between
VRT journalist Tom Van de Weghe outlined the geopolitical context, with a strong focus on China. One image stuck: we rent our digital brain in America, we often buy the robot body in China, and the question is what we can still do ourselves. His advice for Europe was to buy the Chinese hardware and keep the software in our own hands. Those who make things learn, and those who outsource production also lose the ability to improve.
Here too we see a logical next step. Keeping software in your own hands assumes you can trust the layer beneath it. Firmware, drivers and functions on the chip itself help decide what your software can do and who can look over its shoulder. Anyone who takes sovereignty seriously brings that layer into the debate, with attention to firmware you can inspect and verify.
# Staying in control
Surgeon and healthcare executive Dr Sofie Franssen brought sovereignty back to the human level. She named three skills: deciding for yourself where your attention goes, staying in control when technology fails, and continuing to question technology. Her message was that we have to do this together, and stay razor-sharp while doing it.
We share that view entirely. It does come with a condition. You can only question technology if you know how it works and understand what happens under the hood. And when push comes to shove, you also have to be able to say no. That requires insight into the code and alternatives that actually exist.
That question becomes more urgent with AI. One of our members noted that a large share of the sessions and stands were about AI applications that process data from municipalities and citizens, and found it striking how little critical attention went to how those systems work, on a day devoted to data sovereignty. Perhaps we both missed the sessions where that did come up. But Smedts gave the example himself: when access to Anthropic fell away in June, it showed how quickly an AI service becomes a dependency. The same questions he asks of the rest of the digital backbone apply here: where does the data go, can we inspect the model or run it ourselves, and what is our plan B if the service disappears?
# “So what is your alternative?”
On the exhibition floor we spoke with salespeople for Microsoft solutions at several partner companies. The conversations were open and interesting. Their arguments deserve a fair hearing: Microsoft offers a coherent whole, where elsewhere you have to put the pieces together yourself. It prides itself on a strong security team. And according to them, Europe is not an easy climate to grow a tech company in, because of high taxes, a lot of regulation and a government that competes with its own companies.
On some points we agreed. Europe has to become stronger, and we need politicians who can get past their own egos and look for shared solutions together.
Bert Boerland also gave a painful Belgian example of that European climate. Dries Buytaert started Drupal in 2001 as a message board in an Antwerp student house. When he built a company around it in 2007, that became Acquia, founded in the United States. Boerland sees this as a lack of entrepreneurship and seed capital in Belgium and Europe. The talent is there; what is missing is the investment that lets it grow here. That is exactly the role Smedts sees for government, as co-investor.
On other points we see things differently. According to the salespeople, security incidents at Microsoft were handled properly. No company is open about its internal security, we were told, and that may be true, but it is precisely an argument for code you can inspect yourself. With open source, vulnerabilities are visible and publicly documented, and that is exactly what made last week’s PHP story possible.
One question came back in every conversation: so what is your alternative?
# The answer was two stands further
We found that alternative in the same exhibition halls. We spoke with people from SUSE, Red Hat, Kangaroot, Inuits, redpencil - and in the C-smart Innovation Lab, visitors could try out EU OS. Everywhere we heard the same story: they are ready. Nobody expects a government to do everything itself, and the expertise to support it is there.
Another partner worth mentioning that believes in open data and decentralised knowledge sharing is OpenStreetMap with its Belgian chapter. Alongside its worldwide, open and jointly maintained map database, the federated Panoramax project now focuses on images and photos of streets and places. Making that information public as well keeps you from being locked into a single vendor for route planning and directions.
So they do exist. The only problem is that they are not one company, do not have one point of contact and do not have one marketing department. If you don’t happen to run into these players at a trade fair, they are not easy to find. Today there is no overview of who offers what in Belgium around open source, open data or public knowledge sharing.
# The blind spot
At the stand about the town hall of the future, visitors could mark their five most important needs in a poll. After filling it in, we raised a concern that was not on the list: the risk of a single service provider on which everything can fail. We showed a map of Belgium covering municipalities, provinces, regions and the federal government, but also fire services, police, hospitals, banks, insurers, education and even our news sources. In every sector, the same provider handled 65 to 100 percent of email, and probably office applications and computer login as well.
The staff member at the stand admitted that this was indeed a large single point of failure, until a colleague needed her elsewhere a minute later. We fully understand her situation: many questions had been prepared, and ours was not among them. But that is exactly what we find telling. On a day entirely devoted to sovereignty, dependency was not yet on the list of needs for the town hall of the future.
# A Belgian phone number for open source
Jan Smedts warned about a dependency without a phone number. We heard his call. BeLibre wants to help make sure that phone number exists.
Are you active with open source in Belgium? Do you develop it, work with it, offer a product or service around it, or maintain a project others rely on? Get in touch with Christopher at BeLibre. We are collecting that information and building a network with it, so that a government looking for a plan B knows whom to call.
The Trefdag showed that the will is there and the expertise is there. What is still missing is the connection between the two. That is what we want to help build.