Digital Autonomy
Knowledge sharing • Public debate • Policy proposals
Understanding today's digital choices and shaping tomorrow's.
Blog
Do you trust me?
This contribution was taken from the blog of Joop Beris with permission of the author. “Do you trust me?” So began a former manager of mine during the ritualised humiliation we call a performance review. It was, to put it mildly, a discomfiting inquiry from a man whose own breaches of confidence had …
FOSS just passed Mythos' stress test
TL;DR: In April, Anthropic announced an AI model called Mythos that had reportedly found thousands of serious security bugs in every major operating system and web browser. The reaction was loud: The Bank of England warned regulators it could “crack the whole cyber risk world open”, US Treasury …
How DOSBA came to be
Bram Buijs, board member of the Dutch Open Source Business Alliance, is joining the BeLibre meetup to tell us how DOSBA brought in 42 members in a single year and joined the European umbrella organisation APELL. It’s a story spanning more than a quarter century of trial and error: DOSBA is the …
Schleswig-Holstein knows what it wants. That alone is a revolution
This guest contribution was reposted from LinkedIn and translated with the author’s permission. I read the FT article somewhere between two meetings. And I had to stop for a moment. Not because it was so impressive. But because it was so rare. A government saying what it wants, why it wants it, and …
From pioneering to scaling up
Meetup, 7 May 2026 Katrien Bernaerts will be speaking with us at the BeLibre meetup. Anyone attending is welcome to join the presentation. Topic What grew quietly for years is now genuinely picking up pace. Since 2012, we’ve been taking the first steps towards open digital learning with Xerte, …
Digisprong is looking for partners for an open source procurement in Flemish education
The Kenniscentrum Digisprong published a public procurement in early April 2026 that is worth reading carefully. Not because public procurements are generally compelling reading, but because this one explicitly asks for open source expertise, didactic depth and knowledge of digital sovereignty. …
A Belgian tool is quietly running medical imaging worldwide
Somewhere in a place you have never heard of - in a hospital in rural Senegal, a clinic in Peru or a radiology department in the heart of Brussels - a doctor is looking at a medical scan. There is a reasonable chance that scan is being served by software built in Liège. Orthanc is a free, …
Five years of Digisprong: how the Flemish government quietly built an open digital learning infrastructure and is now shifting into a higher gear
For the past five years, the Flemish government has been quietly building an open digital learning infrastructure for its two million people in education: on open source, on European servers, with public money. This article tells the story of how it grew, why it matters, and what the new Digisprong …
The pigeon that flew back: how Belgium quietly chose open source messaging
Imagine: the year is 1914. Somewhere on the Western Front, a small pigeon is released with a message tied to its leg. It doesn’t know why. It doesn’t know for whom. It simply flies - reliable, unseen, tireless - and delivers the message. For centuries, the pigeon was the gold standard of secure …
Banks and the Digital Divide: Let's Build Solutions Together for Everyone
The testimony from Nathalie on the RTL website has touched us in the BeLibre community. In many places, we heard and read indignation about the way these persons got handled. This story is about ING, but we notice a trend toward further digitalization and dehumanizing of consumer banking at multiple …
If FIFA can do it, so can we
We’re here live from the cafeteria, for the announcement of the BeLibre world soccer champion! Last week, the international soccer federation showed us once again how awards work these days. After the big boss felt slighted, FIFA pulled a few feathers out of its ass and delivered them with a deep …
Sovereignty
- Caterer Mike and the Alphabet Soup
On vendor lock-in and enshittification, without a single line of tech. A story about a caterer, a vanished kitchen and the price that never appears on the invoice. - Analysis Government Requests for Customer Data
An analysis of US extraterritorial laws (FISA 702, the CLOUD Act, and Executive Order 12333) and their impact on Belgian and EU data sovereignty. - Europe Measures Digital Sovereignty. Why Doesn’t It Publish the Results?
- What Academia Now Tells Governments About Digital Dependency
- The end of MS Office in sight? Germany chooses ODF, the Netherlands lacks courage.
- What Could Possibly Go Wrong? When Geopolitics Hits Your Cloud, HR and Bank Account
- Beyond the Marketing: Measuring Microsoft’s Cloud Sovereignty in Europe
- Belgium Can’t Afford Microsoft to Go Down: A Wake-Up Call on Digital Sovereignty
- Do you trust me?
- Caterer Mike and the Alphabet Soup
On vendor lock-in and enshittification, without a single line of tech. A story about a caterer, a vanished kitchen and the price that never appears on the invoice. - BeLibre Leak Detector: What your website tells strangers about your visitors
- Cookies are just the doorway
- FOSS just passed Mythos' stress test
- Analysis Government Requests for Customer Data
An analysis of US extraterritorial laws (FISA 702, the CLOUD Act, and Executive Order 12333) and their impact on Belgian and EU data sovereignty. - How DOSBA came to be
- Schleswig-Holstein knows what it wants. That alone is a revolution
- From pioneering to scaling up
- Europe Measures Digital Sovereignty. Why Doesn’t It Publish the Results?
- BeLibre meetup: Grassroots steps towards digital Sovereignty
- Digisprong is looking for partners for an open source procurement in Flemish education
- A Belgian tool is quietly running medical imaging worldwide
- Five years of Digisprong: how the Flemish government quietly built an open digital learning infrastructure and is now shifting into a higher gear
- What Academia Now Tells Governments About Digital Dependency
- The end of MS Office in sight? Germany chooses ODF, the Netherlands lacks courage.
- One year of BeLibre: why digital freedom concerns us all
- The pigeon that flew back: how Belgium quietly chose open source messaging
- Press release - March 17, 2026
- What Could Possibly Go Wrong? When Geopolitics Hits Your Cloud, HR and Bank Account
- Beyond the Marketing: Measuring Microsoft’s Cloud Sovereignty in Europe
- Banks and the Digital Divide: Let's Build Solutions Together for Everyone
- If FIFA can do it, so can we
- Belgium Can’t Afford Microsoft to Go Down: A Wake-Up Call on Digital Sovereignty