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I am living in Spain, and from my point of view, Netherlands is one of the ones doing the most for FOSS in Europe today! It sees much faster real-world adoption of FOSS in ministries and municipalities than other countries, the government seems eager to fund FOSS (again, compared to other countries) and generally be welcoming to the ecosystem. Browsing around, there seems to be lots of FOSS projects funded by money coming from the Dutch state.

Kind of interesting how the perspective is so different from the inside! Maybe it's the typical "the grass is always greener..."?

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Norwegian Government has a couple of thousand open repos for their code https://norwegian-public-organizations.vercel.app/

Most notably the Labor and Welfare Administration with 3000+ open repos.

Yeah, also pretty dope! Sweden also basically spearheads the whole "open data" thing for a long time too :) Too many great stuff happening across the continent to just say one or two countries are doing everything, in that you're right.

Funny that its hosted on vercel. Probably because its employee driven rather than top down. Saves all the bureaucracy to get someone to sign a budget item to buy a domain.

Not sure that site in itself is owned and operated by the Norwegian government.

This is cool (and on Vercel too)

This map shows that the Dutch municipalities are nearly all in the Microsoft cloud.

https://mxmap.nl/

Love it! All European countries should have one

In Belgium, 72% of the communes are on Microsoft 365:

https://jurgen.gaeremyn.be/2025/03/08/european-critical-depe...

"Purely based on the MX-records, we learn that 72% of Belgian municipalities run Microsoft mail servers and 60% of the Dutch municipalities. For Scandinavia, it’s 64% in Norway and 57% in Sweden. In Finland, it’s a whopping 77% if the cities that are being served by Microsoft."

Running a Microsoft mail server doesn't automatically mean you are on 365. You can still host Exchange onsite

Heh, here you go: http://mxmap.be https://mxmap.ch/ https://kommune-epost-norge.netlify.app/ for Norway and https://swedish-mail-dependency.netlify.app/ for Sweden.

France even has an official map of this kind, with publicly visible recommendations: https://suiteterritoriale.anct.gouv.fr/conformite/cartograph...

Disclaimer: I made mxmap.be after seeing Swiss ant Dutch counterparts. I did not look at MX records only but also at EHLO replies, SPF and DMARC records and at fronting services.

Any recommendations / lessons learned when building this? I would love to give it a go for Brazil if one doesn't already exist around the time of my holidays in June/July.

Just take the source, and ask your LLM to do the Brazilian version. It should not take more than a couple hours, including manual checks.

Do not forget to minimize the geojson (there is even a web-based service for that) and to enable compression in your web server.

Cool map!

Another data point: I've visited public libraries around Friesland province. They all use catalog + internet facilities which look & feel the same across libraries: a browser (Mozilla) + office suite, PDF reader, files can be saved locally put don't persist between user sessions.

This would lend itself perfect for a Linux-based setup: netboot (from per-building local file server or NL-based cloud), read-only filesystem, LibreOffice etc.

But alas: the setup is Windows-based (running on Intel NUC or similar), office suite is Microsoft Excel/Word/PP. Completed by Acrobat PDF reader. No doubt it's at least able to leak telemetry and/or user data if Microsoft were to feel like it (or asked/forced to do by US gov).

Not sure. I think Germany and France are way ahead?

Yeah, probably if you asked me for "Top 3 countries for FOSS in Europe" I'd pretty much say France, Germany and Netherlands, hence me saying "is one of the ones" :) Compared to the rest of the countries, those three probably do way more than all the rest together.

NLNet is funding open source projects to the tune of tens of millions of euros per year, and it is Dutch.

NLnet (the foundation) is Dutch, but as far as I know NLnet Labs (which does the work and spends the money) is at least partially funded by Germany (through the Sovereign Tech Fund).

I don't have the numbers at hand and cannot dig them up right now. If anyone knows the extent of participation of each country that'd be definitely interesting for others too.

I think NLnet Labs is indeed like 50% funded through German Sovereign Tech Fund, but most of NLnet + the rest of NLnet Labs is funded via EU project funds or other public programs. I don't think NLnet receives anything at all from the Dutch government AFAIK, and NLnet Labs gets tiny amount of funds via Dutch SIDN subsidy I guess, but that's pretty much it.

This is all (tried to) rememberings from meetings in 2024 sometime, so could be different today.

NLnet Labs was started by NLnet but now independent.

https://nlnetlabs.is.not.nlnet.nl/

Funding for NLnet Labs is largely from paying customers for development of DNS software.

NLnet funds development of the full stack of communication technologies from chip design to office suites. Funding for NLnet comes from public institutions, private companies and citizens.

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