Addressing an audience on research ethics, Roberto Di Cosmo reframed the conversation around data altruism by crossing out “data” to focus on a deeper issue: the shared commons of software code itself.
Roberto Di Cosmo returned to the University of Pisa — where he studied in the 1980s — to make the case that Europe’s digital sovereignty debate is missing its most critical pillar: software. A talk on fragility, dependency, and why resilience is not the same thing as control.
The era of the “free lunch” in open source is over. As the global economy rests on an invisible layer of volunteer-led code, the foundations are beginning to crack under the weight of “maintainer fatigue.” Leaders from the EU issued a blunt warning: digital sovereignty isn’t built on software alone—it’s built on the “invisible” labor of the people who maintain it.
Experts from France, Brazil, and the UAE explore how open-source code and transparent archives provide the essential foundation for digital sovereignty, ethical development, and linguistic inclusion.
Roberto Di Cosmo explains why true sovereignty isn’t about data storage, but having an independent archive of our source code.
