VLC’s Jean-Baptiste Kempf | Digital Sovereignty: How Open Source Can Give Europe Back Control

💡 Does digital sovereignty mean Europe has to build everything itself? At Nexus Luxembourg 2026, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, President of VideoLAN and lead developer of VLC, challenged one of the central assumptions behind Europe’s technological sovereignty debate: complete independence is neither realistic nor necessary. What matters is understanding your dependencies — and retaining the ability to change them. With generative AI, those dependencies are becoming more consequential. Organisations are no longer simply outsourcing software or cloud infrastructure: customer data, internal processes and company know-how increasingly flow through AI systems, raising new questions about control, infrastructure and strategic autonomy. Drawing on more than two decades of experience with VLC and open source, Kempf argues that open technologies offer an alternative to technological lock-in. His analogy is simple: it is better to have the recipe for the cake than to depend entirely on the person selling it. Open source gives organisations the ability to understand, adapt and ultimately retain control over technologies on which they depend. And Europe, he argues, already has many of the ingredients it needs: world-class expertise in electronics, semiconductors and software, alongside strategic industrial players such as ASML. The challenge is turning those capabilities into long-term technological strength. His final lesson goes beyond software: Europe itself could learn from the open-source model of collaboration — bringing different countries, communities and interests together around shared technological objectives. 🗣️ Speaker: Jean-Baptiste Kempf — President, VideoLAN & Lead Developer, VLC 📍 Nexus Luxembourg 2026 | Luxexpo The Box, Luxembourg 👍 Like, Comment, and Subscribe for more talks, keynotes, and conversations from Nexus Luxembourg. Nexus Luxembourg 2027 — 9–10 March 2027 Building AI, Sovereignty & Growth for Europe www.nexusluxembourg.com #NexusLuxembourg #JeanBaptisteKempf #VLC #VideoLAN #OpenSource #DigitalSovereignty #TechSovereignty #ArtificialIntelligence #SovereignAI #Europe