At Paris’s Open Source Experience conference, six Acteurs du Libre awards mapped out a snapshot of Europe’s free software ecosystem in 2025, from enterprise strategy to privacy‑first Android and public‑sector platforms.
Last week the city of Paris played host to this year’s two-day Open Source Experience event, where each year the Acteurs du Libre awards are handed out. Open Source Experience is a professional conference and expo focused on open source technologies and their role in digital transformation, digital sovereignty, and enterprise IT.
If you live here in the States, you’re likely to have never heard of it — partly due to national hubris and partly due to geography — but in France and the rest of Europe, it’s a big deal. For each of the last several years it has attracted something like 4,000 attendees, with about 90 exhibitors on site, and more than 100 conference sessions. It positions itself as a major European business event for open source, bringing together vendors, users, public bodies, and community organizations.
The six awards recognize various aspects of the free software ecosphere and are considered important, not only in France but throughout Europe.
Acteurs du Libre Awards — 2025 Winners
- Best Open Source Strategy: This went to Thales Group, a Paris-based company that’s considered to be a “national champion” in the fields of aerospace, defense electronics, cybersecurity, and transportation systems. It has extensive R&D operations and partnerships with many French educational institutions, including École Polytechnique, where its main French research lab is located on campus.
The company is heavily involved in open source, both as a user and as an active contributor, including in hardware and major software foundations. It also uses open source extensively in its commercial products and publishes internal tools for the wider community. The company participates in and supports organizations such as the Linux Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Open Hardware Group, CNCF, and OSPO Alliance.
- The Business Development Award: XWiki, which received the award in this category, produces an eponymous open source enterprise wiki and knowledge-management platform written in Java. It’s designed to be both a traditional wiki and an application platform for building collaborative web apps.
It won the award for its international growth and because of its impact as an open source company, particularly its success in building a sustainable business around its XWiki and CryptPad projects.
- Public-Private Collaboration Award: This award honors a project or initiative where public bodies and private actors jointly build or govern open source software or services. This year it went to the rectorate of Paris — which is basically the folks who officially oversee public primary and secondary schools in the city — for how it co‑develops and operates its Capytale platform with the private company Vittascience, in a way that supports public‑sector open source ideals.
Capytale is an online platform used in French education to let teachers and students work in an interactive way within a browser. It’s integrated into the rectorate’s official digital environment for schools, making it part of the rectorate’s everyday digital toolkit for classes and homework. Co-developer Vittascience is a French ed‑tech company that builds tools and content to teach science- and tech-focused subjects, with a strong “learning by experimenting” approach.
- Award for an Open and Ethical Digital: This award went to Murena, producer of /e/OS, the deGoogled and open source version of Android. The jury recognized both the operating system and the Murena hardware line as a privacy‑by‑design, deGoogled smartphone ecosystem built on open source, with transparency and user control over data as central design goals.
Murena Workspace (mail, cloud, online services) and its partnerships with “committed” hardware brands (Fairphone, SHIFT, Teracube, etc.) were also cited for advancing digital sovereignty as an ethical, European‑rooted alternative rather than as ad‑driven surveillance platforms.
- Special Jury Prize: This is an award that the Acteurs du Libre jury gives when it wants to highlight something important that doesn’t neatly fit one of the regular categories. This year the jury awarded APRIL, a French nonprofit founded in 1996 to promote and defend free/libre software and open standards in the French‑speaking world, for its radio show Libre à Vous (or Free to You). The show is broadcast online and over-the-air by Cause Commune, a non-profit, listener-supported radio station.
- European Prize (in collaboration with APELL): The “Prix Européen” rewards non-French European companies or organizations that have built a strong, sustainable activity around open source. Recent winners include projects like Nextcloud, which is a platinum sponsor of FOSS Force. This prize is always awarded in collaboration with the Association Professionnelle Européenne du Logiciel Libre, a European open source business association that acts as an umbrella for national open source software business groups.
This year’s prize went to Mockoon, a Luxembourg-based start-up that develops and maintains an eponymous open source tool for creating and running mock APIs that allows developers to test and integrate against non-existent services without hitting real back ends.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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