Europe is starting to fund the commons it legislates for

Three moves in 2025–26 - EHDS, the EU Open Source Strategy, and a Digital Commons consortium - point the same way.

For most of the last decade, the case for open digital health infrastructure was made in the language of principle. In 2025 and 2026 it started being made in the harder languages of regulation and budgets.

The law arrived first

The European Health Data Space Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2025/327) entered into force on 26 March 2025, and the first implementing act - establishing the EHDS Board - followed in April 2026. Cross-border exchange of priority data, such as patient summaries and ePrescriptions, is due across the Union by March 2029. The right to move your health data now exists in law. The infrastructure to exercise it does not yet exist.

Then the money started to follow

Alongside it, the Commission's EU Open Source Strategy and Tech Sovereignty Package reframed open source as a question of sovereignty rather than charity - proposing roughly €2 billion over seven years, including an Open Source Maintenance Instrument to fund the "maintenance and security upkeep of essential components".

And the commons got a legal body

In December 2025 the Commission established the Digital Commons EDIC (DC-EDIC) - a consortium of France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy, seated in Paris - to build cross-border digital infrastructure from reusable open-source building blocks under shared governance.

Why it matters here

Health data is the hardest version of this problem: the most sensitive data, the most fragmented systems, the strongest incentives to keep it closed. But if Europe is willing to legislate the right, fund the maintenance, and give the commons a legal home, then open digital health infrastructure stops being aspirational and starts being buildable. That is the gap the Forum exists to close.

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