Restack: a new European consortium for a digital Europe
Recent geopolitical events have highlighted Europe's need for a resilient, homegrown technology ecosystem free from critical dependencies. The new Horizon Europe project Restack aims to accomplish it. The FSFE is a partner of the Restack consortium, providing legal and licensing support for potentially over 200 Free Software projects and assisting their growth into part of a wider European digital commons.
Europe urgently needs to regain the capabilities to run its own digital infrastructure. The “cloud-first” strategy that has dominated in the past decade has shown itself to be an unsustainable long-term strategy in light of geopolitical stressors. Despite this need for digital sovereignty, funding for European projects such as the Next Generation Internet Zero (NGI0) programme was cut. As a result, the FSFE’s ability to provide legal and licensing support for Free Software projects that have the potential to improve the internet as a platform would have come to a halt in 2027. In light of this setback, the FSFE and our fellow NGI0 consortium partners have been searching for an alternative to provide similar support for Free Software projects.
These efforts proved successful in February 2026, when the proposal for Restack, spearheaded by our consortium partner the NLnet Foundation, was approved. Operating under Horizon Europe, this new 10M€ initiative will enable the consortium partners to continue strengthening the European ecosystem of contributors to the digital commons with financial and practical support.
The Open Internet Stack framework is a cascade funding programme designed to retain the strength of the NGI Zero approach: nurturing bottom-up innovation by providing small- and medium-sized grants to creators of free and open technologies, including Free Software, Open Hardware, and Open Data related projects. It will also provide a pipeline of tailored support to strengthen the quality and maturity of these projects. The main novelty within Restack is that a significant amount of targeted effort will be added to wrap the resulting innovation catalogue into a coherent stack.
Restack aims to support projects that can help accomplish the following goals:
- Strengthening the “Free and Open” technology ecosystem, based on sovereignty and privacy;
- Improving the resilience of the internet;
- Addressing and reducing the environmental impact of digital technology; and
- Improving transparency in the technological supply chain.
The hope is that, by supporting the growth of such European projects, Restack will contribute to a healthy Free Software and technological environment that supports collaboration and transparency. Such an environment can also strengthen privacy and security for different groups, ranging from consumers to vulnerable communities such as minorities and journalists. Additionally, we hope that this project can help develop economic incentives that encourage collaborative strategies and community engagement.
As Restack is currently still in its early stages, more information about how Free Software projects can apply for funding and technical support will be shared in the coming weeks.
Next Generation Internet and the FSFE
Since 2018, the FSFE has been a consortium member of the Next Generation Internet (NGI), supported by the European Commission's DG CNECT. The NGI has the mission to re-imagine and re-engineer the internet in order to shape a value-centric, human, and inclusive society for all.
The FSFE's team provides guidance to successful grantee projects on legal and licensing issues, and helps them become REUSE compliant. Through individual assessments and direct assistance, we aim to promote the display of unambiguous, human-readable, and machine-readable licence and copyright information. Other consortium partners provide support on issues that can improve each grantee software project, such as security, accessibility, and translations, among others. A similar workflow is expected to be enacted for software projects that are supported under Restack as well.