Trust Is the New License What sovereignty actually demands of the databases you run

Open source databases won. Then the licenses started changing, the sovereignty packages started landing, and a question that used to be philosophical became operational: who actually controls the systems your business runs on?

Europe has put open source at the centre of its technology sovereignty agenda, and enterprises that ignored the topic for a decade are suddenly asking their teams to prove things they have never had to prove. Where did this software come from. Can we verify it. Can we reproduce the build. Could we keep it running if the vendor, the license, or the jurisdiction changed tomorrow.

An open license does not answer any of those questions. Control does — and control is something you either built into your architecture or you didn’t.

This keynote looks at what has shifted globally over the past two years, why trust has become the currency that decides which database platforms institutions are willing to depend on, and what the open source database community has already built that the rest of the world is only now discovering it needs.

The counter-argument is well funded and still in the room: not secure, not proven at scale, not for mission-critical workloads. It deserves a better answer than we usually give it