In recent days, the Roadmap to Accelerate Digital Sovereignty in Spain has been presented, a document that reflects something that has been becoming increasingly clear for some time now: digital sovereignty has ceased to be an abstract concept and has become a strategic issue. We are no longer talking only about innovation, but about decision-making capacity, resilience, technological autonomy, and control over critical infrastructures. Technological dependence is a structural vulnerability.

The document points to a key idea: Europe and Spain cannot limit themselves to consuming technologies developed by others. When a public administration, a company, or a public institution depends on technologies it does not control, on platforms it cannot audit, on licences that can change unilaterally, and on infrastructures that respond to external interests, it is not innovating: it is taking on a strategic risk.

And that risk does not affect technology alone. It affects the ability to decide, to plan, to ensure continuity, to protect data, to guarantee public services, and to sustain long-term policies. The question is why we continue to build critical parts of our administrations and organisations on technologies we do not control.

That is why the answer cannot remain at the level of regulation alone. It is necessary to invest, deploy our own infrastructures, strengthen the use of open standards, and promote technological solutions that can be audited, evolved, and governed within our own institutional framework.

In that context, it is especially relevant that the roadmap explicitly mentions the promotion of free software and open source within public administration, as well as the need to connect Spain’s public digital infrastructure with the European one and to strengthen domestic technological capabilities.

That is where initiatives such as gvSIG fully make sense. gvSIG is not just software. It is, and has always been, a practical commitment to digital sovereignty.

Because talking about digital sovereignty also means talking about the concrete tools with which public administrations manage their territory, their information, and their services. It means asking whether an administration can retain control over its geospatial infrastructure, its data, its processes, and the future evolution of its systems.

Today, gvSIG is a suite, a digital infrastructure, a catalogue of solutions based on free software, open standards, and interoperability. It is an ecosystem that enables administrations and organisations to build and maintain their own Spatial Data Infrastructures, geoportals, and territorial management systems without depending on unilateral decisions by third parties, without becoming trapped by restrictive licences, and with a real capacity to adapt over the long term.

A large share of the critical information managed by public administrations has a territorial dimension: urban planning, emergencies, the environment, mobility, cadastre, infrastructure, public services, security, defence… When that technological layer depends entirely on closed vendors, dependency is not only technical: it is also organisational and strategic.

There is a clear risk in continuing to accept as normal a dependency that compromises the autonomy of our institutions.

When Europe and Spain speak about digital sovereignty, public digital infrastructure, free software, and technological autonomy, this is not a debate that is alien to gvSIG. All of this has been part of gvSIG’s DNA for years. We are looking at a framework that reinforces the relevance of projects that have already been demonstrating, in practice, that another way of building technology is possible.