It's not as if this was something that started elsewhere and is being adapted to the American value system: Free Software / Open Source started in the U.S.[1] That's largely due to the fact that for the first couple of decades of it's existence, Internet access[2] was heavily concentrated in the U.S. as it was originally a U.S. government funded project. There are a variety of factors that have changed the open source ecosystem, Americanization isn't one of them. Quite the opposite: if anything, Open Source has been globalizing over the past 25 years or so.

[1] Free Software originated with GNU which was started by Richard Stallman, an American at MIT. Open Source originated in Palo Alto, CA as an alternative (less political, more business friendly) approach to Free Software. There was freely available software prior to the formalization of terminology and licenses from organizations like FSF and OSI, but even then most of it was from developers in the U.S.

[2] Prior to the Internet, most open source projects were heavily concentrated in the U.S. as large scale distributed projects weren't a thing until the 90's with widespread availability of Internet access.

I was in the room with Richard Stallman, in Palo Alto, in the 1980s, as he gave a careful and serious presentation to about twenty chosen people.. from my point of view, the statement above does show one part of the OSS evolution. Meanwhile, the "net" was growing as a combination of ex-dot-mil and their allies, and people who were deeply committed to signals, evolution and in most cases math or physics training, for its own sake, and the social evolution it implied (science fiction readers and highly creative signal processors like musicians but different).

both sides of this odd couple had different motivations and restrictions, but they cooperated in building the network and the software that ran the network. People here have complained, but I claim, TCP/IP was not the only network game in town then, and the massive scaling that you see today was not done yet, and did not work for lots of reasons. Many OSS projects related to the network itself, the signals across the network, and math/science. The media world was largely influenced by commercial print and Hollywood, and was less influential in the early days, as they stuck to the commercial distribution mechanisms. Network media tended to be odd, music-oriented, or sick things, in those early days. Also note that single, massive source code repos were not a thing, so people traded "tarballs" with important releases of whatever.

Do European students run critical infrastructure? Because that's where the real problem is.

Lots of things run on Linux, which was Torvald's thesis project at a European university.

Which, by the way, took 8 years... typical length for European's who really don't feel like graduating (back in the day).

It's a bit out there, but I do believe there is some truth to op's points.

Linux has been developed by paid professional developers for 20 years or more. I agree that the European university model is interesting for initial R&D, but things have to professionalize over time.

How about Linux? KDE and by extension WebKit/Blink(KHTML)?

This is an interesting aspect, and some good projects do come from Europe

But open source projects still need a roadmap, focus and maintenance, regardless of how they are funded.

Whether a project needs those things is up to its author(s) to decide. If you don't agree with them you're welcome to fork.

If you want a real project then you need those

If you just want to share code, that's fine as well, but that's not an OSS project (sure, it can be an open source "project" - but not a project that grows)

What is 'a real project'? What is the (or at least your) definition of that term?

Why is sharing code (as long as an OSS license is attached) not open source?

Under what circumstances am I allowed to call things I do open source, under what circumstances not?

maintenance for a mature project is pretty low if you just don't deal with the masses constantly bombarding you with feature requests/unrelated fixes.

outside of a few specific areas; like compilers but that's mainly because hardware is constantly evolving.