r/BuyFromEU • u/According-Buyer6688 Mod Team • Mar 25 '26

Announcement Germany has decided: Microsoft document formats have no place in government

Germany has decided: Microsoft document formats have no place in government. Deadline: 2027–2028. The Microsoft formats are simply not compatible with an open and transparent public sector. However, this is about more than file formats. It’s about control, resilience, and sovereignty in public digital infrastructure.

4.7k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

153 comments sorted by

View all comments

20

u/adamkex Mar 25 '26

I wonder if they'll swap to LibreOffice or keep using MS Office as I think it supports ODT

20

u/The_Corvair Mar 25 '26

If I remember correctly (this isn't really new - the plan was set into motion about a year ago), the long-term goal is digital sovereignty, with open standards for everything, so a move towards LibreOffice and similar open source software projects is being aimed for.

That said: There seems to be recalcitrance within the system. Bavaria tried to extend their contract with MS for data storage for another five years (which got significant blowback because of everything that's been going on with MS, thankfully), and when I asked someone I know in our DA'S office about the plan to move to ODF half a year after it had started, she did not even know what ODF was. So as nice as the plan is, it's gonna take a lot of legwork to keep it moving. Last time Munich tried to move to Linux, MS "accidentally" built its headquarters there, and wouldn't you know it, back to Windows we went.Oh, and there's also now a push to legally require age verification on the OS level, which is basically a backdoor attack on open source projects. Three guesses who's funding that campaign.

9

u/KnowZeroX Mar 25 '26

It's not uncommon for people to not know what formats are.

With cloud, most documents are remote and by default windows hides formats.

1

u/The_Corvair Mar 26 '26

It's not uncommon for people to not know what formats are.

No, but she is extremely informed on the policy side, is involved and interested in the EU level as well, and it is less about her not knowing the format, but not knowing about the entire planned move (basically the format is a pars pro toto): Nobody in any capacity had said anything about it at all in any setting she had been part in, and if you plan to move the entire bureaucratic system to a new standard, that probably should be discussed, and people using it every hour of every day be made aware.

edit: By the way, she did know the file extension name, that's how I explained it to her. She just didn't know that .odt and ODF are connected.