Latest News – SAOSS

New South African driver’s license renewal system powered by open source

South African motorists can look forward to replacing their physical driving licence card with a digital permit after a small team in the Presidency developed a functional prototype in three months.

The demo was part of a larger prototype of the MyMzansi platform, which Malatsi announced in September. He said it formed part of South Africa’s Digital Transformation Roadmap, launched in May 2025.

Gevers told News24 that the digital driving licence prototype was built on open-source software used by countries such as India, New Zealand, Brazil, and the UK.

See https://mybroadband.co.za/news/government/620868-say-goodbye-to-the-drivers-licence-cards-as-you-know-them-in-south-africa.html

German state replaces Microsoft Exchange and Outlook with open-source email

“The German state of Schleswig-Holstein has dumped its government email and calendar systems for open-source software. The six-month migration has replaced Microsoft Exchange and Outlook with Open-Xchange and Mozilla Thunderbird. The transfer covered more than 40,000 mailboxes and over 100 million messages and calendar entries.”

Again, this is not about necessarily having better or flashier functionality (e-mail and calendaring are basically decades old and open standards). It is about digital sovereignty, preventing vendor lock-in, potentially more local economic investment, and not getting locked into annual increases in cost without any end in sight.

All I can say is, be very wary of corporate PR trying to push any organisation into their cloud-owned service. Losing control of your IT is just not a strategy for the long (or short) term.

See https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-is-my-favorite-linux-distro-of-all-time-and-ive-tried-them-all

Austria’s military has switched from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice

“Austria’s military has completed a major IT overhaul, replacing Microsoft Office with the open-source LibreOffice suite across all its desktop systems. The change, finalised this month, affects approximately 16,000 workstations in the Austrian Armed Forces. This move will substantially reduce Austria’s software bill. At $33.75 per user per month, a Microsoft 365 E3 subscription for 16,000 workstations costs approximately $6,480,000 per year, compared to LibreOffice’s zero cost.”

But despite all the cost savings, the main reason for the change was in fact for digital sovereignty and to gain control over critical data. The whole marketing towards moving everything into foreign controlled clouds not only creates a dependency and lock-in to those services, it also often means reducing an organisation’s own capacity to support itself. Any organisation should be basing its decisions on a very holistic view of all the factors involved.

Be very wary of the allure of glitzy PR and nice-to-haves.

See https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-european-military-just-ditched-microsoft-for-open-source-libreoffice-heres-why

FOSS Force Asked LibreOffice and Collabora: Why Aren’t They in Schools Instead of Word and Google Docs?

“Much free and open source software helps its users save money as possible — on both hardware and software — while protecting their privacy. It also often makes it easy for them to learn how it works — if they’re interested — and customize it in any way they want or need.”

“With such features, FOSS should be the default choice in any educational environment, in these days when many schools face budget cuts, and switching to free as in free beer proprietary cloud applications like Microsoft Teams or Google Docs to save money has the consequence of actively preparing and educating pupils to be endless sources of data to be exploited for the likes of money and political control.”

There are really no big surprises here in the answers from LibreOffice or Collabora. And there should be a lot going for open source such as being able to use much older hardware, studying and adapting the code, no lock-in license fees, complete and unbroken support for the same open standards such as ODF that governments have endorsed, but yet… big money does tend to make the world go around.

Those massive kick-backs that Microsoft gives to education, and the digital villages that they build, etc, all have to be paid for. That money comes out of the far bigger license and cloud subscription costs that governments are already paying. For any change to happen, the whole economic model needs top be rethought. Today, with internal IT being more and more outsourced to cloud service subscriptions, I don’t see this change happening easily.

In fact, with cloud services the lock-in is way greater than just the internal IT capacity being lost, it is also data lock-in.

Ideally, organisations want to be igniting local innovation around IT as well as hosting, and building up their own shared resources. And that all starts with education.

See https://fossforce.com/2025/09/we-asked-libreoffice-and-collabora-why-arent-they-in-schools-instead-of-word-and-google-docs

French City of Lyon Kicks Out Microsoft

“European countries have been growing increasingly wary of relying on Microsoft for critical government and public sector services. Concerns about data privacy, digital sovereignty, and potential governmental surveillance have led many to question the viability of depending on an American tech giant for sensitive infrastructure.”

The point is, this is actually quite possible to do. Whether an organisation invests in its own people, or employs local companies to assist, it can be done. It is the marketing machine of Microsoft that convinces executives that Microsoft is so easy, that pays to certify installers and consultants, etc. The same can be done by governments, just like the UK government established their PRINCE project methodology, which all consultants and training companies were certified against.

The same also goes for document formats. There is no reason to be stuck on .docx after so many governments committed to actually using ODF instead. Governments are not helpless, and can set standards to be complied with, and industry will conform if they want contacts. The big benefit for everyone involved is, anyone can freely download fully compliant ODF suites, and they do really work much the same as Microsoft Office does.

I know this personally as I was part of a project to ready our own government to transition away from Microsoft in 2007. Yes, that never happened, but the reasons had nothing to do with the technology not working, or workers not being able to use Zimbra mail or LibreOffice. It was all politics and backroom manoeuvring around the IT staff.

Such a change though does take guts and drive to implement, and the willingness of someone to stand up to the so-called “norm” of Microsoft. The world not only needs digital sovereignty, it also needs more competition and choices. Such choices do rest on having proper open standards for the formats of data being stored and processed. Vendor lock-in should be a major red flag for any government.

See https://news.itsfoss.com/french-city-replaces-microsoft

‘We’re done with Teams’: German state hits uninstall on Microsoft

In less than three months’ time, almost no civil servant, police officer or judge in Schleswig-Holstein will be using any of Microsoft’s ubiquitous programs at work.

Instead, the northern state will turn to open-source software to “take back control” over data storage and ensure “digital sovereignty”, its digitalisation minister, Dirk Schroedter, told AFP.

“We’re done with Teams!” he said, referring to Microsoft’s messaging and collaboration tool and speaking on a video call — via an open-source German program, of course.

See https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250613-we-re-done-with-teams-german-state-hits-uninstall-on-microsoft

Denmark’s Government Ditches Microsoft for Open Source

“Up to half of employees at Denmark’s Ministry of Digital Affairs will be switched to (an unspecified version of) Linux in place of Windows, and move from Office 365 to the leading open source productivity suite LibreOffice. Denmark’s minister of digitisation, Caroline Stage Olsen, confirmed the migration is in progress to Danish media outlet Politiken (paywalled), adding that if all goes well the whole ministry will switch to using open source software by the autumn. Denmark, like many countries, wants to have greater control over its own digital infrastructure, data, and cloud services.”

This certainly seems to be a move that is growing in popularity across Europe. It does a bit of effort for any change, but this will likely also mean more investment is local skills and resources, and many governments are prepared to pay a premium for that.

See https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/06/denmark-government-replaces-microsoft-with-linux-libreoffice

Nextcloud in 2025: How 25 Million Users Escaped Big Tech’s Data Prison

Nextcloud powers 400,000+ servers worldwide, giving organizations like the German federal government complete control over their data while escaping Big Tech surveillance. Discover why millions choose open-source collaboration over Microsoft and Google’s data-mining platforms.

Today, ITZBund operates Nextcloud for 300,000 employees across the German federal government. The French Ministry of Interior runs it for their 300,000 staff. Schleswig-Holstein deploys it across 25,000 systems. Swedish federal agencies, Dutch ministries, universities across Europe, hospitals, law firms, and millions of home users rely on Nextcloud for file storage, video conferencing, document collaboration, email, calendars, and now AI assistance. These organizations discovered they could have enterprise-grade collaboration tools while maintaining complete control over every byte of their data. No surveillance capitalism. No vendor lock-in. No data held hostage in Silicon Valley.

See https://doingfedtime.com/nextcloud-in-2025-how-25-million-users-escaped-big-techs-data-prison/

Germany committing to ODF and open document standards

Digital sovereignty is of vital importance for data freedom. If governments and organisations use proprietary or pseudo-standard formats, they limit the tools that citizens can use to access data.

So we’re happy to see that the IT Planning Council in Germany is committing to move to the Open Document Format – a fully standardised format (and the default used in LibreOffice). The German IT Planning Council is a 17-member committee consisting of representatives of Germany’s federal government and the state governments.

See https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/04/29/germany-committing-to-odf-and-open-document-standards

Lessons from open source in the Mexican government

The adoption of open-source software in governments has had its ups and downs. While open source seems like a “no-brainer”, it turns out that governments can be surprisingly resistant to using FOSS for a variety of reasons. Federico González Waite spoke in the Open Government track at SCALE 22x in Pasadena, California to recount his experiences working with and for the Mexican government. He led multiple projects to switch away from proprietary, often predatory, software companies with some success—and failure.

See https://lwn.net/Articles/1013776/