Latest News – SAOSS

German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern heads down the open source sovereignty road

“So far, around 5,000 staff are using their new FOSS tools for chat, video conferencing, and groupware, but the plan is to roll it out to more than 50,000 public employees. It is also using OpenProject. For now, the plan is to keep Microsoft client OSes, changing the groupware tools first. This is not a Linux migration… yet.”

Which is the best-practice way of implementing such a migration. Start with the applications, and test out cross-platform alternatives on your existing OS. Once those are bedded down and are working, it is much easier to switch the OS out on user machines.

The admin side of the organisation has to test out updates, backups, networking, etc for the OS migration later on.

I was part of such an exercise back in 2007 or so, I as an early adopter in a government agency, I was running full Linux, with LibreOffice back then, and Zimbra email. It was fully possible as I know I did it for many months and that included remote VPN access into the network, and daily document interchange with other staff.

It just comes down to the will power of the CTO or CIO. Digital sovereignty adds a bit of impetus and will power to that equation.

Having myself just transitioned off some cloud subscription services to alternatives, ye sit took a bit of effort and paradigm change, but all my processes are still working, and I’ve saved a mint of money. Our problem is, like being with a bank or insurance company, we are afraid of change. Believe me, it is often very worth it!

See https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/07/08/another-german-state-heads-down-the-open-source-sovereignty-road/5268192

France’s government is ditching Windows for Linux, calling US tech dependence a strategic risk

As open-source tools begin to catch up with their proprietary cousins, people are realizing they’re handing over far more control to businesses than they probably need to. After all, when two apps essentially do the same thing, but one is open-source, and the other can cut you off from its service on a moment’s notice, it’s hard to justify using the latter.

Now, the French government has decided that enough is enough. It has announced that it will shift away from proprietary technologies from outside the European Union and focus more on open-source solutions — and part of that means ditching Windows for Linux.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/frances-government-ditching-windows-for-linux/

Big Win for Open Source as Germany Backs Open Document Format

“Germany has strictly standardised its digital document requirements. The Deutschland-Stack (in Deutsch), the country’s new sovereign digital infrastructure framework, names just two document formats that public administrations are allowed to use: ODF and PDF/UA.”

When public administrations run on proprietary document formats, they end up dependent on the vendor that controls those formats, with no real way out without significant disruption and cost.

This would help Germany ensure they could switch between various open standard office suites without losing access to their documents in future. This gives freedom of choice and more competition in the market.

See https://itsfoss.com/news/germany-digital-stack-mandate

French government announces move from US based video conferencing to open source Visio

Visio is based on the open source project La Suite Meet powered by LiveKit. It seems that the government will be opting to use the French hosted version, instead of hosting it in-house themselves.

It is time though that countries started taking their digital sovereignty more seriously and evaluated their over reliance on foreign country cloud services. Generally moving to someone else’s cloud service, means not only your data is locked in there, but there is a tendency for the users to lose their own in-house IT skills, and for funds to just move offshore.

See https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet

Brussels plots open source push to pry Europe off Big Tech

The European Commission has launched a fresh consultation into open source, setting out its ambitions for Europe’s developer communities to go beyond propping up US tech giants’ platforms.

In a “Call for Evidence” published this week, Brussels says the EU’s reliance on non-European technology suppliers (read: US tech giants) has become a strategic liability, limiting choice, weakening competitiveness, and creating supply chain risks across everything from cloud services to critical infrastructure. The consultation, which will run from January 6 to February 3, is an early move toward a formal strategy on “European Open Digital Ecosystems,” which would treat open source as core infrastructure rather than a nice-to-have.

See https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/eu_open_source_consultation/

Denmark Begins its Exit from Microsoft — and This is Just the Beginning

The Færdselsstyrelsen (Danish Road Traffic Authority) is becoming the first agency to pilot SIA Open, a government-wide project by Statens IT (Danish Governmental IT Agency) designed to replace Microsoft services with open source alternatives.

With this, they are not stopping at just Office apps. Færdselsstyrelsen will be replacing both the Windows operating system and Microsoft’s suite of applications (Word, Excel, Teams, and Outlook) with open source alternatives.

Though information on the exact alternatives they will be switching to hasn’t been made public yet. The agency has 600 employees across 11 teams and is headquartered in Ribe, but only some of those employees will be taken through the transition.

See https://itsfoss.com/news/denmark-road-traffic-authority-ditches-microsoft/

Hurray! This German State Decides to Save €15 Million Each Year By Kicking Out Microsoft for Open Source

According to Schrödter’s ministry, Schleswig-Holstein will save over €15 million in license costs in 2026. This is money the state previously paid Microsoft for Office 365 and related services.

See https://itsfoss.com/news/german-state-ditch-microsoft/

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