https://itsfoss.com/news/german-state-ditch-microsoft/
Schleswig-Holstein's migration to LibreOffice reaches 80% completion, with a one-time €9 million investment on cards for 2026.
European governments are pushing back against Big Tech's grip on public infrastructure. Denmark announced earlier this year that its Ministry of Digital Affairs was switching from Microsoft to LibreOffice. In more recent news, Switzerland's data protection authorities declared international cloud services unsuitable for handling personal data.
One German state has been leading this charge for quite some time. Schleswig-Holstein started its open source journey early, becoming something of a vanguard in Europe's move away from proprietary software.
Now, Dirk Schrödter, the Minister for Digital Transformation of the state, has shared some remarkable numbers (in Deutsch) that prove the financial case for implementing open source for government use cases.
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.
The savings come from nearly completing the migration to LibreOffice. Outside the tax administration, almost 80% of workplaces in the state government are said to have made the switch.
The remaining 20% of workplaces still depend on Microsoft programs. Technical dependencies in certain specialized applications keep these systems tied to Word or Excel for now. But converting these remaining computers is the end goal.
There is also a one-time €9 million investment set in motion for 2026, which would be used to complete the migration and further develop the open source solutions for the ministry.
These numbers deserve attention from governments worldwide. Schleswig-Holstein proves that breaking free from proprietary software isn't just ideologically appealing but financially smart.
The €15 million annual savings will compound year after year. That is public money staying in the economy instead of flowing to a user data-hungry tech giant based overseas.
More importantly, this is about data sovereignty. Why should governments hand sensitive government data to companies subject to foreign surveillance laws? Open source alternatives keep data in-house, under local control, without forced cloud uploads.
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Associate professor, David Eaves, writes about the essential role of the commodification of services in digital sovereignty. The questions to ask on the way to digital sovereignty are not as much about owning the stack but about the ability to move workloads. In other words, open standards for protocols, file formats, and more are the prerequisites. The same applies to the software supply chain. However, as we recently discussed here, PHK recently pointed out that Free and Open Source reference implementations would be of great benefit. Associate professor Eaves writes:
There is growing and valid concern among policymakers about tech sovereignty and cloud infrastructure. A handful of American hyperscalers — AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud — control the digital substrate on which modern economies run. This concentration is compounded by a US government increasingly willing to wield its digital industries as leverage. As French President Emmanuel Macron quipped: "There is no such thing as happy vassalage."
While some countries appear ready to concede market dominance in exchange for improved trade relations, others are exploring massive investments in public sector alternatives to the hyperscalers, advocating that billions, and possibly many many billions, be spent to on sovereign stack plans, and/or positioning local telecoms as alternatives to the hyperscalers.
Ironically, both strategies may increase dependency, limit government agency and increase economic and geopolitical risks — the very problems sovereignty seeks to solve. As Mike Bracken and I wrote earlier this year: "Domination by a local champion, free to extract rents, may be a path to greater autonomy, but it is unlikely to lead to increased competitiveness or greater global influence."
Any realistic path to increased agency will be expensive and take years. To be sustainable, it must focus on commoditizing existing solutions through interoperability and de facto standards that will broaden the market (and enable effective) national champions. This should be our north star and direction of travel. The metric for success should focus on making it as simple as possible to move data and applications across suppliers. Critically, this cannot be achieved by regulation alone, it will also require deft procurement and a willingness to accept de facto as opposed to ideal standards. The good news is governments have done this before. However, to succeed, it will require building the capacity to become market shapers and not market takers — thinking like electricity grids and railway gauges, not digital empires .
The essential role of commodities has been widely known and acknowledged for decades. We are in this situation because key companies and/or monopolies saw that long ago and were allowed to fight so hard all this time against ICT remaining as commodities. Sadly, the discussion about commodification probably peaked in the years just after the infamous Halloween Documents, particularly the first one. Eric S Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and early FOSS developer, published these leaked documents which covered potential strategies relating to M$ fight against free and open source software and, in particular, against Linux back in 1998. In retrospect these documents have turned out to be blueprints, used against FOSS and open standards by other companies as well.
Previously:
(2026) Sorry, Eh
(2026) Poul-Henning Kamp's Feedback to the EU on Digital Sovereignty
(2026) A Post-American, Enshittification-Resistant Internet
(2025) This German State Decides to Save €15 Million Each Year By Kicking Out Microsoft for Open Source
(2025) Why People Keep Flocking to Linux in 2025 (and It's Not Just to Escape Windows)
(2025) Microsoft Can't Guarantee Data Sovereignty – OVHcloud Says 'We Told You So'
(2014) US Offering Cash For Pro-TAFTA/TTIP Propaganda
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jb on Thursday December 11, @06:34AM (6 children)
It's a very good start.
But just think how much more they'll save (and how much more secure from prying eyes they'll be) if and when they get around to ridding themselves of the shackles of all proprietary software (and all SaaS scams)...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday December 11, @12:58PM (3 children)
This is a reasonable way of doing the transition: First you wean people off of proprietary applications in favor of their FOSS competitors, where it's still relatively easy to switch back should you run into a real problem with the FOSS stuff. Then once you have everyone comfortable with LibreOffice, Mozilla stuff or variants on their stuff, GIMP instead of Photoshop, etc, you then switch the OS around to a Linux desktop with a Windows-like interface.
Each step of the way, you can tout savings, and the employees and more importantly management get some myths busted about the FOSS stuff and have reason to keep going in that direction.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday December 11, @01:11PM (1 child)
I don't recall now how it went. But several German cities or municipalities (or whatever they are called in Germany) switched away from Windows and Microsoft. To Linux and OpenOffice or Libre or whatnot. Didn't they eventually switch back again or did they stick with it?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 11, @01:41PM
Yes, I believe it was Munich. They were almost entirely Linux and FOSS, but Microsoft funded and backed a new mayor who reversed everything. All that wasted money of converting was wasted, plus all that wasted money on Microsoft and other proprietary Windows-centric software licensing. Graft and corruption makes the world go 'round!
I'm going to buy my defensive radar from Temu, just like Venezuela!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by suxen on Friday December 12, @02:47PM
Yeah I worked for a university that decided to unilaterally change out all proprietary software over the course of a year. Every service across the entire university, thousands of users, was phased out in favor of an open source replacement. Right down to every workstation being replaced with a brand new dell running Ubuntu. Suffice to say it didn't go well and within a year the director in charge of that was replaced and they rolled back on the whole project. A lot of people, especially the microsoft specialists, were against the idea before it started but by the time it was finished any random staff member who had previously never heard of open source had a bad opinion of it
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 11, @05:12PM
And elsewhere in Europe…
As of 2024, Finland wastes almost 1.2 billion € per year on just the licensing for M$ gimmicks [northpatrol.fi]. Scroll down to the second pie chart, Hankinnat aihealuettain, and note the € 1.174 billion line item. That's just for licensing. That does not include the lost productivity due to instability and awkward user interfaces. Nor does it count the lost productivity due to incompatibilities, including incompatibilities with other M$ products. Nor does it count the vast sums lost due to malware and cleanup from malware, not limited to ransomware and viruses. Nor does it count the wasted salaries paying droves of "trained monkeys" supporting the M$ products and services in an almost 1:1 ratio. Make-work like that is treading water and does nothing for the national economy [bastiat.org].
If those additional costs are included, and not ignored as externalities, then there are enormous savings to be had by firing all the M$ resellers and hiring skilled IT people in their place — more than enough to cover the costs of upgrading to FOSS and open formats and protocols. The time for that is ripe. There is constant demand from certain political parties to cut national spending. Here's their chance. Furthermore, it is no longer necessary to appease any neighboring countries by granting full but unofficial access to all data and communications via the scores of bugdoors discovered monthly in M$ products.
However, the real nightmare challenge, which m$ counts on, is extracting the government data in a manner usable by real, FOSS systems. That's kind of a deadlock, a chicken-and-egg, problem because platform independence is enabled through open formats and protocols and M$ generally does not support any.
(Score: 2) by JustNiz on Thursday December 11, @07:38PM
Assuming the Libreoffice switch gets perceived as an overall win, It seems natural that they would then start looking at other expensive targets.
I'm guessing the likelihood that it will be perceived as a win will be unlikely though, as no matter how good Libre Office actually is compared to
MS Office, governments are usually made up of small minded paper shufflers that are VERY set in their ways, and will complain hard about about
ANY change, especially one that requires them to give up something they already know and to have to actually do work to learn a new tool.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Bentonite on Thursday December 11, @07:02AM (3 children)
A small percentage of the previous expenses will be donated to assist with development to LibreOffice and other free software projects right?
I hope it's not going to line the pockets of the politicians instead.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Thursday December 11, @08:32AM (1 child)
There will be either service contracts with consulting companies (you need somebody to put the blame on) or there will be an internal department performing development (like there was in Munich but that's less likely in a small state like Schleswig-Holstein). For the rest, it's lining the pockets of politicians (they deserve a cut of the money saved after all).
The "technical dependencies" are likely to be special macros that did not work right away under LibreOffice. They could use a chatbot to port those macros (or whatever plugin they use) but this will be a consulting project of one year. They need their soccer-guessing-excel-game after all.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Dr Spin on Thursday December 11, @10:58AM
Soccer guessing either needs a huge database (which have I used) or AI.
There if far to much data for a spreadsheet - it would need tens of thousands of cells!
Oh, wait - this is government - they probably think tens of thousands of cells is manageable.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday December 11, @11:38AM
I would guess that at least some of the money gets reallocated to other government functions, e.g. transportation infrastructure or policing or environmental protection. Or they might be considering lowering taxes a bit.
By most available measures, Germany is substantially less corrupt than the USA, so if you're using USA government as your basis for perception about how corrupt the government is, you're probably too pessimistic.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin