The state of Schleswig-Holstein is consistently relying on open source

> The goal is not only to save costs, but above all to gain digital sovereignty.

> [It's true] that open source is not necessarily cheaper, [..] it requires investment. But the money flows into internal infrastructure, into the further development of Nextcloud, LibreOffice, and other similar systems, instead of proprietary ones.

> Schleswig-Holstein pursues an "upstream-only strategy," meaning that developments flow directly back into international projects. The state does not want to maintain its own forks, but rather contribute all improvements directly to the main projects, thereby contributing to development for the benefit of the general public.[1]

On a side note, the real key to the project's success is that it's supported by a coalition of the conservative and green parties. They actually value digital sovereignty and longterm cost savings. Contrast that with Bavaria, where the MS lobbyist managed to get them to sign a longterm Office 365 contract…

[1]https://www-heise-de.translate.goog/hintergrund/Interview-Wi...

I hope Holstein prepared the switch well and kill off any Microsoft stuff as quick as possible. Nothing is worse than co-existence with something hostile which doesn’t want to be compatible.

   * No Dual-Booting
   * No VM
   * Especially no WINE (your ducked with every odd update)
   * And by the love of god, hit everyone with a bat which tries to ship incompatible files (MS-Office, ppt, xls, pst…) to you. Links to “Microsoft Teams”? Hit harder and show no mercy :)

    * Make plan.
    * Used standards wherever possible.
    * Switch file-formats and external platforms before. Use a standard distribution and DO NOT MAKE YOUR OWN DISTRIBUTION. If you have a big IT department with hundreds of employees, maybe an own repository with your custom software.
    * Enforce all suppliers hard to support Linux natively! If not? Drop them. Search a honest company which gives you also the source.
    * Avoid the usual mistake like “this a local support company” or “their offer is cheaper”
    * Don’t purchase shitty hardware. ThinkPads are a good start, but we speak about printers, NFC, label writers, scanners and so on.

    The remaining 20 percent of workplaces are currently still dependent on Microsoft programs such as Word or Excel, as there is a technical dependency on these programs in certain specialized applications. According to Schrödter, however, the successive conversion of these remaining computers is the stated goal.

PS: And don’t repeat Munich! Munich is “HOW NOT”. Three distinct IT-Departments. And the next major was “convinced ” with tax money and a Microsoft Headquarters. Result, it is worse than before.

They're out of their minds if they're donating nothing to Libreoffice, though.

Given this understanding, the best away to achieve the desired outcome is to get creative about aligning incentives at the top of org structures where resources are allocated.

In the current cancel culture even if you use *GPL licenses you get attacked for not being MIT or similar. But mysteriously never a peep about Big Tech making billions off open source without giving back even a tiny 1% to the projects. Insanity.

Building a new street? The cheapest bidder wins.

Cuts to social security? As long it saves money in the short term in doesn’t matter if the long term costs will be higher or if the cuts don’t make sense.

It’s a tremendous mis-allocation of public resources. Hiring local people to tailor the free software which already exists and contributing those changes back to the world would spend fewer of those dollars and spend them locally, and be pro-social at the same time.

So I don’t hate this story. I love it and see it as a massive win.

They are contributing actively it seems, so even better.

There are also practical advantages: the ability to fix a bug in-house instead of waiting for a technology giant from another continent.

Despite all the talk about sovereign cloud the actual governments are actually going the other way.

1. The Online Safety Act in the UK pushes people to use big tech more rather than run stuff independently - the forums that moved to social media. 2. EU regulatory requirements that help the incumbents:https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/27/cispe_eu_sovereignty_... 3. ID apps in multiple countries that require installs from Google or Apple stores, and only run on their platforms. 4. The push to cashless which means increased reliance on Visa, Mastercard, Apple and Google.

To be clear I do not not think that any of these things are in the public interest. However the government is not the public, and the public (and probably a lot of the government) has deeply ingrained learned helplessness about technology.

What happens when major OSS projects are controlled by the governments themselves? Will David still beat Goliath?

What would happen instead, and has happened in the past, is Microsoft (or juniper, etc) leaving a remote vulnerability unpatched while certain groups use that exploit. It's much more deniable. So deniable, that it's impossible to say for certain that it was intentional.

It's more practical to audit FOSS systems for bugs than a Microsoft solution, and the tools for doing so are open source and getting even better every day. Like you said, sharing the burden helps with cost: It also helps with the trust issue. Going one step further, formally verified software solutions are possible (and exist!). Good luck getting that from Microsoft, they ship a calculator that needs updates and internet access to run.

But the OS is not where Microsofts power lies. Its in exchange (almost everywhere cloud managed, including for many governments) and SharePoint, with a small amount of teams, where Microsoft is truly a scary prospect for sovereignty.

Linux for starters, however even that has too many US contributions.

In general, we need to go back to the cold war days, multiple OSes and programming languages governed by international standards, with local vendors.

If sovereignty is desired, it can't stop at Office packages.

This is the business model of Quansight Labs, whose employees help maintain much of the scientific python stack. Mostly tech companies, not governments, sponsoring the work

I think governance (both public and private) would benefit from open tools to manage communities at scale via technology.

Isn't the code of law the original open source, for very good reason?

As law becomes more and more enforced by software, should it not all be required to be open source?

wait until they found out that there is no "customer service" in OSS, sometimes the project is fine but people need "someone" to be held accountable in some ways

that's why a lot of OSS project never take flight

Approximately 9 million, according to the article:

> In contrast, there would be one-time investments of nine million euros in 2026, explained the Ministry of Digitalization to the Kieler Nachrichten. These would have to be made for the conversion of workplaces and the further development of solutions with free software in the next 12 months. Given the annual savings, this sum will pay for itself in less than a year.

They knew: If Linux makes it in Munich, it will likely spread over and they loose tons of contracts with other German states.

- Of course, of course.

So if Microsoft would have paved that way, it would have been totally worth it for the city.

You get backups, file synchronization, real time collaboration.

Setting and running all of that is as simple as making O365 account and clicking couple of buttons by one person.

There is no OSS solution that does that.

To replicate that with OSS you need 3 to 5 full time graybeards and it still will be annoying normal people that will not understand “why they can’t just do X as in MSFT tools”.

Most user's Windows ability is to look for apps on the desktop or Start menu.

I've yet to see FLOSS that matches that aspect of Outlook and o365/Exchange. I'm fact, IMO, it should have been one of the monetization efforts with Mozilla, which is a server companion for Thunderbird and a now comprehensive integration of calendar and contacts.

Language, form, muscle memory (call it what you will) is difficult to separate from thinking and working. I'm very picky when it comes to desktop UI: I use Linux exclusively, and I can't tolerate most Linux distros' default desktop environments. Someone who's been productive for a decade or more with Windows applications -- well, to the extent we're willing to ascribe "UI stability" to those applications' own updates -- will probably hate Linux with a passion.

I don't think such a transition can be made seamless. They should have thought about becoming Microsoft's hostage two decades ago (I guess).

When you migrate anyway you could choose that to use a proper database and SQL if that makes sense instead.

Russia is waging war on Europe. America is increasingly aligned with Russia:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpvd01g2kwwo

When the US government has become erratic, unreliable, untrustworthy, and aligned with your enemies then it's necessarily time to de-risk your infrastructure and supply chains by removing America products and services from them.

It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.

Germany has had a fairly active Linux community for decades. A large portion of German local government has had experience using or RFPing FOSS alternatives since the 2000s all the way back to Munich's bake off of Windows vs Linux.

While the geopolitical portion is sexy and fun to look at, in most cases American vendors just don't find much value in supporting DACH customers because their budgets are significantly lower and they tend to be much more on-prem heavy unlike their Scandinavian, CEE, or British peers.

DACH local governments also tend to rely heavily on MSP/MSSPs and for these kinds of businesses, margins really matter and vendors don't like dealing with channel sales because they just don't bring enough money to the table for the amount of money you have to spend wining, dining, and supporting them. And given MSP/MSSP margins, it makes sense for them to adopt FOSS.

Finally, some German local governments have used public proclamations like these to renegotiate vendor deals (I think Munich did something similar).

That said, private sector players in DACH have largely consolidated around American or Israeli vendors, such as Schwarz - despite their proclamation for digital soverignity - using American-Israeli SentinelOne [0].

It's good to have competition though, and I do strongly feel that MSP/MSSPs and organizations dependent on Channel are better suited to using FOSS tooling.

[0] - https://www.sentinelone.com/press/sentinelone-and-schwarz-di...

Mostly the widespread perception that the USA has betrayed the security guarantees given to Europe, and that the USA isn't a reliable partner anymore.

In the end, from a European/German perspective, it matters little whether these thoughts/comments/strategies are a negotiation tactic, "trolling", serious threats or something else entirely. And the fact that "Government adjacent" people like Elon Musk behave the way the do certainly doesn't help.

The fear that the United States may use it's tech companies as blunt offensive weapens does now exist (in a semi-abstract form) where it didn't 5 or 10 years ago.

I think at this point in time nobody can say what the end result will be or how things may develop in the future. Either on the political or the technological field.

Microsoft blocked official email account of Karim Khan (a prosecutor of International Criminal Court). That was due to Executive order by president Trump (Executive Order 14203 - Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court).

* Data processing by advertising providers including personalised advertising with profiling - Consent required for free use

The full page reload after wasting all that time to realise I don't actually have a choice was a nice touch.

Time has come. Over the last few years there is more and more interest from goverments and private organizations to have relieable software that does not depend of foreign entities. Software sovereignty is becoming a necesity rather than a nice to have for both nations and enterprises.

> Excel, in particular, hasn't been unseated despite billions in investments from competitors over the years.

Excel, like many other technologies in the past can be disrupted. Like mane other commenters say, it won't come cheap. Saving costs shouldn't be the the goal here.

> Parity will happen someday, but it's at least a decade away.

Challenge accepted!

Well, now, they can handle it more seriously, which before - they couldn't quite. That's because Microsoft - your company - is one big security breach. You are known to pass information that gets into your hand to the US federal government's intelligence agency, and you probably use it for all sorts of commercial purposes, like training AI models, directing advertising etc. So, by installing Microsoft Office, especially Office365 and cloud facilities, they were ensuring a security failure.

Anyway, there are plenty of local cloud providers.

I've never used anything but OpenOffice / LibreOffice for writing academic texts in the humanities and never missed anything. The "catch" whenever I tried Microsoft Word was the menu that had the most important functions (for me) hidden away much deeper than in OO and LO.

I've never been a big user of Spreadsheets but I've heard only good of Excel and trust the widespread opinion that it is unchallenged in its domain. In sociology you wouldn't use it because you've got specialized statistics software such as R and SPSS (PSPP being an attempt at an Open Source Alternative to SPSS).

Looking at administration, Excel ist probably quite important but when you get rid of it, not one but various solutions might take its place, depending on who uses it. If you want something like a browseable database in a colorful table for office clerks, LO Calc might be enough. But the things Excel gets praised for a lot (I never know what exactly people mean) would probably have to be tackled another way.

Governments going down that need to invest into finding those solutions by providing staff that is qualified to find them or even develop them. The state of Schleswig-Holstein considered in its Open Source initiative strategy that it may be challenged by a future legislation and put a focus on the reasons for acceptance of Open Source solutions. I wonder if that is put into action well to find solutions with the least "catch" that may even excel over Microsoft products depending on their context :)

It's not the most efficient, being effectively a webview. But its UI and compatibility is imho much better than LibreOffice.

https://www.onlyoffice.com/

https://euro-stack.com/blog/2025/3/schleswig-holstein-open-s...

Microsoft is trash and is getting worse day by day, but at the very least it's the same trash everyone has to deal with, so people mostly got used to the smell, and you can get economies of scale in tools used to deal with said smell. MS is trash because of incompetence.

Linux is dozens of different flavors of trash, so you don't even get economies of scale dealing with it. It's trash because of ideology - the people involved would often reject the functionality you mentioned for ideological reasons, and even for those who do accept them, won't agree on the implementation meaning you now have a dozen of different flavors, and will take up arms if someone tries to unify things (just look at the reaction to systemd).

Linux works well for careers where shoveling trash is already part of your work, in which case all the effort doubles as training for the job and experience makes this a non-issue. But for non-IT careers where the computer is just a tool that is expected to work properly, it's nowhere near there, and will never get there because everyone's instead arguing on the definition of "there" and which mode of transportation to use getting there.

/usr is expected to be shared among hosts, host-specific stuff goes into /usr/local for a reason, and as a sysadmin you can decide to simply not have host specific software.

EDR/AV is basically unnecessary, when you only mount things either writable or executable. And you don't want the users to start random software or mount random USB-sticks anyway.

> Back then it was like nobody who had ever actually been a sysadmin had ever taken an honest crack at Linux and all the hype was coming from home users who had no idea what herding boxen was actually like.

Unix has over 50 years of history of being primarily managed by sysadmins instead of home users. While Linux is not Unix, it has inherited a lot. The whole system is basically designed to run a bunch of admin configured software and is actually less suitable for home users. I would say the primary problem was accessing it with a Windows mindset.

https://euro-stack.com/blog/2025/3/schleswig-holstein-open-s...

LibreOffice works just fine on _Windows_ - and that's what the majority of its users are running.

So, Schleswig-Holstein can switch to Linux, or not switch, or let specific agencies or individuals choose.

I can't say I've ever suffered from my choices or that I missed any features. As for "polish" - that's subjective, isn't it? I can access all the features I want quickly and efficiently. It's a tool, after all.

There are some minor bugs with Calc that I'd rate 2/10 in importance - annoyances mostly. I haven't used Excel in a while, but it had annoyances, too.

But even if Microsoft Office is more polished and feature-rich, I still think that the trade-off is worth it - we get data and software sovereignty, privacy and cost savings. The workers need to relearn how to access feature X in the menu or how to live without feature Y.

You see, most Office users are not heavy/expert users and they only occasionally need the basic features that exist everywhere and do good enough of a job. I personally have only used Word maybe 3 times over the past few years, because almost all work documents live elsewhere, while Google Docs is good enough for my personal word processing needs (which could probably be done with Libreoffice as well). In the old days I used to install pirated Microsoft Office when I got a new laptop. These days I don't even think about it.

Imagine every company starts to evaluate how many employees actually need Microsoft Office, and then drop licenses for those who would be ok with Libreoffice or nothing at all. Microsoft would be shitting their pants.

Given that the US has shown it's willing to wield sanctions as a blunt instrument against anyone and everyone, it's only prudent for European countries to reduce their exposure to US tech.

and that's the problem, people wouldn't invest that much into project no one use