Denmark's Digital Ministry shifts from Microsoft to LibreOffice in push for sovereignty and savings

LibreOffice welcomes the move

Denmark's Ministry of Digitalisation has announced its decision to transition from Microsoft Office 365 to the open-source office suite LibreOffice

As part of a strategy to reduce reliance on US-based technology giants, Digitalisation Minister Caroline Stage Olsen revealed the plan in a widely shared LinkedIn post. Roughly half of the ministry's employees will migrate to LibreOffice over the next few months.

If the transition proceeds smoothly, the ministry aims to eliminate its dependence on Microsoft Office products entirely by the end of the year.

"We must never make ourselves so dependent on so few that we can no longer act freely," Olsen wrote.

"Because far too much public digital infrastructure is today tied up with very few foreign suppliers. This makes us vulnerable. Also financially."

She added that the ministry is now running a dual-track test of open-source software to assess real-world functionality.

"Several municipalities are doing the same," she added.

LibreOffice, a full-featured open-source office suite developed by Berlin-based non-profit The Document Foundation, welcomed the move.

"We in the LibreOffice project … look forward to seeing more governments and organisations getting control of their digital sovereignty and using public money for public code," the organisation stated.

The decision comes on the heels of similar actions by Denmark's two largest municipalities, Copenhagen and Aarhus, both of which recently announced plans to phase out Microsoft systems.

Citing high costs and monopolistic behaviour of tech firms, local leaders have positioned the switch as a necessary stride toward achieving "digital sovereignty."

This national realignment follows the lead of Schleswig-Holstein, a German state currently in the process of migrating 30,000 government workstations from Microsoft products to open-source alternatives.

Its digitalisation minister, Dirk Schroedter, told AFP, "We're done with Teams!"

The transition also includes replacing Outlook with Open-Xchange, and a future move to the Linux operating system.

Teachers and law enforcement personnel are next in line, with 30,000 more users expected to follow.

Beyond software, Schleswig-Holstein is shifting its data storage to a domestic cloud platform, entirely owned and operated within Germany, further insulating itself from data privacy concerns.

At the heart of these policy shifts is growing unease over the dominance of the Big three US-based hyperscalers - Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, which control much of Europe's digital infrastructure.

At June's Nextcloud Summit in Munich, German MEP Alexandra Geese, one of the architects of the EU's Digital Services Act, warned: "Europe risks being blackmailed by both American and Chinese tech giants."

Geese and other experts, including renowned antitrust economist Cristina Caffara, emphasised the importance of fostering home-grown digital ecosystems and curbing the lobbying power of Big Tech in Brussels.

Critics of Microsoft and its peers point to the US Cloud Act, which allows American authorities to compel data access, even from servers located abroad, as a major threat to European data protection.

Financial incentives are also playing a role in the shift towards open-source.

Schleswig-Holstein anticipates saving tens of millions of euros over time. Denmark expects similar cost benefits, particularly by avoiding the expensive upgrade of legacy Windows 10 systems ahead of Microsoft's end-of-support deadline.