Austria's Armed Forces Gets Rid of Microsoft Office (Mostly) for LibreOffice
3 hours ago
- #Government IT
- #Open Source
- #Digital Sovereignty
- European governments are increasingly moving away from American-based services like Microsoft due to concerns over digital sovereignty.
- The Austrian Armed Forces migrated 16,000 workstations from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, a process planned since 2020 and completed recently.
- The primary motivation was not cost-saving but ensuring sensitive military data remains on their own servers, avoiding foreign cloud services.
- The Austrian military contributed back to LibreOffice with over five person-years of development work, enhancing features available to all users.
- The transition was smoother due to prior use of self-hosted Linux servers with Samba, reducing dependency on Microsoft's ecosystem.