Digital sovereignty is driving European governments off US clouds and onto homegrown open source options.
The EU is slowly but surely going open source. The most recent example of Microsoft and other ‘born in the USA’ software vendors being shown the door comes from the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
“The transition away from Microsoft SharePoint has been completed step by step, without disruption or data loss for employees,” explained Marco Anschütz, the state’s CIO, in a statement. “Together with DVZ M-V, we have built a platform that runs reliably today and continues to expand step by step.”
The statement was in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern’s announcement of its launch of a Nextcloud-based collaboration platform, which is expected to eventually serve 50,000 state and municipal employees. DVZ M-V is the state’s IT service provider, which is hosting the platform and taking care of most of the logistics to get it running.
So far, about 5,000 employees are actively using the platform for file sharing. By the time it’s finished, it will be expanded to include chat, videoconferencing, and groupware applications. That’s not as big a feat as it sounds, since Nextcloud ships with those capabilities ready to go. (Full disclosure: Nextcloud is a Platinum Sponsor of FOSS Force.)
“Digital sovereignty and open source are central goals and cornerstones of digitization policy in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,” Dr. Heiko Geue, the state’s Minister of Finance and Digitalization said. “We plan to continuously expand the use of open source and promote the use of common standards and open interfaces for IT solutions in the public sector. This is the only way for the state and municipalities to have the power to act in the future.”
Joining the Digital Sovereignty Club
Digital sovereignty has become a top priority in the European Union, and is likely to remain so throughout this second quarter of the 21st century. The notion that EU countries should be in control of their own IT — including the infrastructure and the software it delivers — has been an on again/off again issue in the EU since the advent of the internet, and was partly behind the General Data Protection Regulation that went into effect in 2018.
Long before that, the notion of digital sovereignty partly motivated the city of Munich’s push in 2003 to ditch Windows on municipal workstations for the city’s own LiMux Linux distribution. Although that project was abandoned in 2017, in 2020 the city adopted a five‑point plan to strengthen its use of free software, which eventually included the creation of an open source program office, support for key open source tools used by the city, and publishing software developed in-house under the “public money, public code” banner that was initially established by the Free Software Foundation Europe.
More recently, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein has begun a rollout of its own Linux distribution (+1.Linux) as well as LibreOffice, Nextcloud, Open‑Xchange, Thunderbird, and other open source apps to roughly 25,000–30,000 workplaces. In addition, the Austrian Ministry of Economic Affairs has migrated something like 1,200 staff members from Microsoft 365 to an on‑premises, LibreOffice and Nextcloud‑based platform hosted on Austrian infrastructure, and the French Ministry of Education has rolled out Nextcloud to 400,000 of its employees, with plans to deliver the solution to all of its 1.2 million employees in the near future.
Those are just a start; there’s more. For example, since 2026 France has been on a big sovereignty push that includes:
- DINUM mandate: In April the country’s Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs announced it would migrate all of its workstations from Windows to Linux. It’s ordered all ministries to produce plans by this fall to eliminate non‑European digital dependencies in operating systems, collaboration tools, clouds, and AI platforms. When finished, this will affect about 2.5 million civil servants.
- US tools exit: In January, France announced that it was replacing all use of Microsoft Teams and Zoom within government with a homegrown, open source videoconferencing platform called Visio. This is part of a wider migration to “Suite Numérique,” which includes alternatives to US-based web services such as Gmail and Slack.
- Franco‑German and EU sovereignty projects: France and Germany work together on projects as part of wider EU efforts to reduce reliance on “cloud hyperscalers” and define high‑protection standards for sensitive data.
Why Sovereign and Why Open?
There are many factors driving these moves, not the least being the desire to quit having to write monthly or annual payments for rights to use proprietary software from the likes of Microsoft – as well as to escape the use of document formats that are based on “open” standards containing legacy components that have never been fully made public.
Also, the European Union is becoming aware that reliance on US companies to meet its IT needs was probably never ideal, a point that’s currently being driven home by the Trump administration’s open disdain for neighborly relations between the US and Europe that date back to World War II and before.
The insistence on using open source solutions such as Nextcloud is key to these migrations. Open source is valued not only because the underlying code can be examined or audited at any time by any user, but because it can be adapted to meet unique security and functional requirements.
“With Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, yet another German state is now committing to Nextcloud as a sovereign collaboration platform — in close alignment with Schleswig-Holstein,” explained Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud. “Alliances like these between states are essential to making open source the standard in the public sector, rather than the exception.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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