An unfinished Collabora trial has been cast as an open source failure. The timeline tells a different story.
It appears that government reorganization in Denmark has — at least temporarily — led to something of a stall in part of that nation’s digital sovereignty efforts. Most noticeably, this is likely what’s behind a shutdown of a program the Danish Ministry of Digitization started in 2025 to explore alternatives to Microsoft and other proprietary productivity tools as part of the country’s overall digital sovereignty strategy. The objective was not primarily to do away with products from Microsoft and the like, but to establish greater freedom of choice and reduce dependency on individual technology providers.
The initial project was a collaboration with the Danish software company cBrain, and involved testing Collabora, the open source online office suite based on LibreOffice, which had been integrated into cBrain’s homegrown platform, F2, which is used across all government ministries for everything from case management and communication, to document management, compliance, and archiving. The purpose was to prepare and evaluate the suite as an alternative to be used within an existing workflow, not as a government-wide migration away from Microsoft.
According to a statement published by Collabora on Wednesday, the first stage was successfully completed. The office suite was integrated with F2, and users in the test could freely switch between Collabora Office and Microsoft Office from the same government platform and while using Microsoft-compatible document formats.
After that, on June 19 a second phase followed, in which something like 38 ministry employees began testing Collabora. As might be expected, those tests resulted in some reported compatibility issues, including with document styles, paragraph formatting, blank pages and tracked changes, which were documented without going through a complete evaluation. That’s because an evaluation workshop planned for October, 2025 never took place, although it’s been reported that government employees continued to use Collabora well into the following year.
In June, 2026, Collabora says the pilot was put on hold, and in October it was confirmed that the office suite was no longer being used and that the experiment would not be resumed.
What happened was a big shakeup in the Folketing, Denmark’s parliment.
Denmark’s Post-Election Restructuring
The big shakeup was the reorganization of Denmark’s government after an election in March, which resulted in a fragmented parliament. Social Democrat Mette Frederiksen remained prime minister for a third term, and her party was the largest vote-getter, but its 21.9% share of the vote made it the party’s weakest outing since 1903. It also forced Frederiksen to negotiate a new coalition, which was no easy task with 12 parties in the fray.
The center-left government that emerged in June was composed of four parties — called the “four-leaf clover” coalition — which together represented 82 of the Folketing’s 179 seats — short of the 90 needed for a majority — so it depended on outside support, which it found primarily from the leftist Red-Green Alliance and the center-left Alternative parties.
This creates a government that’s on even-enough ground to govern, but without a single vision and with a parliament that’s tired of compromising. Forming this government forced the Socialist People’s Party to accept tax cuts it opposes, while the Moderates secured business-friendly measures and prevented a controversial wealth tax. Also, the Social Democrats have a restrictive approach to immigration that sits uneasily with the Social Liberal Party’s emphasis on international conventions and migrants’ rights. In other words, it’s a coalition with a great deal of compromise built in.
At about the same time the new government was formed, the Ministry of Digitization was merged with the Ministry of Higher Education and Science, a change that interrupted the ministry’s trial of Collabora before a planned evaluation could be completed, and it appears that parliament’s previous resolve to loosen the grips of Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and other US tech titans is probably off the table — at least for the time being.
That’s very much subject to change, and there are already indications that change might come. For example, Collabora points to recent interest in the project by the Danish press, which indicates that interest in the project continues. Also, other activities with Danish public authorities, in collaboration with cBrain and its F2 platform, continue.
“These activities build on the technical achievements and practical experience of the original project, allowing the work to continue in new organizational settings,” Collabora said in a statement published on its website. “For Collabora Office, the Danish initiative remains an encouraging example of how open-source productivity software can be integrated into established government platforms, providing public authorities with greater flexibility and freedom of choice.”
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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