TDF Community Blog

Germany has made ODF mandatory as the standard format for documents within its sovereign digital infrastructure. The decision is incorporated into the Deutschland-Stack, the framework governing the development, procurement and management of digital systems for public administration at all levels. This is neither a pilot project nor a recommendation from a working group, but a mandate backed by the federal government and the coalition agreement.

The official document has been published by the IT-Planungsrat, the central political steering body comprising the federal government and state governments, which promotes and develops common, user-oriented IT solutions for efficient and secure digital administration in Germany: https://www.it-planungsrat.de/beschluss/b-2026-03-it.

At this point, the question for all other European governments is clear: what are you waiting for? With this decision, the distinction between those who care about digital sovereignty and those who do not becomes stark.

There are no more excuses

Over the years, public administrations in Europe have accumulated a series of tired excuses, long since overtaken by the facts, for not making standard and open document formats mandatory. Let’s examine them one by one.

ODF isn’t mature enough. ODF has been an ISO standard since 2006. It is now at version 1.4, with active development, a broad ecosystem of implementations and adoption by numerous national governments, the European Parliament and major public administrations worldwide. The maturity argument has long been superseded.

Changing the document format requires staff retraining. The explicit principle of Germany’s sovereign stack is to reduce the effects of lock-in. If the objection is the cost of retraining, you are saying that the commercial interests of the dominant supplier outweigh those of citizens and institutions. This is an acceptable position in the private sector, but inadmissible in the realm of public policy.

The market standard format guarantees interoperability. The market standard, adopted uncritically by public administrations without any verification of its characteristics, is a proprietary format designed for lock-in rather than interoperability, to the extent that it was approved by ISO under the name OOXML Transitional because it contains proprietary elements. ODF, by contrast, is interoperable by definition, and as such has evolved over the years.

We are bound by existing procurement contracts. Contracts come to an end, whilst regulatory frameworks are renewed, and today, faced with the need to ensure European digital sovereignty, the time has come to integrate open standards into them, without waiting another decade for the next renewal cycle, whilst continuing to pay for access to documents that administrations have created using public money.

Today, none of these objections hold water anymore. Germany’s decision demonstrates that even a large and complex federal government can take an important step in the right direction. The obstacles are political, not technical.

The European policy framework

The transition from proprietary formats to standard, open formats for documents, incidentally, is not a radical choice, but an alignment with decisions already taken by European institutions, contained within various laws or regulations that have already been approved.

The European Interoperability Framework (EIF) – the reference document for interoperability in public services – requires the use of open standards and calls for the avoidance of formats that create dependency on a single supplier. The EIF does not explicitly mention Open Document Format, but the logic of the document leads to the choice of ODF.

The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), the Network Information Security 2 (NIS2) and the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) state that European digital infrastructure must be built using controllable technologies. Documents are the means by which decisions are recorded and communicated, and form part of the infrastructure; they should therefore be in a standard, open format that is easy to control. This is another example of legislation that does not explicitly mention the Open Document Format, but whose logic leads to the choice of ODF.

Finally, the Interoperable Europe Act (IEA), which came into force in 2024, defines the legal framework for interoperability between EU public administrations and explicitly cites open standards, which – in the context of documents – means ODF and not OOXML, which, even if considered a standard (by a stretch of the imagination), is certainly not open.

Germany has linked these three points. The Deutschland-Stack identifies ODF not as an ideological choice but as a key element of a sovereign, interoperable digital infrastructure aligned with Europe. Other EU governments operating within the same regulatory and political context should apply the same logic.

The current situation in EU countries

Germany is not the only country to have taken steps towards open document standards, although the Deutschland-Stack is the most comprehensive and structurally integrated commitment seen at national level.

France made ODF mandatory in the 2009 Référentiel Général d’Interopérabilité, with subsequent updates strengthening this requirement. The French public administration has a legal obligation to use open formats in its dealings with citizens and between agencies.

The Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Denmark have all, at different times, adopted policies recommending or requiring open document formats in public administration. In 2014, the United Kingdom made ODF mandatory for government documents, and the decision has never been revoked.

Even the Guidelines for the Digital Administration Code, issued in 2023 by the Italian Government’s Agency for Digital Italy (AGID), would define open standards for documents in such a way that only Open Document Format is included in the list, but these are almost always disregarded without reason by public administrations.

Thus, EU governments that seriously examine the issue tend to reach the same conclusion: ODF is the appropriate standard document format for a sovereign and interoperable public administration. What varies are the levels of implementation, and the willingness to see it through when proprietary vendors put up resistance through intense lobbying.

The Deutschland-Stack raises the bar, integrating the choice of ODF into a comprehensive, cross-cutting sovereign infrastructure framework, based on explicit architectural principles and supported by coordinated decisions at every level of the federal system. This is the model to follow.

Our call to action, which should be that of all EU citizens

If you are a government official, a digital policy advisor, the CIO of a public administration, or a minister responsible for digital transformation in any EU country, this post is for you.

You do not need to invent a new policy, but to apply the logic you already accept (on sovereignty, interoperability, reducing dependence on suppliers, and building a public digital infrastructure that serves citizens rather than Big Tech shareholders) to the documents in your stack.

Germany has done so with determination. France, Italy and other countries have done so clearly, though not quite as resolutely. The European regulatory framework demands it, and the open-source ecosystem – with software that properly supports ODF, which today consists solely of solutions based on the LibreOffice Technology stack – is ready to support it.

The only thing standing between your administration and the ODF mandate is the decision to adopt it. We are ready to help you, not only to make this decision but also to turn it into a successful project.

The Document Foundation is the home of LibreOffice, and one of the leading advocates of open document standards in public administration across Europe and the world. For information on adopting LibreOffice and ODF in public administration, please write to info@documentfoundation.org.