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Author: Italo Vignoli

Why Digital Sovereignty Requires an Open Document Platform — and What That Actually Means

When governments and organisations talk about “digital sovereignty,” they usually mean one thing in practice: the ability to choose, control, and if necessary replace the software they depend on — without asking permission from a vendor.

It sounds simple. It rarely is.

Document software sits at the centre of almost every organisation’s operations. Contracts, reports, budgets, policy documents, public communications: they all live in files. And for decades, the format of those files — and therefore the tools required to open, edit, and share them — has been controlled by a single commercial entity. That is not sovereignty. That is dependency with a friendly interface.

LibreOffice Technology exists to make genuine sovereignty possible. Not as a promise, and not as a political statement — but as a technical architecture that removes the dependency by design.

This post explains what LibreOffice Technology actually is, why it is categorically different from a “free alternative to Microsoft Office,” and why it is the only open platform capable of supporting software that is fully compatible with the demands of digital sovereignty. It also reviews what several months of deployments, policy decisions, and one very public debate over what “sovereign” actually means have confirmed about that architecture since we first started making this argument.

Beyond the Application: LibreOffice Technology as a Platform

Most people who encounter LibreOffice encounter it as an application — a word processor, a spreadsheet editor, a presentation tool. That is a reasonable introduction, but it misses what makes LibreOffice Technology significant.

LibreOffice Technology is the underlying platform on which LibreOffice — and a growing number of other products — is built. It is a modular, open-source software framework for creating document applications. It includes rendering engines, import/export filters for dozens of file formats, scripting infrastructure, accessibility layers, and interfaces for integration with operating systems, cloud environments, and enterprise software stacks.

Think of it the way you might think of a general-purpose operating system kernel: the kernel itself is not what users interact with directly, but it is what makes everything else possible — and it is what determines whether the system is genuinely open or merely open-looking.

LibreOffice Technology is governed by The Document Foundation (TDF), a non-profit foundation incorporated under German law. Its source code is publicly available, its governance is transparent, and its development is carried out by a global community of contributors from dozens of countries and organisations — including Collabora, allotropia, Red Hat, and many others.

No single company controls it. No acquisition can change its licence. No pricing decision by a distant board can determine whether your organisation can keep using it next year.

That is what a platform for digital sovereignty looks like.

Open Standards Are Not Optional: The Role of ODF

Sovereignty over software is meaningless if the data is not equally free.

A document format is not just a technical specification. It is a commitment about who can read your files in ten years, which tools can process them today, and whether you are locked into a particular vendor’s upgrade cycle to maintain access to your own information.

LibreOffice Technology is built around the Open Document Format (ODF), an ISO/IEC international standard (ISO/IEC 26300) developed through an open, multi-stakeholder process. ODF defines how text, spreadsheets, presentations, and other document types are stored — in a way that any conforming application can read and write, regardless of who made it or on what platform it runs.

This matters in ways that are easy to underestimate. When a public administration stores its records in ODF, it is not dependent on any vendor to access those records in the future. When a hospital uses ODF for patient documents, it can switch tools without migrating data. When a ministry publishes a policy document in ODF, any citizen with any compliant application — on any operating system — can open it.

Contrast this with proprietary formats that, despite occasional published specifications, remain under the effective control of the companies that defined them. “Open enough” is not the same as open. Earlier this month, we set out a first version of what separates the two: a thirteen-criterion definition of what a genuinely open document format requires, from public specification and royalty-free implementation through to independent governance. That short version is only the opening statement — we originated this framework, and a fuller, more rigorous edition is in development, applying all thirteen criteria in detail to ODF, OOXML Strict, and OOXML Transitional in turn.

LibreOffice Technology’s commitment to ODF is not a preference. It is an architectural principle. The platform is designed around the assumption that the data belongs to the user, not to the software.

The Platform Others Build On

One of the clearest indicators that LibreOffice Technology is a genuine platform — not just a standalone application dressed up in platform language — is the ecosystem of products built on top of it.

Collabora Online, a cloud-native document editing solution deployed by enterprises, governments, and cloud providers across Europe and beyond, is built on LibreOffice Technology. Collabora’s 2025 merger with allotropia — whose engineering team brought deep WebAssembly and vertical-application expertise into the same organisation — is itself an example of how the ecosystem consolidates and grows without ever touching the underlying platform’s governance. Other commercial and community products remain in active development by organisations that have chosen LibreOffice Technology precisely because it provides a stable, open foundation they can build on without acquiring permission from or paying royalties to a gatekeeper.

This ecosystem diversity is itself a form of sovereignty insurance. If one vendor stops supporting a product built on LibreOffice Technology, the platform continues. If a government or organisation builds custom tooling on top of LibreOffice Technology, it owns that investment. If the community of contributors shifts, the codebase remains — licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, which ensures it can never be made proprietary.

A sovereign digital infrastructure is not one built on a single vendor’s promises. It is one built on a platform that multiple independent actors develop, maintain, and depend on. LibreOffice Technology is that platform.

The Euro-Office Test Case: Why Compatibility Is Not Sovereignty

No event tested this argument more directly than the emergence of Euro-Office, the European coalition initiative that surfaced this spring under the digital sovereignty banner.

Our first reaction, when the initiative made its opening announcement, was blunt about the architecture: a European suite built around full compatibility with Microsoft’s OOXML formats does not escape dependency, it relocates it. The hosting moves to Europe. The format — and the vendor who controls its evolution — does not.

Euro-Office’s formal pre-announcement in June moved the conversation forward. It leaned much further into a commitment to open standards, and we welcomed that shift while correcting one detail then circulating in the press: LibreOffice, developed under this Foundation for a decade and a half by a global — and substantially European — community, was never absent from the field Euro-Office proposes to enter. We also set out, plainly, the one destination consistent with the sovereignty the coalition invokes: ODF as its native document format, not merely a supported one.

The distinction is not a technicality. As we laid out in A Standard in Name Only, the version of OOXML every proprietary vendor ships by default is the Transitional conformance class — built to preserve decades of undocumented legacy behaviour from Microsoft Office versions of the 1990s, not the cleaner Strict variant an independent implementer could actually build to. An office suite that treats OOXML Transitional as its working format, however European its servers, is building on a specification only one vendor has ever fully implemented. What Euro-Office does next will show whether the coalition takes the final step from sovereign hosting to sovereign format.

Where Sovereignty Is Not an Abstraction: Real Deployments

Digital sovereignty is sometimes discussed as though it were a future aspiration. For a growing number of organisations, it is a present operational reality — and this year produced the clearest evidence of that yet.

In March, Germany’s Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernisation folded ODF, alongside PDF/UA, into the Deutschland-Stack, the technical framework that will govern digital infrastructure across every level of German public administration. OOXML did not make the list. “This is not a recommendation or a preference, it is a mandate,” said Florian Effenberger, TDF’s Executive Director, at the time — and as we argued in the days that followed, it is a decision the rest of Europe, and every digital policy advisor reading it, should be studying closely.

Germany is not alone. The Italian Ministry of Defence has spent several years migrating well over 100,000 workstations to LibreOffice under its LibreDifesa programme, reducing dependency on proprietary desktop software and building direct control over its document infrastructure. The French Gendarmerie nationale has pursued the same goal at comparable scale over two decades, moving the substantial majority of its computing estate to open-source software as part of a deliberate strategy to reduce vendor lock-in. And in August, in a two–part interview with the Austrian Bundesheer, we heard directly from the team that has moved 16,000 workstations off Microsoft Office: the decision traced back to a 2020 review of what guarantees existed for running office software without a cloud connection at all. The City of Munich’s long-running open-source initiative — despite its complex political history — remains the clearest illustration that sovereign document infrastructure is both technically achievable and organisationally demanding, at scale, inside a large public administration.

These are not proofs-of-concept. They are operational deployments in organisations for which the ability to control their own software stack is not an ideological preference but a security and continuity requirement.

They also illustrate something important: the question is no longer whether LibreOffice Technology can support enterprise-scale sovereign deployments, or whether governments will choose ODF when the choice is put to them plainly. Germany has already answered both. The question now is how quickly the rest of Europe follows.

Why “No Single Vendor Can Pull the Plug” Matters More Than Ever

In 2011, Oracle donated the OpenOffice.org codebase to the Apache Software Foundation and largely stepped back from development. The product that had been the leading open-source office suite effectively stalled. Development slowed, releases became infrequent, and the community migrated — mostly to LibreOffice, which had been founded in 2010 precisely to create a more independent governance structure.

This episode is instructive. A product can be open-source and still be effectively controlled by a single corporate actor. When that actor’s priorities change, the product suffers.

Much of what we have published this year has been an attempt to make that risk structural rather than anecdotal. The invisible architecture of lock-in traces how dependency on a document’s format cascades into dependency on the rendering engine that displays it and, beneath that, the fonts that give it its final shape — three technical layers, each one obscuring the one beneath it. The Calendar and the Invoice extends the same argument to two layers that are not technical at all: the migration deadline a vendor sets, and the subscription price it charges. Five layers, and what unites all of them is a single absence — the user has no exit.

The Document Foundation was designed with this risk explicitly in mind. TDF’s statutes prevent any single company or individual from controlling the foundation. Its governance model distributes decision-making across an elected board, a membership body, and an engineering steering committee. The LibreOffice Technology codebase cannot be re-licensed, sold, or restricted by any single party.

This is not an accident of history. It is an architectural decision about governance — as important to digital sovereignty as any technical specification.

What Sovereignty Requires of a Platform

Digital sovereignty is not a binary condition, and it is not the same thing as self-sufficiency. As we argued in July, it is not about owning everything — no institution, and certainly no continent, is going to reimplement the entire computing stack from silicon upward. It is about ensuring that nothing essential can be taken away. Different organisations will weigh that differently, but a platform that genuinely enables it must satisfy several non-negotiable criteria:

Open source with a robust licence. The code must be inspectable, modifiable, and redistributable. Not just available — auditable and forkable by any qualified party.

Open standards at the data layer. File formats must be governed by independent standards bodies, not by the platform vendor.

Independent governance. No single commercial entity should be able to make decisions — about licensing, pricing, feature development, or platform direction — that override the interests of the broader community of users and contributors.

An active, diverse contributor base. Sovereignty requires resilience. A platform maintained by a single company is a single point of failure.

Ecosystem depth. Sovereignty at the document layer requires that the platform be capable of supporting the full range of an organisation’s document needs — not just basic editing, but integration with enterprise systems, accessibility compliance, multi-language support, and cloud deployment.

LibreOffice Technology satisfies all of these criteria. We are not aware of another document software platform that does.

Sovereignty Starts Here: The Story So Far

When we first sketched out this argument, we framed it as the opening of a campaign. Several months on — with the Euro-Office debate still very much alive, Germany’s Deutschland-Stack mandate now a matter of public record, and the US CISA’s own guidance on open-source verifiability landing squarely in the same argument — it makes more sense to call it what it has become: an ongoing, evidence-led case, not a one-off pitch.

If you want the fuller version, the pieces above trace most of the argument in detail: what digital sovereignty actually means and doesn’t mean; the layered architecture of lock-in and its non-technical extensions; what separates a genuinely open format from one that merely claims the label; the Euro-Office exchange in both its instalments; and, most concretely, the Austrian Bundesheer’s own account of why and how it moved 16,000 desktops off Microsoft Office. Together with the Deutschland-Stack decision, they are the evidence behind everything argued in this piece.

We are not finished. There are interoperability failures we haven’t yet written about, further national deployments to document as they happen, and — with LibreOffice 26.8 due for release on 26 August — a platform that keeps giving us more to report on. Watch this space for what comes next.

If you are a journalist or analyst covering digital sovereignty, open source, or public-sector technology, we would like to talk. If you are an organisation considering or using LibreOffice Technology and would like to share your experience, we would welcome the conversation. Reach out to our communications team at media@documentfoundation.org.

Digital sovereignty requires infrastructure that is genuinely open. That infrastructure exists. It is called LibreOffice Technology, and — as the months since we first wrote that line have gone on to show — this really is where the story starts.

The Document Foundation is the non-profit organisation behind LibreOffice. It is independent, non-commercial, and governed by its membership community. LibreOffice Technology is the open platform on which LibreOffice and a growing ecosystem of document applications are built.

Tags: digital sovereignty, LibreOffice Technology, open document format, ODF, open source, The Document Foundation, public sector IT, vendor lock-in, document software, Euro-Office, Deutschland-Stack

Further Reading on This Blog

The posts behind the argument above, in the order they were published:

External Resources

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The characteristics of a truly open document standard format

A truly open document format requires free public availability, royalty-free standards, and no usage restrictions.

Organizations like the Open Knowledge Foundation and the European Union use several core rules to guarantee long-term data access, system independence, and freedom from single-vendor control.

Core Openness Criteria

  • Public Specification: The complete format rules are published and easy for anyone to access.
  • Royalty-Free: Patents or licensing fees cannot block developers from building compatible software.
  • No Discrimination: Anyone can use the format for any purpose without needing special permission.
  • Independent Control: A transparent, non-profit standards body manages future updates.

Recognized Frameworks

  • The Open Definition: Specifies exact legal and technical terms for open works.
  • European Interoperability Framework (EIF): Requires governments to use truly open formats for public documents.

Comparison of ODF and OOXML

When evaluated against the strict criteria for open formats, Open Document Format (ODF) and Office Open XML (OOXML) take fundamentally different approaches.

While both are recognized as official ISO standards, ODF fully satisfies the open standard criteria by design, whereas OOXML features structural and legal complexities that often limit true open implementation.

Comparison Table

Criterion

Open Document Format (ODF)

Office Open XML (OOXML)

Public Specification

Fully Transparent. Concise, streamlined specifications built using a simplified RelaxNG XML schema

Highly Complex. Over 6,000 pages of specifications containing fragmented legacy behaviors.

Royalty-Free Status

Unconditional. Managed under standard royalty-free parameters for universal software design.

Conditional. Covered under a non-revocable patent promise rather than a traditional license.

No Discrimination

Complete. Equal implementation across open-source and proprietary suites.

Functional Barriers. Biased toward Windows-centric legacy and platform-specific behaviors.

Independent Control

Vendor-Neutral. Managed entirely by OASIS

Vendor-Influenced. Maintained via ISO, but the structural core remains tightly bound to Microsoft.

Key Openness Differences

Public Specification & Transparency

  • ODF: Conceived from the beginning to be a modern, clean XML specification. “ODF is the only openly available standard, published fully in a document that is freely available and easy to comprehend”, as noted by GranneBlog: https://blog.granneman.com/2009/02/06/odf-compared-constrasted-with-ooxml/
  • OOXML: Designed primarily to map Microsoft Office’s old binary data into XML. It is split into Strict and Transitional variants. “Transitional is everything else: a vast catalogue of compatibility features, deprecated elements, platform-specific behaviours, and references to undocumented quirks of Microsoft Office versions from the 1990s.”, as noted by the TDF Blog: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/06/02/a-standard-in-name-only/

Legal & Intellectual Property Rules

  • ODF: Utilizes a standard open-source framework. Anyone can implement ODF in a project without fearing intellectual property or patent litigation.
  • OOXML: Relies on the Microsoft Open Specification Promise (OSP): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Open_Specification_Promise. The OSP is a unilateral covenant not to sue, but it only covers developers to the extent that they precisely mirror the specification. Any implementation-defined deviations or edge cases may leave developers legally unprotected.

Technical Discrimination & System Control

  • ODF: Avoids hardware-specific dependencies, ensuring that independent applications (like LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice) can render the data uniformly.
  • OOXML: Contains platform-specific elements tied closely to the Windows OS ecosystem. Because Microsoft Office has traditionally produced Transitional OOXML by default, third-party platforms encounter massive conversion obstacles when interpreting legacy binary elements or proprietary formatting definitions embedded within the file structure.

INTERESTING REFERENCE: the Italian definition

The document Linee guida su acquisizione e riuso di software per le pubbliche amministrazioni (Guidelines on the procurement and reuse of software for public administrations), published by AgID in 2021, define an open format in the glossary as follows (translated from Italian):

Open (data) format. This is a public, versioned data format that is comprehensively documented and has no implementation constraints. An open format is one recognised by a standardisation body and maintained collaboratively by several organisations that provide competing implementations, through a transparent process. The format must remain consistent with the declared version.

The guidelines are not an interpretive gloss issued alongside the statute. They are adopted in implementation of articles 68 and 69 of the Codice dell’Amministrazione Digitale, under express delegations contained in the statute itself. They also supersede the earlier AgID circular 63/2013 on the same comparative assessment.

The definition of formato aperto (open format) is therefore not a recommendation that happens to be well drafted. It is the operative legal definition for Italian public administration, and it acquires that force through the statute rather than in spite of it.

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CISA Publishes Open Source Security Guidance: Verifiability Is the Difference

On 30 July 2026, the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published Open Source Software: Security Principles and Practices, a 31-page guidance document for federal civilian agencies. It is available at no cost and marked TLP:CLEAR, meaning it may be shared without restriction.

The document is addressed to US federal agencies, and it fulfils obligations under two executive orders on federal cybersecurity. It covers four areas: using open source solutions, contributing to open source projects, producing open source software, and evaluating open source artificial intelligence models. The observations below concern the first three.

Its analytical content is not jurisdiction-specific, and public administrations elsewhere — including in Europe — will find that it articulates, in the vocabulary of risk management, several positions that the open source community has been arguing for two decades.

What the guidance actually says

The central claim is more precise than the headlines suggest. CISA does not assert that open source software is more secure than proprietary software. It states that OSS is “no more or less risky than other software,” and locates the difference elsewhere: with open source, an organisation can assess code quality and security directly, rather than relying solely on vendor assurances.

This is a claim about verifiability, not about defect rates. It is also the more defensible claim, and the more consequential one for procurement. An agency evaluating proprietary software is evaluating a vendor’s statement about its own product. An agency evaluating open source software is evaluating the product.

The guidance draws the corollary explicitly. Among the benefits it lists for federal agencies is reduced vendor lock-in: open standards and modifiable code, CISA writes, protect agencies from “proprietary dependency traps.” A national cybersecurity authority has placed lock-in inside a security document rather than a competition-policy one. That is a meaningful shift in where this argument is permitted to live.

The C4 Framework

The most practically useful part of the guidance is Appendix A, which sets out the C4 Framework for assessing whether an open source project is trustworthy. Its premise is that, because contributors may be pseudonymous and are bound by no delivery obligation, trustworthiness cannot be assessed from who produced the software. It must be assessed from how the software was produced — which open source development makes visible in a way that closed development does not.

C4 groups the evidence into four categories:

  • Codebase — commit recency, known vulnerabilities, dependency currency.
  • Community — number of maintainers, institutional structure, whether the project sits within a foundation.
  • Conduct — whether there is a vulnerability disclosure policy, whether code review is required, whether maintainers merge their own commits, the licence, the code of conduct.
  • Configuration — whether defaults are secure, and what hardening the software supports.

The framework is applied in five steps: identify measurable criteria, determine risk tolerance and weight the criteria, collect observations (with automated tooling where available), evaluate against each criterion, and compare the result to the tolerance.

We would encourage public administrations to apply this framework to LibreOffice. Every category can be answered from public evidence: a continuous commit history since 2010, a published security policy and disclosure process, mandatory peer review, an OSI-approved licence, a documented code of conduct, and a governance structure — The Document Foundation, a German Stiftung with an elected Board of Directors — that is a matter of public record rather than of assertion.

We would encourage administrations to apply the same framework to every candidate solution, including proprietary ones, and to note which questions can be answered and which cannot.

Contributing, and the support question

The guidance also addresses a question that public administrations regularly raise about open source adoption: who is responsible for fixes. CISA’s answer is that no single entity is obliged to provide them, and that agencies should therefore plan accordingly — assigning internal staff, contracting third parties, or both — while following two principles in dealing with upstream projects: collaborate rather than demand, and push fixes upstream.

This is a fair description of how the LibreOffice ecosystem works. Support, long-term maintenance, and custom development are provided by certified developers and certified migration professionals, whose contributions return to the shared codebase and benefit every other deployment. The guidance is right that this requires organisations to plan for it. It is also right that the resulting improvements are shared rather than captured.

CISA further notes that where a project becomes unmaintained, an organisation may as a last resort take over a fork. This option has no equivalent in proprietary software, where end of support arrives on the supplier’s schedule and offers no remedy at all.

A note on scope

The document does not name any product. CISA states explicitly that it does not endorse commercial entities, products, or services, and nothing in the guidance should be read as an assessment of any particular software. What it provides is a set of criteria. The observation that LibreOffice satisfies them is ours, and rests on evidence that anyone may check.

Open Source Software: Security Principles and Practices is available from CISA: https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/open-source-software-security-principles-and-practices

CISA’s announcement: https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/cisa-guide-helps-federal-agencies-securely-and-effectively-use-open-source-software

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Why OOXML-Based Suites Handle ODF Badly

The question arises naturally for anyone who chooses the standard format over the proprietary one: why do office suites that use OOXML as their native format handle ODF in ways that range from poor to appalling?

The two most obvious answers are these: vendors have neglected the format, treating it as an afterthought, or they are quietly working to discredit the very idea of transparent interoperability, through support so bad that it demonstrates the format “does not work”.

Both answers are too simplistic. The reality is that three distinct mechanisms are at work, applying to different vendors in different proportions and ultimately converging on the same outcome.

A challenge that is not a challenge

Reading and writing ODF faithfully, in isolation, is genuinely feasible: the format is completely and openly specified, and there is no equivalent of OOXML’s notorious legacy compatibility flags, which refer to undocumented behaviours of old Microsoft products that only Microsoft can reproduce.

A competent development team is able to implement ODF correctly on the basis of the ODF specification alone.

An office suite, however, does not implement a format in isolation: it has an internal, in-memory representation of the document. Loading a document is a mapping into that representation, and saving a document is a mapping out of it.

Fidelity is greatest when the internal model is congruent with the document format. LibreOffice’s model is essentially ODF, which is why, in this context, ODF is genuinely native.

When a suite’s internal model has the shape of OOXML, ODF stops being native and becomes an external import that must be converted to and from a representation built for a different format.

Take an ODF feature that OOXML lacks: the ODP field that displays the total number of slides. The instructive part is that the information itself is not missing from a PPTX file. The package enumerates every slide, and the count is available to any program that opens it. What OOXML provides no way to express is the statement that this number is the total. There is a field for the current slide number and none for the count, and Microsoft’s own guidance is to type the figure into a text box and keep it up to date by hand, which is a precise description of not having a field at all. Every published workaround is a macro or an add-in that computes the number once and writes it out as fixed text.

So when an ODP file carrying that field is opened in an OOXML-based editor, what is lost is not the data but the instruction. The number survives. The fact that it was calculated does not, and from that moment the document no longer knows how long it is.

The reverse direction fails more quietly, and therefore worse. A slide count exported from Impress to PPTX has to be written out as fixed text, so the presentation is correct on the day it is converted and wrong the first time a slide is added or removed. A number that has stopped being calculated but still looks plausible is more damaging than a visible gap, because nothing in the document signals that it needs checking.

An ODF-based editor handles the reverse case in an entirely different way. When it encounters a feature present in one format and absent from the other, it sets the data aside rather than discarding it, and restores it when the document returns to OOXML. In LibreOffice this mechanism has a name, the grab bag, and it is a documented part of the import filters rather than an incidental behaviour.

The difference does not lie in the quality of the import filter, but in the fact that the architecture was designed to hold the meaning of the other format.

This matters, because it means that poor ODF support in OOXML-based suites is largely overdetermined before the question of motive even arises. The difficulty is not absolute, but relative to the architecture the vendor has chosen.

Three mechanisms

First: the bet on a reference format. Some suites do not consider ODF at all, because they have built their value proposition on the other format.

OnlyOffice is the clearest case, because it was built around OOXML and converts every other format into that model, so ODF is a second-class import and export format by design.

WPS Office is software created to open docx, xlsx and pptx files faithfully. Its ODF functionality derives from the add-in of Microsoft’s own OpenXML project and was integrated into the application only in May 2022, as a conversion layer written for ODF 1.1, which is to say for the 2007 revision of the standard. Fifteen years of delay were built in on the day of release.

Google Workspace is a variant of the same logic rather than an exception to it. Its internal model is neither ODF nor OOXML but a proprietary web representation, and both formats reach it through a conversion layer. For a public administration the consequence is identical: the open standard is an export target, not the substrate the software thinks in.

For these vendors, ODF was never part of the strategy. Their proposition is to open Microsoft documents in something other than Microsoft Office, and to make them look right, so poor ODF support is the direct consequence of the strategy.

Second: deliberate underinvestment. This is probably a cause that cuts across the whole office suite sector. Although ODF is easier and cheaper to implement correctly, the process still involves development, quality assurance and maintenance costs and timelines, in order to keep pace with a continuously evolving standard.

If a vendor’s users mostly exchange docx files, the marginal commercial value of excellent ODF support is close to zero, so ODF is first implemented at the minimum level and then quietly left to rot.

The perception that ODF support does not matter is itself a consequence of a single company’s market dominance, and its effect is twofold. Lock-in becomes a software feature that the market regards as entirely normal, and ODF acquires a reputation for fragility that no deliberate campaign was required to produce.

Third: deliberate disqualification. This mechanism is real, and it concerns Microsoft itself, with Service Pack 2 for Office 2007. The ODF support it shipped failed in two opposite directions at once.

When reading an ODF spreadsheet produced by another application, Excel silently stripped out the formulas and kept only the last value each cell had held, reducing the document, in Rob Weir’s assessment at the time, to a mere “table of numbers” with the calculation logic gone. When writing, Excel placed formulas in an Excel namespace that was neither the one used by OpenOffice and the other ODF applications nor the OOXML one. Applications that checked the namespace rejected the document outright; those that did not check it displayed a corrupted file showing neither the formula nor the value correctly.

This is a textbook mechanism for discrediting interoperability: meeting a format requirement with an implementation that conforms only on paper and produces visibly broken files, demonstrating to every observer that ODF does not actually work.

At the time, Microsoft argued that the ODF standard did not define spreadsheet formulas, which arrived only with ODF 1.2, and that there was therefore no reference to follow. The argument does not survive Microsoft’s own reply. Responding publicly to Weir, Microsoft’s evangelist Doug Mahugh set the two behaviours side by side: faced with the same unrecognised formula syntax, IBM Lotus Symphony preserved the formula markup, while Excel preserved the cached values. Neither application had a specification to follow. Only one had an architecture with somewhere to put what it did not understand.

It is worth noting what Excel kept. Not the formula, but its last result, which is the same reduction we saw with the slide count, in a different application. A model shaped by OOXML retains the value and loses the computation that produced it, and a document reduced to its last results is a document that has stopped being able to correct itself.

That episode is seventeen years old, and it would be easy to set it aside as history. Microsoft Office today declares support for ODF 1.4. But what improved is the nominal conformance, not the architecture. The internal model is still OOXML, and every ODF document that passes through it is still a translation.

The synthesis

Poor ODF support is not a technical verdict on the format, but the visible shape of a market organised around the dominance of a single vendor, and that shape did not come about by chance.

For European public administrations, this redefines the practical question, because the interoperability problems they encounter when they try to migrate to the open standard ODF are not caused by ODF, which is entirely ready. They are evidence that most of the available tools were designed to be native to somebody else’s format, and that the one vendor with the power to change this situation has repeatedly chosen not to.

The precarious state of ODF support in the market is not a reason to hesitate over adopting the standard, but the strongest possible reason to mandate it, and to mandate it precisely.

The question that protects a public body’s documents, and its sovereignty over them, is not whether ODF is supported, but whether that support is native, that is, whether the software’s own internal model is the open standard, or the standard is merely a foreign element inside an engine built for something else.

The document format is the substrate of administrative continuity and public memory. Choosing tools for which the open standard is native is not a preference between equivalent options, but the difference between owning your documents and renting access to them from whoever controls the format in which they are actually written.

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LibreOffice, yours for a lifetime

On 13 October 2026, Microsoft ends support for Office 2021. No more security updates, no more fixes, no more assurances. The software will still launch. It will still open your files. But from that date it becomes a liability rather than an asset — and the only sanctioned path forward runs through a subscription.

This is not a bug in the model. It is the model.

Support that does not expire

LibreOffice has no end-of-support date, because there is no vendor with the power to declare one. The code is public. The development is community-driven and foundation-governed. When a release cycle closes, the next one is already available, free, to everyone — not to those who renewed.

The distinction matters more than it appears. Microsoft’s lifecycle policy is a commercial instrument: the date is chosen, not discovered. It marks the moment when continuing to use software you paid for becomes unwise, and it exists to convert perpetual licences into recurring revenue. LibreOffice cannot issue such a date because no one holds the authority to issue it.

Ownership of documents, not just access to them

A support deadline is the visible layer. Underneath it sits something more consequential: the format your documents are written in.

LibreOffice uses the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an ISO standard maintained by OASIS and implemented by multiple independent applications. The specification is public, complete, and readable. Anyone can write software that opens an ODF file correctly — today, or in forty years, using tools that have not yet been written.

OOXML, despite carrying an ISO number, is not comparable in practice. The standard that was approved and the format that Microsoft Office actually writes have diverged. Independent implementations remain approximations. This is why round-tripping a complex document between suites degrades it, and why the degradation is always the fault of the software that did not write the format in the first place.

The consequence is simple. If your archive is in OOXML, your ability to read it depends on a commercial relationship with a single company continuing indefinitely. If your archive is in ODF, it does not.

Documents are software

A modern document is not a page. It is a structured artefact: markup, style definitions, embedded objects, references to fonts, scripts, conditional logic, external data. It is executed by an application in exactly the way a program is executed by a runtime.

We accepted decades ago that critical software should not be built on formats and interfaces controlled by a single vendor. Documents have escaped that scrutiny only because they look like paper. They are not paper. The same argument that makes open standards essential for software makes them essential for the files that record contracts, medical histories, legislation, research, and institutional memory.

Costs that stop compounding

The licence saving is real but it is the least interesting part of the calculation. What changes structurally is the removal of a recurring, unilaterally repriceable line item from the budget — one that has risen repeatedly and will rise again, because the customer has no alternative to negotiate with.

Migration has costs. Training, template conversion, macro rewrites, integration work. These are one-off and quantifiable. Subscription is perpetual and is not.

Independence from the deployment model

Support deadlines are increasingly used to move users from local installation to cloud service. That transition is not neutral. It changes where documents reside, which jurisdiction governs them, who can be compelled to disclose them, and whether work is possible when connectivity is not.

LibreOffice runs locally, on Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux, and in a browser via LibreOffice Technology-based online solutions — as a choice, not as a condition of receiving updates.

What October 2026 actually asks

The deadline poses a question that the deadline itself cannot answer: should the readability of your organisation’s documents in 2046 depend on decisions made by a company in 2026?

If the answer is no, the migration is not a reaction to an end-of-support notice. It is the correction of a dependency that should never have been accepted.

Support ends on a date someone else chooses. Ownership does not end at all.

LibreOffice is developed by The Document Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in Berlin, and is available free of charge at libreoffice.org. The Document Foundation publishes a LibreOffice Migration Protocol for organisations planning a structured transition.

Image by Alexa from Pixabay

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What is Digital Sovereignty

Digital sovereignty is not about owning everything, it is about ensuring that nothing essential can be taken away.

That single line settles more arguments than it first appears to, because it disqualifies the two positions that dominate the debate. One side imagines sovereignty as control. The other imagines it as choice. Both are talking about something real, and both have mistaken a part for the whole.

The control camp misreads the goal

The instinct to equate sovereignty with control is understandable. Sovereignty, in its older political sense, was control: borders, currency, the monopoly on force. So when the word migrates into the digital domain, people reach for the same picture: own the servers, hold the data, build the stack, depend on no one.

The trouble is that this picture is both impossible and beside the point.

It is impossible because no institution, and certainly no continent, is going to reimplement the entire computing stack from silicon upward. The dream of total self-sufficiency is not sovereignty, it is autarky, and autarky has failed everywhere it has been seriously attempted.

A Europe that tried to own everything would spend a generation rebuilding inferior versions of things that already work, and would be no freer at the end of it.

But the deeper problem is that control is the wrong target even when it is achievable. An institution can own the building and still be a tenant of the lock.

A public administration can run its own data centre, on its own soil, under its own staff, and still find that every document it produces is hostage to a format only one vendor fully understands. The hardware is sovereign. The institution is not. Control over the container tells you nothing about who controls the contents.

This is why the control framing quietly concedes the argument before it begins. It accepts that sovereignty is about what you hold, and so it can always be answered with “but you cannot hold all of it”, which is true, and which is why the framing loses. Sovereignty was never about the holding.

The choice camp misreads the threat

The opposite error is more fashionable and, for that reason, more dangerous.

Here the argument runs: sovereignty simply means freedom to choose. A sovereign buyer surveys the market and selects the best tool for the job, and if the best tool happens to be proprietary, so be it. To exclude proprietary software on principle, this camp says, is itself a kind of unfreedom, an ideology dressed up as independence. Real sovereignty, they insist, is vendor-neutral.

It is a seductive argument because it borrows the language of liberty. But it confuses a choice made today with a choice that remains available tomorrow, and that confusion is the whole game.

Consider what “choosing” a proprietary, closed-format platform actually buys you.

On the day of purchase, you have exercised your freedom: you compared options and picked one. But every document, every workflow, every trained habit that follows accumulates inside a system that only its owner can reproduce.

Five years later, when the licence terms change, or the price rises sharply, or a feature you depend on is discontinued, or the company is acquired and the product withdrawn, you discover that your freedom to choose has quietly expired. The market has not removed your options on paper. It has removed the ground beneath all but one of them.

This is the trap the choice framing cannot see, because it measures freedom at the moment of decision and never at the moment of exit. A choice you cannot reverse is not really a choice, it is a commitment wearing a choice’s clothes. Sovereignty has always been about the capacity to reverse, to leave, to change one’s mind, to refuse a deal that has turned bad. A buyer who cannot say no later was never sovereign to begin with.

What is actually essential

So if sovereignty is neither owning everything nor choosing freely among everything, what is left?

What is left is the thing the opening sentence points to: ensuring that nothing essential can be taken away.

The word doing the work there is essential. An institution does not need to own the cloud, it needs to be sure that if a provider vanishes tomorrow, its data does not vanish with it.

It does not need to forbid proprietary tools it needs to be sure that the things it commits to those tools – its records, its contracts, its citizens’ files – remain readable, movable, and re-creatable by someone other than the vendor who sold it the tool.

Sovereignty is not a wall around one’s possessions. It is a guarantee about one’s exits.

This is why open standards, and not ownership, are the real substance of digital sovereignty, and why open standards alone are not even enough.

A format must do two things. It must persist: it must be readable in ten years without asking permission. And it must be reimplementable: anyone, in principle, must be able to build a tool that reads and writes it, without reverse-engineering, without a licence, without the original vendor’s blessing.

Persistence without reimplementability is a museum exhibit: you can look at your data, but only one company can do anything with it. Reimplementability is what turns a surviving file into a living, portable, sovereign asset.

The shape of the mistake

The control camp and the choice camp look like opposites. One wants to build a fortress, the other wants to shop in an open market. But they make the same underlying error: they locate sovereignty in the present tense: in what you hold now, or what you select now.

Sovereignty lives in the future tense. It is the answer to a question you have not yet had to ask: when this provider fails me, what survives? If the honest answer is “everything essential, and I can take it elsewhere,” you are sovereign, whatever brands happen to sit on your desks today.

If the honest answer is “that depends on whether they let me,” then you are not sovereign, no matter how much you own or how freely you chose.

A closing note: this is not an abstract argument

Everything above can be stated in three letters and a contrast.

The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is what reimplementability looks like in practice. It is a published ISO standard that any developer can implement fully, without permission and without payment, and many independent applications do.

A file saved in ODF is not merely yours, it is re-creatable by anyone, which is precisely what makes it safe to entrust your institution’s memory to it. Nothing essential can be taken away, because nothing essential depends on a single vendor.

OOXML is the cautionary half of the contrast. It exists as a standard, and in that narrow sense a file saved in it will not “disappear.”

But the format as actually deployed carries provisions and behaviours that only its originator implements completely, and the effect is that full fidelity remains the property of one vendor. This is persistence without reimplementability, or the museum exhibit. You may keep the file forever and still be unable to do anything sovereign with it.

Which is why the most consequential decision a sovereignty-minded institution makes is not where its servers sit, nor which brand of software runs on them, but which format its documents are native in.

A platform that can export to an open format but lives, by default, in a proprietary one has granted its users persistence and quietly retained sovereignty for the vendor. The files will survive. The dependency survives with them.

Choose the native format that anyone can re-create, and the rest of the sovereignty question becomes manageable. Get that one choice wrong, and no amount of owned hardware or vendor-neutral procurement will buy back what has been signed away.

Nothing essential can be taken away. For documents, that sentence has a name, and the name is ODF.

This article was inspired by Roberto Di Cosmo’s formulation of digital sovereignty as the capacity to ensure that nothing essential can be taken away.

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