Category: Marketing

Like we’re seeing in Schleswig-Holstein, Denmark and many other government bodies and organisations, the Austrian military (Bundesheer) has migrated 16,000 PCs from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice.

As Heise reports, the main reasons behind the switch are to:

• strengthen digital sovereignty
• maintain independence of IT infrastructure
• ensure that data is processed in-house

The initial plan to move to LibreOffice was formed in 2020, and detailed planning and training of internal developers for improvements began in 2022. In 2023, a company in Germany was contracted to provide technical support and additional development.

The Austrian military’s migration reflects a growing demand for independence from single vendors. With free and open source software like LibreOffice, anyone can study and modify the source code to make improvements specifically for their setup and workflow. Government bodies and organisations can free themselves from vendor lock-in, spending taxpayer’s money on local companies to provide support and further development – rather than paying for license fees from overseas companies.

At the recent LibreOffice Conference 2025, representatives from the Austrian armed forces gave a talk about their switch from Microsoft Office, highlighting some of the new features and improvements that they have sponsored:

Click here to view the slides

Companies around the world use LibreOffice to reduce costs, improve their privacy, and free themselves from dependence on single vendors. Today we’re talking to Flotte Karotte, a German company with 50 employees that recently made a generous donation to support the LibreOffice project and community:

What is Flotte Karotte?

Flotte Karotte is an organic delivery service. We have been in business since 1996. Starting out as a marketing channel for regional growers with the aim of bringing organic produce to the masses, we have since become a full-range supplier. This means that in addition to fruit and vegetables, we also deliver bread, meat and sausage, dairy products, pasta, grains/seeds, sauces, spreads, cosmetics, etc. In other words, everything you would find in an organic supermarket. However, we focus on brands that are loyal to the organic trade and are not usually sold in conventional food retail outlets. We also prioritise association products (Bioland, Demeter) over EC organic products wherever possible.

We attach great importance to seasonality and regionality. Of course, the latter cannot be achieved for all products (bananas). Wherever possible, we try to source from regional growers. We have been working with regional farmers and vegetable growers for years. What makes us special is that we can offer smaller farms in particular a secure marketing channel. This enables the farms to grow more different crops and thus promote diversity. They would not be able to sell these smaller quantities in the wholesale market.

We currently have around 50 employees working in the office, and as drivers and in packing. Sustainability is also important to us when it comes to mobility. Since 2017, we have been increasingly focusing on electric mobility and now deliver almost exclusively by electric vehicle. In the Essen Rüttenscheid district, we deliver exclusively by cargo bike with our partner Roman from Frachtradler.

When did you start using free and open source software (FOSS)?

We have relied on open source from the very beginning. Among other reasons, this is of course due to cost considerations. However, it is also because, as in trade and cultivation, we are critical of the concentration of power and the associated dependence on a few providers in the software services sector.

Which apps do you use in the company?

We use Thunderbird as our email programme, Mozilla Firefox as our default browser, and LibreOffice as our office software (especially for word processing and spreadsheets). Our server runs on Linux, and we use Proxmox for virtualisation.

What have been your experiences with LibreOffice so far?

LibreOffice fully meets our requirements for office application software. There is only one compatibility issue with a public sector contractor who works with Microsoft. A formula used in their Excel spreadsheet is not supported by LibreOffice. However, the solution here should be for the public sector to become independent of proprietary software from the US.

Many thanks again to Flotte Karotte for their generous donation! We hope they continue to find LibreOffice useful for many years to come.

One week ago, we announced LibreOffice 25.8, our brand new major release. It’s packed with new features, and has many improvements to compatibility and performance too. So, what has happened in the week since then? Let’s check out some stats…

642,564 downloads

These are just stats for our official downloads page, of course – many Linux users will have acquired the new release via their distribution’s package repositories.

23,399 views, shares and likes on social media

Combining our Mastodon, Bluesky, X/Twitter and Facebook posts about the announcement, and all the likes, shares, views and comments, we get 23,999. Thanks to everyone who spread the word on social media! 😊

1,225 upvotes on Reddit

On release day, we posted the announcement on the /r/linux subreddit. There was lots of discussion there about the new update, including things users like and things that could still be improved.

Huge thanks to our worldwide community of volunteers, and certified developers, for all their work on this release!

Get a quick overview of some of the new features in LibreOffice 25.8, released on Wednesday. (This video is also available on PeerTube).

Following the example of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, which is moving 30,000 PCs from Microsoft Office/365 to LibreOffice, the Danish Ministry of Digitalisation is doing the same.

Caroline Stage Olsen, the country’s Digitalisation Minister, plans to move half of the employees to LibreOffice over the summer, and if all goes as expected, the entire Ministry will be free from Microsoft Office/365 later in the year.

In a LinkedIn post, Olsen summarised the reasons for switching to LibreOffice:

We must never make ourselves so dependent on so few that we can no longer act freely. Because far too much public digital infrastructure is today tied up with very few foreign suppliers. This makes us vulnerable. Also financially.

That is why we are now testing in parallel at the Ministry of Digitization how it works in practice when we work with open source solutions. Several municipalities are doing the same.

Not because we think it’s easy – but because we know it’s necessary to lead the way if we want to create more competition and innovation – and reduce our dependence on the few.

We in the LibreOffice project welcome this move, and look forward to seeing more governments and organisations getting control of their digital sovereignty and using public money for public code.