Policy and Digital Sovereignty – TDF Annual Report 2025
This is part of the Annual Report 2025 from The Document Foundation, the non-profit that coordinates the LibreOffice project and community. Across the reporting period, the public conversation about office software and document formats shifted decisively. The justification for moving away from proprietary suites is no longer framed primarily as cost saving. It is framed as the preservation of independence — the ability of a government to act without asking permission from a foreign supplier. Several of the year’s migrations were announced with that argument stated explicitly and the cost argument set aside; the Austrian Armed Forces went so far as to say the move was not about money at all. This reframing matters for The Document Foundation, because it moves the debate onto ground where the Foundation has argued for two decades. Digital sovereignty is the ability of nations, organisations and individuals to control their own digital destiny: to control access to their own information without depending on third parties, to make technological choices based on their own needs rather than a vendor’s commercial strategy, and to preserve that self-determination as the market consolidates. When public bodies store their documents in proprietary formats controlled by a single company, they
