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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,

Every year, millions of students open a laptop and log into Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, surrendering their digital sovereignty to US Big Tech in the process. Teachers use cloud-based editors to assign homework. School administrators manage documents in proprietary formats. This ecosystem runs smoothly and seemingly without friction, but almost no one questions the cost of this normalisation. Unfortunately, the cost is quite high. An invisible resume Schools don’t just teach maths and history; they also teach mental processes, such as how to do research, think critically and interact with tools and institutions. Software is part of this invisible curriculum. A student who has spent years using Microsoft Word or Google Docs as the archetype of “word processing” or “collaboration” respectively has not developed neutral, transferable skills, but has become a future customer. This is not a conspiracy, but rather the way markets work. Microsoft and Google both offer heavily discounted or even free licences to educational institutions, knowing that brand loyalty formed in childhood tends to persist into adulthood and the working world. The licence discount is, in commercial terms, the cost of acquiring a new customer, which schools effectively pay on behalf of the seller. LibreOffice offers

The European Commission has accepted our request, and starting from today – Friday March 6 – has added the Open Document Format ODS version of the spreadsheet to be used to provide the feedback. We are grateful to the people working at DG CONNECT, the Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, for responding to our request within 24 hours. At this point, the rest of this message is no longer relevant, and the call for action is no longer necessary. ARCHIVED MESSAGE The European Commission has spent years advocating for open standards, vendor neutrality, and digital sovereignty. The European Interoperability Framework explicitly recommends open formats for public sector digital services. The EU’s own Open Source Software Strategy calls for reducing dependency on proprietary technologies, and the Cyber Resilience Act itself is designed to address systemic risks from unaccountable technology dependencies. On March 3rd, 2026, the European Commission published a request for feedback on to the guidances to be provided in relation to the CRA, which must be provided through the linked spreadsheet in .xlsx format, a proprietary format that makes interoperability extremely difficult due to its ever changing and undocumented features. This is not a minor procedural oversight.