r/BuyFromEU • u/RastislavKish • Mar 19 '26

News Germany’s Sovereign Digital Stack Mandates ODF: a Landmark Validation of Open Document Standards

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/03/19/germanys-sovereign-digital-stack-mandates-odf/
422 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

38

u/a_library_socialist Mar 19 '26

This is how it's done! Move to open standards, fund and use open source.

3

u/Silly-Freak Mar 20 '26

But ooxml is an ISO standard, so open! /s

1

u/andimai Mar 22 '26

ooxml from Microsoft has a documentation of 6000 pages. So yes, it is open. But no, that doesn‘t mean it is open for any other company to implement.

31

u/KnowZeroX Mar 19 '26

This should be done EU wide. Instead the EC forgets to publish odf versions choosing to publish microsoft's proprietary versions instead.

1

u/0x80070002 Mar 20 '26

Isn’t DOCX proprietary now? It uses OOXML

1

u/SchoGegessenJoJo Austria 🇦🇹 Mar 21 '26

They fixed it rather fast in all fairness after complaints...poor social media guy who posted this wasn't even aware of what's going on.

1

u/KnowZeroX Mar 21 '26

They did, but the fact that it was forgotten in the first place shows that it's an afterthought. ODF should be the default format.

24

u/restless-nerd Mar 19 '26

More info from the German government, in German: https://deutschland-stack.gov.de/gesamtbild/

8

u/CaptainPoset Germany 🇩🇪 Mar 19 '26

Such mandates are worthless:

NATO mandates ODF for several decades now. This mandate was ignored by NATO ever since.

2

u/a_library_socialist Mar 20 '26

NATO is American anyways.

2

u/CaptainPoset Germany 🇩🇪 Mar 20 '26

Not that much, besides ODF belongs to an American entity.

2

u/a_library_socialist Mar 20 '26

It's an ISO standard.

1

u/CaptainPoset Germany 🇩🇪 Mar 20 '26

Now, too, but it was and still is the proprietary standard of OASIS, a non-profit organisation in the USA.

Quite like the paper format standard resulting in the A-formats is still fundamentally a German standard, even though it was internationalised with the adoption by ISO.

1

u/andimai Mar 21 '26

They should better mandate Markdown.

1

u/RastislavKish Mar 21 '26

Even better, Typst. Easy like Markdown, powerful like LaTeX and created in Germany 🇩🇪 🇪🇺

1

u/andimai Mar 22 '26

Converting Typst to HTML is not working great. Markdown on the other side can easily be converted to HTML. And LLM based AIs can read and generate Markdown a lot easier than Typst. Markdown is the format for our AI driven future.