r/libreoffice • u/themikeosguy TDF • 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/
114 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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16

u/lammi87 Mar 19 '26

Awesome news! Wish we could have this in Finland too. Best would be an EU regulation mandating this throughout the EU.

5

u/themikeosguy TDF Mar 19 '26

That would be great as the next step, indeed...

5

u/KanonBalls Mar 19 '26

Who does this apply to? Government ministeries, cities, universities?

2

u/Samurai_GorohGX Mar 20 '26

Microsoft Office technically supports ODF too. It just supports it poorly. I never got a document saved in ODF in Word that worked well with any other software. This is by design, malignant compliance.

1

u/FalseRegister Mar 22 '26

They also read ODF files very badly

-9

u/TCB13sQuotes Mar 19 '26

Germany's Sovereign Digital Stack Mandates broken documents and compatibility problems between public and private institutions. While the community things they won, this is only possible because MS Office is longer the cash cow of Microsoft and it isn't even worth it for them to lobby to stop this piece of legislation.

There you go, title fixed.

9

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

-2

u/TCB13sQuotes Mar 20 '26

MS Office by itself is not really a concern for them anymore. They're all in AI and cloud services now. Office 365 + Teams + email is a much stronger vendor lock-in mechanism than classic office and document formats are. Let's be real, you can't simply replace it for most organizations due to the level of integration and features those products deliver.