Denmark’s Ministry of Digital Affairs has set itself a deadline. By next month half of its workforce will have moved off Windows, Office, and every other Microsoft product; the rest follow between September and November, finishing well before Windows 10 reaches end of life. Officials say the motive is “digital sovereignty,” and while buzzwords normally bore me, the adoption of Linux and LibreOffice shows they actually mean it this time. A foreign corporation headquartered outside Copenhagen can still cut the power, raise prices, or ship an update that breaks old forms overnight.
Watching governments outside the United States lean on Redmond for core services still feels odd. Microsoft owns the code and keeps the source locked; Denmark, or Germany, or Uruguay has exactly two levers when something goes wrong: pay fines or walk away, and neither gets the fix that matters. With Office 365 and OneDrive, more of the work moves from local servers to distant racks, so pulling the plug becomes easier for the supplier and harder for every social worker or tax clerk running the application. Even if the telemetry were turned off tomorrow, the money still leaves the country: every desktop, every laptop, every renewal fee ships euros or kroner across the Atlantic.
This adds up fast. Picture the DMV in a mid-size U.S. city. One hundred seats, each running a paid Windows license, renewed every three years. If the unit price is only fifty dollars, the city still throws away fifteen thousand dollars every cycle for the right to keep typing addresses into a database. Run Linux with LibreOffice and the cost drops to zero; without the Windows upgrade treadmill the same Pentiums can last longer because eight gigabytes of RAM plus a lightweight distribution equals an office box still fast enough to print forms. The carbon footprint of churning hardware falls as well.
Moving civil servants to an open stack also creates local work. When an Excel macro breaks in a courthouse hallway, a foreign help desk on the other side of the planet will not be able to reproduce the error; a neighborhood coder with root access might fix it before lunch. Entire suites of paperwork could be rebuilt from source, debugged, tailored, and documented by staff who also do jury duty on Thursdays. Over time those tweaks move upstream and help everyone else using the same code.
Europe has caught on. Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s northernmost state, is pushing civil servants from Office 365 to LibreOffice, from Windows to Linux, and from Microsoft’s cloud to servers that sit in German datacentres. Their finance ministry estimates license savings in the tens of millions each year, enough to pay for new teachers, nurses, or patching a decade supply of potholes. Citizens who depend on these services are no longer reliant on monopolists who can be slowed by “planned maintenance” that happens right when you need to renew your permit.
France started even earlier. In 2005, faced with aging Office XP licenses, the national police chose OpenOffice and the ODF file format, then upgraded around a hundred thousand desktops to Ubuntu, finally forking it into their own distribution called GendBuntu. If French officers can issue tickets and write reports without touching Windows, governments everywhere can follow. When the next budget debate comes up at your city council meeting, ask why taxes continue to fund software that locks you out.