Governments around the world, especially European ones, are increasingly reacting to the threat of American-based services pulling the rug from under them. We have already seen many instances of this, like Denmark moving away from Microsoft or Germany doing the same.
This is a growing pattern that shows Big Tech isn't welcome in sensitive Government installations around Europe anymore, though this does vary from region to region (lobbying is a factor here).
The Austrian Armed Forces (Bundesheer) joined this trend last month by migrating 16,000 workstations from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, marking a notable shift toward open source alternatives within European defense organizations.
LibreOffice in the Austrian Military
The switch didn't happen overnight. The Austrian military started planning this move back in 2020 when they saw Microsoft Office heading toward mandatory cloud services. They finalized the decision in 2021 and spent the next few years actually making it happen.
The rollout was pretty methodical (as expected from a military org). In 2022, they let employees voluntarily try LibreOffice while training internal developers to work on the office suite.
By 2023, they brought in a German company for additional support and made LibreOffice mandatory in some departments. Fast forward to last month, and MS Office 2016 is gone from all military computers.
You might think the motivation was saving money, but it wasn't. Michael Hillebrand from the military's ICT department made that clear at the recent LibreOffice Conference. The real goal was digital sovereignty: keeping sensitive military data on their own servers rather than external clouds accessible to foreign entities.
But wait, there's more!
The Austrian military didn't just adopt LibreOffice; they actually contributed back to it. Over five person-years of development work went into adding features they needed. Those improvements are now available to everyone using LibreOffice, which is pretty cool.
Also worth noting is that they were already using self-hosted Linux servers with Samba before this migration, so they weren't deeply locked into Microsoft's ecosystem. That probably made the whole process smoother than it would have been otherwise.
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Theena Kumaragurunathan
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