good!

Germany’s decision to anchor ODF at the heart of its national sovereign stack confirms what we have argued for years: open, vendor-neutral document formats are not a niche concern for some technology specialists and FOSS advocates. They are a fundamental infrastructure for democratic, interoperable and sovereign public administrations.

I'm gonna repeat this, as expressed here, to a few people

Hopefully the rest of Europe will follow.

Wow, some good news on Lemmy? Sign me up!

Hell yes. I wonder how many man-hours of strategy meetings MS had on their calendars to fend that decision off.

It's so good to see initiatives like these! Hope it spreads across Europe and the World.

Isn't odf the one used by libre office?

Gotta love Germany.

Fun fact: the German equivalent of the BBC, DW, will teach you German if you want to learn it, for free. A but niche but a nice thing to do!

https://www.dw.com/

Gut

Their contract with Microslop must be up for renegotiation.

I remember reading this headline in 2004

This is something very important: Don't focus on aplications (FOSS or not) but on open data formats and proper import/export mechanisms so you can switch applications easily.

This is not a recommendation or a preference, it is a mandate,

ODF’s mandate is the document-layer expression of that principle, as you cannot claim digital sovereignty while allowing your documents to be locked in proprietary formats controlled by a single vendor.

incredibly based

Meanwhile OnlyOffice is saving to Macroslop format by default: https://piefed.social/c/libreoffice/p/1803568/libreoffice-blasts-fake-open-source-onlyoffice-for-working-with-microsoft-to-lock-users

At least something good amid all the bad news regarding the future of software systems

I think this is not (entirely) true. Or at least I have some questions:

• Is this an enacted law that I missed? Because it looks like it is a work in progress.
• "All levels of government" Really? We have federalism. I am not sure, if that can be mandated by the governments.

BTW: https://deutschland-stack.gov.de/

I have searched a bit further: For federal and state governments, ODF is binding through IT Planning Council resolutions and federal guidelines, but there is no formal law yet mandating its use. Also, this is not binding for local authorities, but virtual it is.

https://www.it-planungsrat.de/beschluss/beschluss-2025-06

It's a typo, they wanted to make support of the IDF mandatory

Neat!

Bravo. Can't believe it has taken this long for a gov't to realize storing everything in a poorly obfuscated format makes no sense.

I understand why the world is the way it is, but still it should have been obvious all along that it is not ideal for the government to data in a file format owned by a company. Even worse, a foreign company.

Great news!

Most—certainly not all, but most—documents that are written in Microsoft Word, or in LibreOffice Writer, would be better off as either markdown plain text files, or as LaTeX.

CMV.

Nice! A huge blow to those still trying to push Microsoft

When are we going to have the equivalent for PDF documents, with the ability to comment, fill and sign, as in AdobeAR?

The framework adopts a “Made in EU first” principle, requires open interfaces and local data storage, mandate open source development where proprietary ownership would otherwise apply, and explicitly aims to reduce vendor lock-in effects.

This is such a wet dream 🥹

Nice!

Great!