The Digitization Minister of Denmark, Caroline Stagehas announced that His ministry will begin to replace Microsoft Office for LibreOfficeand progressively, to leave behind Microsoft’s products and services to use Open Source systems and tools. Not only because they believe it is better, but because the minister wants the country to advance in digital sovereignty.
As confirmed by the minister in an interview with a local medium, she wants to withdraw Windows from half of the computers of her department employees this summer, and if everything goes well, in autumn in all departments of the Ministry will use Linux as an operating system. The Microsoft productivity suite, Office 365, will also be replaced before winter by LibreOffice.
If there is no problem during the deployment of the new tools, Microsoft will work on the ministry before winter. In addition, if there is any problem or is a too complex process, they will have everything prepared to use Microsoft tools again in a very short time.
The step that this minister has taken is not something isolated in Denmark, but It is part of a national government strategy to reduce its dependence on the technological services of the United States. In fact, digital sovereignty is one of the priorities of the Danish government, both at the ministerial and central administration level, as in municipalities and regional administrative bodies.
The announcement made by the Digitization Ministry of Denmark arrives shortly after the Municipal Governments of Copenhagen and Aarhus decided to do without Microsoft as its main technological provider. For several reasons: economy, privacy, concerns about the dependence of a technological of a very large size, geopolitical problems, etc.
It all started in November 2024, when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, and several of the main names of the great technological ones showed him their public support. Since then, the European authorities in general, and in this case the Danish in particular, are aware that they depend too much on them.
Besides, The relationship between the United States and Denmark has deteriorated Because of Trump’s claims on Greenland, which opened a broad debate in the country on data protection and on a dependency of US digital infrastructure that is no longer considered sustainable.
