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Germany's Sovereign Digital Stack Mandates ODF: a Landmark Validation of Open Document Standards - TDF Community Blog
blog.documentfoundation.orgThe Document Foundation (TDF), the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, welcomes the inclusion of the Open Document Format (ODF) as a mandated standard format in Germany’s Deutschland-Stack, the federal government’s sovereign digital infrastructure framework for all public administrations. The Stack, published by the German Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernisation (Bundesministerium für Digitales und Staatsmodernisierung), establishes the technical standards for a shared, interoperable and sovereign digital infrastructure serving all Germany’s public administrations. Under the framework’s “Semantic Technologies and Real-Time Analytics” pillar, ODF and PDF/UA are explicitly named as the two mandated document formats, to the exclusion of proprietary alternatives. “This is not a recommendation or a preference, it is a mandate,” said Florian Effenberger, Executive Director of The Document Foundation. “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.” The Deutschland-Stack is grounded in a set of principles that align with TDF’s long-standing advocacy positions. The framework adopts a “Made in EU first” principle, requires open interfaces and local data storage,
That’s a big one and the Netherlands, Portugal, Norway and the UK apparently already do. In no time it will be mandatory in all EU countries.
The Netherlands seems to have it mandatory since 2009, but I’ve never seen it used. My wife works for the municipality, and she has never heard of it either.
Hmm, that’s bad. I wonder for whom it is mandatory then.
It’s probably hardly enforced or even brought to the attention of people.
I understood this as meaning that the file format must be supported by all government institutions. And it probably is supported. Up to a point. Because Microslop has a very bad-quality odf support in Word. Meaning: The support exists. It might not be able to read or save simple odf files that could be opened with anything else than Word, but the support exists all the same. Law fulfilled, all is good!
My kids’ public school is full microslop - outlook branded emails, meetings via teams, .docx files, SharePoint document sharing 🤮
I love the initiative, but in reality we’re very far away.