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Germany has made ODF mandatory as the standard format for documents within its sovereign digital infrastructure. The decision is incorporated into the Deutschland-Stack, the framework governing the development, procurement and management of digital systems for public administration at all levels. This is neither a pilot project nor a recommendation from a working group, but a mandate backed by the federal government and the coalition agreement.

The official document has been published by the IT-Planungsrat , the central political steering body comprising the federal government and state governments, which promotes and develops common, user-oriented IT solutions for efficient and secure digital administration in Germany: https://www.it-planungsrat.de/beschluss/b-2026-03-it .

At this point, the question for all other European governments is clear: what are you waiting for? With this decision, the distinction between those who care about digital sovereignty and those who do not becomes stark.

Over the years, public administrations in Europe have accumulated a series of tired excuses, long since overtaken by the facts, for not making standard and open document formats mandatory. Let’s examine them one by one.

ODF isn’t mature enough . ODF has been an ISO standard since 2006. It is now at version 1.4, with active development, a broad ecosystem of implementations and adoption by numerous national governments, the European Parliament and major public administrations worldwide. The maturity argument has long been superseded.

Changing the document format requires staff retraining . The explicit principle of Germany’s sovereign stack is to reduce the effects of lock-in. If the objection is the cost of retraining, you are saying that the commercial interests of the dominant supplier outweigh those of citizens and institutions. This is an acceptable position in the private sector, but inadmissible in the realm of public policy.