Germany just made open document formats mandatory for all government agencies.

Federal, state, municipal. No more .docx as the default.

Microsoft isn't banned. You can still use Word. But you have to save as .odt now. And once you have to do that, the argument for paying Microsoft license fees gets pretty weak.

LibreOffice does ODF natively. It's free. It works offline.

When the format is open, switching tools becomes a preference, not a migration project. That's how lock-in breaks. Previous attempts were pilot projects. Munich tried in 2004, reversed by 2017.

This one is a binding mandate. For the entire country. We'll see if it sticks. But the direction is clear. Pretty cool!

letters.byburk.net/p/ge…