Austrian Armed Forces goes open source (LibreOffice)

LibreOffice[German]The Austrian Armed Forces have switched from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, an open source project. The reasons for this were not the licensing costs, but rather Redmond's "cloud push" and the army's desire for digital sovereignty.

Blog reader Viebrixx posted this on September 18, 2025, in the discussion area with "A positive surprise for once: Austrian Armed Forces switch to Libre Office. It wasn't the money that was the deciding factor, but… the cloud" (thanks for that).

Austrian Armed Forces has switched to LibreOffice

The Austrian Armed Forces do not want to abandon Microsoft Office, but have completed the migration to LibreOffice! The Austrian broadcaster ORF reported this in its O1 Mittagsjournal news program on September 16, 2025, in an article entitled Freie Software für das Bundesheer – Streitkräfte setzen auf LibreOffice statt auf Microsoft ("Free software for the Armed Forces – Armed forces opt for LibreOffice instead of Microsoft.").

Microsoft Office is out of the Austrian Armed Forces, whose procurement department has decided to switch to open source software in the form of LibreOffice. The developers of this office suite released LibreOffice 25.8 on August 20, 2025. The new version is said to be even more compatible with Microsoft Office and support PDF 2.0.

Exciting reasons for the change

The reasons behind the change are exciting. German site heise addressed this question in this article. The motive for this major shift by the large customer is not the software license costs saved for the approximately 16,000 office workstations of the army.

"It was very important to us to emphasize that we are doing this primarily (…) to strengthen our digital sovereignty, to maintain our independence in terms of ICT infrastructure, and (…) to ensure that data is only processed in-house," quotes Michael Hillebrand from Directorate 6 ICT and Cyber of the Austrian Armed Forces, who made these statements in an interview with ORF.

Key point: Michael Hillebrand explains that it was already apparent five years ago that Microsoft was moving steadily toward the cloud with Office. Processing data in external clouds is out of the question for the Austrian Armed Forces, said Hillebrand, and so the Austrian Armed Forces pulled the plug and kicked Microsoft out.

Steps for migration

Incidentally, the decision-making process began back in 2020—long before the current political developments in the US. In 2021, the decision was made to "go for it, it's much more exciting than just talking about 'we should do something about it'."

Detailed planning and training of internal developers began in 2022. These developers are responsible for improvements and the creation of additional software. It is interesting to note that employees were already allowed to switch to LibreOffice in 2022 if they wished.

In 2023, a German company was commissioned to provide support and external development. At the same time, internal e-learning for LibreOffice as a program was launched and LibreOffice was introduced on a mandatory basis in the first Austrian Armed Forces departments. This development is now complete.

The LibreOffice project benefits

In its article, German site heise reports that adjustments and improvements required by the military are being programmed and incorporated into the LibreOffice project. More than five man-years have already been paid for this work. This is something that can benefit all LibreOffice users.

The migration project was presented by Hillegrand and Stocker at the LibreOffice Conference 2025 in Budapest (the slides in English are available here). Slide 13 also contains a list of selected features that have been fed back into the LibreOffice project.

Currently, Microsoft Office 2024 may only be used by the Austrian Army with special permission. This means that they no longer have to deal with the end of support for Office 2016/2019 in October 2025, and their administrators don't have to struggle with Microsoft 365's quirks and bugs. The Austrian Armed Forces have thus regained a piece of digital sovereignty.

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