Other regions of Germany are starting to move away from proprietary tools and cloud services from the US in favor of FOSS.

The state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, in the northeast of Germany, has confirmed it is on the road to digital sovereignty and in the process of moving to Nextcloud in place of Microsoft SharePoint.

So far, around 5,000 staff are using their new FOSS tools for chat, video conferencing, and groupware, but the plan is to roll it out to more than 50,000 public employees. It is also using OpenProject. For now, the plan is to keep Microsoft client OSes, changing the groupware tools first. This is not a Linux migration… yet.

Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (sometimes Anglicized as Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania) is Germany's least densely populated state. It sits between Schleswig-Holstein to its west and Poland to its east. We mentioned Schleswig-Holstein last year for its move from Microsoft to FOSS tools.

The state government agency in charge of the migration is DVZ-MV, a handy abbreviation for Datenverarbeitungszentrum Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (it has a rather better formatted version of the same announcement). In October last year, the two states announced that they were cooperating for more digital sovereignty, and it looks like the agreement is working out. They are both aiming to use the same tools and platforms.

The news echoes changes down south in Bavaria. In February, state capital Munich's department for digitalization announced a new Sovereignty Check, co-developed with the Technical University of Munich, saying that digital sovereignty is now measurable. A few months later, the state Ministry for Digital Affairs said Bavaria was launching a project for digital sovereignty.

Local online newspaper Mittelstand in Bayern reports that Bavaria's billion-dollar deal with Microsoft is off, and it is looking for new alternatives. Since the 2018 elections, the state has been run by a coalition between the CSU (Christlich-Soziale Union) and the Freie Wähler (Free Voters). The state's Minister for Digital Affairs, Fabian Mehring, is from the Freie Wähler, and seems to be getting his way despite CSU opposition.

The Register has been reporting Munich's on-again-off-again efforts at moving to FOSS for over two decades now. In 2003, Microsoft was down and out in Munich and in 2004 the city embraced the penguin. In 2013, it was still under way, with Ubuntu replacing Windows XP. Then, by 2017, Munich had swung the other way: "To hell with Linux, we're going full Windows in 2020," as The Reg put it, even though it was going to cost.

That was the problem – the moves back then were driven by money. Now, though, they are driven by the realization that the US is no longer a reliable ally. As Finnish MEP Aura Salla put it at February's Open Source Policy Summit: "The EU runs on Microsoft. The US could turn us off inside one hour."

The Reg was reporting back in 2019 that Germany was keen on digital sovereignty, but now the need is more pressing – even if it risks billions. As smaller and less wealthy state governments in the north of the country make the shift, the Center for Digital Sovereignty in Public Administration (ZenDiS) gains experience and its openDesk suite gains credibility. After all, it's good enough for the International Criminal Court.

The Register has asked Microsoft for comment, as well as the Bavarian ministers and parties involved. ®