I’ve been following the German government’s slow drift away from Microsoft for a while now, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern just made a move that caught my attention. They’re not just talking about open source — they’re actually rolling it out.
What’s Happening
The state is replacing Microsoft SharePoint with Nextcloud for its entire administration. We’re talking about more than 50,000 public employees eventually. Around 5,000 are already on it, and the roadmap includes chat, video meetings, and full groupware — essentially rebuilding the Microsoft 365 stack with open-source tools.
OpenProject handles their project management. And here’s the part I really like: they built their own AI assistant called LEA, based on OpenWebUI. No ChatGPT. No Copilot. They’re using European AI models like Mistral and Tilde — keeping everything away from US providers entirely.
Why This Matters
As someone who self-hosts as much as possible, I love this. Data sovereignty isn’t just a buzzword when a government actually acts on it. When your collaboration platform, your AI tools, and your project management all run on infrastructure you control, you own the whole chain.
The officials behind this say they expect greater control, improved security, and long-term cost savings. That tracks. When you’re not paying per-seat licensing to a single vendor, the economics shift. And when you can audit every line of code, security becomes something you verify, not something you trust.
The Bigger Picture
This isn’t happening in isolation. Schleswig-Holstein already pulled off a similar migration successfully, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern took inspiration from that. Multiple German states are now actively reducing their Microsoft dependency. It’s becoming a trend.
They’re not replacing Windows with Linux on desktops — yet. That’s still a bridge too far for most government IT departments. But the backend infrastructure is shifting, and that’s where the real power lives anyway.
Competition Is Good
I think this is healthy for the whole ecosystem. Having a different provider gives users a different approach to the same problem. Microsoft isn’t going to disappear, but when governments have real alternatives, the pressure to innovate and respect user data goes up for everyone.
Whether you care about open source, data privacy, or just want to see big tech face some real competition — what’s happening in northern Germany is worth watching. This isn’t a fringe experiment. It’s a state government betting that open source can run at scale, and putting 50,000 employees on the line to prove it.
I’m rooting for them.
