Summary
- The International Criminal Court will replace Microsoft Office with OpenDesk, a German open source package.
- OpenDesk was developed by the German Center for Digital Sovereignty and offers tools for email, chat, calendaring and document editing.
- Denmark and the German state Slesvic-Holstein are already migrating services to open software, such as Linux and LibreOffice.
The International Criminal Court (ICC), based in The Hague, Netherlands, will replace Microsoft Office with the OpenDesk suite, a German open source alternative. According to the newspaper Handelsblattthe change occurs due to security and digital autonomy concerns.
The German outlet claims that the change was motivated by Microsoft blocking the emails of chief prosecutor Karim Khan and other court officials, following sanctions from the Trump administration. Microsoft, however, denied the accusation.
OpenDesk was developed by the German Center for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDiS), created in 2022 by the German government. The package offers web tools for email, chat, video conferencing, calendar and document editor.
The organization’s motto is to be “sovereign by nature” and has also been collaborating with the French government to develop a national alternative to Google Docs.
Europe wants more sovereignty
The ICC’s decision follows the European Union’s wave of digital sovereignty. Denmark and a German state have already started to officially replace Microsoft solutions with open software in public bodies.
In June, the Danish Ministry of Digital Affairs announced the migration of Windows and Microsoft 365 to Linux and LibreOffice. In addition to the end of official support for Windows 10, which ended on October 14, the measure was attributed to the need to reduce software licensing costs.
Shortly after, the state of Eslésvico-Holsace, in Germany, did the same, exchanging Microsoft Teams and Office for open source alternatives in more than 60 thousand public jobs.
The Document Foundation, responsible for LibreOffice, has also been encouraging governments and companies to adopt open source solutions as an alternative to the end of Windows 10.
Source: https://tecnoblog.net/noticias/corte-foge-da-microsoft-e-adota-codigo-aberto/
