Technology

This is horseshit.

It is worth remembering that many of those who champion Digital Sovereignty today were silent back in 2006, when the open ISO/IEC ODF standard — the pillar of Digital Sovereignty — was announced: not only did they not listen to us during all these years, but in some cases they greeted us with a condescending smile.

If we can speak of Digital Sovereignty in Europe today, it is thanks to The Document Foundation and LibreOffice community members at large, who kept the flag of open-source office suites flying when everyone was predicting their demise, and who continued to develop the only truly open and standard format that guarantees Digital Sovereignty, as it provides full user control over content.

The answer to this, is "thank you for your service". It is / was genuinely valuable. That being said, arguments about what people said or agreed with in the past is irrelevant to discussions about how to move forward.

The basic premise of this kind of arguing is a smell that you don't actually have a real argument to lean on. It's like credential dropping, it's a heuristic that hints at what could be a likelier truth than another, based purely on debate metadata, but that's it, and by their nature / definition, heuristics are constantly wrong.

Insisting on a white knight campaign to make a file format standard when you are not the standard file saving platform is Quixotic. It does not make you an ally of Microsoft to meet users where they're at.

The EU government mandating a certain file format might actually move the needle, a niche documenting software's defaults will not. This is why Microsoft's famous playbook was "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", not "try and force a niche number of users into making this a thing somehow" (of course, Microsoft has also tried and failed the latter playbook numerous times).