Technology

I saw "Germany" in the title and instantly assumed it was a pilot program at a local government level because I thought I'd read somewhere that in Germany, the regional governments do most of the heavy lifting in terms of legislation, with a very limited federal government, but according to the article, I was wrong:

Germany has made ODF mandatory as the standard format for documents within its sovereign digital infrastructure. The decision is incorporated into the Deutschland-Stack, the framework governing the development, procurement and management of digital systems for public administration at all levels. This is neither a pilot project nor a recommendation from a working group, but a mandate backed by the federal government and the coalition agreement.

The official document has been published by the IT-Planungsrat, the central political steering body comprising the federal government and state governments, which promotes and develops common, user-oriented IT solutions for efficient and secure digital administration in Germany: https://www.it-planungsrat.de/beschluss/b-2026-03-it.

Good idea in general but coming with a big caveat:

Neither is this the first regulation making an open format mandatory, nor is Germany the first country to do it.

In the end it always fails because either a complete lack of enforcement or -even worse- an implementation so stupid it borders on malicious compliance (like using MS Office ODF compatibility that is so convoluted and broken that files are now saved as ODF but totalls unusable outside of MS crap).

For reference: see the EU's support of open formats for more than a decade and compare it to actual reality.