The Netherlands builds its own digital office platform Nix to replace Windows and Office to promote the implementation of digital sovereignty strategy

Abstract:

On September 24, the Dutch government is advancing an important plan aimed at enhancing the country's digital sovereignty and building an autonomous digital office environment based on Linux that can replace Microsoft's Windows and Office ecosystem. The project, called "Government Digital Autonomous Work Environment" (DAWO), covers not only operating systems, but also office software, collaboration tools, cloud services and operation and maintenance management platforms. The goal is to reduce dependence on foreign suppliers in the field of critical digital infrastructure.

Currently, relevant pilot projects have been tested within some Dutch government agencies. Participants include not only technicians, security experts and open source software advocates, but also ordinary public servants. Some local governments have even involved city council members in trials to evaluate the feasibility of the new platform in actual office scenarios.

Through the practical verification project organized by the Dutch Municipal Association (VNG), eight city governments have participated in the DAWO test. Cities that had previously publicly participated in the exploration included 's-Hertogenbosch, Zanstad, Ede and Amsterdam. Subsequently, more local governments began to study Linux and open source office solutions, such as the city of Groningen, which has also initiated relevant research.

DAWO was initially an exploratory project promoted internally by a few institutions, but it was officially supported by the central government in July 2026. The Dutch Interdepartmental Government Operations Committee (ICBR) authorized the establishment of a more autonomous and controllable standardized digital office environment, and the implementation tasks were jointly undertaken by the three major IT service agencies of the central government, SSC-ICT, DICTU and DUO-ICT.

The project leader pointed out that the digital office environment is not as simple as replacing an operating system. Once out of the Windows system, related office software, collaboration tools, cloud storage, backup systems and IT management platforms all need to be adjusted simultaneously. Therefore, DAWO is designed as a complete digital ecosystem rather than a single product.

The project is led by the Netherlands Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations. Victor Gevers, a well-known security expert and co-founder of the Dutch vulnerability disclosure research organization DIVD, is one of the core promoters of the project. He formed the core development team with Rutger Putter and Bram Buijs, and jointly promoted the construction of DAWO-Core with the broader open source community.

In addition to the open source concept, the project team places special emphasis on ease of use. They believe that to achieve large-scale rollout, the new system must not only satisfy the needs of technical experts, but must also be easily used by ordinary administrators and public servants. For example, the team developed a graphical management interface specifically for NixOS, rather than requiring administrators to rely entirely on command line operations. They hope to lower the learning threshold for traditional Windows administrators when switching to Linux.

The team also emphasized that there will be no mandatory requirements for participation in the open source community. Although they hope that more institutions will share their results and jointly build the ecosystem, they will not require all participants to disclose all their development results. Institutions involved in national security or sensitive business, such as the defense sector, are also allowed to retain some internally developed content.

The core background for promoting this project is the growing awareness of "digital sovereignty" in Europe in recent years. Although there have been many attempts to migrate from Windows and Microsoft Office to open source platforms in Europe in the past, many cases ultimately failed to last in the long term. Different from paying more attention to costs in the past, governments today are more concerned about control of digital infrastructure and potential strategic risks.

The project team believes that the event that really prompted the Dutch government to make the decision to promote DAWO occurred in 2025. At that time, the U.S. government imposed targeted sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. As part of the impact of the sanctions, Microsoft stopped providing some services, including email access, to the ICC chief prosecutor. Since then, it has been revealed that the US government is studying broader sanctions.

This incident made the Dutch government realize that a large number of critical digital services are actually subject to the US policy environment. Once the political situation changes, even government agencies and international organizations may face the risk of service restrictions or even interruptions. The project team views this as an important turning point for digital sovereignty issues to fully enter the policy agenda.

Subsequently, the Netherlands began to study and build its own "digital emergency system." According to the relevant person in charge, the emergency preparedness of a modern country should not only include drinking water, food and fuel, but also digital infrastructure that can operate independently under special circumstances.

During the technology route selection process, the team evaluated Linux distributions such as openSUSE and Fedora, and finally decided to use NixOS, which was developed in the Netherlands. Unlike distributions supported by commercial companies such as SUSE and Red Hat, NixOS is not attached to any company, and its core technology, the Nix package management system, was also born in the Netherlands.

Nix supports multiple platforms such as Linux, Unix, macOS, and Windows Subsystem for Linux. Its most prominent feature is its high degree of repeatable configuration and verifiability. Each software package in the system has an independent directory and is verified through digital signatures. This means that software configurations can be quickly copied and reused, greatly improving deployment efficiency.

The development team stated that approximately 80% to 90% of Nix configuration code can be directly reused between different organizations. At the same time, because all software components are traceable, when a security vulnerability occurs, administrators can quickly determine which systems are affected and deploy fixes faster.

This mechanism is also highly consistent with the currently widely discussed Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) concept. By fully understanding the building blocks of software, organizations can more easily conduct asset management and security governance. Currently, the Nix warehouse already provides about 150,000 software packages and is compatible with a large number of software resources from other Linux ecosystems, so developers do not need to build the entire software system from scratch.

Despite the emphasis on digital sovereignty goals, the project team did not shy away from the issue of cost. In particular, they pointed out that open source software does not mean that costs disappear, but that the cost structure changes.

Enterprises or government agencies no longer need to pay license fees to large software vendors, but they still need to invest in server hosting, developer compensation, system maintenance, and open source community support. The team believes that instead of continuing to flow funds to large foreign technology companies, it is better to use them to cultivate domestic technical talents and build a local digital industry ecosystem.

The relevant practices of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein are regarded as a typical case. The local government reinvested part of the budget originally paid to Microsoft into open source projects and community building to promote the development of independent technology ecology.

In addition to its strategic significance, DAWO is also expected to reduce expenses in some areas. Because NixOS has low hardware requirements, many of the devices currently used in the pilot project are old laptops that have been retired. Relevant agencies do not need to purchase additional testing equipment, and are even expected to continue to use older computers that cannot meet the requirements of Windows 11 in the future.

The project team believes that this can not only reduce procurement expenses, but also reflect the concept of sustainable development. By extending the life of devices, governments can reduce e-waste generation while reducing the environmental burden of hardware updates.

Although DAWO is currently mainly targeted at government agencies, project participants believe that its significance is far beyond the public sector. They emphasized that digital sovereignty involves the entire national economy, education system and industrial development. More adoption of domestic or European independent technology solutions means that more investment will remain in the region, promoting relevant talent training and industry growth.

However, the team also admitted that getting rid of long-term technical dependence cannot be completed in the short term. Building a complete independent digital ecosystem requires years of continuous investment. At present, the project has not announced a formal implementation timetable, nor has a comprehensive promotion date been determined. The DAWO community is advancing development work through consultation and consensus mechanisms in accordance with open source community practices.

The development team revealed that although the specific release time has not been finalized, they hope to launch the official version of DAWO 1.0 next year. The team is quite optimistic about future prospects and predicts that 2027 will be the "Year of the Linux Desktop", marking a historic step for the open source desktop system in the Dutch government system.