In order to fully de-soften, some German states have already started taking action.The Schleswig-Holstein state government in Germany announced that, except for the tax department, 80% of the state's public workstations have completely uninstalled Microsoft Office and fully migrated to the open source software LibreOffice.
The reason why there is still 20% that has not been transferred is because some specific administrative business systems are still technically heavily dependent on Microsoft components.
In response to this problem, Schleswig-Holstein has joined forces with other federal states to launch a special plan to gradually eliminate these residual dependencies through technology adaptation and system reconstruction in the next few months, and ultimately achieve open source replacement in all fields.
According to state government calculations, Schleswig-Holstein directly saved more than 15 million euros (approximately 124 million yuan) in licensing expenses by stopping the purchase of Microsoft commercial licenses.
In addition, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein also plans to invest approximately 9 million euros in 2026 for migration services and function development of open source systems.