European Governments Grow Suspicious of Silicon Valley
David Meyer •
April 13, 2026
Image: Shutterstock
France’s abandonment of American software for open-source alternatives continues apace, with all government ministries now facing a fall deadline for outlining plans to reduce their dependence on U.S. tech.
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France’s Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs – known by its French acronym as DINUM – earlier this year announced a broad public-sector shift from U.S. videoconferencing services to a homegrown platform called Visio. Now the department itself is going to make a far deeper migration: it’s ditching Microsoft’s Windows operating system for Linux.
DINUM revealed the move at a Wednesday seminar it held with the National Cybersecurity Agency of France and state procurement officials, marking “an acceleration of the French and European strategy for digital sovereignty.”
The French government “must break free. We must become less reliant on American tools and regain control of our digital destiny,” said public action minister David Amiel.
“We can no longer accept that our data, our infrastructure and our strategic decisions depend on solutions whose rules, pricing, evolution and risks we do not control. The transition is underway: our ministries, our operators and our industrial partners are now embarking on an unprecedented initiative to map our dependencies and strengthen our digital sovereignty. Digital sovereignty is not optional,” he said.
Anne Le Hénanff, the minister delegate for tech and a longstanding critic of Microsoft’s dominance in public sector IT systems, said France is “leading the way” in furthering Europe’s quest for greater digital sovereignty.
DINUM itself only has around 220 employees, meaning its Linux adoption will only affect “a tiny fraction of France’s 5 million civil servants,” former DINUM chief open-source officer Bastien Guerry told ISMG on Monday.
But, all French ministries will need to have a formal plan this fall for reducing dependence on non-European suppliers, in a variety of areas: workstations, antivirus, artificial intelligence, databases, virtualization, network equipment and collaborative tools. There is no firm reduction target yet, but the State Procurement Department and Directorate General for Enterprises are working on it, in part by launching a drive to map IT dependencies across the public sector.
DINUM also used the event to hail the migration of 80,000 French National Health Insurance Fund agents to local solutions including Visio, the secure messaging service Tchap and file-exchange platform France Transfert.
There is an increasingly wide-ranging push in Europe to shift away from U.S. tech where possible, due to uncertainty over the trustworthiness of the current administration in Washington, D.C. France is somewhat ahead of the curve, having tasked DINUM back in 2021 with implementation of a state infrastructure program that’s heavy on open source as a driver of transparency and cost-cutting.
Étienne Gonnu, public affairs officer for the French open-source association April, said in a statement that DINUM’s latest announcement is “an important signal that should be welcomed while we await the details of the ministerial plans in favor of genuine strategic autonomy.”
Outside France – where the city of Lyon and some small municipalities are also going open-source – Denmark’s digitization ministry has announced plans to replace Windows with Linux and Office 365 with LibreOffice in its own operations. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein and the Austrian Armed Forces have moved to open-source productivity software, and LibreOffice patron The Document Foundation boasted last month that the German government had made its OpenDocument document format mandatory for the whole public administration there.
In a particularly symbolic move, the Hague-based International Criminal Court, said it was moving from Microsoft Office to Germany’s OpenDesk. This followed a May 2025 report that Microsoft canceled the Outlook email of ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan after U.S. President Donald Trump sanctioned Khan following court judges issuing an arrest warrant for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Microsoft President Brad Smith later said the company did not stop or suspend Outlook or other services to the court – although the incident was sufficient to spark fears that U.S. tech companies could at any time flip a “kill switch” to deprive Europeans of digital services.
It remains unclear which particular Linux distribution DINUM will use in its migration. ISMG has asked for confirmation of claims the directorate is opting for NixOS. Guerry, the former DINUM executive, said he would have preferred to choose the GNU Guix package manager, due to controversy over NixOS governance.
France’s National Gendarmerie – a branch of its armed forces – has developed its own version of Ubuntu known as GendBuntu, which it has been using for nearly two decades and which is now estimated to run on around 100,000 workstations. There is also a community-led, sovereignty-focused project called EU OS, developing a Fedora-based operating system for use across European public sectors, though it is yet to gain traction.
“Regarding the fact that French ministries have to prepare sovereignty plans this year, I believe it’s a good step forward if it encourages the procurement of free and open-source solutions (FLOSS) – not just ‘French’ solutions,” said Guerry, who is these days a co-founder of the BlueHats free-software advocacy group. “Adopting open-source solutions should be accompanied by the recruitment of FLOSS-savvy individuals within the administration.”
If French ministries are going to adopt European AI as DINUM also urges, then the choice there could be particularly straightforward. Europe has only one major provider of foundation models, Mistral, which offers open-source models and just happens to be French.