French City Of Lyon Ditching Microsoft For Open Source Office And Collab Tools

The French city of Lyon has decided to ditch Microsoft’s Office suite and plans to adopt Linux and PostgreSQL.

The République’s third-largest city and second-largest economic hub on Tuesday cited a desire to reduce dependence on American software, extend the lifespan of its hardware and therefore reduce its environmental impact, and strengthen the technological sovereignty of its public service.

Achieving those goals will see Lyon’s government, which serves over a million people, replace Office with OnlyOffice, a package developed by Latvia-based Ascensio Systems and made available under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License.

The municipality also plans to adopt a collaboration suite called “Territoire Numerique Ouvert” – Open Digital Territory – for videoconferencing and office automation tasks.

France’s L'Agence nationale de la cohésion des territoires – an agency that promotes industry development in the country’s regions – awarded a €2 million ($2.3 million) grant to help develop the suite and get it running in local datacenters. Nine French communities already use the suite, which has several thousand individual users.

At the time of writing The Register could not reach the territoirenumeriqueouvert.fr website so we can’t tell you much more about the suite for now.

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Lyon’s government employs almost 10,000 people, so losing it as a customer will briefly sting some regional Microsoft salespeople and partners but won’t make a noticeable dent in the software giant’s balance sheet.

However the city’s decision comes just weeks after Denmark’s’ Ministry for Digitalization decided to drop Microsoft and amid a European Union push to develop sovereign digital capabilities that has seen the likes of Microsoft and AWS try to reassure European customers that their cloudy continental outposts can’t be caught up in US claims to possess extraterritorial jurisdiction over data stored in facilities owned by American companies.

So maybe Lyon ditching Microsoft represents one more snowball in a growing avalanche. ®