The Rule Behind the Choice
The Netherlands did not just decide to leave Microsoft. It wrote a second rule that ruled out two more well-known Linux options along the way. When developers working with the Ministry of the Interior picked a base for DAWO, the government's new digitally autonomous work environment, they turned down openSUSE, backed by the company SUSE, and Fedora, owned by IBM. They picked NixOS instead, a distribution led by a Dutch team, because developer Victor Gevers and colleagues Rutger Putter and Bram Buijs judged it the only option with no company controlling its direction.
That is a narrower test than not American, and a harder one to pass. Plenty of software counts as European while still answering to a single commercial owner who can change licensing, pricing or priorities on its own. The Dutch team's standard rules that out too.
Three Options, One Real Test
Set side by side, the choice was not close.
| Option | Who controls it | Dutch verdict |
|---|---|---|
| NixOS | No company; a Dutch-led open source project | Selected as the DAWO base |
| openSUSE | SUSE, a commercial Linux vendor | Rejected |
| Fedora | IBM, which owns Red Hat | Rejected |
Both rejected options are respected, widely used Linux distributions, and either would have gotten the Netherlands off Windows. Neither would have gotten it off vendor control, which is the part of the problem the DAWO team says it is actually trying to solve.
The Incident That Started It
The project traces back to early 2025, when the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor in The Hague reportedly lost access to Microsoft email and other services after the United States sanctioned the court. Dutch officials pointed to the episode as proof that a foreign company can cut off a government's tools on a foreign government's order, regardless of what the customer wants. Microsoft disputes that account of what happened.
Whichever version is right, the political effect was the same. By July 2025 the Interdepartmental Commission for Government Business Operations had turned a standardized, sovereign digital workplace into formal government policy, and three state IT providers, SSC-ICT, DICTU and DUO-ICT, were told to build it.
The Pilot Nobody Is Rushing
Eight municipalities are now running DAWO day to day, coordinated through the Association of Netherlands Municipalities, and the team behind it is aiming for a first stable release in 2027 with no fixed date for a nationwide rollout after that. For a project framed as urgent, the pace looks deliberately slow, which is itself a signal: swapping a government's entire desktop stack badly would recreate the dependency problem in a new, harder to fix form.
The Netherlands is not alone in making this bet. Denmark and France are running comparable exits from American office software, and France picked NixOS as its own base too, for the identical reason: an operating system a government depends on should not answer to any single company, foreign or domestic.
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