Denmark's Ministry of Digitalisation has ended its pilot with Collabora, the open-source office suite meant to replace Microsoft Office inside the ministry. The ending was not announced. No press release, no ministerial statement, and on the public record, no published evaluation of the trial.
The pilot began in summer 2025, announced on 9 June by the then-minister for digitalisation. About 40 staff tested word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, with Danish delivery and support from the vendor cBrain. The goal was not just to show that an open suite works but whether it fits existing workflows: template compatibility, document exchange, integration with the electronic case-management system. The expectation was that a successful test would encourage other agencies to consider alternatives.
It ended quietly. The employees involved are back on Microsoft Office, no successor pilot has been announced, and no roadmap for open-source adoption has appeared. Golem.de reported the closure first; Danish and international trade press followed.
The missing evaluation is the real story. A failed pilot can be useful if it documents why it failed: format compatibility, macros in specialised case systems, training effort, support response times, or simply political attrition. Without that, other agencies and other European administrations are left to guess. The suspicion that runs through the coverage — internal resistance, lost interest — is unproven, and it stays unproven precisely because nothing is being published.
The pattern is not unique to Denmark. European governments like to launch sovereignty projects with visibility and end them without. Denmark has talked repeatedly in recent years about open-source dependencies, and it sits inside the wider European argument about how tightly public administration should be tied to one US provider's cloud and productivity stack. A 40-person trial is not proof that free office software is unfit. It is a data point about how hard such switches are to sustain politically.
For cBrain the closure is also a signal: the company put resources into a government-grade deployment and used it to show that local vendors can bridge open code and public-sector requirements. For Collabora, the Danish market remains open, the reference case does not.
What is missing is a plain answer to a plain question. Did Collabora fail the requirements, or was the trial simply never finished? Until the ministry says something, the only defensible finding is that a procurement decision was reversed without a stated reason — and that Microsoft Office remains the default in one more European ministry.
