Open-Source Office & Email: Will the Caribbean Follow Europe?

🇫🇷 Lire en français : Bureautique et messagerie libres : la Guadeloupe va-t-elle suivre ?

On 6 February 2025, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, lost access to his Microsoft email after being targeted by US sanctions. He had to switch, in a hurry, to a Swiss email service. Microsoft disputes having cut the service on its own initiative — but the damage was done: Europe had just understood, in real time, that a tool as ordinary as email could become a geopolitical lever. Since then, the shift toward open-source software has accelerated right across the continent. And it leaves me with a simple question: what about us, here in the Caribbean?

Europe’s wake-up call: a blocked email exposes the dependency  

That affair acted as a revealer. The International Criminal Court has since decided to adopt OpenDesk, an open-source collaboration suite developed by the German centre for digital sovereignty. And above it, the states fell into line.

France is leading the charge with LaSuite, the ecosystem of open-source tools run by its interministerial digital directorate, which aims to replace Microsoft and Zoom across the entire State by 2027. Its secure messaging app, Tchap, is used by around 400,000 government employees every month as of early 2026. At city level, Lyon has begun the gradual replacement of Microsoft Office with OnlyOffice, and of Windows with Linux. On the vendor side, Nextcloud — the most widespread file-sharing brick in Europe’s public sector — reports that its incoming enquiries tripled over the course of 2025.

All of this was coordinated at the Summit on European Digital Sovereignty, in Berlin in November 2025, which launched a Franco-German task force later joined by the Netherlands, Italy and Slovenia. In short: this is no longer a free-software activists’ fancy — it is an openly assumed public policy.

What I’ve been doing since the last century  

  Note

A nonprofit in Les Abymes contacted me in 2024: its messages were regularly landing in recipients’ spam folders, and it was using a free consumer webmail account. After moving to a managed professional email service, the deliverability problem all but disappeared, and the nonprofit regained a calendar and a contact book shared across its volunteers.

I didn’t wait for the Khan affair to get started. I’ve been hosting my own files and my clients’ on Nextcloud for a long time — since the days when the tool was still called ownCloud — rather than on seemingly free services like Dropbox. For office work, I use LibreOffice, and before it OpenOffice, since the last century. For email, I offer Kimoun clients a fully managed Zimbra service, with shared calendars and contacts, hosted in France in an OVH data centre.

This choice isn’t ideological; it’s strategic. OVH means hosting subject to the GDPR rather than the US Cloud Act, a controlled eco-index, and above all reversibility: you can leave with your data, no penalty. And with hindsight, that habit gave me a genuine head start, for a reason we almost always underestimate: the file format.

The real issue isn’t the software, it’s the format  

“Switching software is a weekend’s work — a migration, in our jargon. A file format, on the other hand, can keep you captive for ten years: that’s the real trap.”

— Olivier Watte, known as Oliver · founder of Kimoun

  Warning

A closed, proprietary format is a door whose key the vendor keeps. The day they raise their prices, change their terms or disappear, your documents stay behind that door. Captivity is almost never a conscious choice: it’s the default option, the one you end up stuck with for never having asked the question at the outset.

By working with interoperable, open and documented formats from the start, I have never — sorry, my clients have never — been held hostage by a vendor. That is the heart of digital sovereignty in daily life: not a flag, but the concrete ability to change tool, provider or hosting country without rebuilding everything. Interoperability against lock-in. It’s less spectacular than a prosecutor’s blocked email, but it’s exactly the same fight.

To Caribbean public bodies: a maturity indicator  

  Tip

Whether or not a territory adopts open-source tools developed or managed locally is not just a technical choice: it’s a marker of its economic and technological maturity.

When a public body opts for open-source tools developed or managed locally, it does far more than trim a licence bill. It keeps value on the territory, it feeds a local skills sector, it takes back control of its data. To my mind, that’s both an indicator and a stage of maturity: the territories that take this step are the ones that have stopped seeing themselves as mere consumers of imported technology.

Lyon did it. German states and Danish cities did it. So the question isn’t “is it possible?” — it’s “what are we waiting for?”. And the island argument works in our favour: a tool mastered locally is also a tool that stays operational when the link to the outside world weakens.

To businesses and nonprofits: we’ve moved past “yaka”  

  Tip

Close to €6 billion in revenue and 60,000 direct jobs in France: the open-source sector is growing faster than the tech industry as a whole.

The same reasoning applies to my clients — entrepreneurs, craftspeople, nonprofits. Adopting open-source office software and sovereign email is no longer a risky bet reserved for geeks. The tools are mature, compatible with your old files, and supported.

And this is where I want to insist on a point too often forgotten in national debates: the skills exist here. The University of the Antilles trains young people locally in integrating and maintaining these tools. In other words, we have the software, we have the infrastructure ( ethical hosting and non-captive tools are within reach), and we have the qualified workforce on the territory. We’ve moved past yaka — the good intentions, the “all we have to do is…” — and into yapuka: now we just have to get on with it.

There’s no forum on this blog, and the question I’m leaving you with deserves better than silence: at your level — public body, business, nonprofit — what’s the first tool you’d like to stop depending on?

So let’s continue elsewhere. Come talk it over on LinkedIn: I read and reply to the comments, and the best exchanges often end up becoming a future article. And if you’d rather get the follow-up without having to think about it, subscribe to the Kimoun newsletter: once or twice a month — a curated watch on what matters, breakdowns of local cases, and advice you can apply the very next week, sized for real-world budgets and teams. One-click unsubscribe.