Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS

A Dutch government-led initiative brings government, industry and civil society together to build a digitally autonomous workplace that replaces dependence on single-vendor suites. It argues that public IT must be inspectable, replaceable and reproducible to protect security, data protection and public values. The project advances five core goals - digital autonomy, collaboration, security, innovation and verifiability - and frames the workplace as a set of interoperable building blocks rather than a monolithic product so each component can be inspected, swapped or improved.

Technically, the effort centers on DAWO-NixOS and installation tooling to deliver a reproducible operating environment, alongside open and verifiable AI components, autonomous cloud infrastructure building blocks and open collaboration tools for communication and document workflows. A public blueprint, code repositories and a member portal host calendars, news, blogs and a forum; participation happens through conversations, code, documentation, pilots and events. The model pairs public and private actors on a shared blueprint, emphasizes transparency and replaceability of components, and supplies practical artifacts and community governance to enable government agencies to migrate away from proprietary stacks toward auditable, modular alternatives.