Gary Dean
Gary Dean is Indonesian, Chairman of the Okusi Group of companies, and co-founder of Yayasan Teknologi Terbuka Indonesia (YaTTI).
Last week, a coalition of European tech companies held a press conference in Berlin and announced a new office suite called Euro-Office. Documents, spreadsheets, presentations – standard productivity software. Except this wasn’t a product launch. It was a declaration of infrastructure independence.
Euro-Office launched on 27 March 2026 with backing from IONOS, Nextcloud, EuroStack, XWiki, OpenProject, and several other European organisations. A tech preview went live on GitHub immediately. First stable release is planned for summer 2026. The suite is a fork of OnlyOffice with closed-source components rewritten as open source, delivering full Microsoft format compatibility – DOCX, XLSX, PPTX – under European governance and European law.
Achim Weiss, CEO of IONOS, said it plainly: “With the geopolitical developments we have seen in the last year, there is a clear need for a reliable, fully Microsoft-compatible and easy-to-use sovereign office solution in Europe.”
They built it in the open. They put it on GitHub. They gave it away for free. And they did it in coordinated lockstep with sovereign cloud initiatives across Denmark, Estonia, Germany, and France. In three days, Europe went from talking about digital sovereignty to shipping code.
Indonesia has been talking about it for twenty years.
We Should Have Been First
The Indonesian open-source community has been advocating for sovereign technology infrastructure for decades. There have been proposals, meetings, presentations, ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Government ministers and bureaucrats nodded politely and then renewed their Microsoft licences.
I can speak to this directly. Okusi Group – 60 employees, four locations across Indonesia – has run entirely on open-source operating systems and productivity software for over twenty years. It works; it scales; and it costs a fraction of the proprietary alternative. But for corporate tax reporting, we were forced to maintain Windows installations, because DJP’s e-SPT application ran only on Windows using Microsoft Access databases. A government that claims to support Indonesian technology development was, until last year, literally mandating a foreign operating system for tax compliance.
After twenty years of this, the replacement – Coretax – was outsourced to a South Korean consortium for Rp 1.2 trillion. From one foreign dependency to another. Coretax then launched so badly that Indonesia’s own Finance Minister called it “salah desain” – wrong by design. DJP’s Director General publicly admitted the system made tax reporting “more complex”, the filing deadline had to be extended by a month with penalties waived nationwide, and a private bank felt compelled to run 27 education seminars across 15 cities just to help its clients understand the thing. Rp 1.2 trillion, and they couldn’t even get it to work.
In 2004 – over two decades ago – the Indonesian government launched IGOS, “Indonesia Goes Open Source”. It was a formal government initiative. It had a logo and everything. What it never had was sustained funding, political commitment, or follow-through. IGOS became a footnote. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s 280 million citizens generate data that flows through USA servers, USA cloud platforms, and USA productivity suites, all governed by USA law.
Europe acted out of geopolitical caution. Indonesia should be acting out of necessity. Europe has NATO. Europe has the EU. Indonesia is a non-aligned nation with no security guarantees from Washington. When the geopolitical winds shift – and they are shifting – Indonesia has no fallback. Our government data, our citizens’ records, our educational infrastructure, our healthcare systems: all sitting on platforms that answer to USA courts before they answer to Indonesian ones.
Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud, said about Europe: “Europe has had the technical building blocks for years. What was missing until now was an initiative to bring them together.” The same is true of Indonesia, word for word. The building blocks exist; the initiative does not.
What’s Actually at Stake
The USA’s CLOUD Act, passed in 2018, gives USA law enforcement the power to compel data from USA companies regardless of where that data is physically stored. Microsoft can build a data centre in Jakarta – it doesn’t matter. If you’re a Microsoft customer, USA authorities can request your data and Microsoft is legally obligated to comply. Not theoretically. Practically.
Indonesia passed UU PDP – the Personal Data Protection law – in 2022. It’s a good start. But data protection legislation is decorative if the underlying infrastructure answers to foreign courts. You can regulate data handling all you want. You can mandate consent frameworks and breach notification and processing limitations. None of it matters if the servers our government runs on are ultimately governed by the laws of another country.
This isn’t hypothetical. We watched the USA-China tech decoupling in real time. Huawei was cut off from USA semiconductors, Android updates, and cloud services overnight. The mechanism exists and the precedent is set. The only question is whether we want to discover our own vulnerability before or after someone decides to exploit it.
And consider the scope. Indonesian government agencies run Microsoft Office, schools teach on Google Classroom, and hospitals store records on cloud platforms operated by USA companies. Tax systems, immigration databases, national ID infrastructure – how much of this stack is genuinely under Indonesian control? Not Indonesian branding on USA infrastructure. Actual Indonesian control, under Indonesian law, on Indonesian servers, maintained by Indonesian engineers.
The honest answer is: not enough.
We’re Not Starting From Zero
Here’s what frustrates me most. Indonesia isn’t lacking capability entirely. It’s lacking coordination, political will, and – let’s be honest – a culture that values our own programmers.
The Indonesian open-source community is genuinely active. Indonesian developers contribute to major open-source projects globally. Nextcloud is already used by some Indonesian organisations. The tools exist, but the talent pipeline is broken – programming is not a valued profession in Indonesia. Developers with real ability leave – for Singapore, for Europe, for anywhere that pays them what they’re worth and treats software engineering as a serious career. What remains is, too often, not enough. This isn’t just an educational gap that a few coding bootcamps can fix – it’s a cultural problem: a deep-seated failure to recognise that the people who build our digital infrastructure are as strategically important as the people who build our roads.
BlankOn Linux – a Debian-based distribution built by Indonesian developers – first released in 2008 with real promise, is still going but only developing slowly. Same story as IGOS: good initiative, no sustained support. That pattern has to end.
What’s missing is what Europe just demonstrated: the political will to bring existing pieces together under a coordinated national strategy. Europe didn’t invent new technology. They forked OnlyOffice, put it under European governance, and launched a consortium. Indonesia can do exactly the same thing – and arguably should have done it first, given that our dependency is deeper and our safety net is thinner. But it won’t happen until we start treating our developers as a strategic national asset instead of disposable labour.
Seven Things the Government Should Do
Enough analysis. Here’s what needs to happen, concretely.
1. Mandate open-source for government procurement. Not as an aspiration. Not as a guideline. As policy, with compliance mechanisms and consequences. Every rupiah spent on proprietary foreign software is a rupiah invested in someone else’s sovereignty.
2. Fund a sovereign office suite consortium. Indonesia’s Euro Office. Fork LibreOffice or OnlyOffice, put it under Indonesian open-source governance with Indonesian language support built in from the beginning, and make it the default across all government agencies. The total cost would be a fraction of what the government currently pays in Microsoft licensing fees.
3. Build sovereign cloud infrastructure. Indonesian data centres, owned and operated under Indonesian law. Not AWS Jakarta or Azure Southeast Asia – actual sovereign infrastructure where the legal jurisdiction is unambiguous. Partner with Indonesian telcos and data centre operators who already have the physical infrastructure.
4. Give UU PDP real teeth on infrastructure. Amend the data protection framework to address infrastructure sovereignty explicitly. Data residency requirements mean nothing if the operator is a foreign company subject to foreign legal compulsion. Require that government and critical-sector data be hosted on infrastructure that is not subject to foreign jurisdiction. Full stop.
5. Fund the open-source community. The people who have been building Indonesia’s sovereign technology capability – for free, in their spare time, for fifteen years – deserve actual government support. Create grants, fund development sprints, sponsor contributors. This community is a strategic national asset and it has been treated as a hobby.
6. Mandate Open Document Format (ODF) in government. Break the DOCX lock-in at the document level. If every government document is saved in an open format, migration away from proprietary tools becomes trivial. This is the single cheapest, fastest intervention available and it should have been done a decade ago.
7. Build ASEAN digital sovereignty partnerships. Indonesia is the largest economy in Southeast Asia. If it moves, the region follows. Don’t build sovereign infrastructure alone – create regional partnerships with Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines. A shared ASEAN sovereign cloud and productivity stack would have the scale to be self-sustaining and the geopolitical weight to matter.
Control the Infrastructure, Control the System
The analysis that inspired this article ends with a line worth repeating: “Control the infrastructure, control the system – payments, software, cloud services, data storage. Every layer you make sovereign is a layer where foreign power cannot reach.”
The same logic applies to Indonesia. Every government system running on foreign infrastructure is a system that a foreign power can access, disrupt, or leverage. This is not anti-USA paranoia. It’s the same calculation that Europe – USA’s closest ally – just made publicly and acted on in seventy-two hours.
Indonesia is the fourth most populous nation on earth, the largest economy in Southeast Asia, and a G20 member. We should not be running our government on someone else’s software, storing our citizens’ data on someone else’s servers, and hoping that the geopolitical situation remains favourable.
Europe shipped code last week. Indonesia has been writing proposals for twenty years. The open-source community is ready. The technology exists. The only thing missing is the political will to act.
It’s time.
