🇨🇭 10. Switzerland – EMOTA Law Enforces Open Code

Switzerland’s 2024 EMOTA law mandates that all government-developed software be made open-source and that open alternatives be considered by default. Federal IT authorities are currently piloting “openDesk” as a direct Microsoft 365 replacement.

This legal requirement puts transparency and cloud computing security at the core of federal digital transformation. With this move, Switzerland joins a growing club of European nations refusing to depend on foreign, black-box software.

Switzerland’s Federal Act on Electronic Means to Conduct Official Tasks (EMOTA), effective January 2024, elevates open source from “nice to have” to legal obligation. Article 9 compels every federal body to publish source code for software it funds. To ease compliance, the Federal Chancellery released tooling in October 2024: licence templates, security check-lists, and an automated exporter to GitHub Enterprise. The Federal Office of IT (FOITT) then launched a proof-of-concept for openDesk—a German-built alternative to Microsoft 365—on 1 500 workstations across three departments. Early metrics show a 17 percent reduction in incident tickets, largely because patch deployment is decoupled from Microsoft’s release cadence. More interesting is culture: procurement officers can now fork vendor proposals, tweaking them internally before re-tendering, an unheard-of level of agility in Swiss bureaucracy. From a cloud computing security angle, openDesk’s self-hosted model neutralises extraterritorial subpoenas, while the EMOTA-mandated SBOM publication lets independent researchers audit code for supply-chain risk. As cantons like Bern and Zurich join the OSS community of practice, observers predict a network effect: shared modules lower costs, which in turn funds deeper audits and faster innovation. In a nation famed for neutrality, Switzerland is cultivating a new kind of independence—digital, inspectable and, thanks to EMOTA, irreversible.