Since 2022, the City of Lyon, France, has been working on different measures to embrace open software solutions. In June 2025, the municipality announced two important measures to move away from the proprietary Microsoft Office package: start to use the Territoire Numérique Ouvert collaborative platform, and replace Microsoft software solutions with open source alternatives: OnlyOffice, Linux and PostgreSQL databases. 

Based on the official announcement, the city of Lyon has taken these measures to reduce their dependence on US service providers, enhance their digital sovereignty and promote the robustness and environmental sustainability of their IT systems. 

The Métropole Grand Lyon and the Inter-municipal Union for Information Technology in Cities (SITIV) have developed the Territoire Numérique Ouvert (TNO). This is a collaborative platform for local entities and public officers that can access open source solutions in the field of Digital Identity, Cloud, emails and collaborative document edition, such as Jitsi for videoconference or messaging. The TNO project has settled a collaborative platform that aims to: 

Thus, the TNO project has included the promotion of open source solutions as part of its Digital Transition targets. In terms of public funding, the TNO project has received 2 million euros from the National Agency for Territorial Cohesion (ANCT) in the context of the France Relance Plan. The ANCT supports the TNO project in the elaboration, development and implementation. The promotion and support to local companies has been one of the guiding principles of TNO. The project has its data centres hosted in France, out of which more than 50% of public contracts were awarded to companies in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, and relies on French companies' suppliers. At the moment of the announcement, there are officials from 9 local entities which use TNO.  

The municipality of Lyon has made the decision to progressively replace Microsoft software (Microsoft 365, Skype) by open source alternatives: OnlyOffice for office automation, Linux for the operating system, and PostgreSQL for databases. With this, the municipality will save costs for the absence of licensing fees, and overcome the risk of vendor lock-in. 

There is no official timeline for the implementation of the phase out yet, but the municipality of Lyon aims to reinforce the technological sovereignty of public services and prolong the life cycle of IT equipment as much as possible to reduce their environmental footprint.  In parallel, they organise training workshops for public servants, and set up a dedicated open source IT supporting team, to ensure a smooth transition to the new open source alternatives. 

With these measures, the municipality of Lyon has joined a recent trend of prioritising open source solutions  we have observed in other EU countries such as Denmark, Danish cities like Aarhaus and Copenhagen, and the German  region of Schleswig-Holstein.