A live remark from SUSE reveals enterprise Linux leaders still depend on Microsoft Teams and Gmail, undermining their own open source sovereignty message.
SUSE bills itself as a champion of digital sovereignty and open source, yet an on-stage slip at the Open Source Policy Summit revealed the company still runs internal collaboration on proprietary tools.
Closing a panel, SUSE’s Dominic Laurie joked, “We’ll give you three minutes back, as they say on Teams meetings!” — effectively confirming use of Microsoft Teams rather than a FOSS alternative.
The contradiction is not isolated. Staff at Red Hat were observed working through corporate Gmail and Google Gemini, while Canonical reportedly relies on Google Apps internally, a practice publicly mentioned by former staffer Till Kamppeter.
The pattern: vendors selling enterprise Linux stacks still pay proprietary SaaS providers for everyday groupware.
That jars with the summit’s slogan, “Digital Sovereignty Runs on Open Source,” and weakens claims that organisations should escape foreign software dependence.
Ironically, Microsoft demonstrates the opposite approach. It has long “dogfooded” its own stack, migrating Hotmail to Windows and moving LinkedIn from CentOS to Azure Linux, using internal adoption to sharpen products and cut third-party reliance.
With thousands of employees — about 19,000 at Red Hat, 2,500 at SUSE and 1,200 at Canonical — groupware costs are significant. Paying external proprietary vendors undercuts both economics and sovereignty.
Meanwhile, FOSS options such as Open-Xchange, Nextcloud, Zimbra and Kolab already exist.
