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HTML Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)
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dgan wrote 1 day ago:
I always wondered : govt needs support for their IT infra; students
need experience. Every damn uni / eng school have a ton of
"associations". Just delegate software support/development into
universities/eng school? I see it as a win-win
huntoa wrote 1 day ago:
A token gesture. Europe is extremely dependent on foreign tech. I don't
see the political will to really change that. I think the main causes
are corruption, incompetence, extortion (negotiations on trade, etc.),
and short-term thinking of politicians and managers. People did warn
them, but they were ignored. They fucked the citizens long-term.
Treason.
Critical infrastructure, such as energy, healthcare, or train service,
runs on US software and services and thus only works as long as the US
allows it. In Germany, the German Railway moved all of their software
services into US clouds and shut down their own data center. That
didn't protect them from a recent DDoS, taking down their main
customer-facing site for hours.
Meanwhile, the local job market abounds with job ads from government
agencies and private businesses, requiring administrating MS software
(AD, 365, Exchange), cloud and doing "Power"-stuff.
The study "European Software and Cyber Dependencies" [1] (Dec 2025)
from of the European Parliament explains the dire state. It's full of
money quotes:
"Non-EU actors, primarily US companies, control nearly all critical
layers of Europeâs digital stack. These dependencies are reinforced
by vendor lock-in, long-term contracts, proprietary formats, & network
effects that limit switching and suppress market entry for EU
innovators"
"80% of European corporate spending on software and cloud flows to US
vendors."
"Public administrations rely heavily on Microsoft and Google
productivity suites, with only isolated instances of migrations to
open-source alternatives"
"A case study of the EUâs energy infrastructure provides a further
illustration of how its digitalisation creates critical cyber
dependencies. Industrial control, grid management, and market-trading
software increasingly rely on non-EU vendors and cloud platforms."
"Such heavy reliance on US tech and vendors results in [...] tangible
sovereignty risks. The CLOUD Act, FISA Act and US sanctions regimes
give US authorities legal reach over data of European citizens and
institutions hosted by American providers."
"Dependence extends across the supply chain â from chips and hardware
(90% of advanced semiconductors imported) to developer tools and
standards (GitHub, Docker, and major programming frameworks are
US-governed);"
"The EUâs digital trade deficit exceeds EUR 100 billion annually"
"These outflows finance US R&D and jobs: according to one study,
retaining just 15% of this spending could create around 500,000 jobs in
Europe by 2035;"
"Lock-in inflates long-term costs and undermines innovation, while
dependence on external platforms diminishes Europeâs leverage in
trade and security negotiations;"
"Europeâs software and cyber dependencies are becoming a structural
strategic liability. [...] without decisive action, Europe risks
becoming a âdigital colonyâ- dependent on othersâ platforms,
standards, and priorities for decades to come."
"[EU]âs deep reliance on non-EU tech is a strategic vulnerability. It
exposes the EU to geopolitical coercion (a de-facto âvirtual kill
switchâ), with potential cascading disruption across finance, health,
energy and transport if access to [â¦] cloud or key software is
curtailed.
"In the current geopolitical scene, technology interdependence is being
weaponised. External pressure can push the EU to dilute rules or face
retaliatory trade measures, while dependence reduces Europeâs
geopolitical leverage."
"the EU already faces pressure to dilute its own digital regulations to
appease allies or avoid retaliation â recently, trade negotiators
even been softening EU digital rules (like the new Digital Markets Act)
in exchange for avoiding US tariffs"
"if a major US platform suffered a prolonged outage, or if
transatlantic relations deteriorated, leading to data access blocks, a
large swath of European business and government services could grind to
a halt."
"semiconductors account for about 80% of the strategic value of a data
centre; building AI campuses without European hardware will therefore
send most of the value abroad"
HTML [1]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2025/778576...
bigyabai wrote 1 day ago:
If it can stop Hague prosecutors from having their emails deleted,
then it's not exactly a "token" so much as it is a defensive
mitigation.
Emen15 wrote 1 day ago:
The interesting question is not "can LibreOffice replace Word" but
whether Denmark is restructuring identity, device management, and
procurement to avoid recreating lock in elsewhere. Office is visible,
but AD or Entra, MDM, compliance tooling, and vendor tied workflows are
the real gravity wells. The success metric is not feature parity. It is
whether dependency risk is measurably reduced over a 5 to 10 year
horizon without fragmenting operational continuity.
aucisson_masque wrote 1 day ago:
[1] Related
HTML [1]: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulatio...
aucisson_masque wrote 1 day ago:
> If everything goes as expected, all employees will be on an
open-source solution during the autumn
For once, it's very fast.
encom wrote 1 day ago:
>reduce dependence on U.S. tech firms
Let's have a look:
$ host -t A digmin.dk
digmin.dk has address 172.232.147.252
digmin.dk has address 172.233.57.17
$ whois 172.233.57.17 | grep -i orgname
OrgName: Akamai Technologies, Inc.
OrgName: Linode
Pathetic.
This kind of press release happens every so often. It's an election
year, so that probably explains it. Nothing ever comes of it. As
someone employed in the danish public sector, I'd love nothing more
than to never have to use Outlook again, but it's unlikely to happen.
kakoni wrote 1 day ago:
Does somebody have the latest on how the Epic EHR is doing in
Copenhagen/Zealand regions?
capevace wrote 1 day ago:
I really wish there was a EU alternative to Cloudflare. Their
featureset and DX is the best in the industry IMO but their data
sovereignty features are sadly not really good enough for most EU
enterprises we talk to.
The fact theyâre an American company is unfortunately the dealbraker.
We could store data outside of CF network but that defeats the point of
the one stop shop.
Flatterer3544 wrote 1 day ago:
Denmark was literally the US lapdog for such a long time, open to
provide access and info. Denmark was the first to follow US into Iraq,
while the rest of Scandinavia was much more skeptical.
Guess just bad luck with Greenland turning them the complete opposite
direction, since I was certain that Denmark would be the one of the
last to go against US in any way.
jeroenhd wrote 1 day ago:
As a Dutch citizen, I take issue with that. Our politicians worked
hard to be considered the USA's most reliable lapdog!
People also ridiculed the French for maintaining independence of
American influence for decades, even within the EU/EEG/etc., but that
should prove that the America-sceptic voices have always been around,
even if they weren't the most influential. It's also not the first
time the Americans have eyed Greenland, that's why they have
negotiated the right to set up military bases there.
After European countries aligned with America's overreactions in the
Middle East as a gesture of goodwill (but also to buy political
capital, despite the Americans starting an intense smear campaign
against the French for not falling for their propaganda), European
governments expected to be handled as an ally at the very least.
The past decade, the people of the USA and their representatives have
dropped all pretences and the slow and steady criticism in the
background has now made it to the foreground. The political capital
countries tried to buy by doing what Washington asked has turned out
to be worthless.
With recent threats of invasion and the diplomatic problems American
representatives have caused, it's getting harder and harder to see a
future where European governments end up treating the USA any
different from other (upcoming, but not necessarily
politically-aligned) world powers such as China, Russia, India, or
Pakistan.
eitally wrote 1 day ago:
The problem isn't plain MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). The more
nefarious set of issues is around domain-specific software that is only
compatible with Microsoft platforms and software.
For example, Veeva Vault is the industry standard content (and content
workflow) platform for life sciences. It's a heavy, somewhat
unpleasant platform similar to a Workday or ServiceNow, but it's
ingrained and it compliant with all life sci regulatory bodies'
regulations. It requires customers use SharePoint and Office under the
hood.
Things like that can't just be ripped out and replaced because there
are no FOSS options.
thomasjudge wrote 1 day ago:
There are a number of US states that have moved off Microsoft (mostly
to G-Suite) and a number more that are considering it. And yes it won't
be EVERYone (you can pry excel out of accountants cold dead hands) or
everyTHING (obviously mainly Windows) but it's at least a blow against
the pricing and quality issues from MSFT
sublimefire wrote 1 day ago:
However you like it or not banning just one company is not a recipe for
success. IMO the issue is in the procurement and how these tenders are
worded. For instance, if the requirement is data residency backed by
private keys and conf compute then put it in writing. The idea that
some other vendor will come in and solve this problem without such a
requirement upfront will not hold for long.
By and large MS problem is that our world gets fragmented and you need
to have products that adapt, eg great firewall in China, strict data
residency in Europe. It is difficult to achieve that without segmenting
your products as well.
dagaci wrote 1 day ago:
Its understated, but this kind move is now systemic in the EU due to
the sanctioning of ICC & EU officials and random people who hurt the
presidents feelings requiring Microsoft to remotely kill access to
resources tied to Microsoft Accounts.
Without rules of law its literally irresponsible for EU to have this
kind of heavy dependency on US corporations.
neuroelectron wrote 1 day ago:
Previous post on this subject--
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46636445
tjwebbnorfolk wrote 1 day ago:
I look forward to reading these exact same articles 10 years from now:
"EU contemplating debate over a draft proposal to definitely invest in
a consulting contract to study the migration of a part of one agency to
a homegrown office suite away from Microsoft"
notepad0x90 wrote 1 day ago:
Great for them. But are they just going too mooch off of open source
software then? Nothing wrong with that, so long as they fund developers
and projects.
miroslavr wrote 1 day ago:
I am wondering what EU was doing 20+ years in the digital world? Why
doesn't it have own video streaming, cloud, email, social net... pretty
much all that we use now Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft for. It is very
difficult for fragmented Europe to have the central service in pretty
much any domain. And its citizen and ruling classes were sleeping 20
years living cozy.
bookofjoe wrote 1 day ago:
One of the driving themes of "Industry" Season 4 is precisely this:
what happens to your data once big players ahold of it.
arbirk wrote 1 day ago:
Can we just use markdown already?
Beijinger wrote 1 day ago:
Well, not really surprising, considering that Trump wants to snap
Greenland and Microsoft's founder likes to fuck Russian prostitutes on
Epsteins island. Both is not really inspiring confidence to run a
government infrastructure on such software.
m00dy wrote 1 day ago:
I lived in Denmark for quite a while, donât ever believe that,
because itâs never going to happen.
ChrisArchitect wrote 1 day ago:
(2025)
Story from June OP?
Lots of discussion then: [1]
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234552
HTML [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44255352
rbbydotdev wrote 1 day ago:
An EU Linux distro could be interesting
cs702 wrote 1 day ago:
In the past, a small number of European cities or municipalities have
tried to move away from proprietary software, but those have been
isolated cases, lacking broader support.
This time, things look different. Anecdotally, more people in Europe
now suddenly actually care about this. They no longer want their
governments to rely on software controlled by US companies, because
they no longer trust it. Many are shocked and upset about recent US
actions that they view as "detestable," including "irrational efforts
against NATO," "nonsensical tariffs against allies," "ICE raids that
trample over human rights," and "missiles targeting boat survivors."
I'm paraphrasing what others have mentioned to me here. Whether you
agree or disagree with these concerns, they are valid for many
Europeans. They don't particularly care for the open-source movement on
its own, but they now view open-source software as a more desirable
alternative.
In an ironic twist of fate, the US government's actions could end up
causing long-term damage to US tech companies.
This is all based on anecdotal evidence, so I could be wrong, but I
have to call it like I see it.
tsoukase wrote 1 day ago:
An open source replacement of proprietary SW is very easy in the
beginning but becomes hard quickly. You grab a Linux distribution and
the App that match the functionality at best and call it a day. But the
next day a bunch of problems arise: some features are not implemented,
the UI is not ergonomic, the stability is not there and when updates
come, the situation goes overboard. The billions of dollars don't start
software, they end it polished and consumer ready.
encom wrote 1 day ago:
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=FUD
JSR_FDED wrote 1 day ago:
Of all the Microsoft products, Excel is going to be the hardest to
replace. Firstly, it's critical in many organisations. We all know you
shouldn't run your business on a spreadsheet, but everyone does. Just a
tiny difference in how data is handled, an unsupported macro, a missing
formula...the whole deck of cards collapses.
Secondly, while people only use 20% of its features, everyone uses a
different 20%.
acidburnNSA wrote 1 day ago:
That is a common and reasonable sentiment. I can't help wonder if
Claude Code will move this needle. Maybe people will stop relying as
much on excel?
mark_l_watson wrote 1 day ago:
Some degree of national pride and independence simply makes a lot of
sense: slightly modified Linux distros set up for local information
resources and banking, tuned open LLMs, local web site indexing and
search, and parallel backup financial infrastructure.
I get that some of these things are difficult to do, but small steps
lead to larger steps.
202508042147 wrote 1 day ago:
I know someone that works in the central government of an EU country
and have persuaded her to talk to the IT department in the ministry
where she works to try to move away from Microsoft products. The short
answer: "It's not possible for us to move away from Microsoft". And
it's not that they don't want to, but they have extremely low IT
resources + the employees are very reluctant to make any change.
Sometimes they introduce a new program, or update an older one and
there's massive whining in the entire ministry. These public employees
should really try to adapt more and understand that digital
environments have become crucial for independence, privacy and
self-reliance.
fyredge wrote 1 day ago:
There's something about governments moving to open source software that
doesn't sit well with me. The only advantage I can see is reduction in
expenditure with free software.
I believe we should go a step further and institute open standards.
Move away from .docx and to .odt in document submission on government
websites. This gives users the flexibility of choice as long as they
adhere to a specific standards. This would also hopefully alleviate
some of the mess of inconsistent rendering of the same document on
different software.
timbit42 wrote 1 day ago:
What are you talking about? ODT is an open standard.
rambojohnson wrote 1 day ago:
Europeâs reading the room and building exits. Theyâre also cutting
dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a
declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term bet. Wero, the digital
euro, local infrastructure, all of it points to the same thing:
financial sovereignty matters when America looks more like a
geopolitical liability.
my read is that 2026 to 2027 is basically Europe saying, "we should
probably stop wiring the house through a burning building." Payments,
cloud, office software, data infrastructure, all of it.
so Denmark moving to cut Microsoft dependence in the name of digital
independence is basically the same story. When the US starts looking
less like stable infrastructure and more like a chaotic landlord,
everyone starts building their own exits.
jajuuka wrote 17 hours 45 min ago:
I'm not sure conflating US corporations and the US government is
really logical. Microsoft isn't a startup from the US, it's a
worldwide corporation. Same with Visa/Mastercard and others. Whatever
buffoonery happens in the White House doesn't really get reflected
out across US based organizations. It's like being worried about
Siemens stability during a German economic downturn or political
upset.
I think this has much more to do with rising nationalism. (I know the
EU isn't a country. It's just the best word I can think of to fit. )
It's not like Denmark is saying they plan to use technology from the
global south, Asia or are open to options. It's an attitude of "we
want to support European companies". That's not inherently bad, but I
fear this is just another expression of this isolationism that is
becoming more popular in Europe. That's not to say it's exclusive or
unique to Europe, but just recognizing the ways it shows up.
tibu wrote 14 hours 23 min ago:
The US government can require a US company lots of things. After
POTUS declared that he wants Greenland I can totally understand
Danmark wants to get rid of everything US.
trinsic2 wrote 22 hours 32 min ago:
I'm really glad Europe is making these changes. We have an
authoritarian government that needs to go down in flames. The more
pressure this puts on everyone to stop using centralized
anti-competitive products the better off we all are.
deterministic wrote 1 day ago:
It's about time that Europe take independence seriously.
TacticalCoder wrote 1 day ago:
> Theyâre also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying
your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term
bet.
People need to get real here and I've got numbers: Europe is the
declining, unstable empire.
The US is the US and in three years there's going to be another
president. But the EU's problems are much deeper.
Inflation-adjusted, since the 2008 crisis, the Eurozone's GDP barely
grew while both China and the US' GDPs grew like crazy.
2008 to 2025 Eurozone's GDP: $14 trillion USD to $17 trillion USD
(+18%, inflation adjusted it's basically zero)
US same period: about $15 trillion to $30 trillion [1] China same
period: $4 trillion to $19 trillion, going from not a quarter of the
Eurozone's size in 2008 to surpassing the Eurozone in 2025 FFS! In 17
years. This is jaw dropping.
That's when reality should kick in for people who believe the EU is
not declining.
At this rate it's not even declining: it's falling from a cliff.
Now, sure, the Eurozone ain't the entire EU and countries outside the
Eurozone like Poland are, thankfully, doing better. But things still
look terribly bad.
Moreover The EU managed to shoot itself in the foot by destroying the
biggest export of its biggest economy: german cars. They handed over
the market to chinese EVs.
The EU also managed, when the US advised it not to, to become
dependant on Russia for energy. And of course four years ago we now
all know how well that played for Germany: Russia wasn't our friend
anymore and energy price --and the industries in Germany do need lots
of energy-- skyrocketted.
The EU is destroying itself both economically and culturally. Things
are looking terribly bad over here.
I don't know how anyone can look at the US and at China's GDP growth
compared to the Eurozone and believe that somehow Europe is doing
fine.
Europe is not doing fine: Europe is definitely a declining, unstable
(lots of far-right vs far-left parties opposing themselves in
elections in many EU countries now) empire.
That said I very much welcome ditching MS software. [1] round numbers
but it is what it is:
HTML [1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP
conz wrote 1 day ago:
Re: "Europe is not doing fine: Europe is definitely a declining,
unstable (lots of far-right vs far-left parties opposing themselves
in elections in many EU countries now) empire."
If this is reality in Europe, which is perhaps likely, then by
comparison, the US has devolved into failed-state status. Better a
slow decline than a catastrophic fall into the
constitutional/regulatory/legal/technological/scientific abyss.
Even if Europe has insurmountable problems, its best move forward
is to decouple strategically from the US, and these days, all
things strategic are underpinned by information technology. The
fact that Europe (soon to be followed by Canada, Australia and New
Zealand) is heading down this path is why the US has hit the panic
button[0].
Re: "The US is the US and in three years there's going to be
another president. But the EU's problems are much deeper."
The US may have another president or even another style of
president, but that wont stop this migration away from American
technological/strategic hegemony; because at this level and at this
scale, complete trust by former allies, once lost, will never be
regained. The US century is now over.
Thankfully open source software is there as an alternative to that
US software. I guess it's no co-incidence that LibreOffice and
Linux both have their roots in Europe.
[0]
HTML [1]: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regul...
jbm wrote 1 day ago:
> The EU is destroying itself both economically and *culturally*
I understand the former. Can you clarify the details around the
later? I hear this often, but the people I hear it from are not
the most trustworthy or the most knowledgable.
AlexeyBelov wrote 2 hours 5 min ago:
According to his other comments it's about immigrants...
themafia wrote 1 day ago:
> to a declining, unstable empire
It's funny that we've wrapped the clock all the way around and people
don't see Europe as the declining and unstable empires anymore.
> less like stable infrastructure
It's perfectly stable. The news makes a lot of money generating
interesting in overstating this problem. The supreme court is
designed for national stability. It is doing it's job. It just
doesn't act _instantly_, and if you're aiming for actual stability,
you don't want it to.
bean469 wrote 1 hour 37 min ago:
> The supreme court is designed for national stability.
On the contrary, I think that many of the rulings during this
administration caused a lot of uncertainty among lawmakers
trinsic2 wrote 22 hours 22 min ago:
> The supreme court is designed for national stability.
lol my ass. We have a corrupt Adminstration with a corrupt Supreme
Court. The only thing it's doing is making people less safe to
enrich the people at the top. This kind of response is
embarrassing.
prepend wrote 1 day ago:
So itâs like Europe is ungoogling itself from the US?
partiallypro wrote 1 day ago:
I don't know how to break this to you, but Europe itself has been the
burning building for 20 years. I don't see that changing any time
soon. The anti-US stuff is largely flailing, the US is better
positioned than Europe for the next 20 years also. They struggle with
investment, have almost no large companies left of any merit in tech,
have political problems that are similar to the US's, and regulate
themselves to death. It would take a political revolution in Europe
to fix that, and frankly they don't have it in them.
trinsic2 wrote 22 hours 19 min ago:
Wow there is some serious rep management going on here. Trump
Adminstration getting scared their empire collapsing?
aucisson_masque wrote 1 day ago:
That's extremely condescending and naive. I'd say Europe citizen
are in much better situation than the usa citizens, don't care
about tech sector or shareholder revenue.
Usa still don't even have universal social security and medications
are overpriced 10 time more. Just to name a few.
Then there is the American debt. Good luck with that when countries
are switching from dollar to yen and euro. No really, I think that
there are enough challenge to overcome in the states that you don't
need to be condescending.
themafia wrote 1 day ago:
> Usa still don't even have universal social security
It does though. There are several programs, some administered
by the federal government, and some by the states. We don't
have "single payer" but we absolutely have "universal social
security."
> and medications are overpriced 10 time more.
If you use the sticker price. Sure. It looks that way. If you
use the actual pharmacy receipts the story is far different.
tick_tock_tick wrote 1 day ago:
> my read is that 2026 to 2027 is basically Europe saying, "we should
probably stop wiring the house through a burning building." Payments,
cloud, office software, data infrastructure, all of it.
I think you transposed some numbers in those dates it's more like
2062-2072. All of those things need to be built first and frankly all
the initiatives started long before the current USA situation. The EU
has been aware that it is wholly dependent on the USA for a myriad of
reasons for a very long time now but barely seemed to care.
We'll see if anything actually happens it's a very thankless thing to
push for politicians.
JaggerJo wrote 19 hours 39 min ago:
Most solutions already exist as open source software.
ilikerashers wrote 1 day ago:
Europe has just been catastrophically slow in developing anything
related to it's own tech infrastructure. Its doesn't back itself.
Given how poor it's responding to things like the Draghi report, I
wouldn't anticipate success. Just more flailing around and working
groups.
trinsic2 wrote 22 hours 29 min ago:
We will see. My guess is 5 to 10 years these anti-competitive
regimes will collapse as more and more people move away from bad
actors like our current administration.
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
Europe isn't a country, and as such each nation has its own agenda,
and political relations.
For bad or worse, not all European national governments see the
world through the same glasses.
wolvesechoes wrote 1 day ago:
9/10 conversations on things happening across Europe can be
thrown into trash bin, as they treat EU, or even Europe as a
whole, as a single political entity. I could somehow accept that
Americans can display such ignorance, but amazingly pretty often
this mistake is being made by people declaring themselves as
European. Like, are they blind to the political reality that
surrounds them?
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
I can understand talking about us as a wide group, given how we
share many cultural points of view, ways of working are still
closer that across the pound, many being polyglot, having seen
the same cartoons as kids and so on, regardless of the
differences that remain, however we are still quite far away
from turning into United States of Europe. The growing rights
sentiment, is exactly because many nationals don't want going
that far, among other issues.
Also not everything that gets regulated in Brussels, gets
adopted by local goverments, and additionally there are plenty
European countries that still aren't part of EU organisation.
Yeah, cannot understand this misunderstanding when coming from
Europeans, as you mention.
mytailorisrich wrote 1 day ago:
Cynically, my view is that this is actually on purpose and
pushed by the EU itself. My is happening in with Russia,
Ukraine, the US is used as a narrative tool to push for EU
federalisation. This means pushing for more EU control, which
we are seeing, and minimising references to individual
countries. Even the "sovereignty" push is fully through the
lens of more EU oversight (which is oxymoronic but a powerful
political narrative).
ExoticPearTree wrote 23 hours 57 min ago:
I don't think that is going to happen anytime soon. First
thing the EU is that it needs to be reformed from the
ground up and have elections for the general commissioner
and its cabinet. Commissioner positions should be handed
over to every country just because. The whole of Europe
should vote who they want for agriculture, who they want
for foreign relations and so on. The way it works now is
very very wrong and a big disservice to EU citizens.
pydry wrote 1 day ago:
There are plenty of european hosts (e.g. hetzner) and with payments
systems the technology is rarely the problem it's the politics. I
imagine EPI will have no problem succeeding.
The major problem Europe has (mentioned in the draghi report) is
with industrial competitiveness and strategy and access to cheap
energy.
With the former it's not like the US is doing any better though. I
dont think anybody in the west even has an industrial strategy.
jongjong wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, it's glaringly obvious to me that they've been actively
suppressing their own tech sector. Feels like a lot of EU
politicians owned shares of US tech companies.
This effect of politicians making decisions based on what
corporate shares they own is ubiquitous now.
In the other direction, I even wonder if US threats about
Greenland were related to this trend of Denmark moving off US big
tech. I feel like the real game is military coercion dressed up
as economics.
I suspect if people knew the real reasons behind each political
decision, they'd be shocked. I'm sure it's all 100% about money;
about taking as much as possible whilst giving as little in
exchange as possible; filling the gap with pure coercion.
Thlom wrote 1 day ago:
It's a racket. The US have provided military protection in
exchange for Europe tying itself to the mast of the US empire.
Some of it is unspoken, some of it is contracted, especially
concerning military hardware.
ilikerashers wrote 1 day ago:
Yeap. I worked in the UK public sector and I watched the UK gov
briefly back their own cloud company (Skyscape) then ditch them
when they had some minor issues.
Completely captured by US tech
tchalla wrote 1 day ago:
> Theyâre also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying
your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term
be
Digital euro push is beyond the current US administration if thatâs
what you are hinting at. The trigger was Big Tech payments (Facebook
Libra) and the rise of BTC.
retired wrote 1 day ago:
Is there a European alternative to Microsoft 365?
Most platforms like Nextcloud focus on file storage, email, documents
and video conference but don't do anything similar to the identity
management, provisioning, policies and SSO that Office 365 provides.
A national government is large enough to run their own Keycloak
instance but a regional branch of government would be better off with
having a SaaS for that.
It would be great if the EU would subsidize a full alternative to
Microsoft 365 and give every government worker in every EU country an
account to that. Just grab a random laptop from the shelf, install
EUnionOS, log-in to EUnionCloud and have all the required apps for
their work install themselves, set all the rights correctly, mail works
automatically, automatic access to the correct files. Full disk
encryption, theft protection etcetera.
wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
You can always pick other components for those things. Many
enterprises do this also because the included parts in M365 are
usually pretty mediocre compared to AAA solutions that specialise in
that part. For example dedicated MDMs are better than Intune.
Dedicated IDPs are better than Entra AD. Dropbox is better than
OneDrive, slack is way better than teams (to be fair, anything is
better than teams :) )
The big benefit of the MS package is that you get it all for one
price. And that it's integrated so you have less configuration. But
they're not deal-breakers. That's why parties like Okta and
MobileIron still exist. Airwatch was also really good but VMware
screwed them up like they screw everything up.
But M365 is not the only game out there. Unless you're limiting
yourself to wanting exactly what M365 is. Then it's only that yes.
wongarsu wrote 1 day ago:
Many governments have their own MSPs (managed service provider) who
could host any open source software, just as they are likely in
charge right now of many Microsoft admin tasks. And if the government
doesn't have one but a branch office wants a regional branch wants a
keycloak instance they can always get an MSP for that
I do like your vision of a unified full replacement version. But even
just gathering everyone's requirements for that seems like a near
impossible task that would take years. And the end result would
almost certainly end in a mess that's too restrictive for some,
unusuably unsecure for others, and have a set of apps that will
always be slightly wrong and difficult to change. These huge top-down
solutions rarely work well
FpUser wrote 1 day ago:
Ability to make certain kind of software is totally strategic for
countries to be independent. Completely relying on some other 3rd party
is truly stupid.
troad wrote 1 day ago:
I'm very happy for all the Europeans getting to use software they like
and prefer, but honestly I'm a little tired of reading about it.
There's been an awful lot of recent blogging and news about
de-Americanising one's stack.
It seems very important to the Europeans that they let everyone else
know they're leaving? It's got the air of a thirty-five year old
threatening to move out of his parents' basement any day now. Go
already! Stop telling us about it. We all
wish you the best. Good luck!
(Don't expect to get much say over how foreign tech platforms operate
going forward, if you get the balkanised Internet you seem to yearn
for?)
tick_tock_tick wrote 1 day ago:
I mean they can't leave for years so talking about it is the only way
to feel like they are doing something.
pjerem wrote 1 day ago:
HN is not an american only audience. I, as an european, am interested
by this news.
And hey, about hearing the same things again and again, we also are
tired hearing about Trump & Epstein & whatever is the today american
shit. But it's still important to stay up to date.
teekert wrote 1 day ago:
It's an incredibility hot topic here (in the EU) right now. It also
provides a lot of (business) opportunities here. I get that this (HN)
is not an EU platform, but a lot of us are on here.
Collectively we feel like we are going through an EU/US divorce that
is rough and will take years to complete. All our tech is entangled
with the US, everything would grind to a halt if Trump would pull
some plugs at the moment. It's like everybody just woke up. We lost
an ally that we really leaned on.
We even have news like "Dutch Defense dept considers jailbreaking
F35s" [0]. Completely nuts of course! But gives a taste of the
climate here.
I don't see what you mean with your remark about the balkanized
internet, the problems is we've been building our systems in US
walled gardens, and now we want our freedom back.
[0]
HTML [1]: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/244764/defensie-ziet-jailbreak-v...
troad wrote 1 day ago:
> I don't see what you mean with your remark about the balkanized
internet, the problems is we've been building our systems in US
walled gardens, and now we want our freedom back.
The short version is that Europe's influence on tech is going to be
significantly reduced by Europe trying to silo itself off from the
rest of the world. If Europe becomes even more marginal of a market
than it is now, then the established players have ever less reason
to attempt to comply with European regulations. (You may say they
already push back, but that's quite different from not bothering at
all.)
Of course the rest of the world isn't going anywhere, and Europeans
will remain exposed to new technologies coming out of Asia and
America. It does Europe very little good to make a Euro-Twitter
that abides by Euro regs, if the original Twitter remains widely
accessible from Europe, but decides to no longer do business in
Europe, and is no longer responsive to European regulation / courts
/ etc.
TLDR: A necessary outcome of increasing Euro digital autonomy is a
reorientation of foreign players back towards home markets, and the
rise of an American digital autonomy that no longer humours Europe
at all.
teekert wrote 1 day ago:
Those are good points indeed, I didn't look at it that way
before. Thanx.
Edit: You made me think, there are downsides indeed. But we still
need to not be spied upon by the US, and we still don't need
International Criminal Court judges have their email blocked in
retaliation.
troad wrote 1 day ago:
There are definitely up- and downsides. This is all much
trickier than I think people realise, with complex second and
third order effects. (Some that I haven't even mentioned. A
more nationalised Internet will hurt smaller countries, for
example, that cannot create services on par with US
juggernauts. It will harm third countries that are neither the
EU or the US. It will weaken the West's collective influence
vis-Ã -vis China, Africa, etc.)
I don't know what the optimal course of action is.
ddtaylor wrote 1 day ago:
I mean they should be using open source software for this type of
stuff, but every time I see these announcements they are either worded
strangely or the governments just don't do it, because the end result
is always the same.
Can we do a Polymarket bet? I'm taking the Microsoft side. Yeah they
suck. Yup, nothing new there, but they'll find a way to keep all these
dolts paying.
voxleone wrote 1 day ago:
I think an important point in this discussion is that adopting FOSS
requires a level of institutional openness that is not typical of
governments in general. Itâs not just a question of switching
vendors; itâs about embracing transparency, auditability, and shared
ownership of public infrastructure. The question is: are governments
fully aware of what FOSS adoption actually implies?
Brazil is an interesting case. On paper, we have a strong legal
mandate. Under Art. 16 of Lei 14.063/2020[0], information and
communication systems developed exclusively by public bodies must be
governed by an open-source license, allowing use, copying,
modification, and distribution without restriction by other public
entities.
However, implementation tells a different story. Take PIX, the instant
payment system developed by the Brazilian Central Bank. As of today,
only the API is open. The core system code remains unpublished[1]. If
the system was developed exclusively by the public administration, this
seems difficult to reconcile with the letter - and certainly the spirit
- of the law.
So the issue is not only whether governments should reduce vendor
lock-in. Itâs whether they are prepared to follow through on what
real openness demands once they commit to it.
[0] [1]
HTML [1]: https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_Ato2019-2022/2020/Lei/L...
HTML [2]: https://d1gesto.blogspot.com/2025/06/brazils-pix-system-faces-...
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote 1 day ago:
What are the hurdles from any of the EU governments from:
1. Choosing the best open source options for the various MS
replacements
2. Fund an office who's job would be to provide software support,
continue development, and make customizations for various departments.
They continue to host this as open source.
3. Expanding adoption of the new tools to more gov departments over
time. Continue to expand software office accordingly.
4. Eventually, they will have a solution entirely within their control.
The costs will initially be higher likely, but way less over time.
If this progresses, then other governments can also adopt those same
tools and also provide funding to the software office so that the
software is continuously updated for things like security, big fixes,
etc. all remains gov sponsored open source.
Am I crazy?
AtomicOrbital wrote 1 day ago:
take your abandon laptop which still runs and install Ubuntu on it ...
you will see how easy linux is today ... there is no justification for
microsoft windows in 2026
jl6 wrote 1 day ago:
The European sovereign tech trend isnât exclusively a benefit to OSS.
SAP must be anticipating a significant windfall of Oracle refugees.
lejalv wrote 1 day ago:
Can proprietary software (SAP) be truly sovereign, though?
On the one hand, nothing stops SAP from behaving like Oracle for the
sake of shareholder value. On the other hand, even SAP could be
bought by Blackrock or Peter Thiel, and back to US dependence.
Am I missing something about SAP that precludes these scenarios?
jl6 wrote 1 day ago:
Nothing absolutely precludes malfeasance, but SAP is a European
legal entity, answerable ultimately to European law. Microsoft and
Oracle also trade in Europe through European legal entities, which
are theoretically also bound by European law, but should that law
conflict with any US law that binds the parent companies, we would
expect the US law to be the stronger influence (likely covertly).
teekert wrote 1 day ago:
I do like this news, but I wonder why they choose LibreOffice. It's the
most widely known MS alternative, but things like OnlyOffice [0] and
Nextcloud Office [1] (which is based on Collabora Online [2], which in
turn is based on LibreOffice) offer much more compelling collaborative
features, imho. Just plain office (like it's 1997) is quite a step
back, no?
Especially OnlyOffice looks extremely similar to MS Office, I have it
on all our Linux laptops at home so the kids don't feel much difference
between home and school envs. I think document interoperability (as in:
Looks similar) is also better.
[0] [1] [2]
HTML [1]: https://www.onlyoffice.com/
HTML [2]: https://nextcloud.com/office/
HTML [3]: https://www.collaboraonline.com/
mixmastamyk wrote 1 day ago:
> Especially OnlyOffice looks extremely similar to MS Office, I have
it on all our Linux laptops at home so the kids don't feel much
difference between home and school envs.
This is how you make them dependent on a single MS-like interface.
Kids are the most flexible, and shouldn't need. Would go as far as
to say they are mildly harmed by not being exposed to different
workflows.
Sure glad no one paved Windows over our Macs and Amigas so we
wouldn't have to learn anything else.
Hard_Space wrote 1 day ago:
I checked it, but at $149 per year for the home server (and don't
forget to click in the 'information' button on the 'Lifetime' License
Duration option), there seems to be a bit of a premium on that MS
styling, considering the functionality in competing F/OSS suites.
StrauXX wrote 1 day ago:
OnlyOffice had some controversy around being owned and operated by a
Russian company through shell companies. They might even fall under
EU sanctions. There is an open German information request to the
government that was never answered.
Wether those connections are true or not I can't say, but I do know
people that dropped OnlyOffice in their evaluations for this reason.
maxloh wrote 1 day ago:
> They might even fall under EU sanctions.
They FALL under EU sanctions.
HTML [1]: https://www.tu.berlin/en/campusmanagement/news-details/ums...
StrauXX wrote 20 hours 48 min ago:
That's "just" the interpretation of TU Berlin. Here is the FOI
request that was never answered: [1] Just to be clear: TU Berlin
is probably right. But according to some sources (which I don't
believe) OnlyOffice no longer has any connections to Russia and
is now really from an EU company.
HTML [1]: https://fragdenstaat.de/anfrage/onlyoffice-sanktionen/
eXpl0it3r wrote 1 day ago:
OnlyOffice, Nextcloud OPffice, Collabora might all have free
offerings to a degree, but you'll end up at the mercy of the
companies behind those tools and OnlyOffice comes with Enterprise
offering that does also cost money.
Costing money isn't necessarily bad, but it's also hard to beat free
& libre.
teekert wrote 1 day ago:
True.
But I have to say that I got quite used to collaborative editing,
not something I'd like to give up.
People can get used to buttons moving to other places (imo), but
collecting and integrating edits from multiple people via email is
not something I look back at fondly.
eXpl0it3r wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, then again most people haven't experienced this and are
happy to just enable "track changes" in Word and send the
document back and forth, maybe if you're lucky, it's hosted on
SharePoint or OneDrive.
bradley13 wrote 1 day ago:
That's great, but it's always just one agency, or one very local bit of
government. If we (Europeans) really mean it - and we should - the top
level of government just needs to make the declaration: as of X, all
Microsoft licenses will be terminated. No exceptions. Adapt or die.
According to the CLOUD act, the US government can demand access to data
from US companies, regardless of where that data is stored. That must
be unacceptable to any sovereign government. I genuinely do not
understand why other countries put up with this.
throw10920 wrote 1 day ago:
> If we (Europeans) really mean it - and we should - the top level of
government just needs to make the declaration: as of X, all Microsoft
licenses will be terminated. No exceptions. Adapt or die.
This is insane. This is sacrificing the well-being of your
constituents to send a (minor) political message. The amount of
service degradation (including actual physical health) that you'd put
your citizens through would be unbelievable.
Only those who are extraordinarily stupid or outright malicious
decide to deprecate important services before first assessing the
needs of every dependent on that service, and then ensuring that a
full replacement is in place.
AtlasBarfed wrote 1 day ago:
Well governments need to wake up and realize that if they aren't the
US and even if they are the US, open source provides most of the
basic building blocks of what you're going to build independent
non-corporate controlled and non-external-state controlled software
So fund it!
Governments burn billions of dollars on defense which really is just
an economic waste outside of the deterrent effect it does from
getting invaded.
Investing in open source to enable you to be software independent and
protected, not only is it providing some measure of electronic and
economic defense, it improves software for you and your allies.
You get return on your investment.
vanschelven wrote 1 day ago:
Every journey starts with the first step... And those steps are
finally being taken now. Don't see why this kind of naysaying would
be the top comment here
tick_tock_tick wrote 1 day ago:
> According to the CLOUD act, the US government can demand access to
data from US companies, regardless of where that data is stored. That
must be unacceptable to any sovereign government. I genuinely do not
understand why other countries put up with this.
"put up with this" implies they have a choice.
tjwebbnorfolk wrote 1 day ago:
Also, they haven't actually done it yet. Announcements are easy.
Implementation is hard, and most of them fail.
Wake me up when they actually do it.
maratc wrote 1 day ago:
> That must be unacceptable to any sovereign government.
Is it OK for a French sovereign government if a German government can
demand access to its data?
otikik wrote 1 day ago:
> Adapt or die.
Yeah, no. That's not how government works - thankfully. I don't want
my water to stop flowing just because someone decided to be drastic
about software changes.
I agree with you in that all governments should be using open source
software, for the record.
But governments are big machines and you can't steer them like a
sports car. In some cases, the massive inertia they have can even be
a good thing - a crazy guy can't just be elected one day, start
issuing presidential mandates, and then expect them to happen
immediately, for example.
DrScientist wrote 1 day ago:
Indeed. I also fail to see how the existence of the CLOUD act, and
thus use of any US company, is compatible with GDPR.
See [1] ( Though note exoscale, as a European provider has skin in
the game here ).
HTML [1]: https://www.exoscale.com/blog/cloudact-vs-gdpr/
integralid wrote 1 day ago:
>top level of government just needs to make the declaration: as of X,
all Microsoft licenses will be terminated. No exceptions. Adapt or
die
This is unrealistic populism. The type that gets upvoted on HN,
apparently. It's not possible to just ditch all Microsoft licenses in
a year, or in 5 years, or in 10 years. There are hundreds of critical
systems that can't just be migrated to Linux overnight (or ever). And
"just dying" is... not an option for a government branch. What is
this even supposed to mean.
But we can limit American bigtech by 90%, and we should. Especially
everything in the cloud.
lewisjoe wrote 1 day ago:
It honestly doesn't make any sense. Interestingly, India was bold
enough to move its government infra to Zoho's office suite cutting
all reliance on Microsoft. It's only sane that other countries do the
same.
octocop wrote 1 day ago:
A lot of hospitals run Microsoft. So it would be literal death you
are talking about.
yardie wrote 1 day ago:
A lot of hospitals and healthcare systems in Europe use the open
source EMR platform. No ones charts are in .docx format, it is not
life or death, lets be serious.
cguess wrote 1 day ago:
Hospitals are also planning documents, budgets, schedules,
grants, reports, all with different access levels, privacy
requirements, and legal regulations.
They're far more than just patient care in the moment.
yardie wrote 1 day ago:
Certainly true, but no one is dying because payroll is down.
octocop wrote 1 day ago:
Really? Maybe this is news to you then, I rarely get to
educate ppl on here.
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WannaCry_ransomware_at...
csmpltn wrote 1 day ago:
Have you ever even used OpenOffice? It's 50 years behind.
timbit42 wrote 1 day ago:
OpenOffice is 15 or so years behind but LibreOffice isn't.
LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice in 2011 and the vast majority of
volunteers working on it left the OpenOffice project and kept
working on LibreOffice.
Anyone still using OpenOffice probably doesn't realize they would
likely be much better off using LibreOffice instead.
OpenOffice doesn't support docx or xlsx but LibreOffice supports
them much better.
rconti wrote 1 day ago:
Honestly, I hadn't used Microsoft Office in 15 years, and it
somehow went 20 years backwards in that time.
thfuran wrote 1 day ago:
Or at least a decade behind, which should be surprising given that
it hasnât been actively developed in about a decade.
hbn wrote 1 day ago:
You make it sound like a noble act of sacrifice but the employees are
all still getting paid. The real people who will be hurt are the
citizens relying on their government to function, and telling a bunch
of government employees of varying competence levels to "suck it up
and adapt to your workflow being broken" will throw a real wrench in
that.
gizzlon wrote 1 day ago:
> The real people who will be hurt are the citizens relying on
their government to function
You make it sound like the current Microsoft stack is so insanely
great it will be impossible to replace.
Yes, change is hard, but there are also massive upsides in
switching to something better.
KronisLV wrote 1 day ago:
> telling a bunch of government employees of varying competence
levels to "suck it up and adapt to your workflow being broken" will
throw a real wrench in that.
I will weep on the day when the great Europe is defeated by people
being unable to use a slightly different spreadsheet program, word
processor, or a file sharing solution.
But yeah, the argument about "adapt or die" is also way off base.
Ideally it'd be a gradual migration, all low hanging fruit first,
seeing what works and what doesn't.
flexie wrote 1 day ago:
I am Danish, working with IT in the private sector, but with regular
contact to the public sector.
I can assure you that there is plenty of other agencies, ministries,
municipalities, private companies etc. in both Denmark and other
European countries looking into switching to non-American software.
"Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing
supplier. Everybody asks about it it. Everybody plans around it.
Although the weaning off will take many years, and although European
companies and governments will probably never be entirely without
American software, and why should they, the American dominance will
disappear, little by little. For better or worse, the American
Century is coming to an end, also in IT.
lenkite wrote 1 day ago:
I really hope the EU is serious about this and doesn't change its
mind with the next American administration who offers hugs and
kisses.
mfru wrote 1 day ago:
Second that, even though it seems that there is nothing happening
yet, many companies and government agencies in all of Europe are
aware of their hard Microsoft dependency and are looking /
coordinating to leave.
Same with Atlassian Confluence / Jira.
(Source: Working in a state owend company in a EU member country)
trimethylpurine wrote 1 day ago:
Everyone in the American IT world has been trying to leave
Microsoft and Google for decades. In that case, the problem isn't
IT push, it's that users refuse to learn new software. I can
guess it's the same in Europe.
It's maybe harder in Europe, because you also have fragmentation.
For example, Californians are fine using software from New York.
Same, same. But Germany prefers to use German software, so far.
This makes it even harder, I would guess, for EU developers to
establish a thriving standard.
gizzlon wrote 1 day ago:
> "Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing
supplier.
I hope you're right! I'm a backend dev and engineer, and I would
love to specialize in helping companies off US cloud. Haven't found
a lot of interest here in Norway so far..
prerok wrote 1 day ago:
In my experience, companies are perfectly happy with US
companies, as long as the data doesn't leave Europe. This means
we have to prove we only store data in European datacenters.
I guess that's fine for now, but it would be better if we could
get European alternatives to AWS or GCP.
aucisson_masque wrote 1 day ago:
USA companies are subject to us laws, so any data will never be
safe. Companies can be gagged, forced to seal their customer
data and forced to lie about it, by law !
trimethylpurine wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not sure if it's accurate, but according to the summary
on Wikipedia at least, the law "provides mechanisms for the
companies or the courts to reject or challenge these if they
believe the request violates the privacy rights of the
foreign country the data is stored in."[0]
If that's accurate, your country's privacy laws would
supersede US law. That said, as things are going, it's
unlikely that they do.
[0]
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
gizzlon wrote 1 day ago:
There are lots of alternatives in Europe, just a little
different, and smaller than the big 3
> companies are perfectly happy with US companies, as long as
the data doesn't leave Europe
I think it's pretty clear they can not guarantee that, see the
CLOUD act.
Also, they could shut you out or turn your whole business off
if you, or your country, offends the orange fuckhead
JuniperMesos wrote 1 day ago:
And why wouldn't this European equivalent do something that a
lot of people in Europe dislike too, in the future? The entire
model of large cloud companies is bad.
taikahessu wrote 1 day ago:
That's a different risk profile. Companies are governed by
local laws, usually, and currently, that works here in
Europe.
esafak wrote 1 day ago:
What counts as data sovereignty in your book? Are the sovereign
clouds of AWS, MS, Google acceptable? If not, who are your
preferred providers?
kakoni wrote 1 day ago:
There are no such thing as sovereign AWS/Google cloud in Europe.
Marketing-wise maybe.
Razengan wrote 1 day ago:
> If not, who are your preferred providers?
Can we have fully decentralized mesh networking yet?
I love how some hyper-sci-fi settings have the concept of a
"datasphere" (analogous to atmosphere): an actual physical cloud
of ubiquitous nanorobots that provide connectivity, storage and
computation.
Wouldn't that also be ideal for AI too the way it's shaping up to
be? Any device anywhere would just need to connect to a signal
"neuron" of the global brain (possibly becoming a neuron itself)
and it should theoretically be able to fetch anything.
xeonmc wrote 1 day ago:
Meh, best I could do is an atmosphere controlled by an American
PBC.
amarant wrote 1 day ago:
First we gotta migrate everybody to IPv6, then we can start
talking.
esafak wrote 1 day ago:
Dealing with the patchwork of lesser-known infra providers in
the EU is work enough. You want to live life on hard mode!
bombcar wrote 1 day ago:
If everyone started doing it, it would get easier and easier.
There's no inherent reason why the various AWS services
shouldn't be completely replaceable with similar services
from other vendors on a whim.
delfinom wrote 1 day ago:
The US passed the CLOUD Act which subject all those sovereign
clouds run by US companies completely subject to US spying and
hijack.
Those offerings are garbage for anyone outside the US.
beached_whale wrote 1 day ago:
Countries hosting the data centres can make it illegal to allow
access from outside their area/EU... or specifically to US
entities along with making it illegal to move any data out
without customer/local gov approval... This isn't rocket
science. The company cannot do business if it doesn't follow
the law. There are laws like this in places already. The
company's local subsidiary tells the American company to
politely pound sand and the American company says sorry, we
tried, but do not have the capability to do as asked.
rstuart4133 wrote 1 day ago:
America has become China in the eyes of the world.
Everyone banned Huawei products despite the ability to pass
laws saying Huawei must respect data sovereignty. They
didn't ban US firms, because unlike China the USA was
championing the rule of law at the time. Data sovereignty
only works if the USA respects the laws of other countries,
even though, just like China, they could coerce / bribe
citizens and firms to bypass them. Such activity would be
largely undetectable. Who is going to know if someone peeked
at a secret document stored in Azure? There was a huge
amount of trust involved in the arrangement.
The USA has now denounced the rule of law, is withdrawing the
the institutions set up to champion it, and has shut down the
ICCC's access to some services. The trust has gone.
j16sdiz wrote 1 day ago:
GDPR give exemption for foreign government for "national
security", "important reasons of public interest" or "law
enforcement", whatever that meant.
edwinjm wrote 1 day ago:
An American company will always follow US law, no matter the
local laws.
XorNot wrote 1 day ago:
The employees of the actual subsidiary entity follow the
laws of the country they're based in.
beached_whale wrote 1 day ago:
It isn't usually an American company doing the local
operations, but a local subsidiary. Like Walmart Canada
telling Walmart corporate to pound sand in the 1990's over
Cuban pajamas. It's illegal for Canadian companies to
participate in the US embargo of Cuba.
This is all well within the realm of what governments can
and do regulate. Want to do business in a country with
their laws or not is the choice.
bombcar wrote 1 day ago:
At some point it comes to a head; Walmart corporate and
the USA didn't care enough about Cuban pajamas, but in a
situation where they DO care, you quickly get
ÐкÑÑно â и ÑоÑка.
The EU (nay, perhaps every country) should be prepared to
deal with Microsoft or AWS completely cutting them off
from access to all their systems - what would be the cost
and impact?
We are rapidly heading to not one Internet, but
country-specific internets that may or may not bridge to
other ones in some cases.
bee_rider wrote 1 day ago:
Apparently AWS sovereign cloud is designed to continue
operating even if the US offices cut them off. The
servers are in the EU and the people running them are
subject to EU laws, not US ones.
Realistically a US executive could be legally required
to give an EU engineer a command that they legally
couldnât follow. At that point I guess we find out if
the engineersâ national or corporate identities are
dominant. I suspect the former in most cases, but who
knows?
beached_whale wrote 1 day ago:
The US exec probably doesn't want to order them
either. So the game would be played and they did
their best. There's another article about the US
fighting data sovereignty requirements/laws in other
countries, but that relies on their quickly dwindling
soft power.
dijit wrote 1 day ago:
Canadian companies can't use Cloud providers at all then?
I'm incredulous about that.
Google, AWS & Microsoft all nullroute the countries of
Cuba, Iran and North Korea. Google also nullroutes
Crimea.
So by using a cloud provider, you are participating in
the embargo of Cuba.
beached_whale wrote 1 day ago:
Not sure Canada has the leverage/market to get them to
sway here. But a body like the EU has the leverage to
force local operation and control.
dijit wrote 1 day ago:
They're largely not unless you are looking to appease your
superiors.
OVH, Telecity, Hezner, Bahnhof, Tele2 etc;etc;etc;etc;etc; are
all valid suppliers without the need to buy from hyperscalers.
I think what tends to work though is the idea that someone in
redmond can't arbitrarily decide to shut you down as an
individual or exert pressure. So it goes in order of importance:
A) Can we buy the software and use it in perpetuity
B) If we can't buy the software in perpetuity, do we at least
control who has access to the software and our data
C) If we can't control who has access to the data then can we at
least ensure we always have access to it?
D) If we can't ensure we have access to our own data then what
are we even doing here?
Depending on where you fall on this line (which is a decision
each government must make) you'll have to claw back something
because right now we're all on D.
foobarian wrote 1 day ago:
Should we discuss DNS root servers at some point too?
ggm wrote 1 day ago:
Run local root. Rootservers are not essential. It's in ietf
draft discussion now as 4 documents but already works and just
has to be turned on.
If you want to change pace, ask your dns sw provider to turn on
local root by default.
(One of the things being defined is how to get a root zone
trustably out of band using the new ZONEMD checksum)
A bigger question might be why there are no ICANN HSM outside
the USA to generate root zone signings. ICANN has offices in
Geneva and Singapore, it would not be hard to find secure DC
locations for the signing ceremonies.
koalacongregate wrote 1 day ago:
I've had this thought too - of the 13 root servers, 10 are US
or US-based companies. The only exceptions are Netnod (Sweden),
RIPE NCC (Netherlands), WIDE Project (Japan). Even ICANN and
Internet Systems Consortium are US-based non-profits... How do
you even mitigate risk in this case?
brunoborges wrote 1 day ago:
How does one start a Root DNS business?
j16sdiz wrote 1 day ago:
China do root server mirrors:
HTML [1]: https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1156025.shtml
esafak wrote 1 day ago:
Looks like a business opportunity.
usrbinbash wrote 1 day ago:
> That's great, but it's always just one agency, or one very local
bit of government.
Transitioning every system wholesale at once, is not gonna happen.
I rather have our governents and agencies do it step by step than not
at all.
tchalla wrote 1 day ago:
It wonât but it creates a sense of urgency.
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
Not exactly the best conditions for making good and measured
choices, I'd prefer if we didn't add more urgency than what most
of us (Europeans) feel already. Everyone already have it on their
mind when making purchasing decisions now, no need to also make
those people do rash decisions.
tchalla wrote 1 day ago:
The reason Europeans feel the urgency is because of rigid
minders and failure to act at least 10-15 years ago. So now
itâs ok to bite the bullet a bit. Itâs a lesson for the
next time.
philipallstar wrote 1 day ago:
This is a clash of semi-overlapping, transitioning philosophies.
The global, liberal hegemony philosophy is that you can trust other
countries, and countries are just economic zones with mildly
different food and weather. Country dividing lines for any other
purpose are bad. The UK was evil for wanting more sovereignty vs the
EU; what's the difference? Open the borders. Let anyone vote. This
has only recently been philosophically countered in the popular
left-leaning consciousness by the war in Ukraine, where at least one
border is seen to be worth defending, and in the mainstream as
sovereignty and related conservative ideas are taking hold again,
although with a few extra steps to make it palateable to
non-conservatives.
The practical philosophy is: we already save a huge amount of money
we can spend on benefits by depending on the US for defence; might as
well do the same with tech. They probably know everything anyway, and
what's to know? This isn't exactly countered yet philosophically, but
Donald Trump is making people realise they should at least pay their
own way in defense, which is helping to gradually override the
prioritising of short-term vote-buying.
macintux wrote 1 day ago:
> The UK was evil for wanting more sovereignty vs the EU
I don't think many thought the UK was evil.
I think many thought the UK had been sold a bag of lies, and that
exiting based on a very slim majority of voters on a referendum was
a bad idea.
justin66 wrote 1 day ago:
> the top level of government just needs to make the declaration: as
of X, all Microsoft licenses will be terminated. No exceptions. Adapt
or die.
Edgy! But it sounds like really terrible government. As if the
failure of a government agency which cannot adapt to losing all its
computer systems and therefore "dies" will not negatively effect
those who are governed.
erk__ wrote 1 day ago:
It is actually at least two agencies that is working in that
direction, The Danish Road Authorities is also working on it:
HTML [1]: https://www.fstyr.dk/nyheder/2025/dec/faerdselsstyrelsen-tag...
piokoch wrote 1 day ago:
"all Microsoft licenses will be terminated"
Ok, and what will be the alternative? I am not talking about the easy
part, like documents creation, although I don't see walking away from
Excel as LibreOffice alternative is a bit of disappointment. But what
about the whole security/networking/permissions area? What is the
viable alternative that can scale?
Remember Covid times? In Poland all schools got access to Office 365
(overnight ) and education kept going. 500 000 teachers and a few
millions of pupils. Tell me who else except Microsoft or Google have
ability to support that?
xylifyx wrote 1 day ago:
99% of users, could just as well use another form of spreadsheet.
Only complex macros or custom integration does. Perhaps very large
spreadsheets, I don't know.
mastermage wrote 1 day ago:
Also the IT Administrators that may be skilled in Windows Server
and similar but less so in Linux. Thats something that beeds to be
taken into account. Can be changed they can learn new things, but
that takes time.
wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
Time is not a problem. Keeping up with Microsoft takes time and
investment too. Especially right now as they're changing stuff
around on a monthly basis in their rabiate urge to sell copilot.
hermanzegerman wrote 1 day ago:
In my part of Germany we used BigBlueButton after a short time when
Zoom was used.
E-Mail and a LDAP account was also always available for students.
It's not exactly Rocket Science.
There are also ready made solutions available for purchase
HTML [1]: https://www.univention.com/industries/educational-sector/
jbreckmckye wrote 1 day ago:
I agree. Whilst I think MS products are on a downward trajectory, I'm
getting "Maastricht Planning Department switches to Kali Linux" vibes
I want to see (sincerely) a whole government ditch MS
wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
See la suite in France.
They have an extensive history in this too. The gendarmerie even
has their own Linux distro for their workstations.
llm_nerd wrote 1 day ago:
>That must be unacceptable to any sovereign government
The US recently doubled down on using US corporations as vehicles of
coercion, sanctioning ICC judges for judging against Israel. [1] This
is beyond insane, and every American company causing grief for the
staff of a criminal court in which every single civilized nation but
the US and Israel (I guess I didn't have to add that but) belongs
needs to see enormous fines, and to be marginalized and removed.
Microsoft, Google, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal...either they can
domesticate in another nation, or get relegated to provincial US
operations.
It is absolutely untenable, and every single nation needs to purge
all American operations as rapidly as possible.
And...it's happening. This criminal US administration filled with
pedophiles and self-dealing garbage overextended. They overplayed
their hand, and the result is not only the rapidly accelerated
decline of the American empire, it invariably has redoubled China's
influence.
I keep seeing prophesying about China invading Taiwan on here. Surely
HN knows that won't be necessary, right? Taiwan recently re-engaged
in diplomatic unification talks with China (not overtly, but the
feelers are obvious to anyone with any sense of the moment), and
they're going to make that choice themselves. Now that the US is
relegated to worldwide joke/idiocracy, and it really is rapidly
becoming a unipolar world, it's really the only rational choice.
But I guess the US has the pathetic joke of the Board of Peace, or
their close allies El Salvador and new puppet state Venezuela. What a
disgrace.
HTML [1]: https://www.state.gov/icc-sanctions
tick_tock_tick wrote 1 day ago:
Why shouldn't the USA sanction a clear overstep of authority?
Neither the USA or Israel are part of the ICC.
llm_nerd wrote 1 day ago:
Overstep?
ICC members make judgements that are abided by ICC member states.
They have every authority to make those judgments, and it does
not matter what the busted idiocracy US of A, acting as a
pathetic supplicant state for their boss Israel, thinks about it.
Maybe Trump can complain to his unbelievably pathetic Board of
Peace. Christ.
The war criminal Netanyahu can stick to the rogue shitholes he is
welcomed at. The US -- which btw is currently engaged in
BLATANTLY criminal activities in a number of venues -- can get
fucked. The US has *ZERO* authority to tell members of the ICC
who or what they can declare a warcrime, or who members of the
ICC will hold to account if they enter their country.
What a bizarre take.
And yes, the US can sanction whoever they want, but such actions
are far from free.. When every American firm is sent packing,
enjoy the results. And yes, American payment processors are
discovering in super-rapid quicktime how this rogue cabal of war
criminal, paedos and criminal grifters are destroying their
future.
tick_tock_tick wrote 1 day ago:
> And yes, the US can sanction whoever they want, but such
actions are far from free..
Honestly the biggest problem that's coming out of all of this
is the US is finding out most of its actions actually are
free... Like everyone know the US was "stronger" and better
positioned than Europe 10 years ago but it's just gotten
ridiculously skewed.
With Europe losing basically all ability to push back against
the US because of their poor decision making we've lost a
critical moderating influence on the USA.
kyboren wrote 1 day ago:
ICC claims[0] that since:
- The Palestinian Authority claims to represent 'Palestine'
- UNGA Resolution 67/19 "Reaffirms the right of the
Palestinian people to self-
determination and to independence in their State of
Palestine on the Palestinian
territory occupied since 1967"
- They consider Gaza "Palestinian territory occupied since
1967" (despite the fact
that Gaza has certainly not been occupied by Israel for
decades and a completely
separate entity from the PA exercises sovereignty there)
Therefore 'Palestine' is a State Party properly represented by
the PA and covered by its accession to the Rome Statute, and
thus the ICC totally have jurisdiction over Gaza and non-party
state Israel's actions there.
Beyond the absurd sophistry and incoherent reasoning, Israel
is--once again--not a signatory to the ICC. Asserting
jurisdiction over a sovereign entity without their consent is a
violation of state immunity[1], a legal concept predating the
ICC by over 600 years.
I'd say that qualifies as an overstep.
[0]: [1]:
HTML [1]: https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/itemsDocum...
HTML [2]: https://opil.ouplaw.com/display/10.1093/law:epil/97801...
llm_nerd wrote 1 day ago:
Bizarre that you cite state immunity like this is some
fundamental truth. Talk about sophistry. Do you understand
what a "legal concept" is? And if you think the US of all
places observes the notion of state immunity for other
states, that's just a fucking howler.
"Beyond the absurd sophistry and incoherent reasoning"
There is literally nothing incoherent about the reasoning.
"Palestine" is a member since 2015, and literally no one
aside from Israel-bots have any confusion about what that
means. The fact that Israel, a rogue nuclear armed global
pariah, isn't is *utterly irrelevant*. Netanyahu is to be
held accountable if they step foot in any Western nation
beside its partner in crime Idiocracy supplicant.
kyboren wrote 1 day ago:
Bizarre that you hold the validity of the ICC's claim to
jurisdiction up as some fundamental truth. It's a creature
of its signatory states and is not some arbiter of
morality.
Regardless of the US's willingness to ignore customary
international law, the "International Criminal Court"'s
willingness to ignore customary international law is worthy
of reprimand, and their facially ridiculous claim to
jurisdiction over Gaza was fairly characterized as
overstepping their authority.
> literally no one aside from Israel-bots have any
confusion about what that means
"Palestine" probably includes Area A. What about Area B?
Probably not Area C. How about the settlements? Gaza--which
is actually controlled by a totally different government?
East Jerusalem? "From the river to the sea"?
It seems to me that there is actually a great deal of
confusion about what exactly "Palestine" means. It
certainly doesn't refer to any specific area with defined
borders and a single sovereign.
> Israel-bots
> rogue nuclear armed global pariah
> partner in crime Idiocracy supplicant
Conversing with you is a chore and I doubt there is any
value to be had continuing our discourse. Have a good one.
llm_nerd wrote 1 day ago:
>Bizarre that you hold the validity of the ICC's claim to
jurisdiction up as some fundamental truth.
But...I didn't. The members of the ICC observe the
findings of the ICC. Another bizarre non-sequitur. No one
is demanding that the US honour the ICC's warrant.
The ICC has no authority in Israel. Nor do they claim to.
But they do in the member countries, which thoroughly
angers the Idiocracy.
>willingness to ignore customary international law
Absolutely delusional nonsense. The hypocrisy in the
claim that state immunity is some overarching thing --
when neither Israel or the US honour such a ridiculous
notion -- is amazing given the context.
>It seems to me that there is actually a great deal of
confusion about what exactly "Palestine" means
Absolutely no one but Israelis and Americans have any
(convenient) confusion on this. Palestine is the
non-Israel parts of the former Palestine. Playing
incredibly stupid is unconvincing.
>Conversing with you is a chore
Ah, the "you're all butthurt Europeans"
American-exceptionalism guy thinks it's a chore. Good
god.
dlubarov wrote 1 day ago:
> "Palestine" is a member since 2015, and literally no one
aside from Israel-bots have any confusion about what that
means.
Except that the people who joined on behalf of Palestine
have never controlled Gaza, while the government that
actually controls Gaza never accepted the ICC's
jurisdiction.
I can similarly declare myself the king of Gaza, and decree
that Gaza is under the jurisdiction of my newly invented
Court of Daniel, and it would make about as much sense from
a legal perspective.
llm_nerd wrote 1 day ago:
>Except that the people who joined on behalf of Palestine
have never controlled Gaza
They literally, directly controlled Gaza until 2006. So
what's with the lies?
There is good evidence that they lost control because
Netanyahu covertly supported Hamas. Riling up fundies to
do vile things is good business when your goal is getting
a massively armed idiocracy simp nation to do your
bidding.
dlubarov wrote 1 day ago:
It was Israel who controlled Gaza before they withdrew,
and Egypt before that. PA helped with with local
policing and civil administration; that's not the sort
of effective control that's relevant here.
wiseowise wrote 1 day ago:
> But I guess the US has the pathetic joke of the Board of Peace,
or their close allies El Salvador and new puppet state Venezuela.
What a disgrace.
You forgot Trumps best butt-buddy: Putin.
bytehowl wrote 1 day ago:
>Taiwan recently re-engaged in diplomatic unification talks with
China
That's news to me, got any good articles on the topic?
Tarq0n wrote 1 day ago:
Not everything is a state secret. There's no need to immediately
migrate every trivial email and permit request, but having a parallel
infrastructure for the stuff that needs it should be a no-brainer.
marcosdumay wrote 1 day ago:
There's no point in having a parallel software "infrastructure". In
fact, it's a choice well known for never working.
Either your main architecture handles something or it doesn't get
handled.
hermanzegerman wrote 1 day ago:
It's not about state secrets, it's about being able to provide
services when the US is turning Hostile.
Hospitals or Police aren't guarding state secrets too, but if they
would loose access to their IT Infrastructure because Donald had
some strange brainfart this morning like the Judge of the
International Court of Justice it would impact the State critically
heikkilevanto wrote 1 day ago:
> Not everything is a state secret.
No, but almost everything is a potential DDOS. And slight
modifications to emails, documents, and calendars can cause a lot
of havoc that may be hard to detect.
Izmaki wrote 1 day ago:
The âthatâs nice but Denmark is smallâ comment is getting
tiresome. Whether the country had 6 million or 60 million the
bureaucracy is the same. Itâs not about the size or the economics,
itâs about the message.
It wonât be long until the rest of the public sectors follow along.
There has already been plenty of consideration and desire to follow
through. Whatâs holding them back typically is not the desire to
stay with Microsoft et. al., but the investment needed to make the
switch away from a live system.
nxm wrote 1 day ago:
Investment and long term maintenance costs are usually not worth
it. All is good until thereâs a self induced outage and your boss
has to take the blame (and not Microsoft)
kakacik wrote 1 day ago:
But those investments will only get bigger over time and vendor
lock-in will get more complex. I get that there is no unlimited
budget to this but proper will to migrate for good would look very
differently.
For example detailed plan for next 5-10 years how gradually
everything moves. Now it feels like 1 step ahead 3 steps back, nice
pat on the back for doing something, while overall transition will
take 2 centuries unless magic happens. Not enough, not at this
point when all cards are on the table.
quietbritishjim wrote 1 day ago:
> The âthatâs nice but Denmark is smallâ comment is getting
tiresome.
The parent comment didn't complain that Denmark or its overall
government is small. They complained that this agency represents a
small fraction of their government.
graemep wrote 1 day ago:
Quite a lot of small bits on Denmark are moving towards this, but
its still not every much in a country that is one of the most
strongly motivated to not depend on the US (because of
Greenland).
Izmaki wrote 1 day ago:
The branch of the public sector I'm responsible for is moving
towards Cloud Native and Open Source where it makes sense. It's
an interesting journey but far from cheap.
nunobrito wrote 1 day ago:
Yes. Typically is some town hall shifting to Linux and making a
big fuss when literally million others are still running Windows.
Seeing an agency doing it is good, but still less than the French
ditching Teams and Zoom altogether as country-wide policy.
Spooky23 wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs usually German towns or cities trying to drive hard
bargains or fighting some internal political battle.
This is a different - the agency has more scope and with the
ridiculous confrontation between the US and Denmark thereâs
no doubt active espionage targeting Denmark from the US.
slow_typist wrote 1 day ago:
But still, this is Denmarkâs tech modernization agency. They
follow an eat-your-own-dogfood stance.
Transforming the public administration is the logical next
step. Something different happening here, not the town hall big
fuss approach.
MengerSponge wrote 1 day ago:
It makes you wonder what critics think the process should
look like?
Plan A: Just burn it down and rebuild FOSS in the ashes.
Plan B: The tech modernization agency can make the
transition, document and enhance the process, and then guide
less savvy users.
I dunno. Tough call.
bonesss wrote 1 day ago:
Also, how does government work?
Model A: some visionary gets a great idea and everyone
across the board stops whatever theyâre doing all at once
to prioritize this one initiative, budgets and contracts
and laws be damned.
Model B: the modernization department sets standards, those
standards are mandatory in the governments procurement
process. All suppliers know to update, everything swaps
out as-planned over time, no one goes to jail.
I dunno. Danes are weird.
MengerSponge wrote 1 day ago:
I can't trust somebody with that many vowels.
nunobrito wrote 1 day ago:
Indeed, crossing the fingers to see if we finally have a
proper transition.
hermanzegerman wrote 1 day ago:
Well the State of Schleswig Holstein is ditching Microsoft
completely.
But it's a difficult political uphill battle, because some Users
won't change their habits and cry about it.
The Minister shut this up with "Software is a decision by the
employer, the employee has to accept it"
Which then got blown up by the tabloid media, which ran BS Headlines
like "OMG Courts and Police not working (because they're childish and
refuse to learn another E-Mail Client)
Also Microsoft is playing dirty and lobbying very hard behind the
scenes to obstruct it, in Munich they changed their German HQs to
Munich and started to pay Taxes there. So suddenly the city changed
back to MS
TL;Dr: It's a thankless and tough battle for politicians, because
they face lobbying and media pressure against them. Also they will be
blamed for any roadblocks, and there is no real upside for them in
it, as no one except for a few nerds cares about this
Ylpertnodi wrote 1 day ago:
> It's a thankless and tough battle for politicians, because they
face lobbying and media pressure against them.
Awwww, poor babies.
lnsru wrote 1 day ago:
Youâre absolutely right. The benefit of being US independent has
no value in the eyes of the large part of European population. The
politician fighting for it is fighting uphill battle against mega
corporation with endless lobbying budget and simultaneously digging
a grave for the political career.
xcf_seetan wrote 1 day ago:
Framing lobby as corruption would take care of those Mega
corporations.
padraic7a wrote 1 day ago:
I don't believe that's true any longer. The U.S. moves over
Greenland have a large part to play in this, but I think the
sanctioning of the International Criminal Court is much more
relevant.
Overnight ICC officials couldn't access email, documents etc, all
because the U.S. government leaned on Microsoft. If they can do
it to a United Nations court they can and will do it to anyone.
Spending money on a system you don't have any control over
doesn't make sense. The public understand this.
wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
That was true in the time when Munich went Linux yes.
It's no longer true. There's a huge public moment to move away
from all things American since Trump and his tariff wars and
putting NATO at risk. A lot of people I know are now factoring
this in to their purchasing choices and there's a lot more
empathy for employers changing things.
hermanzegerman wrote 1 day ago:
Well the Bavarian State has just tried to give Microsoft a huge
contract without tender.
But the governing party there is known to be quite susceptible
to "Lobbying" and enriching themselves
mijoharas wrote 1 day ago:
> The benefit of being US independent has no value in the eyes of
the large part of European population
I think this may have changed a bit within the last year or so...
xylifyx wrote 1 day ago:
Definitely, at least in Denmark.
justinclift wrote 1 day ago:
And in Greenland. ;)
lukan wrote 1 day ago:
"I genuinely do not understand why other countries put up with this."
Maybe because there is no drop in replacement of microsoft and
microsoft dependant tools?
So yes, one can (and should) build them. But the market right now is
not offering this yet.
throwyawayyyy wrote 1 day ago:
What I find interesting, and reflects my ignorance of how these
things are used, is that if you look at, say, FAANG companies,
Office isn't used. I've worked for two FAANGs over the past couple
of years, and everything is done via Google docs. Replacing a giant
suite like Office looks hard, replacing something simpler like
Google docs looks very much simpler, and surely should suffice?
rconti wrote 1 day ago:
The best time to do this was ~2010 before all of the cloud lock-in
stuff.
The second best time is now.
wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
Well, if your goal is to be 100% the same as what Microsoft offer,
then sure no there's not. But that's letting them set the
goalposts.
If you look at the features you actually need and are willing to
explore different ways of doing things that are not exactly like
M365 there's more options. France and Germany are also working on
freeing themselves from M365.
This kinda thing sounds a lot like those RFPs that were
specifically written so they could only be fulfilled by Microsoft
because it was just a list of their feature tickboxes.
KronisLV wrote 1 day ago:
> But that's letting them set the goalposts.
This is missed in so, so very many discussions out there.
You can reproduce about 50-75% of what MS offers with FOSS and
work on writing the rest in-house/in-EU.
Would a bunch of workflows suffer initially? Sure, but not even
trying is just preseving the status quo.
Guestmodinfo wrote 1 day ago:
Today I opened a .docx file on libreoffice on my linux machine.
Did a whole bunch of editing and sent back the file for some
semi official purpose. And the .docx file behaved as usual on
the windows machine of the sender.
I mean to say for many many people the workflows will not
suffer even one but. It's just too much automated people whose
work may suffer initially b cause they are using windows API or
something like that. But that's like just for developers
suffering. Most govt offices or universities just work on
individual files and that will never suffer even one bit
KronisLV wrote 1 day ago:
I mean, to be honest, I've historically had most software out
there break in all sorts of ways, LibreOffice had some
interesting issues while working on my thesis: [1] (bit of a
rant back then, when I had a section on my blog called
"Everything is broken", but you get the idea)
But yeah, it probably depends on what you're trying to do
with any one software package, some people will be affected
more than others and sometimes most stuff will just work!
HTML [1]: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/libreoffice-bibliograph...
hermanzegerman wrote 1 day ago:
For many services there are drop-in Replacements available.
I don't see what's so special about Mail or Calendar from Microsoft
vs other vendors.
The Quality is also Shit. I get some stupid Errors when trying to
Access OWA every other day. Then I have to reset cookies/cache and
can login again
spogbiper wrote 1 day ago:
Its not the basic mail and calendar functionality that drives
large business to Microsoft (and to a lesser degree Google).
It's really not anything that a normal user would see in an
average role.
Email in a large organization requires things like central
management, compliance with retention policies and other
regulations, data loss prevention, encryption standards, auditing
and ediscovery capabilities, etc.
wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
Yes and they keep blocking features in Firefox on Linux. When I
change the user agent to match edge on windows things suddenly
work fine.
When it's set to Firefox attachment uploads don't work and ever
morning it jumps to "please wait while we're signing you out..."
when i never asked for that. When it thinks it's edge it just
stays signed in.
Not to mention the huge amount of telemetry I need to block with
ublock origin.
mrweasel wrote 1 day ago:
You don't want a drop-in replacement for each service, you want
one for the entire system.
Microsofts advantage is ActiveDirectory integration. Centrally
managed users and machines, every user, every application, every
service authentications through the AD.
Organizations opt for Teams all the time, because it's part of
the package and fully integrated. There's no reason they couldn't
pick something else, but why deal with it when Teams just work
(sort of).
hermanzegerman wrote 1 day ago:
And OpenDesk has managed to do without, they seem to be using
Univention Nubus as an AD Replacement
HTML [1]: https://www.univention.de/loesungen/alternative-zu-mic...
redkoala wrote 1 day ago:
Is there a combination of open standards to drop in to replace
AD integration with self management?
OAuth enabled systems arenât enough, central management of
users and machines are huge. If that core matures, it opens up
the market for replacements in other areas. Teams, Outlook and
the Office Suite need first grade replacements.
lpcvoid wrote 1 day ago:
There's Nextcloud/OCIS/Owncloud for Sharepoint (god I fucking hate
Sharepoint) and Onedrive, there's Libreoffice/Collabora (and
Onlyoffice, but that's russian...), there's Thunderbird for Email.
Windows is absolutely replaceable also, of course, maybe even
easier than the Office365 subscription mentioned above.
The lock in only exists in brains of (old) people that can't adapt.
MS products can all be replaced, and should be in the EU. You
simply cannot trust an American company anymore after Trump.
cguess wrote 1 day ago:
There's not even a reasonable FOSS calendar for Linux that
integrates with email. Thunderbird has it, but it doesn't work
with Google's Advanced Protection for instance.
l72 wrote 1 day ago:
Evolution has worked with every corporate environment Iâve
been in since 2003. Mail, calendar, contacts, tasks has always
worked great, including companies that have used outlook,
Google, and others.
I personally donât love thunderbird, but what is it missing?
Gnome through their online accounts supports most major
corporate providers which has calendars showing up in
evolution, the dedicated calendar app, and in the status bar of
gnome shell.
XorNot wrote 1 day ago:
Currently I need Thunderbird to support Oauth login using a
yubikey with a webauthn and a pin.
I can't enter a pin to authenticate, so I can't use it.
philipallstar wrote 1 day ago:
> The lock in only exists in brains of (old) people that can't
adapt.
I think this is a little superficial. There will be mountains of
existing Word/Excel/Powerpoint documents that would need
converting, as well as configured permissions structures and
remotely managed laptop configurations that currently are working
well. Of course anything is possible given enough time and money.
The real issue isn't to do with your ageism. It's whether that
time and money is best spent on this particular area.
lpcvoid wrote 1 day ago:
>There will be mountains of existing Word/Excel/Powerpoint
documents that would need converting, as well as configured
permissions structures and remotely managed laptop
configurations that currently are working well
Well, they are not working well right now, because they could
be rendered inoperable at any moment through Microsoft flipping
a switch. That risk is real and has precedent (ICC having their
Outlook access revoked).
>The real issue isn't to do with your ageism. It's whether that
time and money is best spent on this particular area.
When European sovereignty is on the line, it's never too
expensive.
NetMageSCW wrote 1 day ago:
>Well, they are not working well right now, because they
could be rendered inoperable at any moment through Microsoft
flipping a switch.
They are literally working well right now, because Microsoft
hasnât flipped that switch and may never do so.
NetMageSCW wrote 1 day ago:
How much are you willing to have your taxes go up?
lpcvoid wrote 1 day ago:
By a lot, if that means I never have to use a Microslop
product again ;)
heraldgeezer wrote 1 day ago:
Okay... and what about Intune? (Device management)
Entra? (User management and policy)
Office 365 Exchange?
Excel? (Finance runs on custom Excel macros and sheets)
Teams?
Office 365 in general, security, DLP, MFA?
lpcvoid wrote 1 day ago:
>Intune
Fleet
>Entra? (User management and policy)
LDAP
>Office 365 Exchange?
Dovecot, Postfix
>Excel? (Finance runs on custom Excel macros and sheets)
Libreoffice calc, R and Python were needed. And if that doesn't
work, finance needs to work around the vendor lockin
>Teams?
Matrix, Jitsi, Bigbluebutton, Mattermost
>Office 365 in general, security, DLP, MFA?
Authentik, Keycloak for MFA/security, OpenZFS with
Nextcloud/Opencloud for DLP
It's possible, though of course less integrated and more work
involved than just selling your soul to MS. But I am sure that
time will also solve that, now that people are more interested
in open source.
202508042147 wrote 1 day ago:
> [...] anymore after Trump.
We shouldn't have waited until Trump, we had clear signs of
distrust when the Americans were spying on Angela Merkel and
other European officials [1]
HTML [1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-...
lpcvoid wrote 1 day ago:
Agreed. But Trump is the absolute last straw, and it seems some
people needed that earthquake to finally wake up in the EU.
wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
> Sharepoint (god I fucking hate Sharepoint)
Same with SharePoint here. I've never seen it not turn into a
steaming pile of shit within months of deployment where nobody
can find anything.
The way teams and yammer auto create groups left right and center
in it doesn't help. And its search function is less than useless.
This is in fact the main thing I use copilot for, to find stuff
in that mess.
lukan wrote 1 day ago:
Have you worked in government services and know what their needs
are?
I did not, but as far as I know, they require a bit more more
than some office solution, shared drive and some email client.
(How do you imagine how it works internally if you apply for a
new passport, they just send some office documents via email
around?)
lpcvoid wrote 1 day ago:
I have worked in (German) Government, and apart from
complacency (and maybe corruption, see Limux) there's nothing
stopping the German government (at least at federal level) from
adopting open source.
If processes depend on some crappy excel table (created by
somebody 20 years ago) or even worse, sharepoint app
(commissioned by people who shouldn't be deciding things like
this), the processes suck and need to be rebuilt anyhow.
Spooky23 wrote 1 day ago:
Government is top down. Once the top level people are engaged
and accountable, they can do anything.
The people in the middle can ensnare and kill anything that
doesnât have that support and engagement - their incentive
is to encourage consistency.
philipallstar wrote 1 day ago:
The processes might well be in Microsoft Dynamics 365.
chromehearts wrote 1 day ago:
I agree, apart from legal entities because iirc they use some
software that's available on windows only
hermanzegerman wrote 1 day ago:
In what way do they need Microsoft Software or Technology
except maybe Windows for their Passport Application?
That's special software developed for one customer only
anyways. So it's perfectly possible to target another Platform
or do this as some kind of WebApp.
And until then run some Windows Desktops for those special
applications/services
lukan wrote 1 day ago:
"So it's perfectly possible to target another Platform or do
this as some kind of WebApp."
Yes, it is possible to rewrite software. But currently most
of that software was written and licenced for windows.
Just choosing another plattform might, or might not work. And
if it doesn't, many people will be angry for not getting tax
refunds back, or getting a new passport, or being able to
register a new car etc.
Bugs are real. And there is a saying, never change a running
system.
So yes, I do agree that the system is not running so well
being dependant on Trump and change is required, but this is
not just some webapp for fun that needs replacement. We are
talking about critical government services, with lots of
custom made software, that was often exclusivly written for
windows.
hermanzegerman wrote 1 day ago:
Yes and you conveniently ignored the part where I said you
can operate some Windows Desktops or VMs for those services
until a replacement is ready.
Just because you can't replace 100% tomorrow doesn't mean
that you shouldn't begin today, or never try at all
Foobar8568 wrote 1 day ago:
People get a lot of cash, house and other benefits when they pick
up suppliers.
And if they don't get a direct bribe, for some reasons, they end
up as VP of what ever branch more or less directly related to
their previous job as client.
bediger4000 wrote 1 day ago:
Exactly this. A while back, a greybeard told me "CVS never flew
anyone to the Bahamas for a few rounds of bikini golf", when I
was complaining about my employer picking the version control
system and torture device "Serena Dimensions".
close04 wrote 1 day ago:
Someone yanked your chain with this one. Nobody gets a house or
a job at Microsoft for buying Microsoft, these cases can't even
register in the statistic of the total volume of orders. Every
tech company would buy you a house if that worked, when a house
is always a rounding error on the value of the contracts we're
talking about.
They buy it because it's the "safe", "does everything" choice
that "everyone else has". It's easier to deal with a single
party than it is to get licenses and support from 20 other
suppliers that then blame each other when there are issues at
the border between 2 of the products. You can talk to anyone
else who has Teams, your files are always fully compatible, all
of the rest of your software integrates, single identity, etc.
A lot of good it is that you have Google Meet and Libre Office
when the partners you work closes to have Teams and MS Office.
Users are proficient with the products, you can find skilled
admins everywhere. Incumbency has a lot of inertia.
So you have to pay millions in support contracts every year,
it's the cost of doing business. So MS gets hacked every other
day, what could you have done about it better when even MS
(!!!) couldn't?
Foobar8568 wrote 1 day ago:
I can't quote examples for obvious reasons.
Since you quoted Microsoft, remember this? [1] you have other
companies that have a much better track record on Security.
If you browse HN everyday, at least once a weak, you'll see
security issues related to Azure and Microsoft product, to
the point that Microsoft stopped bounty programs or don't
include some products.
HTML [1]: https://www.dhs.gov/archive/news/2024/04/02/cyber-sa...
close04 wrote 1 day ago:
If you want to establish a pattern or rule youâll need
way more than one example you canât give.
Is Googleâs search engine used just because they give
money to those who do? Because they pay Apple and Mozilla.
Just set Google as default and the checkâs in the mail
right?
The last paragraph was obviously a diss at MS for costing a
lot in support and having shitty security. Anyone with
first hand experience (rather than Google searches) with MS
contracts and heard the justifications again and again
doesnât need the joke explained.
lpcvoid wrote 1 day ago:
>A lot of good it is that you have Google Meet and Libre
Office when the partners you work closes to have Teams and MS
Office
Which is why governments in the EU need to lead this change
to open source so others can point and say "hey even the big
guys use it now".
bobmcnamara wrote 1 day ago:
> Nobody gets a house or a job at Microsoft for buying
Microsoft...
This is the same Microsoft we're talking about right? [1] [2]
[3] Any fines that allow profitable operations are no more
than a tax.
HTML [1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-pays-25-mil...
HTML [2]: https://techcentral.co.za/eoh-microsoft-ensnared-in-...
HTML [3]: https://www.wsj.com/tech/former-microsoft-employee-a...
close04 wrote 1 day ago:
This is the same comment weâre referring to right? The
one that said that MS gets contracts because they buy
houses and cars or give jobs to the people deciding where
the contract goes?
Thatâs someone who read a couple of articles on
corruption and just extrapolated to âall of it must be
the sameâ.
Gigachad wrote 1 day ago:
Google has drop in replacements for most of it. But that doesnât
solve the problem of using US tech.
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
They're competitive but they're not drop-in replacements. Even
office for Mac is not a drop-in replacement for office on
Windows. It's pretty trivial to find significant differences that
will be in use in any large organization.
Gigachad wrote 1 day ago:
Considering every job Iâve had in recent times has involved a
switch between Google/Microsoft tools after being acquired,
itâs about as drop in as anything gets in tech.
Of course no product will be an identical replica of the
Microsoft tools, but both get the job done.
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
It depends. If you're writing documents and sending email,
it probably not gonna be too tough. If you've got 100,000+
lines of Excel macros, you're gonna need a pretty significant
migration.
clickety_clack wrote 1 day ago:
After using both extensively, there is no comparison between
Google and the MS suite. Googleâs apps are like a toy version
of MS Office.
Gigachad wrote 1 day ago:
The Microsoft ones feel broken, buggy, and bloated with decades
of crap. I guess there are some people using those weird edge
features, but if you donât, the Google stuff works way
better.
Johnny555 wrote 1 day ago:
The problem is that Google only covers "most of it", so even if
it covers 99% of use cases, for that cases where it doesn't,
companies still need MS Office.
I worked for a startup that was all OSX desktops and Google Docs.
Then when we hit 100 employees, the finance department required
MS Office, so they used Office for Mac, then as we grew, they
needed real MS Office running in Windows, so they ran Windows in
Parallels, then as we continued to grow they moved to full
Windows laptops. When I left the company (at around 1000
employees), almost a third of the company was on Windows (mostly
in Finance, Sales, and other business departments). And the team
supporting the 2/3 Mac desktops was about 1/3 the size of the
team supporting Windows.
Though I suppose it's easier for a government to move off
Microsoft. When an investor tells you to use their financial
modeling software that only works with MS Excel, it's pretty hard
for a small company to refuse, but a government has more power to
force others to conform to their choice.
wasabi991011 wrote 1 day ago:
Any insight in to why the finance department (and other
departments) required MS office?
max51 wrote 1 day ago:
For a power user, There is nothing even remotely comparable
to Excel that exists today.
dh2022 wrote 1 day ago:
Not anymore. Today I tried to copy paste a string of 15
ascii characters into an Excel cell. Excel spun around for
20 seconds then blurted out an error that "the data is too
big". I hit F2 (enter cell Edit Mode), pasted the 15
characters in the edit window and this was I was able to
get the data in the cell.
Excel has gone downhill massively.
Johnny555 wrote 1 day ago:
Their initial need for Office was some soft of forecasting
model that they needed to update for a large investor. That
was a big spreadsheet that ran on Office for OSX if I
remember correctly. After that, I don't know what
specifically they needed to use, they had purchased some
software that required Windows and Office.
sho wrote 1 day ago:
Call me cynical, but having been around the block a few
times when I hear "need" and "require" my brain translates
that to "want" and "it would be convenient if". I've done
my share of forecasting for investors and am quite
confident that there is nothing in any startup forecast
that could conceivably "require" Windows. I mean, absolute
worst case, just use SQL.
The CFO just preferred Windows, that's it, I'd bet money on
it.
Johnny555 wrote 1 day ago:
The requirement came from the investment house - they
wanted data in the format they were accustomed to.
What was driving that requirement at the investment house
doesn't matter, when the company that owns over 50% of
your company wants something, you don't say "Hey, we
don't want to buy a Windows license with your money, how
about I send it to you in this similar, but different
format and then you guys can figure out how to make it
match what you're looking for?"
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
IME what it means is that they have a bunch of processes
built that specifically depend on it. It doesn't make it
impossible to switch but depending on the scope could be
financially or practically prohibitive to migrate. Maybe
someone has 10 years of custom excel macros put together
that are run every quarter, that would need to be
migrated. To migrate you might not have the internal
capacity and might need to hire external help to do it.
m000 wrote 1 day ago:
France have already developed their own (recently posted here)
[1][2].
Also, the "there's no drop in replacement" line is just making up
excuses for not acting. Yes, you will not get 100% of the Office
365 features out of the box. There will be some friction.
It's simply ridiculous seeing EU bureaucracy preparing e.g. to
ban russian oil [3], making life more expensive for all people,
and balking on being forced to switch their stupid word
processor. [1] [2]
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46923736
HTML [2]: https://github.com/suitenumerique
HTML [3]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-propose-perma...
weirdmantis69 wrote 1 day ago:
It is way more ridiculous to ask USA to protect you from Russia
when you are funding the Russian military with your oil
purchases.
mgoetzke wrote 1 day ago:
Considering that I doubt most normal office-user people even
use features in Word other than changing fonts etc I doubt that
will be a big issue anyway.
bdavbdav wrote 1 day ago:
Not sure if you've worked in an office recently, but on
google workspace I (we) use very regularly:
- Group Editing - this ones hard to get right
- Reviewing Tools
- Automated document generation
- Embedding of data-backed images from 3rd party tools
Looking at my wife who works in government, they use it even
more heavily, with a lot of complicated formatting,
numbering, standards etc going into each document, plus
OneDrive collaborative features on top of that.
I suspect office-user people are where most of the features
get used. Agreed, most people only use 15% of the features,
but which 15% that is likely changes quickly person to
person.
MegaDeKay wrote 1 day ago:
It doesn't need to be "most". "Some" or even "a few" can be
enough to make a hell of a mess if those few have created
documents that are key to the business in one way or another
(proposals, end-user documentation, etc). And there are the
other components to the suite like Powerpoint, Excel, and
Project to consider.
einr wrote 1 day ago:
So then act now, because the best time to act was
yesterday, and the longer you wait the worse the mess and
pain becomes. Not acting at all is not an option.
lukan wrote 1 day ago:
"Also, the "there's no drop in replacement" line is just making
up excuses for not acting"
If you claim, that this is my position, please read at least
one more sentence
"So yes, one can (and should) build them. "
Jolter wrote 1 day ago:
Good luck convincing the government (or local councils) of
Bulgaria to migrate to an office suite thatâs available in
French or English only.
Thatâs beside the sibling commentâs point that this suite
is not complete enough (yet).
Forgeties79 wrote 1 day ago:
What France is doing is great but, as youâll see discussed in
that HN comment section, it is hardly an office suite. Itâs
not a full replacement by a long shot. I hope it will be one
day though!
skrebbel wrote 1 day ago:
> That's great, but it's always just one agency, or one very local
bit of government.
All change starts small. If these small agencies or very local bits
of government successfully pull it off, larger ones may well follow.
tokai wrote 1 day ago:
This is way overblown. Its parts of some ministries. All public IT in
Denmark is still bound to Microsoft. Statens IT, the IT systems
provider for the public sector, is right now in the middle of rolling
out Windows 11.
Braxton1980 wrote 1 day ago:
The article says "Danish agency" not a"Denmark"
whh wrote 1 day ago:
I think a move to Open Source would be great in Europe, but only if the
governments using the technologies are actively funding their
development.
This doesn't just mean once-off grants, or a bit of cash donated here
and there. I would like to see per-user per-year contributions to the
organisations that develop these tools on-par with the current spend
going towards Microsoft Cloud products.
It can be better than Microsoft, but you need to fund it to be better
than Microsoft.
leke wrote 1 day ago:
I would like to see tech related educational institutions incorporate
contributing to open source as part of their curriculum. A lot of
these institutions are funded by the government anyway, so it would
make sense to support the technology running your country which funds
you.
rbanffy wrote 1 day ago:
> I would like to see tech related educational institutions
incorporate contributing to open source as part of their curriculum
As long as we avoid drowning maintainers with review requests, I'm
in.
Thanemate wrote 1 day ago:
I would replace "funding" with at minimum "contributing", because
there are people who would think having a government actively dipping
their toes in a product gives them right over actively piloting the
direction of that product.
I've already seen online discussions of something similar happening
when Valve announced that they're actively contributing to Arch Linux
and KDE. But then, it's Valve.
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
> It can be better than Microsoft, but you need to fund it to be
better than Microsoft.
Lol no. Microsoft profits more than the value they provide, not
exactly we should want to copy. We need to prevent hypercapitalism
from reaching us in Europe, not make it worse, as we now seen exactly
what it does to countries when you let it grow unfettered.
But I agree in general, governments and companies that use FOSS
should donate back either engineering-time or money, but no need to
do complicated "per-user per-year contributions", give them a sum per
year, enough to fund the core developers at least and ideally to hire
new ones, otherwise hire engineers and let them full-time contribute
back.
Luckily, at least in Europe, this is exactly what we're seeing now.
The governments who are looking into FOSS are all thinking about how
to help fund it, no one seem to be thinking "How can we do this for
free?" which is nice thing to see.
kakacik wrote 1 day ago:
Europe as in EU can certainly use a bit more capitalism. Nothing
brutal like US or China have where individuals are often crushed by
system or situation with no help in sight, but Europe got lazy,
complacent, used to over-generous unsustainable easy to abuse
social system and generally living off debt to future generations.
Self-serving massive bureaucracy and corruption. Companies like car
makers are already being hit badly and its going to get a lot worse
with global competition.
For the 1000th time here and elsewhere - look no further than
Switzerland. Highly diverse, federated group of people that managed
to preserve most direct democracy in the world for 800 years and
counting. 'Most free and most armed nation in the world' still
holds true without clusterfuck that US gun situation is. Each
canton is very self-sufficient, governs local rules, laws and
taxation so there is no animosity between various regions - really
a mini version of EU.
This is how EU parliament should look like, if (mostly) french and
german egos would step down from their pedestals and acknowledge
that somebody may figured things out better. Its most capitalistic
country in Europe by far while preserving most of what we call
social and healthcare net, has top notch free education and so on.
Also its not increasing its debt, a clear mark of sustainable
economical success of such approach, in contrary with literally any
EU country.
mainecoder wrote 19 hours 7 min ago:
Are we just going to forget that the Switzerland is the place
where capitalists many(in my opinion or some if you want) keep
their money.
simonask wrote 1 day ago:
Sweeping generalizations like just donât really contribute
anything worthwhile. You mention Switzerland as supposedly a
counter-example, but the characterization also does not apply to
the Scandinavian countries, Netherlands, several Baltic states,
and to a certain degree countries like Poland.
Is this actually just a criticism of French and German public
governance, or Spanish, or Italian? If so, yes, I agree. They are
slow and have a lot of overhead. But they donât represent
anything like a full picture.
trinsic2 wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
I think it's a rep management firm trying to slow the trump
administrations collapse
hbn wrote 1 day ago:
Governments funding FOSS is not Microsoft's business model and it's
not capitalism.
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
> Governments funding FOSS is not Microsoft's business model
Yeah, long time ago we last saw the whole "Microsoft <3 Open
Source" shtick, so seems more true than ever.
pu_pe wrote 1 day ago:
One aspect of the AI bubble that is not talked about very much is how
the European market is a key factor in any serious calculation about
future revenue. If Europe decides to, or is forced to decouple its
digital infrastructure from the US, that essentially slashes the
addressable market of a company like chatGPT by a third. And Europe has
some of the richest customers too.
In other words, Sam Altman et al. should be hardcore Atlanticists at
this point.
kyboren wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe this will happen eventually but decoupling any time soon is a
pipe dream. For the foreseeable future, Europe's BATNA is shit.
Forget Microsoft and Google services, what about the hardware? To
support all this new demand for European infrastructure you'll have
to buy tons of new gear from mostly American companies: AMD, INTC,
NVDA, MU, etc.
Are cutting-edge European competitors going to suddenly spring into
existence to satisfy that demand? Is TSMC gonna allocate wafer spins
to some scrappy EU startup instead of NVDA, AAPL, AMZN, MSFT, AMD,
INTC, AVGO, QCOM?
I dunno if you've been paying attention to the market but demand for
all data center components has gone through the roof and supply is
already spoken for for years to come. The hardware you'd need to
decouple simply isn't available, when it becomes available you'll be
competing with nearly $1T in annual hyperscaler CapEx, and Europe has
no capability to produce domestic alternatives.
pu_pe wrote 1 day ago:
Decoupling would be painful and certainly hardware would be the
most difficult challenge. However, consider that for all those
companies you mentioned, Chinese alternatives are starting to
appear and will be very competitive in the next few years. Europe
also has some key strategic cards to play when it comes to
hardware, such as access to TSMC.
The most likely scenario in my view is that Europe will be a
consumer/bystander in the AI race, not a protagonist. For that, you
don't need a lot of hardware. China and the US will compete for the
European market, with the US already far ahead and earning billions
from European customers. But it can lose that post in the future,
either through crazy foreign policy or simply being outcompeted by
the Chinese.
kyboren wrote 14 hours 12 min ago:
Look, I support Europe's push for computational sovereignty. It's
frankly long overdue. But Europeans still consistently
underestimate the scope and difficulty of that task, and it must
be undertaken simultaneously with building military and energy
sovereignty while China's eating their economic lunch.
There isn't the money, the attention bandwidth, the industry, the
IP, the skilled labor with know-how, the tools, or the raw
materials to do all of those.
> Chinese alternatives are starting to appear
Maybe, but they are seriously handicapped and not competitive.
And certainly when it comes to inference: They also don't have
the hardware capacity to supply their own market and the European
market.
> will be very competitive in the next few years
Maybe. More likely they'll only be competitive in 10+ years.
> Europe also has some key strategic cards to play when it comes
to hardware, such as access to TSMC.
Then why haven't they played them? Both Japan and America got
commitments for significant domestic advanced node fab and
packaging facilities from TSMC. Europe only got 40k WSPMs of
already-outdated 12nm+ lines.
Further: Which European company is designing or will soon design
competitive CPUs/GPUs/switching to hand off to TSMC? Will a
European company cut in line for cutting-edge tools, conjure up
IP and know-how from nothing, and start selling HBM and DRAM,
too? And will all these fantasy companies be decoupling from US
EDA tools, as well?
Finally: If you're saying that Europe will be able to outplay the
US in a zero-sum game for access to TSMC wafer spins, you might
want to consider also the strategic cards that the US can play to
prevent that.
> Europe will be a consumer/bystander in the AI race, not a
protagonist
That's not just likely, that's absolutely guaranteed. Sorry, Mr.
Draghi.
> For that, you don't need a lot of hardware
How do you serve inference at scale without a lot of hardware? If
both US and China are supply-constrained for GPUs that they're
turning into high-value-added products/services, why would they
give Europe any hardware at all?
If I can turn a $100k GPU into $1M of value, there aren't enough
GPUs in the world, your companies don't have the fiscal firepower
to be price-setters, and your products/services compete with mine
on global markets--why the fuck would I sell you any GPUs?
Charity?
And if the plan is for European computing to remain totally
dependent on US and CN... what are we even talking about here?
> But it can lose that post in the future
Sure, nothing lasts forever. But I thought this was about
European computational sovereignty, not dependence on the US
specifically. I guess not: Depending on the US is a crisis, but
depending on Qatar and China is A-OK. What could go wrong?
enaaem wrote 1 day ago:
It also destroys the winner takes all market. Investors would count
on the winner takes all market and give infinite VC money to a start
up, so that they would make a product that is slightly better than
the competitor and kill the competition early on.
_ache_ wrote 1 day ago:
You are right, but I have the feeling that the Google, Microsoft, ...
and the IA companies think that the EU is a acquired market. It's
false, they can shift off the US, they eventually will.
daft_pink wrote 1 day ago:
Good luck. Itâs just not really practical. Office 365 is cheap and
training everyone on another platform will cost more and make it harder
to onboard new talent than using another system.
I worked for a company that was fully Google and the executives who
were highly effective all just paid for excel themselves. Itâs just
not really practical when youâre going to make a presentation to
learn how to do pivot tables in a new software in the crunch time.
Iâm not a fanboy. I prefer Mac, but in a high cost labor environment
like Europe itâs not worth it to save less than 1% of your labor cost
on new software.
hapidjus wrote 1 day ago:
If the goal is purely to save costs, then yes. The main reason is
actually stated in the title of the article. I recommend clicking the
link to see it.
daft_pink wrote 1 day ago:
The articles like 2-3 paragraphs?
Itâs not only costs. Itâs the productivity and output of your
labor force compared to something that in the grand scheme of
things is not really expensive.
sylware wrote 1 day ago:
From an applications point of view:
They want web apps only running in whatng cartel web engines?
libreoffice? A massive piece of software you can build only with US c++
compilers (MIT and mostly apple)? (the mistake was to use c++ in the
first place, well computer languages on an insane level of complexity).
To put it together: it won't be perfect, lines for compromises will
have to be drawn, and it will feel like getting out of 'the matrix' for
the time (normal "users" won't understand), if you see where I am
going. Digital freedom has a "price", efty "price" in a digital world
dominated by Big Tech.
Going for a strong independence will have to hurt, or it will be
slatted as "posture" more than a real long term/strategic will.
It is not "against" the US, but "in the interest" of the danish people
(well, should be EU though...)
robinei wrote 1 day ago:
Who cares if a piece of open source has American maintainers? The
point is not to avoid touching anything American. It is control and
sovereignty.
sylware wrote 1 day ago:
This is what I implied: this is not against the US, which have
actually the most control and sovereignty on critical software.
It is much cheaper and easier to have control and sovereignty on
less complex software, including the SDK.
Usually you get developer lock-in via non-pertinent complexity,
often including the SDK namely the computer language.
goldman7911 wrote 1 day ago:
Sorry if I sound bit political but this whole trump/usa political issue
(hope) helps push more and more opensource and decentralization.
blue_hex wrote 1 day ago:
This is a good thing, imo. Perhaps, the EU could generally switch to
OSS, wherever possible, thus eroding even more the grip of the US
tech giants on parts of the digital world.
motoboi wrote 1 day ago:
Brazilâs free software initiative in 2000âs was all about
technological dependency.
Brazil was hoping to leverage governmental spending to kickstart a
national software development industry. Some sort of leap into the
future, jumping over first the industrial era and then service-based
economy we missed.
It was killed with fire by huge Microsoft (and American, I suppose)
lobbying in congress, but then America had a very favorable public view
as a nurturing and democratic partner. Some sort of older brother
guiding you into adulthood.
Currently, at least in my bubble, the public view of America is more
like a predator with Trump as a protodictator. Not necessarily true,
understand me, just as that older brother view wasnât. But itâs
public perception.
A good part of that disabling of the Brazil initiative was simply free
Google workspace for public universities (which were in the government
plan).
I suppose that given the existencial threat level of anxiety caused by
current developments will probably make Europe government immune to
American lobby (at least in the short term), so I suppose this can
actually happen.
Letâs see how it develops when they try to ban Microsoft from the
universities. That would be the acid test.
marcosdumay wrote 1 day ago:
> It was killed with fire by huge Microsoft (and American, I suppose)
lobbying in congress
Well... the bad quality of the decree itself helped at least as much
as Microsoft.
Government organizations often discover it's easier to publish their
software in github than to make the publishing agency accept it.
There was no migration plan, and the option that was actually pushed
from the central organizations required constant contracts that were
about as expensive and hard to manage as the ones with Microsoft, but
hiring the government.
At the same time, the same organization that others were supposed to
contract was getting delisted worldwide for bad security practices.
piker wrote 1 day ago:
A lot of good behind this idea if nothing else than to keep Microsoft
honest. The Azureware push is nauseating and such a transparent attempt
to lock in its monopoly against disruptors. Weâre hoping Tritium[1]
can provide a free or commercial alternative for legal teams soon.
All that said, itâs easy to underestimate the quality of
Microsoftâs office products. They handle millions of edge cases,
accessibility, i18n. They are performant and in a lot of cases extended
through long-term add ins.
Even Google hasnât achieved real parity.
Itâs Microsoftâs race to lose, but my bet is theyâre too
distracted by AI to even noticed those coming for them.
HTML [1]: https://tritium.legal
bayindirh wrote 1 day ago:
> performant
Inexplicably taking two seconds to load the next page in a simple, 10
page .docx document on a completely idle MacBook Air M1 w/ 16GB RAM.
No memory pressure, no heavy processes, no excessive number of apps
open.
Yes, it's normally much faster, but not always.
piker wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, that is surprising. Though I think modern Office has always
struggled on macOS.
prathje wrote 1 day ago:
Happy to see Schleswig-Holstein switching as well and also it being
mentioned in an article on the HN front page. Who would have thought?
andypiper wrote 1 day ago:
They also have their own Mastodon server, which is a great way
forward for government institutions!
adornKey wrote 1 day ago:
Oh oh... Time to say goodbye to Greenland. Lets see what is going to
happen to LEGO.. Freedom Bricks?
ndsipa_pomu wrote 1 day ago:
Why do you think there's a connection between the Danish government
and LEGO?
simonh wrote 1 day ago:
Trump has already started talking about taking over Iceland.
Where's next?
HTML [1]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yZA7A1fy8yelNvDK2aVesx24j...
mrweasel wrote 1 day ago:
> Copenhagen and Aarhus, which previously announced plans to abandon
Microsoft software, citing financial concerns, market dominance and
political tensions with Washington.
That's not going to happen, their infrastructure is completely tied to
Microsoft Active Directory, it's going to be incredibly expensive to
just plan a migration out of that. Trump will be out of office before
anything serious can even get startet, and depending on the next US
administration, someone will decide that it's not worth the spending.
Plus you'd need to re-train and army of Windows administrators to run,
what... Linux and OpenLDAP?
zweifuss wrote 1 day ago:
If you can do a successful switch to cloud only Entra (aka. AzureAD)
first, you are 90% ready for a migration to Open Source. You need
Entra for Licensing anyway. Yes, I'm aware that this is hard.
Univention Nubus (Keycloak + OpenLDAP) or FreeIPA as alternatives for
Entra come to mind.
You can even leverage your Powershell expertise.
oellegaard wrote 1 day ago:
I donât think the IT admins are the concern TBH. How about the
thousands of people who need to use new software - people who some
barely know how to turn the computer on and off?
littlecosmic wrote 1 day ago:
Far crazier things have happened on this planet than switching to
Linux and retraining some IT folk.
throwawaysleep wrote 1 day ago:
Trump represents the average American. That part is not changing and
that problem is not going away. Joe Average said "Yes! [current mess]
is what I want."
tallanvor wrote 1 day ago:
No. Trump represented what seemed like a solution to just enough
people who were willing to change their votes from one party to
another, and didn't represent enough of a threat to most of the
people who might have been swayed to switch their vote away from
the Republican party.
The issue with voters choosing more right-wing populist parties is
not unique to the US.
CoastalCoder wrote 1 day ago:
> Trump represents the average American.
If that were true, you wouldn't see such a deeply divided America
right now.
throwawaysleep wrote 1 day ago:
Fine. Median American. 2 out of 3 Americans either endorsed this
explicitly or were ok with it.
maypeacepreva1l wrote 1 day ago:
Exactly, people saying Trump will be out of office and everything
will be back to normal are incredibly naive. If current trends
stay, Trump is going to be one of the better ones for what is
coming next. The politicians in US are saying worst xenophobic,
racist, sexist things and are still getting praised or even
promoted to higher positions. At least for a decade, unless
something big or drastic happens, nothing is going to change for
better in US, politics wise.
fbn79 wrote 1 day ago:
Who remember the failed experiment of abandoning Micro$oft by Munich
HTML [1]: https://www-sueddeutsche-de.translate.goog/muenchen/muenchner-...
jamesbelchamber wrote 1 day ago:
It should be acknowledged that this was at least significantly about
lobbying, and shouldn't be considered a cut-and-dry "failed
experiment" (though clearly there are lessons that can be learned):
> [Munich Mayor] Reiter wanted Microsoft to move its Microsoft
Germany corporate headquarters to to Munich. Microsoft moved and
Reiter wants to deliver on his promise to make Munich a
Windows-powered city.
HTML [1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-munich-should-stick-with-l...
iso1631 wrote 1 day ago:
Microsoft came back with a far lower cost offer than they had before,
and took the new head out for nice lunches
petcat wrote 1 day ago:
So it sounds like Munich ditching Microsoft wasn't a principled
move, but just a business tactic to get the same software for
cheaper.
iso1631 wrote 1 day ago:
Either that or decision makers changed from the decision to drop.
The first ones valued sovereignty higher but they moved on and
the second ones valued it less.
Kampfschnitzel wrote 1 day ago:
failed due to corrupt government official and M$ bribes
amelius wrote 1 day ago:
Sounds like a strategy to get money from M$. You can always switch
to FOSS later.
cromka wrote 1 day ago:
It failed because of MS pushback and lobbying. As was reported
countless times.
petcat wrote 1 day ago:
Also because Munich didn't actually want to leave Microsoft, they
just wanted a better deal. (Which they got)
xienze wrote 1 day ago:
So, it can happen again is what youâre saying.
cromka wrote 1 day ago:
Not what I am saying. But yeah, except MS position in general is
much weaker nowadays, especially because of Apple, not open
source.
c03 wrote 1 day ago:
I don't. But I remember that the French also just did the same.
ulrikrasmussen wrote 1 day ago:
And meanwhile the exact same agency spits out government Android apps
that use Play Integrity so citizens cannot ditch Google for GrapheneOS.
This is symbolism, the minister does not actually care about digital
sovereignty for the citizens.
simonh wrote 1 day ago:
Because if they were serious about it, they'd have replatformed
completely in 5 minutes.
berkes wrote 1 day ago:
> This is symbolism
It is probably unintentional. I work and worked in such projects (in
The Netherlands), and the process is -rightfully- chaotic.
Governments typically don't have a central single team that builds
all their android apps. They usually write a tender with loads of
requirements and app-agencies will then build it. Or freelancers. Or
volunteer teams. Or all of that. So there's no central team governed
by one minister who can dictate what should happen today. There's
hundreds of companies, teams, freelancers, interims, running around
trying to make deadlines
Between writing a spec and the delivered app, there's chasms: could
be a year between the specs are written and the first app pushed onto
a phone. In a (trump)year a lot can change. But also between how
specs are requirements or wishes in real life. "No user data may ever
reach a google server" (actual specs are far vaguer and broader) may
sound good, but will conflict directly with "user must receive push
notifications of Foo and Bar". Or "passport NFC data must be attested
for login", requiring a non-rooted, android, signed-by-google
hardware attestation thingymajick.
So no, this is not malice. Nor incompetence. This is a sad reality,
where we've allowed the monopoly to dictate what we, and users,
expect, and to have that monopoly be the only option to provide those
expectations.
berkes wrote 1 hour 26 min ago:
Since a few people ask "What can I do to help my
govt/region/country to become more sovereign", here's my tips on
this:
- All governments under EU (on almost all levels) are "required" to
use and/or produce software as Open Source. The source of "that
government app" should be available somewhere (though quite likely
is not)¹ So go hunt for the source and start there.
- Look at underlying standards. EU regulation, trickling down into
local laws and guidelines, rely on Open Standards almost always.
That app you use to log into your tax environment quite probably
uses (a weird, hard to recognize) variation of OAUTH2 or OpenID
connect, SAML or such. The app that shows the time+dates for
garbage-collection, quite probably uses a simple ical-feed under
the hood. With that knowledge, you may be able to develop/fork/use
open source alternatives without too much effort².
- Show (local) representatives the alternatives. Listen to them.
Learn from them. Most representatives are suprisingly open to you
as expert. But, I cannot stress enough, learn and listen foremost.
IT experts and open source community in particular have an (IMHO
well deserved) reputation for being arrogant, know-it-all
unfriendly and rediculously single-minded. So don't lecture that
councillor for using Twitter instead of Mastodon, riduculing them
for not using GPG or scoffing at their insistence on using
Microsoft Word over Vim with Markdown (My younger self was such an
arrogant neckbeard; I am now convinced I have done actual harm to
the Open Source community that way). But ask why twitter, have they
tried mastodon, or bluesky? Why not? Why did they leave? What
features in MSword do they require? Did they know that Jitsi is an
option? Maybe you can show how they could use Nextcloud for at
least their own files? Sometimes you can answer some of their
questions and help them. More often, you learn a few things that
you could use to improve sovereign and open source alternatives and
align them slightly more with whats needed.
¹ The details, interpretations and implementations are a mess, but
the idea is "open source, unless..." for any software that any
government buys, rents, builds, etc. In practice almost all
projects fall under "unless...". I spoke to a MSFT account-manager
for several local govts and he told me they have f*in training
material to "help" govt officials write tenders/requirements in
such a way that Open Source is practically excluded and Microsoft
the only option. I am appalled, but also not that surprised.
² The ical-finding is how I got my local garbage-collection
schedule into my calendar app. And when I told this to someone who
happened to work at the municipality, they realized that publishing
the urls and docs online helped a lot of citizens. Ironically, the
push-back, according to this person, was from a civil-servant whose
career was influenced on the success (install counts) of the
"municipality app" and who was afraid that if people could add the
calendar to their outlook/google cal/ical/other-cal, might no
longer install the app. Again, I was appalled at such perverse
incentives.
teekert wrote 1 day ago:
As someone in the Netherlands, and also with a company in this
space, could you point me to some relevant resources (like ongoing
projects)? I'd love to help our country get more sovereign (in
small steps).
Btw, NRC has a nice podcast series on the topic. One thing
hampering the sovereignty effort is the enormous amounts of
Azure/AWS/GCP certified people. Their career is build on these
platforms.
electrosphere wrote 1 day ago:
Upvote for wanting to help with digital soverign effort (UK
national here).
berkes wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not familiar with all current ongoing projects. Because of
the situation mentioned above.
Currently I'm involved in projects surrounding [1] . Have a look
there. It's not FLOSS in the way that you can just provide PRs of
things you'd like different, but FLOSS in the way that you can
get in touch and with enough expertise, have people listen to
you.
HTML [1]: https://developer.overheid.nl/kennisbank/security/standa...
isodev wrote 1 day ago:
I think it has more to do with ignorance. Device attestation is not
trivial to adopt while both Apple and Google promise you a very
simple abstraction. So it takes being informed and having leverage in
the process to be able to make a difference.
For me the blame is squarely on the technical âexpertsâ who are
behind the architecture and implementation of such apps.
ulrikrasmussen wrote 1 day ago:
The thing is, device attestation is fundamentally incompatible with
digital freedom so governments should never adopt it to begin with.
We lived without digital solutions that depended on device
attestation and we will continue to do so.
azalemeth wrote 1 day ago:
Device attestation is precisely the thing I do not want my
government to ever adopt. I have a Danish CPR number. They've given
me a FIDO secure token generator as my phone is degoogled for
MitID. Most Danes don't know what those words mean, and if they
did, wouldn't understand why I distrust (all) governments (and
indeed things! Three default scientific position is scepticism,
albeit with varying degrees of priors)
guerrilla wrote 1 day ago:
> This is symbolism
I don't think so. It's more complicated than that. The state is not a
monolith. Different heads are doing different things and it's a
enormous bureaucracy. The divisions pumping out Android will
eventually catch up to what's going on and the vulnerability they're
exposing themselves to. These things take time. It doesn't all happen
at once. People (who are not very technical, barely knowing what a
computer is) need to understand what's going on and that can take a
while. Let's just hope they figure it out before it matters.
Aeglaecia wrote 1 day ago:
denmark spearheads the EU push for chat control , this is a bit of
an impediment to the good will argument
guerrilla wrote 1 day ago:
There is no "good will" argument being made here. The state
doesn't care about good, it cares about it's own survival. Being
independent from foreign interference in the software they use
and having deep insight into what residents within the territory
of that state are talking about are critical to that mission. It
has nothing to do with morals. It is a machine.
steinvakt2 wrote 1 day ago:
EU chat control is also better than American government spying
on American tech companies (which is effectively a kind of EU
Chat Control, except its USA who gets to spy). Both are bad,
but one is less bad.
tick_tock_tick wrote 1 day ago:
For the average citizen absolutely not there is no free
speech in the EU any form of EU chat control will result in
constant arrests for what should be perfectly legal speech.
wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
True, at least the EU does it above board. No secret court
backroom shenanigans.
I'm still super opposed to chatcontrol but at least it's in
the open for us to fight.
guerrilla wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, I agree with you both. Lesser evils do exist. At
least there's some pretense of democracy and not just spy
on everyone without limit without telling anyone. If it
wasn't for Snowden, it'd still just be us "conspiracy
theorists". (Anyone remember the 90s?)
Mashimo wrote 1 day ago:
I work in software development for Danish hospitals, and some regions
already used OpenOffice, now libre office, for .. well over 15 years.
At least in parts.
We integrate with an API into libreoffice, and it more or less did not
change in well over a decade. But sometimes libreoffice crashes and you
can't figure out why. There are just no logs. It feels like a black box
at times.
But I don't think they will be switching away from Teams as quickly.
Will be interesting for sure.
Slightly off topic, but does anyone know why libreoffice stopped
publishing artefacts to mvn repo?
HTML [1]: https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.libreoffice/libreoffice
PeterStuer wrote 12 hours 41 min ago:
Could you expand on the Teams remark? What exactly is the lock=in?
trinsic2 wrote 22 hours 55 min ago:
Did you try running Libra office from command line to see the console
output?
flopsamjetsam wrote 1 day ago:
> But I don't think they will be switching away from Teams as
quickly.
I'm interested to know why Teams is so sticky for the team. Are
there not good replacements available? I've used it a little, but am
by no means a power user.
trinsic2 wrote 22 hours 37 min ago:
It's buggy as hell. That's one thing. But they rolled teams out
with office anti-competitively to lock orgs in and on that premise
it should be abandoned. Market saturation by a company that is
contributing to an authoritarian government by way of
anti-competition needs to be black listed everywhere.
close04 wrote 1 day ago:
On top of what sibling comment says, Teams benefits from other
network effects. If all your partners use Teams and the federation
is a enabled, next time you consider a replacement that can do all
of this, the bar will be that much higher to find a suitable
alternative.
If an inter-operable protocols were enforced by some regulation it
would alleviate the situation a bit.
wiredpancake wrote 1 day ago:
Because 'Teams' isn't just a simple meeting application. It's very
feature rich.
If you ever have to deal with the admin.teams.microsoft portal
you'll know how many options and toggles it has.
Alongside this many businesses deploy 'Teams Supported' or 'Teams
Enabled' devices into meeting and conference rooms. Yealink is a
popular brand, they don't have baked in support for LibreMeet or
whatever meeting products exist.
buovjaga wrote 1 day ago:
LibreOffice release builds should offer to send a crash report.
Ideally, you should then create a bug report referencing the crash
report. Besides that, you can do your own build with debug symbols
and get backtraces or debug the program.
At The Document Foundation we are always interested in helping
deployments. It is also nice to do writeups for our blog. Let me
know, if your organisation needs help:
ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org
I recommend to consider our certification program: [1] I asked about
the Maven artifacts and our release engineer will update them later
this week.
HTML [1]: https://www.documentfoundation.org/certification-program/
trinsic2 wrote 22 hours 57 min ago:
Why does libreoffice have such an annoying document recovery
mechanism that I can't turn off or modify? It takes like three
clicks to cancel that process every time I open a new doc
buovjaga wrote 21 hours 48 min ago:
Have you deactivated Tools - Options - Load/Save - General: Save
AutoRecovery information...?
trinsic2 wrote 16 hours 13 min ago:
Yes. It still operates after that if I open a document that I
didn't shutdown correctly. Many times I just open documents to
take temp notes. and some times I shutdown the application with
out saving and that document recovery process starts no matter
what.
buovjaga wrote 41 min ago:
There is this command line option that you could add to your
shortcut for launching LibreOffice: --norestore
It will skip the recovery dialog. I use it often when doing
QA.
rbanffy wrote 1 day ago:
> you should then create a bug report referencing the crash report
Reducing friction would be nice here - I don't remember
encountering the crash log screen, but if you could file a bug
report right from that screen, that'd be perfect. A lot of
information can be pre-collected at that stage - precise version,
build, OS, architecture, processor type, etc. All that'd be left is
the "What I was trying to do", my e-mail, and a checkbox if I agree
with the privacy policies and if I want to receive e-mail updates
about this bug report.
> you can do your own build with debug symbols
It'd be great if the Document Foundation helped distros to offer
libreoffice-*-debug packages for this case - if it's crashing for
you, install the debug version and your crash logs will be a lot
easier to read.
buovjaga wrote 22 hours 6 min ago:
> if you could file a bug report right from that screen, that'd
be perfect
You can file a bug report from a crash report - it prefills all
the relevant data. See an example crash report: [1] "Bug reports
for libc.so.6:
File a bug for: Calc Writer Impress Chart Base"
Here is what the dialog says about bug reports: [2] > It'd be
great if the Document Foundation helped distros to offer
libreoffice-*-debug packages for this case
I believe most distros have this covered now, some by making use
of debuginfod, which downloads symbols on demand:
HTML [1]: https://crashreport.libreoffice.org/stats/crash_details/...
HTML [2]: https://git.libreoffice.org/core/+/master/svx/uiconfig/u...
HTML [3]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Debuginfod
rbanffy wrote 20 hours 7 min ago:
Thank you. This is all awesome work. BTW, I didn't know
debuginfod existed :-)
andix wrote 1 day ago:
Switching from Word/Excel to LibreOffice is comparably easy. A lot of
other Microsoft Products are much harder to get rid of.
I've never seen a European corporation that doesn't do user
management with ActiveDirectory. Some still have it on their own
Windows servers, but most browser based applications still go through
Entra (Azure Cloud based AD). Just shut off their Entra/AAD and most
of their software is blocked because nobody can log in.
close04 wrote 1 day ago:
This is the elephant in the room that most comments on this page
miss. Office may be hard to replace, Teams maybe even harder, but
the real pain comes when you touch identity and access management.
The usual initial optimism that "yeah but [insert solution name
here] does this, problem solved" dissolves very fast as you start
going through the inventory of requirements for managing users,
devices, authentication, etc.
It's not just the technical hurdle which maybe you'll whip your
admins into finding workarounds (-keep praying that your admins
don't leave because it will be painful to find replacements who
understand and can maintain the spaghetti pasta monster your infra
ended up being-). In overall non-technical organizations the user
experience always ends up hobbled even just by asking people to
keep track of multiple identities.
MS is still entrenched because they give a turnkey solution with
Eeeeeverything⢠and your CTO doesn't need to struggle with any
uncertainty. SaaS made it so easy to just "outsource" everything to
MS, they'll be responsible and accountable for operations, infra,
security, processes, etc. Even less headache for your C-level
people. See no evil, hear no evil, you pay MS to take the shit and
your job is safe. If you throw a stone out the window you'll hit
someone with general "MS administration" skills. And users are
usually familiar with MS tools, Windows, Office, so they aren't
bothered (you hear a lot of complaints about Teams on HN but not so
much from normal users). So this covers the tech, the skills, and
the UX.
andix wrote 1 day ago:
Exactly. And if identity and access management is turned off,
then nothing works anymore.
In the past there was a lot of Software directly installed to
user's PCs and might have been authenticated without SSO. Also
log in to a PC often works without identity management (cached
credentials). But nowadays nearly everything is somehow in the
browser and requires SSO.
ExoticPearTree wrote 1 day ago:
> Office may be hard to replace, Teams maybe even harder.
It actually depends how you use it. If you use the shared online
collaboration features (concurrent editing for example) it might
be pretty hard since I do not know any other solution besides
Google Workspace that can do that.
And Excel standalone I think is the hardest to replace if you
have lots of macros with business logic inside them.
For Teams, as long as you use it for conferencing and chat (no
file sharing or editing), you can replace it with Slack or
whatever other solution might exist that has some feature parity.
IAM can stay MS, as it is a pretty battle tested solution on-prem
and in the cloud. Or you move to something like Okta with a LDAP
like backend where you manage users and groups.
close04 wrote 1 day ago:
> IAM can stay MS
That's leaving the most critical component still with a US
company. Doesn't fly if the goal is what the Danish agency is
trying to achieve.
> It actually depends how you use it.
Obviously but the larger the company, the more ways to use it,
and one of those ways will be a nightmare to tackle. You want
one solution, not a patchwork. So the one that does everything
gets picked. MS throws everything and the kitchen sink in their
ecosystem to fit every need even if sometimes at mediocre or
crappy quality.
> For Teams, as long as you use it for conferencing and chat
(no file sharing or editing), you can replace it with Slack
Taken in isolation you're right. But in a world of network
effects every company, supplier, service provider you work with
might use Teams and you can federate. Switch to Slack alone and
you make your life harder.
I mentioned this in another comment, if protocols and formats
were mandated to be open or interoperable (in practice) to
allow usage in the public sector, replacing MS would be a notch
or 2 simpler.
ExoticPearTree wrote 22 hours 28 min ago:
> That's leaving the most critical component still with a US
company. Doesn't fly if the goal is what the Danish agency is
trying to achieve.
Yes, because it is very hard to replace. I said that you
could move to Okta or something similar (in this or in
another comment), but this requires you have pretty modern
apps that can integrate with SAML/OAuth/OIDC.
And, even staying with MS for a few more years while you
migrate IAM to something else is not as bad as having the
full Office stack. You can't just yank out everything
overnight - I mean you could, but you have to spend a ton of
money to have a 1:1 solution from the get-go.
close04 wrote 21 hours 55 min ago:
> You can't just yank out everything overnight
Yeah, it's that transition period - "it's going to get
worse before it gets any better" - that hurts the most and
that everyone tries to avoid.
andix wrote 1 day ago:
> IAM can stay MS
The idea is to move critical parts away from US companies.
The US shows hostility towards Europe, even threatened a
military attack. So the goal is now to remove as much
dependence as possible.
To claim Microsoft is a company and doesn't have to follow US
government order is naive. US government is now routinely
breaking the law, if they threaten Europe with military action,
they can also threaten Microsoft with military/police action.
trinsic2 wrote 22 hours 44 min ago:
How does that matter? They said the same shit during the
Nuremberg trials. You're encouraging bad behavior. You can't
be submitting to illegal actions by rouge governments. You
make everyone less safe when you do this.
andix wrote 22 hours 20 min ago:
???
dijit wrote 1 day ago:
Agreed, and even things like Keycloak/FreeIPA are only partial
solutions.
FreeIPA in particular is a beast to maintain, it puts
kubernetes-cowboys to shame.
staticlibs wrote 1 day ago:
> sometimes libreoffice crashes and you can't figure out why
> why libreoffice stopped publishing artefacts to mvn repo
I think both questions would be a perfect fit for the paid support
bugtracker of LibreOffice maintainers. Hopefully paid by some
hospital funds that are not spent on MS Office licenses.
deanc wrote 1 day ago:
I think if we're to move to away from these US products to open
source ones, then governments should also provide resources or
funding to develop them using the licensing fees they save. Is the
Danish government contributing back to libreoffice?
trinsic2 wrote 22 hours 52 min ago:
Agreed. There should be some structure setup for open source
projects to request contribution fees. Having stuff like this in
plain sight might help orgs play nice.
toomuchtodo wrote 1 day ago:
Indeed, take what you're paying US Big Tech and direct it to
domestic EU enterprises, corporate or non profit.
hermanzegerman wrote 1 day ago:
The German State of Schleswig Holstein does
HTML [1]: https://euro-stack.com/blog/2025/3/schleswig-holstein-open...
wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
There's a lot more than just one municipality. The French
government uses a lot of open source and is actively working on
la suite.. The gendarmerie has been on Linux for years. Nato is
using matrix (noteworthy especially because America is of course
part of that) [1]
HTML [1]: https://element.io/en/case-studies/nato
HTML [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
trilogic wrote 1 day ago:
I wonder about Vatican policy in regards to similar compromising
infrastructure.
999900000999 wrote 1 day ago:
The entire American software industry will feel the ramifications here.
Gotta stay polite for HN. No data stored on an American server is
secure.
I really really do like Open Suse though, and I think an open source
future is possible. Open Suse, Libre Office, etc.
harambae wrote 15 hours 54 min ago:
For all of the talk of the downfall of Americans software here on HN
and how all the Europeans are moving away, this happened today as
well... [1] (iPhone and iPad approved to handle classified NATO
information)
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47169815
mghackerlady wrote 1 day ago:
SUSE and its children in openSUSE are freaking awesome. The
tumbleweed release is the most stable rolling release ever, they have
slowroll if you want something even more stable, and leap for
basically a free version of SLE. Genuinely surprised that SLES hasn't
overtaken redhat
mmsimanga wrote 1 day ago:
I am often amused at how people outside the US don't like the current
US government yet if it wasn't for the current US government the
whole world would have been sleep walking into Office 365 and Teams.
I don't hold any political opinion but do like that we are now going
to have alternatives and true competition.
Drakim wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not sure I follow, are you saying that because the current US
government is so bad that people are rejecting Microsoft products,
the rest of the world should be thankful to the US for "waking them
up"?
mmsimanga wrote 1 day ago:
Yes. The key point of view being from someone outside the US. I
cannot speak for those in the US. But the point is techies
outside the US had been reduced to merely configuring US
products. Speaking where I am from IT organisations were now
being led by accountants and lawyers because there wasn't any
decision to make, just go with Office 365. The hardest part was
negotiating the often opaque licensing. There has been a
revitalization of the craft of software development and I think
in the long run this will be good for the industry. Yes there
might be fragmentation but hopefully standards start getting
adopted to counter this fragmentation and interoperability.
isodev wrote 1 day ago:
Not will, they already do. My day job big corp hasnât renewed a
single US contract or license this year. Weâre also in the process
of ditching Office 365. Even Azure is no longer allowed for new
deployments
cyberpunk wrote 1 day ago:
No data stored on european servers either, see microsoftâs comments
in french court to this effect.
The only solution is no american companies in the loop at all.
999900000999 wrote 1 day ago:
TBF I also sorta just think Microsoft is generally stupid.
> Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the
Defense Departmentâs computer systems â with minimal
supervision by U.S. personnel â leaving some of the nationâs
most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber
adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found. [1] After thinking
about this for 90 seconds, Microsoft could license Azure tech to
Hetzner or something. Keep the servers under EU control, but unless
they share source code itâs still a blackbox.
Honestly everything used for anything serious should be open source
and regularly audited. We need check each others homework.
HTML [1]: https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-digital-escor...
simonh wrote 1 day ago:
AWS Outpost might be a reasonable compromise in some situations.
rockskon wrote 1 day ago:
To be fair, the same could be said about most other servers too.
data_maan wrote 1 day ago:
I love these posts that are so on the edge that I can't tell if it's
sarcastic or for real :)
gammalost wrote 1 day ago:
I do not know what you mean. The US and US-based companies have now
become a liability. Global politics change on a day-by-day basis,
EU has frozen trade agreement discussions because the tariff
situation is unclear. There are open discussions in Sweden about
how we can reduce our dependence on US-based companies, because we
do not know whether that dependency will be wielded as a political
tool against us.
maypeacepreva1l wrote 1 day ago:
Which part is sarcastic here? As far as Europe as market goes,
Software industries have already started to feel the pinch. Right
now data protection and privacy rights of common people in the US
is at lowest point, as we have seen in the news, anything goes for
this administration. One must be living in an alternate reality to
not see these things happening.
edgyquant wrote 1 day ago:
This admin is doing nothing we havenât seen previous admins do.
Blaming the administration for how poorly American privacy is
takes the blame away from all other politicians whoâve helped
to create the âstandardsâ as we have then today.
pbhjpbhj wrote 1 day ago:
Remotely cutting off European allied nations personnel from IT
access to private US companies at the whim of someone having a
tantrum? That seems new.
Braxton1980 wrote 1 day ago:
The level is what matters. That combined with Trump erratic
behavior and acting without thinking as shown with the 10 15
tariff change
inglor_cz wrote 1 day ago:
This is not really true.
This administration spends a lot of effort on cultivating a
visibly hostile image to its former allies and emphasizing the
role of force over diplomacy.
If there was any sort of tacit understanding that certain
American power possibilites will only be used in relatively
rare contexts (going after terrorists), it is gone. Nowadays
the expectation is that the US will use various tools at their
disposal even over relatively minor disagreements and
conflicts.
Juliate wrote 1 day ago:
> This admin is doing nothing we havenât seen previous admins
do.
Well... lots disagree with that statement.
krior wrote 1 day ago:
This is the first time in decades the current administration
has openly threatened Europe with war. Before it was a vague
risk. Now it is a matter of national security.
simonh wrote 1 day ago:
Threatened Europe and Canada with war.
maypeacepreva1l wrote 1 day ago:
I beg to differ here. There are multiple things that have been
either unprecedented or done in larger scale by this
administration. We can start the blame from founding fathers
for creating an exploitable system (as Godel had correctly
pointed out), but to look elsewhere for the blatant abuse of
power and disregarding privacy of citizens by this
administration is, in my opinion, a biased take on it.
pu_pe wrote 1 day ago:
It's true that the cloud act and other data handling issues
were already there. There is one thing this US administration
did that was unique though, which was to threaten the
territorial integrity of an European country.
titanomachy wrote 1 day ago:
The perception in the rest of the world is that America has gone
completely off the rails and could do almost literally anything at
any time. I don't think this comment is that strange.
edgyquant wrote 1 day ago:
Which country do you live in?
titanomachy wrote 1 day ago:
Currently in Europe, but I've spent a few years in the states.
(Avoiding specifics, because I think AI will soon make it too
easy to mass-doxx HN accounts based on their comment history,
and I want to remain employable)
embedding-shape wrote 2 days ago:
Bit old, from June 13th, 2025, this and similar stories been on HN a
bunch of times:
- [1] -
HTML [1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query...
HTML [2]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query...
nunobrito wrote 2 days ago:
Very good news for open source, hopefully.
okintheory wrote 2 days ago:
How could any European govt use MS after Trump ordered MS to sanction
an ICC prosecutor and MS complied? I imagine they're all trying to walk
away
tick_tock_tick wrote 1 day ago:
Europe still buys Russian gas and just signed a trade deal with India
to whitewash it buying of Russian gas after they "stop".
hrmtst93837 wrote 1 day ago:
Many European governments are reassessing their tech dependencies,
especially after incidents like that. It raises significant concerns
about privacy and autonomy when companies respond to geopolitical
pressures.
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
The big problem, and I say this as someone that appreciates some of
the Microsoft technologies, is that it is always first and foremost
about Office, and nothing else.
Forgotten are Windows, XBox, DirectX, VC++, C#, F#, TypeScript,
Github, VSCode, Azure, Teams, SQL Server, SharePoint, Dynamics,....
Ah but some of those are FOSS, they are, pity that most money and
project steering only flows from one place.
Repeat the same listing exercise for every US big tech company and
their influence on the computing industry at large, and possible
geopolitcs, that is how we end up with HarmonyOS NEXT with ArkTS.
ndsipa_pomu wrote 1 day ago:
> Forgotten are Windows, XBox, DirectX, VC++, C#, F#, TypeScript,
Github, VSCode, Azure, Teams, SQL Server, SharePoint, Dynamics,....
Ah but some of those are FOSS
Which of those are FOSS?
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
C#, F#, TypeScript, VSCode, under the business friendly OSI
approved licenses, MIT and Apache.
seu wrote 1 day ago:
Not exactly governments, but I work with NGOs in Germany, and plenty
of them use Teams and other MS products, just because they receive
them for free and don't have the budget to pay someone to install
open source alternatives. Training is especially costly and in these
environments people are not really "digital native". It's not even
about age, but about culture: people here will do what they are
trained to do and fear doing something they don't know, because they
might "do something wrong".
I was responsible for a platform that gives free online storage, chat
functions and videocalls (BBB) for NGOs, and had to hear these
arguments over and over when discussing migrations.
So unless there is a political drive, together with good trainings
and support, the transition is very very difficult.
abc123abc123 wrote 1 day ago:
Easy. Intertia and incompetence. Government is full of paper pushers
who hav eno higher wish but to live comfortably on tax payers money
until they retire. The key to survival is to do what everyone else is
doing, and not to be the first to try anything new.
The good thing is, as soon as someone tries anything new, and it
looks like it is a success, the paper pushers will join in as soon as
they think it is safe, and try to steal the fame and glory.
This is just how the government and the public sector works.
CoastalCoder wrote 1 day ago:
> This is just how the government and the public sector works.
I work in the public sector, and that isn't remotely my experience.
Could you roughly quantify what faction of public sector workers
you believe operate that way, and how you arrived at that belief?
olav wrote 1 day ago:
Plus, fulfillment of wishes to users as opposed to IT architecture
management. Users have been brainwashed to demand certain brands.
When you combine this with an IT Management that lacks mid-term
risk management or a vision, you get happy users and an IT
landscape easily taken hostage by single vendors.
Frieren wrote 1 day ago:
> Government is full of paper pushers who hav eno higher wish but
to live comfortably on tax payers money until they retire.
Even billionaires are into getting as much tax payer money as
possible. But they get the big numbers.
Report Says Elon Musk's Businesses Have Been Awarded $38 Billion In
Government Contracts Since 2003:
HTML [1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/report-says-elon-musks-busi...
kachnuv_ocasek wrote 1 day ago:
This is not in any way specific to the government or public
institution. Many (perhaps most) private companies work the same
way.
q3k wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, anyone who says 'the government should be ran like a
company' has likely never worked in a large corporation. It's
full of meaningless work, bullshit jobs and red tape.
jjgreen wrote 2 days ago:
The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip
through your fingers
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