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.
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.
> "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..
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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 Вкусно – и точка.
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.
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.
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.
The “that’s nice but Denmark is small” comment is getting tiresome. Whether the country had 6 million or 60 million the bureaucracy is the same. It’s not about the size or the economics, it’s about the message.
It won’t be long until the rest of the public sectors follow along. There has already been plenty of consideration and desire to follow through. What’s 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.
> The “that’s nice but Denmark is small” 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.
It’s 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 there’s no doubt active espionage targeting Denmark from the US.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
What France is doing is great but, as you’ll see discussed in that HN comment section, it is hardly an office suite. It’s not a full replacement by a long shot. I hope it will be one day though!
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.
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.
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.
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
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: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/libreoffice-bibliography-is-bro... (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!
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.
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).
Is there a combination of open standards to drop in to replace AD integration with self management?
OAuth enabled systems aren’t 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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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
"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.
>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.
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.
The reason Europeans feel the urgency is because of rigid minders and failure to act at least 10-15 years ago. So now it’s ok to bite the bullet a bit. It’s a lesson for the next time.
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
You’re 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
> 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.
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.
Europe’s reading the room and building exits. They’re 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.
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.
> They’re 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 that’s what you are hinting at. The trigger was Big Tech payments (Facebook Libra) and the rise of BTC.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Sweeping generalizations like just don’t 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 don’t represent anything like a full picture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
I'm not familiar with all current ongoing projects. Because of the situation mentioned above.
Currently I'm involved in projects surrounding https://developer.overheid.nl/kennisbank/security/standaarde... . 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.
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 “experts” who are behind the architecture and implementation of such apps.
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)
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.
Not will, they already do. My day job big corp hasn’t renewed a single US contract or license this year. We’re also in the process of ditching Office 365. Even Azure is no longer allowed for new deployments
TBF I also sorta just think Microsoft is generally stupid.
> Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found.
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 it’s still a blackbox.
Honestly everything used for anything serious should be open source and regularly audited. We need check each others homework.
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
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
This admin is doing nothing we haven’t seen previous admins do. Blaming the administration for how poorly American privacy is takes the blame away from all other politicians who’ve helped to create the “standards” as we have then today.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. It’s not just a question of switching vendors; it’s 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. It’s whether they are prepared to follow through on what real openness demands once they commit to it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. We’re hoping Tritium[1] can provide a free or commercial alternative for legal teams soon.
All that said, it’s easy to underestimate the quality of Microsoft’s 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 hasn’t achieved real parity.
It’s Microsoft’s race to lose, but my bet is they’re too distracted by AI to even noticed those coming for them.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Brazil’s free software initiative in 2000’s 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 wasn’t. But it’s 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.
Let’s see how it develops when they try to ban Microsoft from the universities. That would be the acid test.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
I don’t 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?
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."
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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...)
Good luck. It’s 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. It’s just not really practical when you’re going to make a presentation to learn how to do pivot tables in a new software in the crunch time.
I’m not a fanboy. I prefer Mac, but in a high cost labor environment like Europe it’s not worth it to save less than 1% of your labor cost on new software.
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.
It’s not only costs. It’s the productivity and output of your labor force compared to something that in the grand scheme of things is not really expensive.
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.
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.
> "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..
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)
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.
What counts as data sovereignty in your book? Are the sovereign clouds of AWS, MS, Google acceptable? If not, who are your preferred providers?
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.
Should we discuss DNS root servers at some point too?
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?
China do root server mirrors: https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1156025.shtml
How does one start a Root DNS business?
Looks like a business opportunity.
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.
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.
An American company will always follow US law, no matter the local laws.
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.
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 Вкусно – и точка.
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.
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.
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.
GDPR give exemption for foreign government for "national security", "important reasons of public interest" or "law enforcement", whatever that meant.
> 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.
First we gotta migrate everybody to IPv6, then we can start talking.
Dealing with the patchwork of lesser-known infra providers in the EU is work enough. You want to live life on hard mode!
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.
The “that’s nice but Denmark is small” comment is getting tiresome. Whether the country had 6 million or 60 million the bureaucracy is the same. It’s not about the size or the economics, it’s about the message.
It won’t be long until the rest of the public sectors follow along. There has already been plenty of consideration and desire to follow through. What’s 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.
> The “that’s nice but Denmark is small” 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.
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.
But still, this is Denmark’s 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.
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.
Indeed, crossing the fingers to see if we finally have a proper transition.
It’s 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 there’s no doubt active espionage targeting Denmark from the US.
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).
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.
"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.
The best time to do this was ~2010 before all of the cloud lock-in stuff.
The second best time is now.
Google has drop in replacements for most of it. But that doesn’t solve the problem of using US tech.
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] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46923736
[2] https://github.com/suitenumerique
[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-propose-permanent...
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.
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.
"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. "
Good luck convincing the government (or local councils) of Bulgaria to migrate to an office suite that’s available in French or English only.
That’s beside the sibling comment’s point that this suite is not complete enough (yet).
What France is doing is great but, as you’ll see discussed in that HN comment section, it is hardly an office suite. It’s not a full replacement by a long shot. I hope it will be one day though!
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.
Any insight in to why the finance department (and other departments) required MS office?
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.
After using both extensively, there is no comparison between Google and the MS suite. Google’s apps are like a toy version of MS Office.
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.
> 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.
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
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: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/libreoffice-bibliography-is-bro... (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!
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
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.
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).
And OpenDesk has managed to do without, they seem to be using Univention Nubus as an AD Replacement
https://www.univention.de/loesungen/alternative-zu-microsoft...
Is there a combination of open standards to drop in to replace AD integration with self management?
OAuth enabled systems aren’t 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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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".
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?
> Nobody gets a house or a job at Microsoft for buying Microsoft...
This is the same Microsoft we're talking about right?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-pays-25-million-end...
https://techcentral.co.za/eoh-microsoft-ensnared-in-sec-corr...
https://www.wsj.com/tech/former-microsoft-employee-alleges-b...
Any fines that allow profitable operations are no more than a tax.
>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".
> 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.
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?)
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.
The processes might well be in Microsoft Dynamics 365.
I agree, apart from legal entities because iirc they use some software that's available on windows only
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
"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.
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
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?
>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.
> [...] 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].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spie...
Agreed. But Trump is the absolute last straw, and it seems some people needed that earthquake to finally wake up in the EU.
> 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.
It won’t but it creates a sense of urgency.
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.
The reason Europeans feel the urgency is because of rigid minders and failure to act at least 10-15 years ago. So now it’s ok to bite the bullet a bit. It’s a lesson for the next time.
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
See la suite in France.
They have an extensive history in this too. The gendarmerie even has their own Linux distro for their workstations.
> 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.
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
You’re 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.
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.
> 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...
Definitely, at least in Denmark.
And in Greenland. ;)
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.
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
> It's a thankless and tough battle for politicians, because they face lobbying and media pressure against them.
Awwww, poor babies.
> 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?
> 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.
It is actually at least two agencies that is working in that direction, The Danish Road Authorities is also working on it: https://www.fstyr.dk/nyheder/2025/dec/faerdselsstyrelsen-tag...
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
A lot of hospitals run Microsoft. So it would be literal death you are talking about.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
>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.
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 https://www.exoscale.com/blog/cloudact-vs-gdpr/
( Though note exoscale, as a European provider has skin in the game here ).
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.
Have you ever even used OpenOffice? It's 50 years behind.
Or at least a decade behind, which should be surprising given that it hasn’t been actively developed in about a decade.
Honestly, I hadn't used Microsoft Office in 15 years, and it somehow went 20 years backwards in that time.
>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.
https://www.state.gov/icc-sanctions
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.
>Taiwan recently re-engaged in diplomatic unification talks with China
That's news to me, got any good articles on the topic?
> 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.
"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?
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
https://www.univention.com/industries/educational-sector/
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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? https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.libreoffice/libreoffi...
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?
The German State of Schleswig Holstein does
https://euro-stack.com/blog/2025/3/schleswig-holstein-open-s...
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)
https://element.io/en/case-studies/nato https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
> 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.
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.
Europe’s reading the room and building exits. They’re 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.
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.
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.
> They’re 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 that’s what you are hinting at. The trigger was Big Tech payments (Facebook Libra) and the rise of BTC.
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.
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.
> 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.
Governments funding FOSS is not Microsoft's business model and it's not capitalism.
> 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.
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.
Sweeping generalizations like just don’t 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 don’t represent anything like a full picture.
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.
> 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.
denmark spearheads the EU push for chat control , this is a bit of an impediment to the good will argument
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.
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.
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.
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?)
> 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.
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.
I'm not familiar with all current ongoing projects. Because of the situation mentioned above.
Currently I'm involved in projects surrounding https://developer.overheid.nl/kennisbank/security/standaarde... . 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.
Upvote for wanting to help with digital soverign effort (UK national here).
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 “experts” who are behind the architecture and implementation of such apps.
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)
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.
Because if they were serious about it, they'd have replatformed completely in 5 minutes.
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.
Not will, they already do. My day job big corp hasn’t renewed a single US contract or license this year. We’re also in the process of ditching Office 365. Even Azure is no longer allowed for new deployments
No data stored on european servers either, see microsoft’s comments in french court to this effect.
The only solution is no american companies in the loop at all.
TBF I also sorta just think Microsoft is generally stupid.
> Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found.
https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-digital-escorts...
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 it’s still a blackbox.
Honestly everything used for anything serious should be open source and regularly audited. We need check each others homework.
AWS Outpost might be a reasonable compromise in some situations.
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
To be fair, the same could be said about most other servers too.
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.
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"?
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.
I love these posts that are so on the edge that I can't tell if it's sarcastic or for real :)
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.
Which country do you live in?
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)
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.
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.
This admin is doing nothing we haven’t seen previous admins do. Blaming the administration for how poorly American privacy is takes the blame away from all other politicians who’ve helped to create the “standards” as we have then today.
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.
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.
Threatened Europe and Canada with war.
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.
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.
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.
> This admin is doing nothing we haven’t seen previous admins do.
Well... lots disagree with that statement.
The level is what matters. That combined with Trump erratic behavior and acting without thinking as shown with the 10 15 tariff change
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. It’s not just a question of switching vendors; it’s 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. It’s whether they are prepared to follow through on what real openness demands once they commit to it.
[0] https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_Ato2019-2022/2020/Lei... [1] https://d1gesto.blogspot.com/2025/06/brazils-pix-system-face...
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] https://www.onlyoffice.com/
[1] https://nextcloud.com/office/
[2] https://www.collaboraonline.com/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the driving themes of "Industry" Season 4 is precisely this: what happens to your data once big players ahold of it.
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.
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. We’re hoping Tritium[1] can provide a free or commercial alternative for legal teams soon.
All that said, it’s easy to underestimate the quality of Microsoft’s 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 hasn’t achieved real parity.
It’s Microsoft’s race to lose, but my bet is they’re too distracted by AI to even noticed those coming for them.
[1] https://tritium.legal
> 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.
Yes, that is surprising. Though I think modern Office has always struggled on macOS.
Bit old, from June 13th, 2025, this and similar stories been on HN a bunch of times:
- https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
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%.
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?
They also have their own Mastodon server, which is a great way forward for government institutions!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
I wonder about Vatican policy in regards to similar compromising infrastructure.
Sorry if I sound bit political but this whole trump/usa political issue (hope) helps push more and more opensource and decentralization.
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.
Who remember the failed experiment of abandoning Micro$oft by Munich
https://www-sueddeutsche-de.translate.goog/muenchen/muenchne...
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.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-munich-should-stick-with-l...
It failed because of MS pushback and lobbying. As was reported countless times.
Also because Munich didn't actually want to leave Microsoft, they just wanted a better deal. (Which they got)
So, it can happen again is what you’re saying.
Not what I am saying. But yeah, except MS position in general is much weaker nowadays, especially because of Apple, not open source.
failed due to corrupt government official and M$ bribes
Sounds like a strategy to get money from M$. You can always switch to FOSS later.
I don't. But I remember that the French also just did the same.
Microsoft came back with a far lower cost offer than they had before, and took the new head out for nice lunches
So it sounds like Munich ditching Microsoft wasn't a principled move, but just a business tactic to get the same software for cheaper.
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.
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.
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.
An EU Linux distro could be interesting
The European sovereign tech trend isn’t exclusively a benefit to OSS. SAP must be anticipating a significant windfall of Oracle refugees.
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?
Brazil’s free software initiative in 2000’s 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 wasn’t. But it’s 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.
Let’s see how it develops when they try to ban Microsoft from the universities. That would be the acid test.
> 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.
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
I lived in Denmark for quite a while, don’t ever believe that, because it’s never going to happen.
Very good news for open source, hopefully.
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.
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.
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.
(2025)
Story from June OP?
Lots of discussion then:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234552
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44255352
> 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?
Far crazier things have happened on this planet than switching to Linux and retraining some IT folk.
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.
I don’t 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?
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."
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.
> Trump represents the average American.
If that were true, you wouldn't see such a deeply divided America right now.
Fine. Median American. 2 out of 3 Americans either endorsed this explicitly or were ok with it.
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.
Can we just use markdown already?
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.
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?)
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] https://tweakers.net/nieuws/244764/defensie-ziet-jailbreak-v...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The article says "Danish agency" not a"Denmark"
The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers
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
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.
> 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?
This is not in any way specific to the government or public institution. Many (perhaps most) private companies work the same way.
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.
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.
> 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: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/report-says-elon-musks-busine...
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
C#, F#, TypeScript, VSCode, under the business friendly OSI approved licenses, MIT and Apache.
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...)
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.
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.
Good luck. It’s 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. It’s just not really practical when you’re going to make a presentation to learn how to do pivot tables in a new software in the crunch time.
I’m not a fanboy. I prefer Mac, but in a high cost labor environment like Europe it’s not worth it to save less than 1% of your labor cost on new software.
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.
The articles like 2-3 paragraphs?
It’s not only costs. It’s the productivity and output of your labor force compared to something that in the grand scheme of things is not really expensive.
Oh oh... Time to say goodbye to Greenland. Lets see what is going to happen to LEGO.. Freedom Bricks?
Why do you think there's a connection between the Danish government and LEGO?
Trump has already started talking about taking over Iceland. Where's next?
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yZA7A1fy8yelNvDK2aVesx24jak...