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Comment by cladopa | Hacker News Reader

They already did that before until Microsoft offered them new conditions and they went back to MS.

So take all those "digital sovereignity" with a grain of salt. It usually means: "We want you to lower your fees".

No, they didn't. That happened for example in Munich. But that is on the other side of Germany. And there is already a joke that MS can't move their german headquarters every time a state or big city want's to move away from MS products. (They did this when Munich changed back to MS producs - but of course this was pure coincidence.)

Microsoft started building their new Munich headquarters in 2013/2014. Their old headquarters were already immediately outside Munich. For example, the Munich airport is further away from Munch city than the old headquarters were.

The decision to revert to a Microsoft Platform was taken in November 2017.

Yes, the final decision to revert to Microsoft was taken in 2017. But in 2014, the mayor of Munich began an investigation into how to return to Microsoft products. And he was also the one who negotiated the location of the headquarters with Microsoft in 2013.

Yes, Bavaria is practically an entirely different state, with its' own language, religion, politics, and culture.

Not just "practically", but actually, factually, and legally: Yes, the state of Bavaria is indeed an entirely different state than the state of Schleswig-Holstein. That's like saying "Virginia is practically an entirely different state than California" -- WTF do you mean, "practically"?!? It IS a different state!

It was mainly in Munich and more about Linux in general and Bill Gates personally intervened. The next government rolled back to MS.

And no, data sovereignity means more than money, but it might cost more money in the end. There were quite some problems, but those could have been resolved. But not for free.

> So take all those "digital sovereignty" with a grain of salt

Actually, there's actual money flowing from Germany to open source companies as we speak to build digital sovereign solutions (like openDesk [1]), so it's more than "We want you to lower your fees".

Real concerns have more and more motivated this kind of things in recent years.

[1] https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/info/-/blob/main/REA...

So you're saying digital sovereignty provides leverage. That itself is valuable.

Sovereignty might have gotten a bit of a priority boost post Nordstream.

Opposite end of the country.

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