French City of Lyon Kicks Out Microsoft | Hacker News Reader

French City of Lyon Kicks Out Microsoft

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59 pointsbuyucu23 comments

Complete opposite of Finland where everything from schools meeting/document systems(office/teams) to healthcare data silos(azure datalakes) is on Microsoft

That's insanely stupid.

We need more of this.

Can't agree more

Wanna bet U.S. company lobbying will push the current administration to pressure the EU over these shifts away from Microsoft? And bring it into the ongoing tariff negotiations?

Wanna bet this campaign to ditch Microsoft for free software is a negotiating tactic to get a better deal on a support contract from Microsoft?

Good for Lyon! Windows 11 seems the perfect vector for foreign espionage.

On "reciprocal" tariffs I think many countries are making preparations to wait it out while telling the current lot to fuck off. Look at Japan.

Again, open source is not enough: you may have a chance with _LEAN_ open source, that stable in time, down to the SDK (computer languages), file formats, protocols.

One step at a time

No beaf with microsoft, this is about EU affairs and prosperity. Well done.

Per my understanding, Microsoft (Office and Azure) take data sovereignty seriously and host in respective public, sovereign, national or gov clouds - as the case might be.

Is this a perception issue?

Moving from the USA to Russia for the office suite!

They use LibreOffice, which is open-source. [0] That suite is part of the The Document Foundation [1] which headquarters are in Berlin, Germany. How is this related to Russia?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Document_Foundation

The article only mentions LibreOffice in connection with Denmark, not France.

Since when did LibreOffice on Linux become "Russia"?

It never did,

but the article mentions ONLYOFFICE which seems to have strong connection to Russia, this is what your parent meant

Thats open source self hosted software. If you dont trust the prebuilt binaries you can inspect the source code and build it from source yourself

Thx, I indeed misread that in the article. Sill, it's AGPL v3.0 so if the French are ok with Open Source I guess they could always sever the cord.

I don't get the bandwagon here on HN. I'm happy for Lyon and European governments finding solutions that work for them, but like 99% of the world's corporations and governments run on Microsoft software on the desktop side of things.

I've used all the popular chat platforms like slack,matrix, discord or meeting solutions like zoom, goto,etc.. and Teams is by far the most cohesive and consistent experience. I've tried out google office, took a peek at zoho, libreoffice,etc... M365 is by a long margin the best office/document/spreadsheet suite. Even for my own personal use I'd rather use their web-based M365 tools.

Just objectively looking at this, I think I get that MS has been really bad for consumers in the last few years and being flippant with data privacy laws. If that is the reason, then I get it 100%, but quality of product sure isn't it. If I were them, I would just fine MS insane amounts of fines and maybe use the proceeds to fund and support alternative solutions. EU can fine MS whatever they want and MS will comply because of how important the market is to them. I'm also biased there because I'm hoping those fines would help us even by a small measure in the US.

Perhaps the alternatives are worse(that's subjective). But with M$, you're putting all your eggs in one basket. If there is demand, the alternatives will improve too.

It's not just that. Microsoft benefits massively from network effects.

So you decide to run your infrastructure on something else. Good luck trying to find a contractor who does anything but Active Directory, MS Office and Exchange. Or try to find admins who have experience setting up keycloak as an alternative identity provider or using ansible to manage the endpoints. They exist, sure, but are much rarer.

If you are a somewhat larger corporation and decide to buy up a shop, they most likely run AD, O365, etc already and merging the IT landscapes will be much easier if you do too.

If you're a small operation of a few dozen people or so, it is soo much easier and probably cheaper to simply sign up to O365 and get the entire suite of email, office, calendar, IM, file sharing, etc, than finding a contractor that manages your IT using all open source software.

Every time this discussion comes up, most people focus on the office suite and perhaps the OS of the workstations, but the business world is much more entrenched with Microsoft products than that.

For the record, I think it's vital to avoid vendor lock-in, and I hope us Europeans manage to do it sooner rather than later, but I'm also afraid many people severely underestimate how hard this is going to be.

I use Ansible and can run Keycloak and yet I still recommended O365. Initially, I appreciated the convenience and the integrated suite, but I'm starting to regret it.

In recent months, Microsoft's reliability has noticeably declined. At this point, I'm just inches away from switching the entire org to LibreOffice and Fedora.

A big one is that Microsoft shut off the email of the president of International Criminal Court based on an order from US authorities because he dared prosecute Israeli government officials.

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