Comment by caubin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by caubin | Hacker News Reader

Hei hei,

I'm working for the XWiki and CryptPad projects, which are integrated in openDesk. Here are a couple links / infos that can be interesting to understand the context of openDesk.

The openDesk project comes initially from an initiative of the Ministry of Interior of Germany in 2021, to build the alternative to Office 365. The project was progressively transferred in 2025 to a state-owned organization, the ZenDis (https://zendis.de), which oversees the global development of openDesk.

The source code is mainly available on https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk, where you will find mirrors of every project which is bundled into openDesk (Nextcloud, Collabora, Element, Univention, XWiki, Jitsi, OpenXchange, CryptPad, OpenProject, …)

There was also a couple public presentations about openDesk at FOSDEM during the past years :

* In 2024 : https://archive.fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3...

* In 2025 : https://archive.fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5...

I appreciate your comment. I'm thrilled to learn that CryptPad is part of the openDesk solution.

>CryptPad was selected to join the German "Sovereign Workplace" project, now called openDesk.

https://blog.cryptpad.org/2025/01/28/CryptPad-Funding-Status...

Many more details in this blog post from XWiki: https://xwiki.com/en/Blog/XWiki-CryptPad-knowledge-managemen...

CryptPad isn’t used for word processing or table calculations in openDesk. It’s super confusing how the tools were put together.

I find it fascinating to see how much power Germany's "digital sovereignty" initiative has gained. In the beginning, it looked like yet another government thingy that nobody will use. But by now, they must be well above 100k government employees using it daily.

Also, in case you missed that: StackIt is the AWS / G Cloud competitor by LIDL: https://www.stackit.de/en/ It's the basebone for their app strategy with 100 mio+ client installs and about 500k employees.

Every time this happens Microsoft either threatens to move out or promises to move in with a chunk of their operation. Blackmailing with jobs has been very effective for them.

I think that strategy might be running out of steam though, before these projects seemed to have more commercial reasons or just pushing the idea of openness, but sovereignty is a much stronger ideal and much more likely to be the one that will weather the blackmail.

Yeah but what is different now is that the US is run by unpredictable lunatics. It's not really just about Microsoft anymore.

And the more important thing is just how much damage those lunatics can do through Microsoft using American laws -- even current ones, much less new ones. Microsoft would be a mostly helpless puppet in this entire exchange; a cat’s paw, as it were.

Yes, given how fast Amazon and Apple rolled over it's clear they don't stand a chance. It's not like they can teleport Seattle out of the USA if they had to.

I wonder how big a fraction of the US tech and Military industry realizes that Trump is killing their business for the next century.

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