Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)
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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...
https://euro-stack.com/blog/2025/3/schleswig-holstein-open-s...
https://element.io/en/case-studies/nato https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
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.
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.
FreeIPA in particular is a beast to maintain, it puts kubernetes-cowboys to shame.
It's not just the technical hurdle which maybe you'll whip your admins into finding workarounds (-keep praying that your admins don't leave because it will be painful to find replacements who understand and can maintain the spaghetti pasta monster your infra ended up being-). In overall non-technical organizations the user experience always ends up hobbled even just by asking people to keep track of multiple identities.
MS is still entrenched because they give a turnkey solution with Eeeeeverything™ and your CTO doesn't need to struggle with any uncertainty. SaaS made it so easy to just "outsource" everything to MS, they'll be responsible and accountable for operations, infra, security, processes, etc. Even less headache for your C-level people. See no evil, hear no evil, you pay MS to take the shit and your job is safe. If you throw a stone out the window you'll hit someone with general "MS administration" skills. And users are usually familiar with MS tools, Windows, Office, so they aren't bothered (you hear a lot of complaints about Teams on HN but not so much from normal users). So this covers the tech, the skills, and the UX.
It actually depends how you use it. If you use the shared online collaboration features (concurrent editing for example) it might be pretty hard since I do not know any other solution besides Google Workspace that can do that.
And Excel standalone I think is the hardest to replace if you have lots of macros with business logic inside them.
For Teams, as long as you use it for conferencing and chat (no file sharing or editing), you can replace it with Slack or whatever other solution might exist that has some feature parity.
IAM can stay MS, as it is a pretty battle tested solution on-prem and in the cloud. Or you move to something like Okta with a LDAP like backend where you manage users and groups.
The idea is to move critical parts away from US companies.
The US shows hostility towards Europe, even threatened a military attack. So the goal is now to remove as much dependence as possible.
To claim Microsoft is a company and doesn't have to follow US government order is naive. US government is now routinely breaking the law, if they threaten Europe with military action, they can also threaten Microsoft with military/police action.
That's leaving the most critical component still with a US company. Doesn't fly if the goal is what the Danish agency is trying to achieve.
> It actually depends how you use it.
Obviously but the larger the company, the more ways to use it, and one of those ways will be a nightmare to tackle. You want one solution, not a patchwork. So the one that does everything gets picked. MS throws everything and the kitchen sink in their ecosystem to fit every need even if sometimes at mediocre or crappy quality.
> For Teams, as long as you use it for conferencing and chat (no file sharing or editing), you can replace it with Slack
Taken in isolation you're right. But in a world of network effects every company, supplier, service provider you work with might use Teams and you can federate. Switch to Slack alone and you make your life harder.
I mentioned this in another comment, if protocols and formats were mandated to be open or interoperable (in practice) to allow usage in the public sector, replacing MS would be a notch or 2 simpler.
Yes, because it is very hard to replace. I said that you could move to Okta or something similar (in this or in another comment), but this requires you have pretty modern apps that can integrate with SAML/OAuth/OIDC.
And, even staying with MS for a few more years while you migrate IAM to something else is not as bad as having the full Office stack. You can't just yank out everything overnight - I mean you could, but you have to spend a ton of money to have a 1:1 solution from the get-go.
Yeah, it's that transition period - "it's going to get worse before it gets any better" - that hurts the most and that everyone tries to avoid.
In the past there was a lot of Software directly installed to user's PCs and might have been authenticated without SSO. Also log in to a PC often works without identity management (cached credentials). But nowadays nearly everything is somehow in the browser and requires SSO.
At The Document Foundation we are always interested in helping deployments. It is also nice to do writeups for our blog. Let me know, if your organisation needs help: ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org
I recommend to consider our certification program: https://www.documentfoundation.org/certification-program/
I asked about the Maven artifacts and our release engineer will update them later this week.
Reducing friction would be nice here - I don't remember encountering the crash log screen, but if you could file a bug report right from that screen, that'd be perfect. A lot of information can be pre-collected at that stage - precise version, build, OS, architecture, processor type, etc. All that'd be left is the "What I was trying to do", my e-mail, and a checkbox if I agree with the privacy policies and if I want to receive e-mail updates about this bug report.
> you can do your own build with debug symbols
It'd be great if the Document Foundation helped distros to offer libreoffice-*-debug packages for this case - if it's crashing for you, install the debug version and your crash logs will be a lot easier to read.
You can file a bug report from a crash report - it prefills all the relevant data. See an example crash report: https://crashreport.libreoffice.org/stats/crash_details/bac2...
"Bug reports for libc.so.6:
File a bug for: Calc Writer Impress Chart Base"
Here is what the dialog says about bug reports: https://git.libreoffice.org/core/+/master/svx/uiconfig/ui/cr...
> It'd be great if the Document Foundation helped distros to offer libreoffice-*-debug packages for this case
I believe most distros have this covered now, some by making use of debuginfod, which downloads symbols on demand: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Debuginfod
It will skip the recovery dialog. I use it often when doing QA.
I'm interested to know why Teams is so sticky for the team. Are there not good replacements available? I've used it a little, but am by no means a power user.
Alongside this many businesses deploy 'Teams Supported' or 'Teams Enabled' devices into meeting and conference rooms. Yealink is a popular brand, they don't have baked in support for LibreMeet or whatever meeting products exist.
If an inter-operable protocols were enforced by some regulation it would alleviate the situation a bit.
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.
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.
Given how poor it's responding to things like the Draghi report, I wouldn't anticipate success. Just more flailing around and working groups.
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.
This effect of politicians making decisions based on what corporate shares they own is ubiquitous now.
In the other direction, I even wonder if US threats about Greenland were related to this trend of Denmark moving off US big tech. I feel like the real game is military coercion dressed up as economics.
I suspect if people knew the real reasons behind each political decision, they'd be shocked. I'm sure it's all 100% about money; about taking as much as possible whilst giving as little in exchange as possible; filling the gap with pure coercion.
Completely captured by US tech
For bad or worse, not all European national governments see the world through the same glasses.
Also not everything that gets regulated in Brussels, gets adopted by local goverments, and additionally there are plenty European countries that still aren't part of EU organisation.
Yeah, cannot understand this misunderstanding when coming from Europeans, as you mention.
I think you transposed some numbers in those dates it's more like 2062-2072. All of those things need to be built first and frankly all the initiatives started long before the current USA situation. The EU has been aware that it is wholly dependent on the USA for a myriad of reasons for a very long time now but barely seemed to care.
We'll see if anything actually happens it's a very thankless thing to push for politicians.
Usa still don't even have universal social security and medications are overpriced 10 time more. Just to name a few.
Then there is the American debt. Good luck with that when countries are switching from dollar to yen and euro. No really, I think that there are enough challenge to overcome in the states that you don't need to be condescending.
It does though. There are several programs, some administered by the federal government, and some by the states. We don't have "single payer" but we absolutely have "universal social security."
> and medications are overpriced 10 time more.
If you use the sticker price. Sure. It looks that way. If you use the actual pharmacy receipts the story is far different.
Also we do have universal social security, and while many medications are expensive at least they are available. Try getting a weeks worth of ibuprofen in Germany, it requires a doctor's appointment. I love Europe and have lived there, but talk to virtually any business person in Europe and they both envy the US and China, not themselves. If you can't see that painfully obvious reality, I don't know what to say, honestly.
It's funny that we've wrapped the clock all the way around and people don't see Europe as the declining and unstable empires anymore.
> less like stable infrastructure
It's perfectly stable. The news makes a lot of money generating interesting in overstating this problem. The supreme court is designed for national stability. It is doing it's job. It just doesn't act _instantly_, and if you're aiming for actual stability, you don't want it to.
lol my ass. We have a corrupt Adminstration with a corrupt Supreme Court. The only thing it's doing is making people less safe to enrich the people at the top. This kind of response is embarrassing.
On the contrary, I think that many of the rulings during this administration caused a lot of uncertainty among lawmakers
People need to get real here and I've got numbers: Europe is the declining, unstable empire.
The US is the US and in three years there's going to be another president. But the EU's problems are much deeper.
Inflation-adjusted, since the 2008 crisis, the Eurozone's GDP barely grew while both China and the US' GDPs grew like crazy.
2008 to 2025 Eurozone's GDP: $14 trillion USD to $17 trillion USD (+18%, inflation adjusted it's basically zero)
US same period: about $15 trillion to $30 trillion [1]
China same period: $4 trillion to $19 trillion, going from not a quarter of the Eurozone's size in 2008 to surpassing the Eurozone in 2025 FFS! In 17 years. This is jaw dropping.
That's when reality should kick in for people who believe the EU is not declining.
At this rate it's not even declining: it's falling from a cliff.
Now, sure, the Eurozone ain't the entire EU and countries outside the Eurozone like Poland are, thankfully, doing better. But things still look terribly bad.
Moreover The EU managed to shoot itself in the foot by destroying the biggest export of its biggest economy: german cars. They handed over the market to chinese EVs.
The EU also managed, when the US advised it not to, to become dependant on Russia for energy. And of course four years ago we now all know how well that played for Germany: Russia wasn't our friend anymore and energy price --and the industries in Germany do need lots of energy-- skyrocketted.
The EU is destroying itself both economically and culturally. Things are looking terribly bad over here.
I don't know how anyone can look at the US and at China's GDP growth compared to the Eurozone and believe that somehow Europe is doing fine.
Europe is not doing fine: Europe is definitely a declining, unstable (lots of far-right vs far-left parties opposing themselves in elections in many EU countries now) empire.
That said I very much welcome ditching MS software.
[1] round numbers but it is what it is: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP
I understand the former. Can you clarify the details around the later? I hear this often, but the people I hear it from are not the most trustworthy or the most knowledgable.
It isn't though. GDP is growing in most of Europe. Slowly but it is growing.
If this is reality in Europe, which is perhaps likely, then by comparison, the US has devolved into failed-state status. Better a slow decline than a catastrophic fall into the constitutional/regulatory/legal/technological/scientific abyss.
Even if Europe has insurmountable problems, its best move forward is to decouple strategically from the US, and these days, all things strategic are underpinned by information technology. The fact that Europe (soon to be followed by Canada, Australia and New Zealand) is heading down this path is why the US has hit the panic button[0].
Re: "The US is the US and in three years there's going to be another president. But the EU's problems are much deeper."
The US may have another president or even another style of president, but that wont stop this migration away from American technological/strategic hegemony; because at this level and at this scale, complete trust by former allies, once lost, will never be regained. The US century is now over.
Thankfully open source software is there as an alternative to that US software. I guess it's no co-incidence that LibreOffice and Linux both have their roots in Europe.
[0]https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
I think this has much more to do with rising nationalism. (I know the EU isn't a country. It's just the best word I can think of to fit. ) It's not like Denmark is saying they plan to use technology from the global south, Asia or are open to options. It's an attitude of "we want to support European companies". That's not inherently bad, but I fear this is just another expression of this isolationism that is becoming more popular in Europe. That's not to say it's exclusive or unique to Europe, but just recognizing the ways it shows up.
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.
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.
Yeah, long time ago we last saw the whole "Microsoft <3 Open Source" shtick, so seems more true than ever.
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.
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.
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.
As long as we avoid drowning maintainers with review requests, I'm in.
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.
All change starts small. If these small agencies or very local bits of government successfully pull it off, larger ones may well follow.
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.
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...
That’s beside the sibling comment’s point that this suite is not complete enough (yet).
If you claim, that this is my position, please read at least one more sentence
"So yes, one can (and should) build them. "
- Group Editing - this ones hard to get right - Reviewing Tools - Automated document generation - Embedding of data-backed images from 3rd party tools
Looking at my wife who works in government, they use it even more heavily, with a lot of complicated formatting, numbering, standards etc going into each document, plus OneDrive collaborative features on top of that.
I suspect office-user people are where most of the features get used. Agreed, most people only use 15% of the features, but which 15% that is likely changes quickly person to person.
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.
The CFO just preferred Windows, that's it, I'd bet money on it.
What was driving that requirement at the investment house doesn't matter, when the company that owns over 50% of your company wants something, you don't say "Hey, we don't want to buy a Windows license with your money, how about I send it to you in this similar, but different format and then you guys can figure out how to make it match what you're looking for?"
Excel has gone downhill massively.
If it doesn't have something equivalent to Pivot Tables, it's not even worth talking about.
Of course no product will be an identical replica of the Microsoft tools, but both get the job done.
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.
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.
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?
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.
That’s someone who read a couple of articles on corruption and just extrapolated to “all of it must be the same”.
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".
Since you quoted Microsoft, remember this? https://www.dhs.gov/archive/news/2024/04/02/cyber-safety-rev... you have other companies that have a much better track record on Security.
If you browse HN everyday, at least once a weak, you'll see security issues related to Azure and Microsoft product, to the point that Microsoft stopped bounty programs or don't include some products.
Is Google’s search engine used just because they give money to those who do? Because they pay Apple and Mozilla. Just set Google as default and the check’s in the mail right?
The last paragraph was obviously a diss at MS for costing a lot in support and having shitty security. Anyone with first hand experience (as opposed to hearing the stories) with MS contracts and heard the justifications again and again doesn’t need the joke explained.
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?)
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
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.
Just because you can't replace 100% tomorrow doesn't mean that you shouldn't begin today, or never try at all
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 people in the middle can ensnare and kill anything that doesn’t have that support and engagement - their incentive is to encourage consistency.
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.
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...
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?
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.
What are the SLA and support for this?
And can IT techs work it?
>What are the SLA and support for this?
I don't know why I would need any sort of support when all these projects are open source, I can just debug stuff on my own.
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.
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.
They are literally working well right now, because Microsoft hasn’t flipped that switch and may never do so.
I personally don’t love thunderbird, but what is it missing?
Gnome through their online accounts supports most major corporate providers which has calendars showing up in evolution, the dedicated calendar app, and in the status bar of gnome shell.
I can't enter a pin to authenticate, so I can't use it.
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
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).
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.
https://www.univention.de/loesungen/alternative-zu-microsoft...
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.
Email in a large organization requires things like central management, compliance with retention policies and other regulations, data loss prevention, encryption standards, auditing and ediscovery capabilities, etc.
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.
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.
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!
The second best time is now.
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
I think this may have changed a bit within the last year or so...
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.
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.
Awwww, poor babies.
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 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.
Seeing an agency doing it is good, but still less than the French ditching Teams and Zoom altogether as country-wide policy.
Transforming the public administration is the logical next step. Something different happening here, not the town hall big fuss approach.
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.
Model A: some visionary gets a great idea and everyone across the board stops whatever they’re doing all at once to prioritize this one initiative, budgets and contracts and laws be damned.
Model B: the modernization department sets standards, those standards are mandatory in the governments procurement process. All suppliers know to update, everything swaps out as-planned over time, no one goes to jail.
I dunno. Danes are weird.
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.
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.
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.
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
Either your main architecture handles something or it doesn't get handled.
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.
That's news to me, got any good articles on the topic?
You forgot Trumps best butt-buddy: Putin.
ICC members make judgements that are abided by ICC member states. They have every authority to make those judgments, and it does not matter what the busted idiocracy US of A, acting as a pathetic supplicant state for their boss Israel, thinks about it.
Maybe Trump can complain to his unbelievably pathetic Board of Peace. Christ.
The war criminal Netanyahu can stick to the rogue shitholes he is welcomed at. The US -- which btw is currently engaged in BLATANTLY criminal activities in a number of venues -- can get fucked. The US has *ZERO* authority to tell members of the ICC who or what they can declare a warcrime, or who members of the ICC will hold to account if they enter their country.
What a bizarre take.
And yes, the US can sanction whoever they want, but such actions are far from free.. When every American firm is sent packing, enjoy the results. And yes, American payment processors are discovering in super-rapid quicktime how this rogue cabal of war criminal, paedos and criminal grifters are destroying their future.
- The Palestinian Authority claims to represent 'Palestine'
- UNGA Resolution 67/19 "Reaffirms the right of the Palestinian people to self-
determination and to independence in their State of Palestine on the Palestinian
territory occupied since 1967"
- They consider Gaza "Palestinian territory occupied since 1967" (despite the fact
that Gaza has certainly not been occupied by Israel for decades and a completely
separate entity from the PA exercises sovereignty there)
Beyond the absurd sophistry and incoherent reasoning, Israel is--once again--not a signatory to the ICC. Asserting jurisdiction over a sovereign entity without their consent is a violation of state immunity[1], a legal concept predating the ICC by over 600 years.
I'd say that qualifies as an overstep.
[0]: https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/itemsDocuments/p... [1]: https://opil.ouplaw.com/display/10.1093/law:epil/97801992316...
"Beyond the absurd sophistry and incoherent reasoning"
There is literally nothing incoherent about the reasoning. "Palestine" is a member since 2015, and literally no one aside from Israel-bots have any confusion about what that means. The fact that Israel, a rogue nuclear armed global pariah, isn't is *utterly irrelevant*. Netanyahu is to be held accountable if they step foot in any Western nation beside its partner in crime Idiocracy supplicant.
Except that the people who joined on behalf of Palestine have never controlled Gaza, while the government that actually controls Gaza never accepted the ICC's jurisdiction.
I can similarly declare myself the king of Gaza, and decree that Gaza is under the jurisdiction of my newly invented Court of Daniel, and it would make about as much sense from a legal perspective.
They literally, directly controlled Gaza until 2006. So what's with the lies?
There is good evidence that they lost control because Netanyahu covertly supported Hamas. Riling up fundies to do vile things is good business when your goal is getting a massively armed idiocracy simp nation to do your bidding.
Regardless of the US's willingness to ignore customary international law, the "International Criminal Court"'s willingness to ignore customary international law is worthy of reprimand, and their facially ridiculous claim to jurisdiction over Gaza was fairly characterized as overstepping their authority.
> literally no one aside from Israel-bots have any confusion about what that means
"Palestine" probably includes Area A. What about Area B? Probably not Area C. How about the settlements? Gaza--which is actually controlled by a totally different government? East Jerusalem? "From the river to the sea"?
It seems to me that there is actually a great deal of confusion about what exactly "Palestine" means. It certainly doesn't refer to any specific area with defined borders and a single sovereign.
> Israel-bots
> rogue nuclear armed global pariah
> partner in crime Idiocracy supplicant
Conversing with you is a chore and I doubt there is any value to be had continuing our discourse. Have a good one.
But...I didn't. The members of the ICC observe the findings of the ICC. Another bizarre non-sequitur. No one is demanding that the US honour the ICC's warrant.
The ICC has no authority in Israel. Nor do they claim to. But they do in the member countries, which thoroughly angers the Idiocracy.
>willingness to ignore customary international law
Absolutely delusional nonsense. The hypocrisy in the claim that state immunity is some overarching thing -- when neither Israel or the US honour such a ridiculous notion -- is amazing given the context.
>It seems to me that there is actually a great deal of confusion about what exactly "Palestine" means
Absolutely no one but Israelis and Americans have any (convenient) confusion on this. Palestine is the non-Israel parts of the former Palestine. Playing incredibly stupid is unconvincing.
>Conversing with you is a chore
Ah, the "you're all butthurt Europeans" American-exceptionalism guy thinks it's a chore. Good god.
Honestly the biggest problem that's coming out of all of this is the US is finding out most of its actions actually are free... Like everyone know the US was "stronger" and better positioned than Europe 10 years ago but it's just gotten ridiculously skewed.
With Europe losing basically all ability to push back against the US because of their poor decision making we've lost a critical moderating influence on the USA.
I want to see (sincerely) a whole government ditch MS
They have an extensive history in this too. The gendarmerie even has their own Linux distro for their workstations.
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?
There are also ready made solutions available for purchase
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
If you want to change pace, ask your dns sw provider to turn on local root by default.
(One of the things being defined is how to get a root zone trustably out of band using the new ZONEMD checksum)
A bigger question might be why there are no ICANN HSM outside the USA to generate root zone signings. ICANN has offices in Geneva and Singapore, it would not be hard to find secure DC locations for the signing ceremonies.
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.
Those offerings are garbage for anyone outside the US.
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.
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.
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.
Realistically a US executive could be legally required to give an EU engineer a command that they legally couldn’t follow. At that point I guess we find out if the engineers’ national or corporate identities are dominant. I suspect the former in most cases, but who knows?
Everyone banned Huawei products despite the ability to pass laws saying Huawei must respect data sovereignty. They didn't ban US firms, because unlike China the USA was championing the rule of law at the time. Data sovereignty only works if the USA respects the laws of other countries, even though, just like China, they could coerce / bribe citizens and firms to bypass them. Such activity would be largely undetectable. Who is going to know if someone peeked at a secret document stored in Azure? There was a huge amount of trust involved in the arrangement.
The USA has now denounced the rule of law, is withdrawing the the institutions set up to champion it, and has shut down the ICCC's access to some services. The trust has gone.
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.
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..
I guess that's fine for now, but it would be better if we could get European alternatives to AWS or GCP.
> companies are perfectly happy with US companies, as long as the data doesn't leave Europe
I think it's pretty clear they can not guarantee that, see the CLOUD act.
Also, they could shut you out or turn your whole business off if you, or your country, offends the orange fuckhead
If that's accurate, your country's privacy laws would supersede US law. That said, as things are going, it's unlikely that they do.
Same with Atlassian Confluence / Jira.
(Source: Working in a state owend company in a EU member country)
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.
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.
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.
Anyone still using OpenOffice probably doesn't realize they would likely be much better off using LibreOffice instead.
OpenOffice doesn't support docx or xlsx but LibreOffice supports them much better.
They're far more than just patient care in the moment.
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.
See https://www.exoscale.com/blog/cloudact-vs-gdpr/
( Though note exoscale, as a European provider has skin in the game here ).
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.
Is it OK for a French sovereign government if a German government can demand access to its data?
Wake me up when they actually do it.
"put up with this" implies they have a choice.
So fund it!
Governments burn billions of dollars on defense which really is just an economic waste outside of the deterrent effect it does from getting invaded.
Investing in open source to enable you to be software independent and protected, not only is it providing some measure of electronic and economic defense, it improves software for you and your allies.
You get return on your investment.
This is insane. This is sacrificing the well-being of your constituents to send a (minor) political message. The amount of service degradation (including actual physical health) that you'd put your citizens through would be unbelievable.
Only those who are extraordinarily stupid or outright malicious decide to deprecate important services before first assessing the needs of every dependent on that service, and then ensuring that a full replacement is in place.
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.
I'm still super opposed to chatcontrol but at least it's in the open for us to fight.
For me the blame is squarely on the technical “experts” who are behind the architecture and implementation of such apps.
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.
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.
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.
- All governments under EU (on almost all levels) are "required" to use and/or produce software as Open Source. The source of "that government app" should be available somewhere (though quite likely is not)¹ So go hunt for the source and start there.
- Look at underlying standards. EU regulation, trickling down into local laws and guidelines, rely on Open Standards almost always. That app you use to log into your tax environment quite probably uses (a weird, hard to recognize) variation of OAUTH2 or OpenID connect, SAML or such. The app that shows the time+dates for garbage-collection, quite probably uses a simple ical-feed under the hood. With that knowledge, you may be able to develop/fork/use open source alternatives without too much effort².
- Show (local) representatives the alternatives. Listen to them. Learn from them. Most representatives are suprisingly open to you as expert. But, I cannot stress enough, learn and listen foremost. IT experts and open source community in particular have an (IMHO well deserved) reputation for being arrogant, know-it-all unfriendly and rediculously single-minded. So don't lecture that councillor for using Twitter instead of Mastodon, riduculing them for not using GPG or scoffing at their insistence on using Microsoft Word over Vim with Markdown (My younger self was such an arrogant neckbeard; I am now convinced I have done actual harm to the Open Source community that way). But ask why twitter, have they tried mastodon, or bluesky? Why not? Why did they leave? What features in MSword do they require? Did they know that Jitsi is an option? Maybe you can show how they could use Nextcloud for at least their own files? Sometimes you can answer some of their questions and help them. More often, you learn a few things that you could use to improve sovereign and open source alternatives and align them slightly more with whats needed.
¹ The details, interpretations and implementations are a mess, but the idea is "open source, unless..." for any software that any government buys, rents, builds, etc. In practice almost all projects fall under "unless...". I spoke to a MSFT account-manager for several local govts and he told me they have f*in training material to "help" govt officials write tenders/requirements in such a way that Open Source is practically excluded and Microsoft the only option. I am appalled, but also not that surprised.
² The ical-finding is how I got my local garbage-collection schedule into my calendar app. And when I told this to someone who happened to work at the municipality, they realized that publishing the urls and docs online helped a lot of citizens. Ironically, the push-back, according to this person, was from a civil-servant whose career was influenced on the success (install counts) of the "municipality app" and who was afraid that if people could add the calendar to their outlook/google cal/ical/other-cal, might no longer install the app. Again, I was appalled at such perverse incentives.
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.
(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)
Well... lots disagree with that statement.
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.
The only solution is no american companies in the loop at all.
> 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47169815 (iPhone and iPad approved to handle classified NATO information)
Without rules of law its literally irresponsible for EU to have this kind of heavy dependency on US corporations.
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...
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/
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.
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.
They FALL under EU sanctions.
https://www.tu.berlin/en/campusmanagement/news-details/umste...
Just to be clear: TU Berlin is probably right. But according to some sources (which I don't believe) OnlyOffice no longer has any connections to Russia and is now really from an EU company.
This is how you make them dependent on a single MS-like interface. Kids are the most flexible, and shouldn't need. Would go as far as to say they are mildly harmed by not being exposed to different workflows.
Sure glad no one paved Windows over our Macs and Amigas so we wouldn't have to learn anything else.
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.
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.
Guess just bad luck with Greenland turning them the complete opposite direction, since I was certain that Denmark would be the one of the last to go against US in any way.
People also ridiculed the French for maintaining independence of American influence for decades, even within the EU/EEG/etc., but that should prove that the America-sceptic voices have always been around, even if they weren't the most influential. It's also not the first time the Americans have eyed Greenland, that's why they have negotiated the right to set up military bases there.
After European countries aligned with America's overreactions in the Middle East as a gesture of goodwill (but also to buy political capital, despite the Americans starting an intense smear campaign against the French for not falling for their propaganda), European governments expected to be handled as an ally at the very least.
The past decade, the people of the USA and their representatives have dropped all pretences and the slow and steady criticism in the background has now made it to the foreground. The political capital countries tried to buy by doing what Washington asked has turned out to be worthless.
With recent threats of invasion and the diplomatic problems American representatives have caused, it's getting harder and harder to see a future where European governments end up treating the USA any different from other (upcoming, but not necessarily politically-aligned) world powers such as China, Russia, India, or Pakistan.
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?
By and large MS problem is that our world gets fragmented and you need to have products that adapt, eg great firewall in China, strict data residency in Europe. It is difficult to achieve that without segmenting your products as well.
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.
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
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.
For example, Veeva Vault is the industry standard content (and content workflow) platform for life sciences. It's a heavy, somewhat unpleasant platform similar to a Workday or ServiceNow, but it's ingrained and it compliant with all life sci regulatory bodies' regulations. It requires customers use SharePoint and Office under the hood.
Things like that can't just be ripped out and replaced because there are no FOSS options.
- https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
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.
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The fact they’re an American company is unfortunately the dealbraker. We could store data outside of CF network but that defeats the point of the one stop shop.
I get that some of these things are difficult to do, but small steps lead to larger steps.
"EU contemplating debate over a draft proposal to definitely invest in a consulting contract to study the migration of a part of one agency to a homegrown office suite away from Microsoft"
In other words, Sam Altman et al. should be hardcore Atlanticists at this point.
Forget Microsoft and Google services, what about the hardware? To support all this new demand for European infrastructure you'll have to buy tons of new gear from mostly American companies: AMD, INTC, NVDA, MU, etc.
Are cutting-edge European competitors going to suddenly spring into existence to satisfy that demand? Is TSMC gonna allocate wafer spins to some scrappy EU startup instead of NVDA, AAPL, AMZN, MSFT, AMD, INTC, AVGO, QCOM?
I dunno if you've been paying attention to the market but demand for all data center components has gone through the roof and supply is already spoken for for years to come. The hardware you'd need to decouple simply isn't available, when it becomes available you'll be competing with nearly $1T in annual hyperscaler CapEx, and Europe has no capability to produce domestic alternatives.
The most likely scenario in my view is that Europe will be a consumer/bystander in the AI race, not a protagonist. For that, you don't need a lot of hardware. China and the US will compete for the European market, with the US already far ahead and earning billions from European customers. But it can lose that post in the future, either through crazy foreign policy or simply being outcompeted by the Chinese.
There isn't the money, the attention bandwidth, the industry, the IP, the skilled labor with know-how, the tools, or the raw materials to do all of those.
> Chinese alternatives are starting to appear
Maybe, but they are seriously handicapped and not competitive. And certainly when it comes to inference: They also don't have the hardware capacity to supply their own market and the European market.
> will be very competitive in the next few years
Maybe. More likely they'll only be competitive in 10+ years.
> Europe also has some key strategic cards to play when it comes to hardware, such as access to TSMC.
Then why haven't they played them? Both Japan and America got commitments for significant domestic advanced node fab and packaging facilities from TSMC. Europe only got 40k WSPMs of already-outdated 12nm+ lines.
Further: Which European company is designing or will soon design competitive CPUs/GPUs/switching to hand off to TSMC? Will a European company cut in line for cutting-edge tools, conjure up IP and know-how from nothing, and start selling HBM and DRAM, too? And will all these fantasy companies be decoupling from US EDA tools, as well?
Finally: If you're saying that Europe will be able to outplay the US in a zero-sum game for access to TSMC wafer spins, you might want to consider also the strategic cards that the US can play to prevent that.
> Europe will be a consumer/bystander in the AI race, not a protagonist
That's not just likely, that's absolutely guaranteed. Sorry, Mr. Draghi.
> For that, you don't need a lot of hardware
How do you serve inference at scale without a lot of hardware? If both US and China are supply-constrained for GPUs that they're turning into high-value-added products/services, why would they give Europe any hardware at all?
If I can turn a $100k GPU into $1M of value, there aren't enough GPUs in the world, your companies don't have the fiscal firepower to be price-setters, and your products/services compete with mine on global markets--why the fuck would I sell you any GPUs? Charity?
And if the plan is for European computing to remain totally dependent on US and CN... what are we even talking about here?
> But it can lose that post in the future
Sure, nothing lasts forever. But I thought this was about European computational sovereignty, not dependence on the US specifically. I guess not: Depending on the US is a crisis, but depending on Qatar and China is A-OK. What could go wrong?
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.
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.
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?
For once, it's very fast.
Let's have a look:
$ host -t A digmin.dk
digmin.dk has address 172.232.147.252
digmin.dk has address 172.233.57.17
$ whois 172.233.57.17 | grep -i orgname
OrgName: Akamai Technologies, Inc.
OrgName: Linode
This kind of press release happens every so often. It's an election year, so that probably explains it. Nothing ever comes of it. As someone employed in the danish public sector, I'd love nothing more than to never have to use Outlook again, but it's unlikely to happen.
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.
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...
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?
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.
Which of those are FOSS?
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.
Critical infrastructure, such as energy, healthcare, or train service, runs on US software and services and thus only works as long as the US allows it. In Germany, the German Railway moved all of their software services into US clouds and shut down their own data center. That didn't protect them from a recent DDoS, taking down their main customer-facing site for hours.
Meanwhile, the local job market abounds with job ads from government agencies and private businesses, requiring administrating MS software (AD, 365, Exchange), cloud and doing "Power"-stuff.
The study "European Software and Cyber Dependencies" [1] (Dec 2025) from of the European Parliament explains the dire state. It's full of money quotes:
"Non-EU actors, primarily US companies, control nearly all critical layers of Europe’s digital stack. These dependencies are reinforced by vendor lock-in, long-term contracts, proprietary formats, & network effects that limit switching and suppress market entry for EU innovators"
"80% of European corporate spending on software and cloud flows to US vendors."
"Public administrations rely heavily on Microsoft and Google productivity suites, with only isolated instances of migrations to open-source alternatives"
"A case study of the EU’s energy infrastructure provides a further illustration of how its digitalisation creates critical cyber dependencies. Industrial control, grid management, and market-trading software increasingly rely on non-EU vendors and cloud platforms."
"Such heavy reliance on US tech and vendors results in [...] tangible sovereignty risks. The CLOUD Act, FISA Act and US sanctions regimes give US authorities legal reach over data of European citizens and institutions hosted by American providers."
"Dependence extends across the supply chain — from chips and hardware (90% of advanced semiconductors imported) to developer tools and standards (GitHub, Docker, and major programming frameworks are US-governed);"
"The EU’s digital trade deficit exceeds EUR 100 billion annually"
"These outflows finance US R&D and jobs: according to one study, retaining just 15% of this spending could create around 500,000 jobs in Europe by 2035;"
"Lock-in inflates long-term costs and undermines innovation, while dependence on external platforms diminishes Europe’s leverage in trade and security negotiations;"
"Europe’s software and cyber dependencies are becoming a structural strategic liability. [...] without decisive action, Europe risks becoming a “digital colony”- dependent on others’ platforms, standards, and priorities for decades to come."
"[EU]’s deep reliance on non-EU tech is a strategic vulnerability. It exposes the EU to geopolitical coercion (a de-facto “virtual kill switch”), with potential cascading disruption across finance, health, energy and transport if access to […] cloud or key software is curtailed.
"In the current geopolitical scene, technology interdependence is being weaponised. External pressure can push the EU to dilute rules or face retaliatory trade measures, while dependence reduces Europe’s geopolitical leverage."
"the EU already faces pressure to dilute its own digital regulations to appease allies or avoid retaliation – recently, trade negotiators even been softening EU digital rules (like the new Digital Markets Act) in exchange for avoiding US tariffs"
"if a major US platform suffered a prolonged outage, or if transatlantic relations deteriorated, leading to data access blocks, a large swath of European business and government services could grind to a halt."
"semiconductors account for about 80% of the strategic value of a data centre; building AI campuses without European hardware will therefore send most of the value abroad"
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2025/7785...
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.
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.
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?)
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...
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.
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.
I don't know what the optimal course of action is.
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.
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 that were true, you wouldn't see such a deeply divided America right now.
The issue with voters choosing more right-wing populist parties is not unique to the US.
Univention Nubus (Keycloak + OpenLDAP) or FreeIPA as alternatives for Entra come to mind. You can even leverage your Powershell expertise.
https://www-sueddeutsche-de.translate.goog/muenchen/muenchne...
> [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...
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.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yZA7A1fy8yelNvDK2aVesx24jak...
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...)
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.