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Comment by Izmaki | Hacker News Reader

The “that’s nice but Denmark is small” comment is getting tiresome. Whether the country had 6 million or 60 million the bureaucracy is the same. It’s not about the size or the economics, it’s about the message.

It won’t be long until the rest of the public sectors follow along. There has already been plenty of consideration and desire to follow through. What’s holding them back typically is not the desire to stay with Microsoft et. al., but the investment needed to make the switch away from a live system.

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> The “that’s nice but Denmark is small” comment is getting tiresome.

The parent comment didn't complain that Denmark or its overall government is small. They complained that this agency represents a small fraction of their government.

Yes. Typically is some town hall shifting to Linux and making a big fuss when literally million others are still running Windows.

Seeing an agency doing it is good, but still less than the French ditching Teams and Zoom altogether as country-wide policy.

But still, this is Denmark’s tech modernization agency. They follow an eat-your-own-dogfood stance.

Transforming the public administration is the logical next step. Something different happening here, not the town hall big fuss approach.

Indeed, crossing the fingers to see if we finally have a proper transition.

It makes you wonder what critics think the process should look like?

Plan A: Just burn it down and rebuild FOSS in the ashes.

Plan B: The tech modernization agency can make the transition, document and enhance the process, and then guide less savvy users.

I dunno. Tough call.

Also, how does government work?

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.

I can't trust somebody with that many vowels.

It’s usually German towns or cities trying to drive hard bargains or fighting some internal political battle.

This is a different - the agency has more scope and with the ridiculous confrontation between the US and Denmark there’s no doubt active espionage targeting Denmark from the US.

Quite a lot of small bits on Denmark are moving towards this, but its still not every much in a country that is one of the most strongly motivated to not depend on the US (because of Greenland).

The branch of the public sector I'm responsible for is moving towards Cloud Native and Open Source where it makes sense. It's an interesting journey but far from cheap.

But those investments will only get bigger over time and vendor lock-in will get more complex. I get that there is no unlimited budget to this but proper will to migrate for good would look very differently.

For example detailed plan for next 5-10 years how gradually everything moves. Now it feels like 1 step ahead 3 steps back, nice pat on the back for doing something, while overall transition will take 2 centuries unless magic happens. Not enough, not at this point when all cards are on the table.

Investment and long term maintenance costs are usually not worth it. All is good until there’s a self induced outage and your boss has to take the blame (and not Microsoft)

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