Personally I couldn’t care less which operating system the city chooses to use as long as it helps to save costs and increase efficiency. Bureaucracy is extremely high and ideology driven, permissions take too long to be granted and populist projects are taking money away from families and their young children (Kindergarten contributions are through the roof).
It's your personal opinion so that's fine, but that's exactly the thinking that got us into other hard to detangle dependencies before (gas from russia was cheap and efficient, until it got turned off) and that's the same for building up an even bigger dependency on Microsoft and other large US vendors when many other European countries like France are investiging heavily into building up European alternatives.
Microsoft Word is absolutely not a core strategic asset to your countries economic success. You could easily migrate off of it tomorrow and everything would be fine, minus some banal feature gaps in LibreOffice/etc. Nobody will die in the winter and there will be no food shortages (EU is fertilizer dependent) if Microsoft shuts off your access to creating PowerPoints.
The fact that there’s more effort being put into building EU alternatives for Microsoft Office than energy security, tells you how unserious and out of touch the political class truly is.
And Microsoft office is just the very very top of the stack (the easiest to vibe code alternatives to). What about the operating systems, the hardware, for which there is no EU alternative for? And it’s not just the US you need to worry about, all of computing depends on physical manufacturing in China/Taiwan. China could cut off access tomorrow and there’d be no more computers/phones/comms infrastructure/etc. That’s an actual real threat.
As someone living in the EU, the saber rattling for domestic political points between the US and the EU is one of the dumbest memes and is resulting is real tax money being spent on the silliest of projects. Migrating off microsoft while their entire business model is being made irrelevant by AI, being one of them. Meanwhile, the stuff that actually matters for sovereignty and isn't surface level BS is of course ignored (energy, resources, mining) in favor of handouts to companies for domestic manufacturing of weapons that aren't even relevant for modern war.
What's happening is that all those private companies are getting tax payers money from EU to come-up with some janky alternative to a US software and label it as sovereign and pocket the money. It's quite funny that Europeans are still discussing on what alternative they can use for MS Office in 2026 while the rest of the world is researching on frontier AI
You don't have to pick. The people working on office suites and negotiating government contracts are not the same people that work on frontier AI.
Example from Germany (https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministe...), that county moved to LibreOffice and previously spent 15 millionen euros on licenses, the migration was 9 million.
Why do you think many countries like the US try to divest from China and even move some manufacturing back?
I agree, with this point, but you really have to answer, is migrating an office suite does that? Non of those office suites are developed within Germany, they are open source solutions. Also what kind of economic growth would you expect from building an army of developers to maintain and build an offie suite? At least train them for the technologies of the future, not for some outdated one of last decade. Further, after the migration who is going to fix bugs? provide support, also implement new features and keep the office suite modernized and maintain backwards compatibility throughout? All these topics would cost money, that's a reason why the MS license costs that much.
People this just because everything is migrated to LibreOffice it's done and it's a one time task. Imagine this migration happened in 2010, and back then it was oracle open office. Like, then would these computers still be stuck in that outdated office version till 2026? Otherwise who is doing the auto updates? Also for some reason imagine LibreOffice development is abandoned or stopped and the community created a new fork of it, who is going to migrate these thousands of computers again to the new version?
I'm not sure I understand why you are arguing so much against using open source software vs. closed software from a big corporation, on HN of all places.
> Also for some reason imagine LibreOffice development is abandoned or stopped and the community created a new fork of it, who is going to migrate these thousands of computers again to the new version?
The same way you do version upgrades for any software. You test the fork, you roll it out to your machines. What makes you think the fork would be so different right away than existing installations can't be updated to it? That's much easier than trying to migrate off a proprietary system that you can't change at all.
Resources are not infinite. European deficits are ballooning, and europe's ability to invest in anything (go further into debt) is constrained by peoples willingness to lend money to European governments at reasonable rates (the bond market)....a willingness which is rapidly collapsing for France, Germany, UK, etc due to lack of growth and underwater social entitlements.
As of right now, there's about 1000X more people working on Microsoft Office than on Frontier AI in Europe. Hence why Europe isn't even near being able to compete with the US and China on the frontier.
Cool that we're re-creating 1990s Microsoft Software in 2026 (why not an EU-native fax machine too? those are still used heavily in 80% of German orgs).
But what will you do if OpenAI/Anthropic/Kimi/GLM cut off your access? The frontier is only going to continue advancing and the openness of the Chinese models will not last forever.
If you can cripple the everyday workings of government, even temporarily, by shutting off access to Microsoft word, then that is a serious security concern. End of story.
But honestly, if we're comparing ENERGY and FERTILIZER to productivity software, it's no contest as to which is more important for the functioning of modern life.
You cannot vibe code your way out of an energy shortage or switch to 'open-source' fertilizer as soon as tomorrow.
Have you missed the news where multiple countries tried to do exactly that and it took either multiple tries or was abandoned? This is very deeply engrained in government and corporate networks (For good reasons like support, backwards compatibility, staffing etc.) but it's not something you can change over night like replacing your parents computer with a Linux version with a similar GUI and hoping all will be fine.
I think you might be underestimating a tad the dependency of bureaucracies on, you know, office software. Maybe word processing is not paramount, but every large organization will have an excel spreadsheat or two that takes tens of hours of work to replicate by hand alone. Will their absence make the economy crumble? Probably not, but it will definitely throw sand in the already grinding gears of German public service.