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Comment by sajithdilshan | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately you're singing to deaf ears. I totally agree with you regarding the current drama about EU sovereignty. Being sovereign is amazing, but at the moment EU is doing it for all the wrong reasons. It's more like cut dependency on US while moving towards China and I wonder what kind of a sovereignty that is. Also I saw the other day an announcement from NextCloud that they can now run the new Euro office or whatever its called on their cloud, and that would have been exciting if we were living in 2010.

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

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> 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.

I think you're missing the point. It's not about who is working on what, but the tax payers money is being wasted that could have been used for a better purpose. If they switch to a new office suite, that's millions of Euros wasted on migration, training people to use and building all the existing processes and flows around it.

That's very short term thinking. Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees as licensing fees is most likely the better use of tax payer money. What makes you think that licensing cost is much cheaper than migrating even over a short term horizon?

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?

> Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees

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?

You should probably fact check a little bit before throwing out claims like that. LibreOffice is run by a German non-profit (https://www.documentfoundation.org) and developed partially in Germany and with partial funding from the government. The beauty of spending that money on open source is that other countries can just use the exact software, contribute to it's development and don't pay license fees.

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.

Yes, you do have to pick.

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.

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