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Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

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Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#41

Post by bojan »

ramon156 wrote: post #27
saubeidl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity It really needs to be, though, that's kind of the crux of it. Federate or die off, it's time to get rid of old tribal thinking. We're all Europeans.

I can't fathom why you would give one parlement all the power. This is the root issue of America right now, individual states have less and less power every year.

Otherwise you get an economy stifling patchwork of regulations, which is what we have within the EU now.

Further, it'd probably be two Chambers, and we have proportional representation, which should make a slide to fascism a bit more difficult.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#42

Post by nemomarx »

Vespasian wrote: post #18
ttkari wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand how an American company would be able to provide any service that could be "sovereign European".

In theory Amazon could license the stack to a European Operator while having no operative access themselves. I think this is already done in some cases altough the political reliability has not yet been tested.

They must have something like this for China, right?

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#44

Post by [deleted] »

aeyes wrote: post #32
arethuza wrote: post #23

When I did a 4 year CS degree at a UK university in the 1980s I don't think I touched anything from Microsoft for the entire time I was there!

Because for a CS degree students are expected to work with other systems and the software needed to complete the course work is usually low level. Even when I did my CS degree 20 years ago our labs were Linux and Solaris. For other degrees you need software which only runs on Windows. It might also help that Microsoft was totally irrelevant in the professional world in the 80s.

[deleted]

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#45

Post by bojan »

skirge wrote: post #25
bojan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity. Yes, we have European Union which helps a lot, but it is not complete (and certainly wasn't in the time when Microsofts and Googles of this world started), making that all-important initial scaling way more difficult than it is in the US.

if we talk beaurocracy EU is very well consolidated: "you can't do that", everyone says consistently.

This is a popular meme, but compared to the combined regulation of 27 member states, the EU as a whole is doing great.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#46

Post by pjmlp »

Depends.

Can they get rid of Typescript, npm, Github, VS, VSCode, .NET, C#, F#, C++ / DirectX, Next.js, vcpkg, Microsoft contributions to Java, Rust, and Linux kernel, on their students teaching materials?

If they can switch to UNIX FOSS technologies with zero trace of Microsoft's money sponsorship, and hinder the students careers in specific job markets, then surely.

People usually never look beyond getting rid of Office and Windows.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#48

Post by lysace »

In the 90s I used to sort of tease/banter our sysadmin guy at a small, developer-centric company in Europe (SunOS/Linux/etc-focused) in a friendly way with something like:

"It seems to me like all the things you're doing can and should be automated at a larger scale."

Ten years ago when I recalled this I felt sort of good about the prediction. What I predicted pretty much happened.

That sysadmin guy has become some sort of CIO and seems to be doing well.

I did not anticipate the loss of data sovereignty.

.... and now I'm doing like 50% SRE/devops. Who's the sysadmin now, but without physical control of our data?

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#49

Post by concinds »

ramon156 wrote: post #27
saubeidl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity It really needs to be, though, that's kind of the crux of it. Federate or die off, it's time to get rid of old tribal thinking. We're all Europeans.

I can't fathom why you would give one parlement all the power. This is the root issue of America right now, individual states have less and less power every year.

America is already a country. The EU isn't. You could give the EU a metric ton more power and they'd still be more decentralized than the halcyon days of the US that you reference.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#50

Post by rzerowan »

For one reasono another im not seeing any of the currently OSS solutions like LibreOffice/OpenOffice.orgwould not gain much traction and will remain niche even as the MS/Goog options remain entrenched.

The path taken by Blender(propreiety initially to open source) to reach industry lead would to me seem the most viable to make a dent.

In that i think best cost effective options like WPSOffice or Corel Suite , would be a good option.They have the professional usability in the interface and functionality.

Corel is basically leaving the market wide , by mostly collecting rent from lawfirms as they are well taken care of there.Considering they used to have viable Linux options , seems a lack of vision theer to pick up marketshare.

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