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Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

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Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#51

Post by hx8 »

vikingtoby wrote: post #28
kenjackson wrote: post #8

At this point all tech is big business. Microsoft or Apple. Azure or AWS. Google Apps or Office. Even dealing with Red Hat feels like you’re dealing with big tech. And the thing is 99.99% of the time everything works just fine. I think these governments often struggle with moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want.

Red Hat is IBM, the OG big tech really

I'd say Bell is the OG, which was founded about 40 years before IBM.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#52

Post by cmckn »

nemomarx wrote: post #42
Vespasian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sort of. AWS operates the China regions more or less like any other region, with oversight by the Chinese holding companies.

The EUSC will be more restricted, similar to GovCloud. Only EU citizens can access/operate it.

Specific example: an alarm fires for your service. If it’s in China, anyone on the team can go look at the logs. If it’s in GovCloud, only teammates who are American can look at the logs. In the EUSC, only Europeans can.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#53

Post by vunderba »

saubeidl wrote: post #9
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.

> "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.

What could go wrong with more centralization of power…

https://reclaimthenet.org/eu-council-approves-new-chat-contr...

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#54

Post by kenjackson »

dietr1ch wrote: post #26
kenjackson wrote: post #8

At this point all tech is big business. Microsoft or Apple. Azure or AWS. Google Apps or Office. Even dealing with Red Hat feels like you’re dealing with big tech. And the thing is 99.99% of the time everything works just fine. I think these governments often struggle with moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want.

> moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want. Until you have companies trying to intervene. If Universities are publicly funded by the government, and those companies do stuff like spying on, or silencing public officials, then why should the government finance those companies? I think its nuts that the EU has seen spying, access from servic…

Unfortunately part of it is that it likely goes both ways. For example illegal subsidies to Airbus. And US companies still buy Airbus. I think all of these go into the calculus of the decisions to purchase though. It’s likely you value open source much higher than they do based on your own principles.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#55

Post by godzillabrennus »

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!

Students go to university to get an education and obtain employment. All larger employers use Microsoft. Universities would be failing students by not giving them an education on their technologies. Microsoft gives the Universities and their students steep discounts or free software to propagate this.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#56

Post by Jaxan »

gcanyon wrote: post #6

Is it really that hard to switch to [google|libre|apache|free|etc.|etc.]? It seems like at the university level the ideas are the important part, and the need to write/spreadsheet at the bleeding edge of functionality much less so?

Yes. Because sometimes even the fundamental sign-in is through Microsoft.

Word and excel are not the difficult part. Mail, calendars, management, storage, security measures, etc are hard.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#57

Post by abdullahkhalids »

crazygringo wrote: post #31
gcanyon wrote: post #6

Is it really that hard to switch to [google|libre|apache|free|etc.|etc.]? It seems like at the university level the ideas are the important part, and the need to write/spreadsheet at the bleeding edge of functionality much less so?

Short answer: to Google it's not so bad but it's not like the legal risks are any different from Microsoft. And to the rest -- yes it is very hard. Universities need cloud storage with online collaboration and a fully functioning office suite. LibreOffice doesn't work because it's desktop-only and has no collaboration. However, there's an online-collaboration fork called Collabora Online, and you can use something li…

How much is the typical dutch university paying MS/Google? Maybe 10k students x 200EUR/year = 2 million EUR/year.

Twenty universities come together to move to make Collabora+NextCloud work for them. That's 40 million EUR/year. How much do they need to actually spend on developers + infrastructure to make it happen?

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#58

Post by tgv »

Jaxan wrote: post #56
gcanyon wrote: post #6

Is it really that hard to switch to [google|libre|apache|free|etc.|etc.]? It seems like at the university level the ideas are the important part, and the need to write/spreadsheet at the bleeding edge of functionality much less so?

Yes. Because sometimes even the fundamental sign-in is through Microsoft. Word and excel are not the difficult part. Mail, calendars, management, storage, security measures, etc are hard.

IIRC, Dutch unis have another account managing system, run by SURFnet. OAuth2, I think.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#59

Post by nxm »

seanieb wrote: post #34
petcat wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU is in a really tough situation. They're getting squeezed on all sides economically by USA and China while also facing a belligerent Russia on their eastern borders. And their internal politics and governance makes it very difficult to align in a direction that could enable them to start digging out of so much globalized dependence.

A recent analysis of the Trump Tarrifs on the EU concluded that while “some regions and industries could suffer”, for Europe overall the hit may be “limited but not negligible. The EU is quietly investing massively in diversifying away from the US market. there are trade negotiations or agreements in process (or being advanced) with countries/regions including India, the countries of the Mercosur bloc, Mexico, and Mi…

If that was so easy to do then they would have done it already years ago
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