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Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

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Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#91

If China can survive — and even start to thrive without ASML and TMSC, then have no doubt that should push come to shove Europe will be able to run a mail server and some office tools. They’re just hedging that American politics will stop licking the car battery.

Push has come to shove and has been shoving for nearly a decade. Europeans continue to be incapable. As a Canadian I wish they were not, but they are.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#92

Europe's failure to facilitate a competitive tech scene in the early 2000's (and even still ongoing today) will haunt them for decades. Such an enormous fumble that people still celebrate as a win.

They tried. They were either spied on (Earth - then developed by Google) or aquired (Star Office by Sun).

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you look at the numbers that way, open source usually looks like a slam dunk.

The problem is coordination issues: actually getting people and orgs to look at it that way and spend the money that way, rather than just waiting for someone else to fix the problem.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would argue that the root issue in America right now is that you have one guy that can pass 200+ executive orders in less than a year completely bypassing the other two supposed branches of government. There's no such position or a branch in the EU. None of the three can make any sort of change of their own.

> There's no such position or a branch in the EU.

cough vdL cough

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#95
post #5

Europe's failure to facilitate a competitive tech scene in the early 2000's (and even still ongoing today) will haunt them for decades. Such an enormous fumble that people still celebrate as a win.

"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.

Excuse denied. All they had to do was nothing. Instead they over-regulated way too early, before the industries could grow enough to support operating in such an environment. Now they are behind and will likely never catch up. The future of European tech is government handouts/scraps, collected by force from American companies.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#96

If China can survive — and even start to thrive without ASML and TMSC, then have no doubt that should push come to shove Europe will be able to run a mail server and some office tools. They’re just hedging that American politics will stop licking the car battery.

Push has come to shove and has been shoving for nearly a decade. Europeans continue to be incapable. As a Canadian I wish they were not, but they are.

It's more a risk management issue. A country that wants to do everything by itself (from food, to shovels, to cars, to computers) will not be the most efficient and will loose a lot. Before '90s communist countries were "proud" that everything was produced locally - except many things were breaking or bad quality or unavailable (not all, but many).

I would claim that today is a much better moment to switch than it was 20 years ago - much more open source options, so less overall costs.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you need Outlook? Can't you use it in a browser?

Yes, and the same can be done with Teams. That's what I do on my Linux laptop.

My university uses Teams and the browser version is missing some features. For example, I can't see the files uploaded by the professor. That tab won't load.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#98
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.

This is true, but it's also a fixable problem. The issue I've seen is that there isn't really the political will to fix it. Europeans broadly seem uncomfortable giving up national sovereignty when it comes to digital issues (including those that impact scaling businesses), so they implicitly choose the status quo that makes it hard for software/internet businesses to succeed. Literally in this thread you can see Euro…

Digital can probably be fixed easier. Energy independence on the other hand was a more stupid thing not to target (like Germany closing nuclear reactors, then buying gas from people that thought they could do whatever they want...).

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#99

If China can survive — and even start to thrive without ASML and TMSC, then have no doubt that should push come to shove Europe will be able to run a mail server and some office tools. They’re just hedging that American politics will stop licking the car battery.

EU politicians are just too dependent on keeping the status quo of the last decade. The status quo is how they got to their position so they have no incentive to change anything (Starmer, Merz, Marcon, Von der Lyen. Yuck). By the time they finally get the shove they need to rapidly decouple, e.g. when America invades The Hague* to rescue Netanyahu from war crimes charges, it will be when they're already on the edge of the proverbial cliff.

*: https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#100
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Push has come to shove and has been shoving for nearly a decade. Europeans continue to be incapable. As a Canadian I wish they were not, but they are.

It's more a risk management issue. A country that wants to do everything by itself (from food, to shovels, to cars, to computers) will not be the most efficient and will loose a lot. Before '90s communist countries were "proud" that everything was produced locally - except many things were breaking or bad quality or unavailable (not all, but many). I would claim that today is a much better moment to switch than it wa…

Coming from ex-USSR, I can assure you that shortages and shitty quality was not because of closed garden. But because of politics (and corruption) first. And lack of meritocratic natural selection.

Many factories were building crap or wrong stuff just because somebody high up in the Party found it convenient for some reason.

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