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Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

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Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#181

Post by tchalla »

usrbinbash wrote: post #161
bradley13 wrote: post #80

That's great, but it's always just one agency, or one very local bit of government. If we (Europeans) really mean it - and we should - the top level of government just needs to make the declaration: as of X, all Microsoft licenses will be terminated. No exceptions. Adapt or die. According to the CLOUD act, the US government can demand access to data from US companies, regardless of where that data is stored. That mus…

> That's great, but it's always just one agency, or one very local bit of government. Transitioning every system wholesale at once, is not gonna happen. I rather have our governents and agencies do it step by step than not at all.

It won’t but it creates a sense of urgency.

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#182

Post by marcosdumay »

motoboi wrote: post #55

Brazil’s free software initiative in 2000’s was all about technological dependency. Brazil was hoping to leverage governmental spending to kickstart a national software development industry. Some sort of leap into the future, jumping over first the industrial era and then service-based economy we missed. It was killed with fire by huge Microsoft (and American, I suppose) lobbying in congress, but then America had a v…

> It was killed with fire by huge Microsoft (and American, I suppose) lobbying in congress

Well... the bad quality of the decree itself helped at least as much as Microsoft.

Government organizations often discover it's easier to publish their software in github than to make the publishing agency accept it.

There was no migration plan, and the option that was actually pushed from the central organizations required constant contracts that were about as expensive and hard to manage as the ones with Microsoft, but hiring the government.

At the same time, the same organization that others were supposed to contract was getting delisted worldwide for bad security practices.

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#183

Post by wolvoleo »

hermanzegerman wrote: post #119
lukan wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I genuinely do not understand why other countries put up with this." Maybe because there is no drop in replacement of microsoft and microsoft dependant tools? So yes, one can (and should) build them. But the market right now is not offering this yet.

For many services there are drop-in Replacements available. I don't see what's so special about Mail or Calendar from Microsoft vs other vendors. The Quality is also Shit. I get some stupid Errors when trying to Access OWA every other day. Then I have to reset cookies/cache and can login again

Yes and they keep blocking features in Firefox on Linux. When I change the user agent to match edge on windows things suddenly work fine.

When it's set to Firefox attachment uploads don't work and ever morning it jumps to "please wait while we're signing you out..." when i never asked for that. When it thinks it's edge it just stays signed in.

Not to mention the huge amount of telemetry I need to block with ublock origin.

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#184

Post by troad »

teekert wrote: post #154
troad wrote: post #145

I'm very happy for all the Europeans getting to use software they like and prefer, but honestly I'm a little tired of reading about it. There's been an awful lot of recent blogging and news about de-Americanising one's stack. It seems very important to the Europeans that they let everyone else know they're leaving? It's got the air of a thirty-five year old threatening to move out of his parents' basement any day now…

It's an incredibility hot topic here (in the EU) right now. It also provides a lot of (business) opportunities here. I get that this (HN) is not an EU platform, but a lot of us are on here. Collectively we feel like we are going through an EU/US divorce that is rough and will take years to complete. All our tech is entangled with the US, everything would grind to a halt if Trump would pull some plugs at the moment. I…

> I don't see what you mean with your remark about the balkanized internet, the problems is we've been building our systems in US walled gardens, and now we want our freedom back.

The short version is that Europe's influence on tech is going to be significantly reduced by Europe trying to silo itself off from the rest of the world. If Europe becomes even more marginal of a market than it is now, then the established players have ever less reason to attempt to comply with European regulations. (You may say they already push back, but that's quite different from not bothering at all.)

Of course the rest of the world isn't going anywhere, and Europeans will remain exposed to new technologies coming out of Asia and America. It does Europe very little good to make a Euro-Twitter that abides by Euro regs, if the original Twitter remains widely accessible from Europe, but decides to no longer do business in Europe, and is no longer responsive to European regulation / courts / etc.

TLDR: A necessary outcome of increasing Euro digital autonomy is a reorientation of foreign players back towards home markets, and the rise of an American digital autonomy that no longer humours Europe at all.

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#185

Post by fyredge »

There's something about governments moving to open source software that doesn't sit well with me. The only advantage I can see is reduction in expenditure with free software.

I believe we should go a step further and institute open standards. Move away from .docx and to .odt in document submission on government websites. This gives users the flexibility of choice as long as they adhere to a specific standards. This would also hopefully alleviate some of the mess of inconsistent rendering of the same document on different software.

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#186

Post by andix »

Mashimo wrote: post #15

I work in software development for Danish hospitals, and some regions already used OpenOffice, now libre office, for .. well over 15 years. At least in parts. We integrate with an API into libreoffice, and it more or less did not change in well over a decade. But sometimes libreoffice crashes and you can't figure out why. There are just no logs. It feels like a black box at times. But I don't think they will be switc…

Switching from Word/Excel to LibreOffice is comparably easy. A lot of other Microsoft Products are much harder to get rid of.

I've never seen a European corporation that doesn't do user management with ActiveDirectory. Some still have it on their own Windows servers, but most browser based applications still go through Entra (Azure Cloud based AD). Just shut off their Entra/AAD and most of their software is blocked because nobody can log in.

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#187

Post by wolvoleo »

steinvakt2 wrote: post #159
guerrilla wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no "good will" argument being made here. The state doesn't care about good, it cares about it's own survival. Being independent from foreign interference in the software they use and having deep insight into what residents within the territory of that state are talking about are critical to that mission. It has nothing to do with morals. It is a machine.

EU chat control is also better than American government spying on American tech companies (which is effectively a kind of EU Chat Control, except its USA who gets to spy). Both are bad, but one is less bad.

True, at least the EU does it above board. No secret court backroom shenanigans.

I'm still super opposed to chatcontrol but at least it's in the open for us to fight.

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#188

Post by 202508042147 »

lpcvoid wrote: post #102
lukan wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I genuinely do not understand why other countries put up with this." Maybe because there is no drop in replacement of microsoft and microsoft dependant tools? So yes, one can (and should) build them. But the market right now is not offering this yet.

There's Nextcloud/OCIS/Owncloud for Sharepoint (god I fucking hate Sharepoint) and Onedrive, there's Libreoffice/Collabora (and Onlyoffice, but that's russian...), there's Thunderbird for Email. Windows is absolutely replaceable also, of course, maybe even easier than the Office365 subscription mentioned above. The lock in only exists in brains of (old) people that can't adapt. MS products can all be replaced, and sh…

> [...] anymore after Trump.

We shouldn't have waited until Trump, we had clear signs of distrust when the Americans were spying on Angela Merkel and other European officials [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spie...

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#189

Post by teekert »

troad wrote: post #184
teekert wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an incredibility hot topic here (in the EU) right now. It also provides a lot of (business) opportunities here. I get that this (HN) is not an EU platform, but a lot of us are on here. Collectively we feel like we are going through an EU/US divorce that is rough and will take years to complete. All our tech is entangled with the US, everything would grind to a halt if Trump would pull some plugs at the moment. I…

> I don't see what you mean with your remark about the balkanized internet, the problems is we've been building our systems in US walled gardens, and now we want our freedom back. The short version is that Europe's influence on tech is going to be significantly reduced by Europe trying to silo itself off from the rest of the world. If Europe becomes even more marginal of a market than it is now, then the established…

Those are good points indeed, I didn't look at it that way before. Thanx.

Edit: You made me think, there are downsides indeed. But we still need to not be spied upon by the US, and we still don't need International Criminal Court judges have their email blocked in retaliation.

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#190

Post by kakacik »

embedding-shape wrote: post #79
whh wrote: post #68

I think a move to Open Source would be great in Europe, but only if the governments using the technologies are actively funding their development. This doesn't just mean once-off grants, or a bit of cash donated here and there. I would like to see per-user per-year contributions to the organisations that develop these tools on-par with the current spend going towards Microsoft Cloud products. It can be better than Mi…

> It can be better than Microsoft, but you need to fund it to be better than Microsoft. Lol no. Microsoft profits more than the value they provide, not exactly we should want to copy. We need to prevent hypercapitalism from reaching us in Europe, not make it worse, as we now seen exactly what it does to countries when you let it grow unfettered. But I agree in general, governments and companies that use FOSS should d…

Europe as in EU can certainly use a bit more capitalism. Nothing brutal like US or China have where individuals are often crushed by system or situation with no help in sight, but Europe got lazy, complacent, used to over-generous unsustainable easy to abuse social system and generally living off debt to future generations. Self-serving massive bureaucracy and corruption. Companies like car makers are already being hit badly and its going to get a lot worse with global competition.

For the 1000th time here and elsewhere - look no further than Switzerland. Highly diverse, federated group of people that managed to preserve most direct democracy in the world for 800 years and counting. 'Most free and most armed nation in the world' still holds true without clusterfuck that US gun situation is. Each canton is very self-sufficient, governs local rules, laws and taxation so there is no animosity between various regions - really a mini version of EU.

This is how EU parliament should look like, if (mostly) french and german egos would step down from their pedestals and acknowledge that somebody may figured things out better. Its most capitalistic country in Europe by far while preserving most of what we call social and healthcare net, has top notch free education and so on. Also its not increasing its debt, a clear mark of sustainable economical success of such approach, in contrary with literally any EU country.

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