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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)

#221

Post by DrScientist »

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…

Indeed. I also fail to see how the existence of the CLOUD act, and thus use of any US company, is compatible with GDPR.

See https://www.exoscale.com/blog/cloudact-vs-gdpr/

( Though note exoscale, as a European provider has skin in the game here ).

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

#222

Post by Johnny555 »

Gigachad wrote: post #88
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.

Google has drop in replacements for most of it. But that doesn’t solve the problem of using US tech.

The problem is that Google only covers "most of it", so even if it covers 99% of use cases, for that cases where it doesn't, companies still need MS Office.

I worked for a startup that was all OSX desktops and Google Docs. Then when we hit 100 employees, the finance department required MS Office, so they used Office for Mac, then as we grew, they needed real MS Office running in Windows, so they ran Windows in Parallels, then as we continued to grow they moved to full Windows laptops. When I left the company (at around 1000 employees), almost a third of the company was on Windows (mostly in Finance, Sales, and other business departments). And the team supporting the 2/3 Mac desktops was about 1/3 the size of the team supporting Windows.

Though I suppose it's easier for a government to move off Microsoft. When an investor tells you to use their financial modeling software that only works with MS Excel, it's pretty hard for a small company to refuse, but a government has more power to force others to conform to their choice.

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

#223

Post by yardie »

octocop wrote: post #178
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…

A lot of hospitals run Microsoft. So it would be literal death you are talking about.

A lot of hospitals and healthcare systems in Europe use the open source EMR platform. No ones charts are in .docx format, it is not life or death, lets be serious.

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

#224

Post by beached_whale »

delfinom wrote: post #218
esafak wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What counts as data sovereignty in your book? Are the sovereign clouds of AWS, MS, Google acceptable? If not, who are your preferred providers?

The US passed the CLOUD Act which subject all those sovereign clouds run by US companies completely subject to US spying and hijack. Those offerings are garbage for anyone outside the US.

Countries hosting the data centres can make it illegal to allow access from outside their area/EU... or specifically to US entities along with making it illegal to move any data out without customer/local gov approval... This isn't rocket science. The company cannot do business if it doesn't follow the law. There are laws like this in places already. The company's local subsidiary tells the American company to politely pound sand and the American company says sorry, we tried, but do not have the capability to do as asked.

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

#225

Post by bediger4000 »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #113
lpcvoid wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People get a lot of cash, house and other benefits when they pick up suppliers. And if they don't get a direct bribe, for some reasons, they end up as VP of what ever branch more or less directly related to their previous job as client.

Exactly this. A while back, a greybeard told me "CVS never flew anyone to the Bahamas for a few rounds of bikini golf", when I was complaining about my employer picking the version control system and torture device "Serena Dimensions".

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

#227

Post by wasabi991011 »

Johnny555 wrote: post #222
Gigachad wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has drop in replacements for most of it. But that doesn’t solve the problem of using US tech.

The problem is that Google only covers "most of it", so even if it covers 99% of use cases, for that cases where it doesn't, companies still need MS Office. I worked for a startup that was all OSX desktops and Google Docs. Then when we hit 100 employees, the finance department required MS Office, so they used Office for Mac, then as we grew, they needed real MS Office running in Windows, so they ran Windows in Parall…

Any insight in to why the finance department (and other departments) required MS office?

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

#228

Post by koalacongregate »

foobarian wrote: post #215
esafak wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What counts as data sovereignty in your book? Are the sovereign clouds of AWS, MS, Google acceptable? If not, who are your preferred providers?

Should we discuss DNS root servers at some point too?

I've had this thought too - of the 13 root servers, 10 are US or US-based companies. The only exceptions are Netnod (Sweden), RIPE NCC (Netherlands), WIDE Project (Japan). Even ICANN and Internet Systems Consortium are US-based non-profits... How do you even mitigate risk in this case?

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

#229

Post by esafak »

Razengan wrote: post #219
esafak wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What counts as data sovereignty in your book? Are the sovereign clouds of AWS, MS, Google acceptable? If not, who are your preferred providers?

> If not, who are your preferred providers? Can we have fully decentralized mesh networking yet? I love how some hyper-sci-fi settings have the concept of a "datasphere" (analogous to atmosphere): an actual physical cloud of ubiquitous nanorobots that provide connectivity, storage and computation. Wouldn't that also be ideal for AI too the way it's shaping up to be? Any device anywhere would just need to connect to a…

Dealing with the patchwork of lesser-known infra providers in the EU is work enough. You want to live life on hard mode!

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

#230

Post by lpcvoid »

close04 wrote: post #155
Foobar8568 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People get a lot of cash, house and other benefits when they pick up suppliers. And if they don't get a direct bribe, for some reasons, they end up as VP of what ever branch more or less directly related to their previous job as client.

Someone yanked your chain with this one. Nobody gets a house or a job at Microsoft for buying Microsoft, these cases can't even register in the statistic of the total volume of orders. Every tech company would buy you a house if that worked, when a house is always a rounding error on the value of the contracts we're talking about. They buy it because it's the "safe", "does everything" choice that "everyone else has".…

>A lot of good it is that you have Google Meet and Libre Office when the partners you work closes to have Teams and MS Office

Which is why governments in the EU need to lead this change to open source so others can point and say "hey even the big guys use it now".

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