Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025) • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by sylware » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:41 PM UTC

robinei wrote: post #114

sylware wrote: post #57

From an applications point of view: They want web apps only running in whatng cartel web engines? libreoffice? A massive piece of software you can build only with US c++ compilers (MIT and mostly apple)? (the mistake was to use c++ in the first place, well computer languages on an insane level of complexity). To put it together: it won't be perfect, lines for compromises will have to be drawn, and it will feel like g…

Who cares if a piece of open source has American maintainers? The point is not to avoid touching anything American. It is control and sovereignty.

This is what I implied: this is not against the US, which have actually the most control and sovereignty on critical software.

It is much cheaper and easier to have control and sovereignty on less complex software, including the SDK.

Usually you get developer lock-in via non-pertinent complexity, often including the SDK namely the computer language.

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

#232

Post by edwinjm » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

beached_whale wrote: post #224

delfinom wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 polite…

An American company will always follow US law, no matter the local laws.

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

#233

Post by macintux » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

philipallstar wrote: post #158

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…

This is a clash of semi-overlapping, transitioning philosophies. The global, liberal hegemony philosophy is that you can trust other countries, and countries are just economic zones with mildly different food and weather. Country dividing lines for any other purpose are bad. The UK was evil for wanting more sovereignty vs the EU; what's the difference? Open the borders. Let anyone vote. This has only recently been ph…

> The UK was evil for wanting more sovereignty vs the EU

I don't think many thought the UK was evil.

I think many thought the UK had been sold a bag of lies, and that exiting based on a very slim majority of voters on a referendum was a bad idea.

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

#234

Post by cs702 » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

In the past, a small number of European cities or municipalities have tried to move away from proprietary software, but those have been isolated cases, lacking broader support.

This time, things look different. Anecdotally, more people in Europe now suddenly actually care about this. They no longer want their governments to rely on software controlled by US companies, because they no longer trust it. Many are shocked and upset about recent US actions that they view as "detestable," including "irrational efforts against NATO," "nonsensical tariffs against allies," "ICE raids that trample over human rights," and "missiles targeting boat survivors." I'm paraphrasing what others have mentioned to me here. Whether you agree or disagree with these concerns, they are valid for many Europeans. They don't particularly care for the open-source movement on its own, but they now view open-source software as a more desirable alternative.

In an ironic twist of fate, the US government's actions could end up causing long-term damage to US tech companies.

This is all based on anecdotal evidence, so I could be wrong, but I have to call it like I see it.

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

#235

Post by lpcvoid » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

heraldgeezer wrote: post #198

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…

Okay... and what about Intune? (Device management) Entra? (User management and policy) Office 365 Exchange? Excel? (Finance runs on custom Excel macros and sheets) Teams? Office 365 in general, security, DLP, MFA?

>Intune

Fleet

>Entra? (User management and policy)

LDAP

>Office 365 Exchange?

Dovecot, Postfix

>Excel? (Finance runs on custom Excel macros and sheets)

Libreoffice calc, R and Python were needed. And if that doesn't work, finance needs to work around the vendor lockin

>Teams?

Matrix, Jitsi, Bigbluebutton, Mattermost

>Office 365 in general, security, DLP, MFA?

Authentik, Keycloak for MFA/security, OpenZFS with Nextcloud/Opencloud for DLP

It's possible, though of course less integrated and more work involved than just selling your soul to MS. But I am sure that time will also solve that, now that people are more interested in open source.

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

#236

Post by KronisLV » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

wolvoleo wrote: post #160

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.

Well, if your goal is to be 100% the same as what Microsoft offer, then sure no there's not. But that's letting them set the goalposts. If you look at the features you actually need and are willing to explore different ways of doing things that are not exactly like M365 there's more options. France and Germany are also working on freeing themselves from M365. This kinda thing sounds a lot like those RFPs that were sp…

> But that's letting them set the goalposts.

This is missed in so, so very many discussions out there.

You can reproduce about 50-75% of what MS offers with FOSS and work on writing the rest in-house/in-EU.

Would a bunch of workflows suffer initially? Sure, but not even trying is just preseving the status quo.

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

#237

Post by simonask » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:46 PM UTC

kakacik wrote: post #190

embedding-shape wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 h…

Sweeping generalizations like just don’t really contribute anything worthwhile. You mention Switzerland as supposedly a counter-example, but the characterization also does not apply to the Scandinavian countries, Netherlands, several Baltic states, and to a certain degree countries like Poland.

Is this actually just a criticism of French and German public governance, or Spanish, or Italian? If so, yes, I agree. They are slow and have a lot of overhead. But they don’t represent anything like a full picture.

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

#238

Post by rbbydotdev » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:48 PM UTC

An EU Linux distro could be interesting

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

#239

Post by Johnny555 » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:48 PM UTC

wasabi991011 wrote: post #227

Johnny555 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Their initial need for Office was some soft of forecasting model that they needed to update for a large investor. That was a big spreadsheet that ran on Office for OSX if I remember correctly. After that, I don't know what specifically they needed to use, they had purchased some software that required Windows and Office.

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

#240

Post by philipallstar » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:52 PM UTC

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…

> The lock in only exists in brains of (old) people that can't adapt.

I think this is a little superficial. There will be mountains of existing Word/Excel/Powerpoint documents that would need converting, as well as configured permissions structures and remotely managed laptop configurations that currently are working well. Of course anything is possible given enough time and money. The real issue isn't to do with your ageism. It's whether that time and money is best spent on this particular area.