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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)

#211

Post by esafak »

flexie wrote: post #164
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…

I am Danish, working with IT in the private sector, but with regular contact to the public sector. I can assure you that there is plenty of other agencies, ministries, municipalities, private companies etc. in both Denmark and other European countries looking into switching to non-American software. "Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier. Everybody asks about it it. Everybody plans aro…

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

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

#212

Post by JSR_FDED »

Of all the Microsoft products, Excel is going to be the hardest to replace. Firstly, it's critical in many organisations. We all know you shouldn't run your business on a spreadsheet, but everyone does. Just a tiny difference in how data is handled, an unsupported macro, a missing formula...the whole deck of cards collapses. Secondly, while people only use 20% of its features, everyone uses a different 20%.

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

#213

Post by tsoukase »

An open source replacement of proprietary SW is very easy in the beginning but becomes hard quickly. You grab a Linux distribution and the App that match the functionality at best and call it a day. But the next day a bunch of problems arise: some features are not implemented, the UI is not ergonomic, the stability is not there and when updates come, the situation goes overboard. The billions of dollars don't start software, they end it polished and consumer ready.

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

#215

Post by foobarian »

esafak wrote: post #211
flexie wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am Danish, working with IT in the private sector, but with regular contact to the public sector. I can assure you that there is plenty of other agencies, ministries, municipalities, private companies etc. in both Denmark and other European countries looking into switching to non-American software. "Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier. Everybody asks about it it. Everybody plans aro…

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?

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

#216

Post by dijit »

esafak wrote: post #211
flexie wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am Danish, working with IT in the private sector, but with regular contact to the public sector. I can assure you that there is plenty of other agencies, ministries, municipalities, private companies etc. in both Denmark and other European countries looking into switching to non-American software. "Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier. Everybody asks about it it. Everybody plans aro…

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

They're largely not unless you are looking to appease your superiors.

OVH, Telecity, Hezner, Bahnhof, Tele2 etc;etc;etc;etc;etc; are all valid suppliers without the need to buy from hyperscalers.

I think what tends to work though is the idea that someone in redmond can't arbitrarily decide to shut you down as an individual or exert pressure. So it goes in order of importance:

A) Can we buy the software and use it in perpetuity

B) If we can't buy the software in perpetuity, do we at least control who has access to the software and our data

C) If we can't control who has access to the data then can we at least ensure we always have access to it?

D) If we can't ensure we have access to our own data then what are we even doing here?

Depending on where you fall on this line (which is a decision each government must make) you'll have to claw back something because right now we're all on D.

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

#217

Post by embedding-shape »

hbn wrote: post #175
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…

Governments funding FOSS is not Microsoft's business model and it's not capitalism.

> Governments funding FOSS is not Microsoft's business model

Yeah, long time ago we last saw the whole "Microsoft <3 Open Source" shtick, so seems more true than ever.

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

#218

Post by delfinom »

esafak wrote: post #211
flexie wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am Danish, working with IT in the private sector, but with regular contact to the public sector. I can assure you that there is plenty of other agencies, ministries, municipalities, private companies etc. in both Denmark and other European countries looking into switching to non-American software. "Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier. Everybody asks about it it. Everybody plans aro…

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.

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

#219

Post by Razengan »

esafak wrote: post #211
flexie wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am Danish, working with IT in the private sector, but with regular contact to the public sector. I can assure you that there is plenty of other agencies, ministries, municipalities, private companies etc. in both Denmark and other European countries looking into switching to non-American software. "Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier. Everybody asks about it it. Everybody plans aro…

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 signal "neuron" of the global brain (possibly becoming a neuron itself) and it should theoretically be able to fetch anything.

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

#220

Post by integralid »

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…

>top level of government just needs to make the declaration: as of X, all Microsoft licenses will be terminated. No exceptions. Adapt or die

This is unrealistic populism. The type that gets upvoted on HN, apparently. It's not possible to just ditch all Microsoft licenses in a year, or in 5 years, or in 10 years. There are hundreds of critical systems that can't just be migrated to Linux overnight (or ever). And "just dying" is... not an option for a government branch. What is this even supposed to mean.

But we can limit American bigtech by 90%, and we should. Especially everything in the cloud.

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