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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)

#241

Post by philipallstar »

lpcvoid wrote: post #132
lukan wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you worked in government services and know what their needs are? I did not, but as far as I know, they require a bit more more than some office solution, shared drive and some email client. (How do you imagine how it works internally if you apply for a new passport, they just send some office documents via email around?)

I have worked in (German) Government, and apart from complacency (and maybe corruption, see Limux) there's nothing stopping the German government (at least at federal level) from adopting open source. If processes depend on some crappy excel table (created by somebody 20 years ago) or even worse, sharepoint app (commissioned by people who shouldn't be deciding things like this), the processes suck and need to be rebu…

The processes might well be in Microsoft Dynamics 365.

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

#242

Post by KronisLV »

hbn wrote: post #167
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…

You make it sound like a noble act of sacrifice but the employees are all still getting paid. The real people who will be hurt are the citizens relying on their government to function, and telling a bunch of government employees of varying competence levels to "suck it up and adapt to your workflow being broken" will throw a real wrench in that.

> telling a bunch of government employees of varying competence levels to "suck it up and adapt to your workflow being broken" will throw a real wrench in that.

I will weep on the day when the great Europe is defeated by people being unable to use a slightly different spreadsheet program, word processor, or a file sharing solution.

But yeah, the argument about "adapt or die" is also way off base. Ideally it'd be a gradual migration, all low hanging fruit first, seeing what works and what doesn't.

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

#243

Post by cromka »

xienze wrote: post #36
cromka wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It failed because of MS pushback and lobbying. As was reported countless times.

So, it can happen again is what you’re saying.

Not what I am saying. But yeah, except MS position in general is much weaker nowadays, especially because of Apple, not open source.

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

#244

Post by lpcvoid »

philipallstar wrote: post #240
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…

> 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 you…

>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

Well, they are not working well right now, because they could be rendered inoperable at any moment through Microsoft flipping a switch. That risk is real and has precedent (ICC having their Outlook access revoked).

>The real issue isn't to do with your ageism. It's whether that time and money is best spent on this particular area.

When European sovereignty is on the line, it's never too expensive.

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

#245

Post by Guestmodinfo »

KronisLV wrote: post #236
wolvoleo wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Today I opened a .docx file on libreoffice on my linux machine. Did a whole bunch of editing and sent back the file for some semi official purpose. And the .docx file behaved as usual on the windows machine of the sender. I mean to say for many many people the workflows will not suffer even one but. It's just too much automated people whose work may suffer initially b cause they are using windows API or something like that. But that's like just for developers suffering. Most govt offices or universities just work on individual files and that will never suffer even one bit

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

#246

Post by MegaDeKay »

mgoetzke wrote: post #142
m000 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France have already developed their own (recently posted here) [1][2]. Also, the "there's no drop in replacement" line is just making up excuses for not acting. Yes, you will not get 100% of the Office 365 features out of the box. There will be some friction. It's simply ridiculous seeing EU bureaucracy preparing e.g. to ban russian oil [3], making life more expensive for all people, and balking on being forced to sw…

Considering that I doubt most normal office-user people even use features in Word other than changing fonts etc I doubt that will be a big issue anyway.

It doesn't need to be "most". "Some" or even "a few" can be enough to make a hell of a mess if those few have created documents that are key to the business in one way or another (proposals, end-user documentation, etc). And there are the other components to the suite like Powerpoint, Excel, and Project to consider.

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

#247

Post by gizzlon »

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…

> "Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier.

I hope you're right! I'm a backend dev and engineer, and I would love to specialize in helping companies off US cloud. Haven't found a lot of interest here in Norway so far..

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

#248

Post by [deleted] »

esafak wrote: post #229
Razengan wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

[deleted]

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

#249

Post by esafak »

koalacongregate wrote: post #228
foobarian wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Looks like a business opportunity.

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

#250

Post by gizzlon »

hbn wrote: post #167
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…

You make it sound like a noble act of sacrifice but the employees are all still getting paid. The real people who will be hurt are the citizens relying on their government to function, and telling a bunch of government employees of varying competence levels to "suck it up and adapt to your workflow being broken" will throw a real wrench in that.

> The real people who will be hurt are the citizens relying on their government to function

You make it sound like the current Microsoft stack is so insanely great it will be impossible to replace.

Yes, change is hard, but there are also massive upsides in switching to something better.

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