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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)

#391

Post by pu_pe »

kyboren wrote: post #333
pu_pe wrote: post #67

One aspect of the AI bubble that is not talked about very much is how the European market is a key factor in any serious calculation about future revenue. If Europe decides to, or is forced to decouple its digital infrastructure from the US, that essentially slashes the addressable market of a company like chatGPT by a third. And Europe has some of the richest customers too. In other words, Sam Altman et al. should b…

Maybe this will happen eventually but decoupling any time soon is a pipe dream. For the foreseeable future, Europe's BATNA is shit. Forget Microsoft and Google services, what about the hardware? To support all this new demand for European infrastructure you'll have to buy tons of new gear from mostly American companies: AMD, INTC, NVDA, MU, etc. Are cutting-edge European competitors going to suddenly spring into exis…

Decoupling would be painful and certainly hardware would be the most difficult challenge. However, consider that for all those companies you mentioned, Chinese alternatives are starting to appear and will be very competitive in the next few years. Europe also has some key strategic cards to play when it comes to hardware, such as access to TSMC.

The most likely scenario in my view is that Europe will be a consumer/bystander in the AI race, not a protagonist. For that, you don't need a lot of hardware. China and the US will compete for the European market, with the US already far ahead and earning billions from European customers. But it can lose that post in the future, either through crazy foreign policy or simply being outcompeted by the Chinese.

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

#392

Post by octocop »

yardie wrote: post #337
cguess wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hospitals are also planning documents, budgets, schedules, grants, reports, all with different access levels, privacy requirements, and legal regulations. They're far more than just patient care in the moment.

Certainly true, but no one is dying because payroll is down.

Really? Maybe this is news to you then, I rarely get to educate ppl on here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WannaCry_ransomware_attack

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

#393

Post by wolvesechoes »

pjmlp wrote: post #386
ilikerashers wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe has just been catastrophically slow in developing anything related to it's own tech infrastructure. Its doesn't back itself. Given how poor it's responding to things like the Draghi report, I wouldn't anticipate success. Just more flailing around and working groups.

Europe isn't a country, and as such each nation has its own agenda, and political relations. For bad or worse, not all European national governments see the world through the same glasses.

9/10 conversations on things happening across Europe can be thrown into trash bin, as they treat EU, or even Europe as a whole, as a single political entity. I could somehow accept that Americans can display such ignorance, but amazingly pretty often this mistake is being made by people declaring themselves as European. Like, are they blind to the political reality that surrounds them?

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

#394

Post by pjmlp »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #393
pjmlp wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe isn't a country, and as such each nation has its own agenda, and political relations. For bad or worse, not all European national governments see the world through the same glasses.

9/10 conversations on things happening across Europe can be thrown into trash bin, as they treat EU, or even Europe as a whole, as a single political entity. I could somehow accept that Americans can display such ignorance, but amazingly pretty often this mistake is being made by people declaring themselves as European. Like, are they blind to the political reality that surrounds them?

I can understand talking about us as a wide group, given how we share many cultural points of view, ways of working are still closer that across the pound, many being polyglot, having seen the same cartoons as kids and so on, regardless of the differences that remain, however we are still quite far away from turning into United States of Europe. The growing rights sentiment, is exactly because many nationals don't want going that far, among other issues.

Also not everything that gets regulated in Brussels, gets adopted by local goverments, and additionally there are plenty European countries that still aren't part of EU organisation.

Yeah, cannot understand this misunderstanding when coming from Europeans, as you mention.

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

#395

Post by Thlom »

jongjong wrote: post #361
pydry wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of european hosts (e.g. hetzner) and with payments systems the technology is rarely the problem it's the politics. I imagine EPI will have no problem succeeding. The major problem Europe has (mentioned in the draghi report) is with industrial competitiveness and strategy and access to cheap energy. With the former it's not like the US is doing any better though. I dont think anybody in the west even…

Yes, it's glaringly obvious to me that they've been actively suppressing their own tech sector. Feels like a lot of EU politicians owned shares of US tech companies. This effect of politicians making decisions based on what corporate shares they own is ubiquitous now. In the other direction, I even wonder if US threats about Greenland were related to this trend of Denmark moving off US big tech. I feel like the real…

It's a racket. The US have provided military protection in exchange for Europe tying itself to the mast of the US empire. Some of it is unspoken, some of it is contracted, especially concerning military hardware.

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

#396

Post by jeroenhd »

Flatterer3544 wrote: post #310

Denmark was literally the US lapdog for such a long time, open to provide access and info. Denmark was the first to follow US into Iraq, while the rest of Scandinavia was much more skeptical. Guess just bad luck with Greenland turning them the complete opposite direction, since I was certain that Denmark would be the one of the last to go against US in any way.

As a Dutch citizen, I take issue with that. Our politicians worked hard to be considered the USA's most reliable lapdog!

People also ridiculed the French for maintaining independence of American influence for decades, even within the EU/EEG/etc., but that should prove that the America-sceptic voices have always been around, even if they weren't the most influential. It's also not the first time the Americans have eyed Greenland, that's why they have negotiated the right to set up military bases there.

After European countries aligned with America's overreactions in the Middle East as a gesture of goodwill (but also to buy political capital, despite the Americans starting an intense smear campaign against the French for not falling for their propaganda), European governments expected to be handled as an ally at the very least.

The past decade, the people of the USA and their representatives have dropped all pretences and the slow and steady criticism in the background has now made it to the foreground. The political capital countries tried to buy by doing what Washington asked has turned out to be worthless.

With recent threats of invasion and the diplomatic problems American representatives have caused, it's getting harder and harder to see a future where European governments end up treating the USA any different from other (upcoming, but not necessarily politically-aligned) world powers such as China, Russia, India, or Pakistan.

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

#398

Post by rbanffy »

buovjaga wrote: post #286
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…

LibreOffice release builds should offer to send a crash report. Ideally, you should then create a bug report referencing the crash report. Besides that, you can do your own build with debug symbols and get backtraces or debug the program. At The Document Foundation we are always interested in helping deployments. It is also nice to do writeups for our blog. Let me know, if your organisation needs help: ilmari.lauhaka…

> you should then create a bug report referencing the crash report

Reducing friction would be nice here - I don't remember encountering the crash log screen, but if you could file a bug report right from that screen, that'd be perfect. A lot of information can be pre-collected at that stage - precise version, build, OS, architecture, processor type, etc. All that'd be left is the "What I was trying to do", my e-mail, and a checkbox if I agree with the privacy policies and if I want to receive e-mail updates about this bug report.

> you can do your own build with debug symbols

It'd be great if the Document Foundation helped distros to offer libreoffice-*-debug packages for this case - if it's crashing for you, install the debug version and your crash logs will be a lot easier to read.

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

#399

Post by close04 »

andix wrote: post #186
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 b…

This is the elephant in the room that most comments on this page miss. Office may be hard to replace, Teams maybe even harder, but the real pain comes when you touch identity and access management. The usual initial optimism that "yeah but [insert solution name here] does this, problem solved" dissolves very fast as you start going through the inventory of requirements for managing users, devices, authentication, etc.

It's not just the technical hurdle which maybe you'll whip your admins into finding workarounds (-keep praying that your admins don't leave because it will be painful to find replacements who understand and can maintain the spaghetti pasta monster your infra ended up being-). In overall non-technical organizations the user experience always ends up hobbled even just by asking people to keep track of multiple identities.

MS is still entrenched because they give a turnkey solution with Eeeeeverything™ and your CTO doesn't need to struggle with any uncertainty. SaaS made it so easy to just "outsource" everything to MS, they'll be responsible and accountable for operations, infra, security, processes, etc. Even less headache for your C-level people. See no evil, hear no evil, you pay MS to take the shit and your job is safe. If you throw a stone out the window you'll hit someone with general "MS administration" skills. And users are usually familiar with MS tools, Windows, Office, so they aren't bothered (you hear a lot of complaints about Teams on HN but not so much from normal users). So this covers the tech, the skills, and the UX.

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

#400

Post by rbanffy »

leke wrote: post #388
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…

I would like to see tech related educational institutions incorporate contributing to open source as part of their curriculum. A lot of these institutions are funded by the government anyway, so it would make sense to support the technology running your country which funds you.

> I would like to see tech related educational institutions incorporate contributing to open source as part of their curriculum

As long as we avoid drowning maintainers with review requests, I'm in.

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