Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice

>> It seems like you could throw a fraction of that money at open source software, actually make it good

As much as I love OSS I don't think throwing money at it is what's going to make it rival large closed-source software projects. You need clear direction and goals which won't happen when building by committee.

If you're a government, it makes more sense to throw the money at creating your own infrastructure than paying to make a foreign company control everything you're running.

Everything is alright until the country with the highest obesity rate in the world chooses not to honor your patent for ozempic for example and makes it for a lot cheaper back home, then you escalate, then they escalate, something something your software stops getting updates or gets locked down.

I obviously don't think this is a likely scenario to happen, but so is getting nuked, yet every government has some sort of bunker command center, but everyone just seems ok with trusting those US companies with everything.

And today you don't even have to recreate the wheel, there are some open source alternatives for almost everything, and as a government if you put in the money you could improve on those, other governments can get inspired and improve on them as well, etc.

Governments should fund more open source projects. Apparently there's a model of governance here that could work. Enough people like writing software. The innate motivation is there. With funding, there could be more of it.

There might be some iffy issues. For example, if a state backs certain open source software too hard, then I'm afraid you get "state backed vaporware" in some cases. I can definitely see where it'll be like "Denmark has start open source initiative xyz" but because it's so externally pushed, from a motivation standpoint, it becomes half baked.

So I'm more advocating for a gentle monetary nudge.

Americans do not realize how much damage Trump has done to the trust in American services. Europeans used to consider America as an ally the same as other European countries, now it is more like an unreliable trade partner. Microsoft tried to reassure the Europeans [1] but not even a month later they were forced to disable the email account of ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan [2] due to sanctions from Trump voiding their reassurance completely. What happens when Trump gets mad at Denmark for not giving him Greenland and forces Microsoft to turn off Danish services?

Every large European company and all of the governments are now considering how to move away from US services. They may not be able to do it quickly but it is a part of the conversation. Customers specifically request that new systems should be independent from US service providers.

In my view the damage has been done and will not go away even after Trump. The Europeans have realized that their only true allies, that they can trust in terms of critical infrastructure, are other European nations. It used to include America, it no longer does.

[1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/04/30/europea...

[2] https://nltimes.nl/2025/05/20/microsofts-icc-email-block-tri...

I agree that the UI/UX of libreofice is not the prettiest...but its fine for what i need it for: regular work-related document management, word processing sorts of tasks. But my partner? They LOVE libreoffice specifically BECAUSE its looks like older versions of MS Word! Their needs are basic and are easily met with the functionality of libreoffice and onlyoffice...but they prefer libreoffice especially for the look-and-feel. Caveat: we are of a particularly advanced age, hence we recall many decades of the different versions of MS Office and its app offerings. ;-)