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 switching away from Teams as quickly. Will be interesting for sure.
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.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org
> 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.
Why does libreoffice have such an annoying document recovery mechanism that I can't turn off or modify? It takes like three clicks to cancel that process every time I open a new doc
I think if we're to move to away from these US products to open source ones, then governments should also provide resources or funding to develop them using the licensing fees they save. Is the Danish government contributing back to libreoffice?
Agreed. There should be some structure setup for open source projects to request contribution fees. Having stuff like this in plain sight might help orgs play nice.
> sometimes libreoffice crashes and you can't figure out why
> why libreoffice stopped publishing artefacts to mvn repo
I think both questions would be a perfect fit for the paid support bugtracker of LibreOffice maintainers. Hopefully paid by some hospital funds that are not spent on MS Office licenses.
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 because nobody can log in.
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.
> But I don't think they will be switching away from Teams as quickly.
I'm interested to know why Teams is so sticky for the team. Are there not good replacements available? I've used it a little, but am by no means a power user.
On top of what sibling comment says, Teams benefits from other network effects. If all your partners use Teams and the federation is a enabled, next time you consider a replacement that can do all of this, the bar will be that much higher to find a suitable alternative.
If an inter-operable protocols were enforced by some regulation it would alleviate the situation a bit.
It's buggy as hell. That's one thing. But they rolled teams out with office anti-competitively to lock orgs in and on that premise it should be abandoned. Market saturation by a company that is contributing to an authoritarian government by way of anti-competition needs to be black listed everywhere.
Because 'Teams' isn't just a simple meeting application. It's very feature rich.
If you ever have to deal with the admin.teams.microsoft portal you'll know how many options and toggles it has.
Alongside this many businesses deploy 'Teams Supported' or 'Teams Enabled' devices into meeting and conference rooms. Yealink is a popular brand, they don't have baked in support for LibreMeet or whatever meeting products exist.
Europe’s reading the room and building exits. They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term bet. Wero, the digital euro, local infrastructure, all of it points to the same thing: financial sovereignty matters when America looks more like a geopolitical liability.
my read is that 2026 to 2027 is basically Europe saying, "we should probably stop wiring the house through a burning building." Payments, cloud, office software, data infrastructure, all of it.
so Denmark moving to cut Microsoft dependence in the name of digital independence is basically the same story. When the US starts looking less like stable infrastructure and more like a chaotic landlord, everyone starts building their own exits.
I'm really glad Europe is making these changes. We have an authoritarian government that needs to go down in flames. The more pressure this puts on everyone to stop using centralized anti-competitive products the better off we all are.
It's funny that we've wrapped the clock all the way around and people don't see Europe as the declining and unstable empires anymore.
> less like stable infrastructure
It's perfectly stable. The news makes a lot of money generating interesting in overstating this problem. The supreme court is designed for national stability. It is doing it's job. It just doesn't act _instantly_, and if you're aiming for actual stability, you don't want it to.
> The supreme court is designed for national stability.
lol my ass. We have a corrupt Adminstration with a corrupt Supreme Court. The only thing it's doing is making people less safe to enrich the people at the top. This kind of response is embarrassing.
I'm not sure conflating US corporations and the US government is really logical. Microsoft isn't a startup from the US, it's a worldwide corporation. Same with Visa/Mastercard and others. Whatever buffoonery happens in the White House doesn't really get reflected out across US based organizations. It's like being worried about Siemens stability during a German economic downturn or political upset.
I think this has much more to do with rising nationalism. (I know the EU isn't a country. It's just the best word I can think of to fit. ) It's not like Denmark is saying they plan to use technology from the global south, Asia or are open to options. It's an attitude of "we want to support European companies". That's not inherently bad, but I fear this is just another expression of this isolationism that is becoming more popular in Europe. That's not to say it's exclusive or unique to Europe, but just recognizing the ways it shows up.
The US government can require a US company lots of things. After POTUS declared that he wants Greenland I can totally understand Danmark wants to get rid of everything US.
> They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term be
Digital euro push is beyond the current US administration if that’s what you are hinting at. The trigger was Big Tech payments (Facebook Libra) and the rise of BTC.
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 has an industrial strategy.
We will see. My guess is 5 to 10 years these anti-competitive regimes will collapse as more and more people move away from bad actors like our current administration.
> my read is that 2026 to 2027 is basically Europe saying, "we should probably stop wiring the house through a burning building." Payments, cloud, office software, data infrastructure, all of it.
I think you transposed some numbers in those dates it's more like 2062-2072. All of those things need to be built first and frankly all the initiatives started long before the current USA situation. The EU has been aware that it is wholly dependent on the USA for a myriad of reasons for a very long time now but barely seemed to care.
We'll see if anything actually happens it's a very thankless thing to push for politicians.
> They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term bet.
People need to get real here and I've got numbers: Europe is the declining, unstable empire.
The US is the US and in three years there's going to be another president. But the EU's problems are much deeper.
Inflation-adjusted, since the 2008 crisis, the Eurozone's GDP barely grew while both China and the US' GDPs grew like crazy.
2008 to 2025 Eurozone's GDP: $14 trillion USD to $17 trillion USD (+18%, inflation adjusted it's basically zero)
US same period: about $15 trillion to $30 trillion [1]
China same period: $4 trillion to $19 trillion, going from not a quarter of the Eurozone's size in 2008 to surpassing the Eurozone in 2025 FFS! In 17 years. This is jaw dropping.
That's when reality should kick in for people who believe the EU is not declining.
At this rate it's not even declining: it's falling from a cliff.
Now, sure, the Eurozone ain't the entire EU and countries outside the Eurozone like Poland are, thankfully, doing better. But things still look terribly bad.
Moreover The EU managed to shoot itself in the foot by destroying the biggest export of its biggest economy: german cars. They handed over the market to chinese EVs.
The EU also managed, when the US advised it not to, to become dependant on Russia for energy. And of course four years ago we now all know how well that played for Germany: Russia wasn't our friend anymore and energy price --and the industries in Germany do need lots of energy-- skyrocketted.
The EU is destroying itself both economically and culturally. Things are looking terribly bad over here.
I don't know how anyone can look at the US and at China's GDP growth compared to the Eurozone and believe that somehow Europe is doing fine.
Europe is not doing fine: Europe is definitely a declining, unstable (lots of far-right vs far-left parties opposing themselves in elections in many EU countries now) empire.
That said I very much welcome ditching MS software.
Re: "Europe is not doing fine: Europe is definitely a declining, unstable (lots of far-right vs far-left parties opposing themselves in elections in many EU countries now) empire."
If this is reality in Europe, which is perhaps likely, then by comparison, the US has devolved into failed-state status. Better a slow decline than a catastrophic fall into the constitutional/regulatory/legal/technological/scientific abyss.
Even if Europe has insurmountable problems, its best move forward is to decouple strategically from the US, and these days, all things strategic are underpinned by information technology. The fact that Europe (soon to be followed by Canada, Australia and New Zealand) is heading down this path is why the US has hit the panic button[0].
Re: "The US is the US and in three years there's going to be another president. But the EU's problems are much deeper."
The US may have another president or even another style of president, but that wont stop this migration away from American technological/strategic hegemony; because at this level and at this scale, complete trust by former allies, once lost, will never be regained. The US century is now over.
Thankfully open source software is there as an alternative to that US software. I guess it's no co-incidence that LibreOffice and Linux both have their roots in Europe.
> The EU is destroying itself both economically and *culturally*
I understand the former. Can you clarify the details around the later? I hear this often, but the people I hear it from are not the most trustworthy or the most knowledgable.
I don't know how to break this to you, but Europe itself has been the burning building for 20 years. I don't see that changing any time soon. The anti-US stuff is largely flailing, the US is better positioned than Europe for the next 20 years also. They struggle with investment, have almost no large companies left of any merit in tech, have political problems that are similar to the US's, and regulate themselves to death. It would take a political revolution in Europe to fix that, and frankly they don't have it in them.
That's extremely condescending and naive. I'd say Europe citizen are in much better situation than the usa citizens, don't care about tech sector or shareholder revenue.
Usa still don't even have universal social security and medications are overpriced 10 time more. Just to name a few.
Then there is the American debt. Good luck with that when countries are switching from dollar to yen and euro. No really, I think that there are enough challenge to overcome in the states that you don't need to be condescending.
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 Microsoft, but you need to fund it to be better than Microsoft.
I would replace "funding" with at minimum "contributing", because there are people who would think having a government actively dipping their toes in a product gives them right over actively piloting the direction of that product.
I've already seen online discussions of something similar happening when Valve announced that they're actively contributing to Arch Linux and KDE. But then, it's Valve.
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.
> 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 donate back either engineering-time or money, but no need to do complicated "per-user per-year contributions", give them a sum per year, enough to fund the core developers at least and ideally to hire new ones, otherwise hire engineers and let them full-time contribute back.
Luckily, at least in Europe, this is exactly what we're seeing now. The governments who are looking into FOSS are all thinking about how to help fund it, no one seem to be thinking "How can we do this for free?" which is nice thing to see.
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 hit badly and its going to get a lot worse with global competition.
For the 1000th time here and elsewhere - look no further than Switzerland. Highly diverse, federated group of people that managed to preserve most direct democracy in the world for 800 years and counting. 'Most free and most armed nation in the world' still holds true without clusterfuck that US gun situation is. Each canton is very self-sufficient, governs local rules, laws and taxation so there is no animosity between various regions - really a mini version of EU.
This is how EU parliament should look like, if (mostly) french and german egos would step down from their pedestals and acknowledge that somebody may figured things out better. Its most capitalistic country in Europe by far while preserving most of what we call social and healthcare net, has top notch free education and so on. Also its not increasing its debt, a clear mark of sustainable economical success of such approach, in contrary with literally any EU country.
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 must be unacceptable to any sovereign government. I genuinely do not understand why other countries put up with this.
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 around it.
Although the weaning off will take many years, and although European companies and governments will probably never be entirely without American software, and why should they, the American dominance will disappear, little by little. For better or worse, the American Century is coming to an end, also in IT.
> "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..
Second that, even though it seems that there is nothing happening yet, many companies and government agencies in all of Europe are aware of their hard Microsoft dependency and are looking / coordinating to leave.
Same with Atlassian Confluence / Jira.
(Source: Working in a state owend company in a EU member country)
The “that’s nice but Denmark is small” comment is getting tiresome. Whether the country had 6 million or 60 million the bureaucracy is the same. It’s not about the size or the economics, it’s about the message.
It won’t be long until the rest of the public sectors follow along. There has already been plenty of consideration and desire to follow through. What’s holding them back typically is not the desire to stay with Microsoft et. al., but the investment needed to make the switch away from a live system.
> The “that’s nice but Denmark is small” comment is getting tiresome.
The parent comment didn't complain that Denmark or its overall government is small. They complained that this agency represents a small fraction of their government.
But those investments will only get bigger over time and vendor lock-in will get more complex. I get that there is no unlimited budget to this but proper will to migrate for good would look very differently.
For example detailed plan for next 5-10 years how gradually everything moves. Now it feels like 1 step ahead 3 steps back, nice pat on the back for doing something, while overall transition will take 2 centuries unless magic happens. Not enough, not at this point when all cards are on the table.
Investment and long term maintenance costs are usually not worth it. All is good until there’s a self induced outage and your boss has to take the blame (and not Microsoft)
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 specifically written so they could only be fulfilled by Microsoft because it was just a list of their feature tickboxes.
What I find interesting, and reflects my ignorance of how these things are used, is that if you look at, say, FAANG companies, Office isn't used. I've worked for two FAANGs over the past couple of years, and everything is done via Google docs. Replacing a giant suite like Office looks hard, replacing something simpler like Google docs looks very much simpler, and surely should suffice?
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 should be in the EU. You simply cannot trust an American company anymore after Trump.
Well the State of Schleswig Holstein is ditching Microsoft completely.
But it's a difficult political uphill battle, because some Users won't change their habits and cry about it.
The Minister shut this up with "Software is a decision by the employer, the employee has to accept it"
Which then got blown up by the tabloid media, which ran BS Headlines like "OMG Courts and Police not working (because they're childish and refuse to learn another E-Mail Client)
Also Microsoft is playing dirty and lobbying very hard behind the scenes to obstruct it, in Munich they changed their German HQs to Munich and started to pay Taxes there. So suddenly the city changed back to MS
TL;Dr: It's a thankless and tough battle for politicians, because they face lobbying and media pressure against them. Also they will be blamed for any roadblocks, and there is no real upside for them in it, as no one except for a few nerds cares about this
You’re absolutely right. The benefit of being US independent has no value in the eyes of the large part of European population. The politician fighting for it is fighting uphill battle against mega corporation with endless lobbying budget and simultaneously digging a grave for the political career.
This is beyond insane, and every American company causing grief for the staff of a criminal court in which every single civilized nation but the US and Israel (I guess I didn't have to add that but) belongs needs to see enormous fines, and to be marginalized and removed. Microsoft, Google, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal...either they can domesticate in another nation, or get relegated to provincial US operations.
It is absolutely untenable, and every single nation needs to purge all American operations as rapidly as possible.
And...it's happening. This criminal US administration filled with pedophiles and self-dealing garbage overextended. They overplayed their hand, and the result is not only the rapidly accelerated decline of the American empire, it invariably has redoubled China's influence.
I keep seeing prophesying about China invading Taiwan on here. Surely HN knows that won't be necessary, right? Taiwan recently re-engaged in diplomatic unification talks with China (not overtly, but the feelers are obvious to anyone with any sense of the moment), and they're going to make that choice themselves. Now that the US is relegated to worldwide joke/idiocracy, and it really is rapidly becoming a unipolar world, it's really the only rational choice.
But I guess the US has the pathetic joke of the Board of Peace, or their close allies El Salvador and new puppet state Venezuela. What a disgrace.
> 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.
This is insane. This is sacrificing the well-being of your constituents to send a (minor) political message. The amount of service degradation (including actual physical health) that you'd put your citizens through would be unbelievable.
Only those who are extraordinarily stupid or outright malicious decide to deprecate important services before first assessing the needs of every dependent on that service, and then ensuring that a full replacement is in place.
Every journey starts with the first step... And those steps are finally being taken now. Don't see why this kind of naysaying would be the top comment here
> 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.
Edgy! But it sounds like really terrible government. As if the failure of a government agency which cannot adapt to losing all its computer systems and therefore "dies" will not negatively effect those who are governed.
Well governments need to wake up and realize that if they aren't the US and even if they are the US, open source provides most of the basic building blocks of what you're going to build independent non-corporate controlled and non-external-state controlled software
So fund it!
Governments burn billions of dollars on defense which really is just an economic waste outside of the deterrent effect it does from getting invaded.
Investing in open source to enable you to be software independent and protected, not only is it providing some measure of electronic and economic defense, it improves software for you and your allies.
Yeah, no. That's not how government works - thankfully. I don't want my water to stop flowing just because someone decided to be drastic about software changes.
I agree with you in that all governments should be using open source software, for the record.
But governments are big machines and you can't steer them like a sports car. In some cases, the massive inertia they have can even be a good thing - a crazy guy can't just be elected one day, start issuing presidential mandates, and then expect them to happen immediately, for example.
> According to the CLOUD act, the US government can demand access to data from US companies, regardless of where that data is stored. That must be unacceptable to any sovereign government. I genuinely do not understand why other countries put up with this.
>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.
A lot of hospitals and healthcare systems in Europe use the open source EMR platform. No ones charts are in .docx format, it is not life or death, lets be serious.
Not everything is a state secret. There's no need to immediately migrate every trivial email and permit request, but having a parallel infrastructure for the stuff that needs it should be a no-brainer.
It's not about state secrets, it's about being able to provide services when the US is turning Hostile.
Hospitals or Police aren't guarding state secrets too, but if they would loose access to their IT Infrastructure because Donald had some strange brainfart this morning like the Judge of the International Court of Justice it would impact the State critically
No, but almost everything is a potential DDOS. And slight modifications to emails, documents, and calendars can cause a lot of havoc that may be hard to detect.
Ok, and what will be the alternative? I am not talking about the easy part, like documents creation, although I don't see walking away from Excel as LibreOffice alternative is a bit of disappointment. But what about the whole security/networking/permissions area? What is the viable alternative that can scale?
Remember Covid times? In Poland all schools got access to Office 365 (overnight ) and education kept going. 500 000 teachers and a few millions of pupils. Tell me who else except Microsoft or Google have ability to support that?
In my part of Germany we used BigBlueButton after a short time when Zoom was used.
E-Mail and a LDAP account was also always available for students.
It's not exactly Rocket Science.
There are also ready made solutions available for purchase
99% of users, could just as well use another form of spreadsheet. Only complex macros or custom integration does. Perhaps very large spreadsheets, I don't know.
Also the IT Administrators that may be skilled in Windows Server and similar but less so in Linux. Thats something that beeds to be taken into account. Can be changed they can learn new things, but that takes time.
It honestly doesn't make any sense. Interestingly, India was bold enough to move its government infra to Zoho's office suite cutting all reliance on Microsoft. It's only sane that other countries do the same.
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 philosophically countered in the popular left-leaning consciousness by the war in Ukraine, where at least one border is seen to be worth defending, and in the mainstream as sovereignty and related conservative ideas are taking hold again, although with a few extra steps to make it palateable to non-conservatives.
The practical philosophy is: we already save a huge amount of money we can spend on benefits by depending on the US for defence; might as well do the same with tech. They probably know everything anyway, and what's to know? This isn't exactly countered yet philosophically, but Donald Trump is making people realise they should at least pay their own way in defense, which is helping to gradually override the prioritising of short-term vote-buying.
OpenOffice is 15 or so years behind but LibreOffice isn't. LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice in 2011 and the vast majority of volunteers working on it left the OpenOffice project and kept working on LibreOffice.
Anyone still using OpenOffice probably doesn't realize they would likely be much better off using LibreOffice instead.
OpenOffice doesn't support docx or xlsx but LibreOffice supports them much better.
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.
And meanwhile the exact same agency spits out government Android apps that use Play Integrity so citizens cannot ditch Google for GrapheneOS. This is symbolism, the minister does not actually care about digital sovereignty for the citizens.
I don't think so. It's more complicated than that. The state is not a monolith. Different heads are doing different things and it's a enormous bureaucracy. The divisions pumping out Android will eventually catch up to what's going on and the vulnerability they're exposing themselves to. These things take time. It doesn't all happen at once. People (who are not very technical, barely knowing what a computer is) need to understand what's going on and that can take a while. Let's just hope they figure it out before it matters.
It is probably unintentional. I work and worked in such projects (in The Netherlands), and the process is -rightfully- chaotic.
Governments typically don't have a central single team that builds all their android apps. They usually write a tender with loads of requirements and app-agencies will then build it. Or freelancers. Or volunteer teams. Or all of that. So there's no central team governed by one minister who can dictate what should happen today. There's hundreds of companies, teams, freelancers, interims, running around trying to make deadlines
Between writing a spec and the delivered app, there's chasms: could be a year between the specs are written and the first app pushed onto a phone. In a (trump)year a lot can change. But also between how specs are requirements or wishes in real life. "No user data may ever reach a google server" (actual specs are far vaguer and broader) may sound good, but will conflict directly with "user must receive push notifications of Foo and Bar". Or "passport NFC data must be attested for login", requiring a non-rooted, android, signed-by-google hardware attestation thingymajick.
So no, this is not malice. Nor incompetence. This is a sad reality, where we've allowed the monopoly to dictate what we, and users, expect, and to have that monopoly be the only option to provide those expectations.
As someone in the Netherlands, and also with a company in this space, could you point me to some relevant resources (like ongoing projects)? I'd love to help our country get more sovereign (in small steps).
Btw, NRC has a nice podcast series on the topic. One thing hampering the sovereignty effort is the enormous amounts of Azure/AWS/GCP certified people. Their career is build on these platforms.
Since a few people ask "What can I do to help my govt/region/country to become more sovereign", here's my tips on this:
- All governments under EU (on almost all levels) are "required" to use and/or produce software as Open Source. The source of "that government app" should be available somewhere (though quite likely is not)¹ So go hunt for the source and start there.
- Look at underlying standards. EU regulation, trickling down into local laws and guidelines, rely on Open Standards almost always. That app you use to log into your tax environment quite probably uses (a weird, hard to recognize) variation of OAUTH2 or OpenID connect, SAML or such. The app that shows the time+dates for garbage-collection, quite probably uses a simple ical-feed under the hood. With that knowledge, you may be able to develop/fork/use open source alternatives without too much effort².
- Show (local) representatives the alternatives. Listen to them. Learn from them. Most representatives are suprisingly open to you as expert. But, I cannot stress enough, learn and listen foremost. IT experts and open source community in particular have an (IMHO well deserved) reputation for being arrogant, know-it-all unfriendly and rediculously single-minded. So don't lecture that councillor for using Twitter instead of Mastodon, riduculing them for not using GPG or scoffing at their insistence on using Microsoft Word over Vim with Markdown (My younger self was such an arrogant neckbeard; I am now convinced I have done actual harm to the Open Source community that way). But ask why twitter, have they tried mastodon, or bluesky? Why not? Why did they leave? What features in MSword do they require? Did they know that Jitsi is an option? Maybe you can show how they could use Nextcloud for at least their own files? Sometimes you can answer some of their questions and help them. More often, you learn a few things that you could use to improve sovereign and open source alternatives and align them slightly more with whats needed.
¹ The details, interpretations and implementations are a mess, but the idea is "open source, unless..." for any software that any government buys, rents, builds, etc. In practice almost all projects fall under "unless...". I spoke to a MSFT account-manager for several local govts and he told me they have f*in training material to "help" govt officials write tenders/requirements in such a way that Open Source is practically excluded and Microsoft the only option. I am appalled, but also not that surprised.
² The ical-finding is how I got my local garbage-collection schedule into my calendar app. And when I told this to someone who happened to work at the municipality, they realized that publishing the urls and docs online helped a lot of citizens. Ironically, the push-back, according to this person, was from a civil-servant whose career was influenced on the success (install counts) of the "municipality app" and who was afraid that if people could add the calendar to their outlook/google cal/ical/other-cal, might no longer install the app. Again, I was appalled at such perverse incentives.
I think it has more to do with ignorance. Device attestation is not trivial to adopt while both Apple and Google promise you a very simple abstraction. So it takes being informed and having leverage in the process to be able to make a difference.
For me the blame is squarely on the technical “experts” who are behind the architecture and implementation of such apps.
Device attestation is precisely the thing I do not want my government to ever adopt. I have a Danish CPR number. They've given me a FIDO secure token generator as my phone is degoogled for MitID. Most Danes don't know what those words mean, and if they did, wouldn't understand why I distrust (all) governments (and indeed things! Three default scientific position is scepticism, albeit with varying degrees of priors)
The thing is, device attestation is fundamentally incompatible with digital freedom so governments should never adopt it to begin with. We lived without digital solutions that depended on device attestation and we will continue to do so.
Not will, they already do. My day job big corp hasn’t renewed a single US contract or license this year. We’re also in the process of ditching Office 365. Even Azure is no longer allowed for new deployments
TBF I also sorta just think Microsoft is generally stupid.
> Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found.
After thinking about this for 90 seconds, Microsoft could license Azure tech to Hetzner or something. Keep the servers under EU control, but unless they share source code it’s still a blackbox.
Honestly everything used for anything serious should be open source and regularly audited. We need check each others homework.
SUSE and its children in openSUSE are freaking awesome. The tumbleweed release is the most stable rolling release ever, they have slowroll if you want something even more stable, and leap for basically a free version of SLE. Genuinely surprised that SLES hasn't overtaken redhat
I am often amused at how people outside the US don't like the current US government yet if it wasn't for the current US government the whole world would have been sleep walking into Office 365 and Teams. I don't hold any political opinion but do like that we are now going to have alternatives and true competition.
I'm not sure I follow, are you saying that because the current US government is so bad that people are rejecting Microsoft products, the rest of the world should be thankful to the US for "waking them up"?
The perception in the rest of the world is that America has gone completely off the rails and could do almost literally anything at any time. I don't think this comment is that strange.
I do not know what you mean. The US and US-based companies have now become a liability. Global politics change on a day-by-day basis, EU has frozen trade agreement discussions because the tariff situation is unclear. There are open discussions in Sweden about how we can reduce our dependence on US-based companies, because we do not know whether that dependency will be wielded as a political tool against us.
Which part is sarcastic here? As far as Europe as market goes, Software industries have already started to feel the pinch. Right now data protection and privacy rights of common people in the US is at lowest point, as we have seen in the news, anything goes for this administration. One must be living in an alternate reality to not see these things happening.
Its understated, but this kind move is now systemic in the EU due to the sanctioning of ICC & EU officials and random people who hurt the presidents feelings requiring Microsoft to remotely kill access to resources tied to Microsoft Accounts.
Without rules of law its literally irresponsible for EU to have this kind of heavy dependency on US corporations.
I think an important point in this discussion is that adopting FOSS requires a level of institutional openness that is not typical of governments in general. It’s not just a question of switching vendors; it’s about embracing transparency, auditability, and shared ownership of public infrastructure. The question is: are governments fully aware of what FOSS adoption actually implies?
Brazil is an interesting case. On paper, we have a strong legal mandate. Under Art. 16 of Lei 14.063/2020[0], information and communication systems developed exclusively by public bodies must be governed by an open-source license, allowing use, copying, modification, and distribution without restriction by other public entities.
However, implementation tells a different story. Take PIX, the instant payment system developed by the Brazilian Central Bank. As of today, only the API is open. The core system code remains unpublished[1]. If the system was developed exclusively by the public administration, this seems difficult to reconcile with the letter - and certainly the spirit - of the law.
So the issue is not only whether governments should reduce vendor lock-in. It’s whether they are prepared to follow through on what real openness demands once they commit to it.
Readit News
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 switching away from Teams as quickly. Will be interesting for sure.
Slightly off topic, but does anyone know why libreoffice stopped publishing artefacts to mvn repo? https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.libreoffice/libreoffi...
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.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org
I recommend to consider our certification program: https://www.documentfoundation.org/certification-program/
I asked about the Maven artifacts and our release engineer will update them later this week.
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.
https://euro-stack.com/blog/2025/3/schleswig-holstein-open-s...
I think both questions would be a perfect fit for the paid support bugtracker of LibreOffice maintainers. Hopefully paid by some hospital funds that are not spent on MS Office licenses.
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 because nobody can log in.
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.
FreeIPA in particular is a beast to maintain, it puts kubernetes-cowboys to shame.
I'm interested to know why Teams is so sticky for the team. Are there not good replacements available? I've used it a little, but am by no means a power user.
If an inter-operable protocols were enforced by some regulation it would alleviate the situation a bit.
Alongside this many businesses deploy 'Teams Supported' or 'Teams Enabled' devices into meeting and conference rooms. Yealink is a popular brand, they don't have baked in support for LibreMeet or whatever meeting products exist.
my read is that 2026 to 2027 is basically Europe saying, "we should probably stop wiring the house through a burning building." Payments, cloud, office software, data infrastructure, all of it.
so Denmark moving to cut Microsoft dependence in the name of digital independence is basically the same story. When the US starts looking less like stable infrastructure and more like a chaotic landlord, everyone starts building their own exits.
It's funny that we've wrapped the clock all the way around and people don't see Europe as the declining and unstable empires anymore.
> less like stable infrastructure
It's perfectly stable. The news makes a lot of money generating interesting in overstating this problem. The supreme court is designed for national stability. It is doing it's job. It just doesn't act _instantly_, and if you're aiming for actual stability, you don't want it to.
lol my ass. We have a corrupt Adminstration with a corrupt Supreme Court. The only thing it's doing is making people less safe to enrich the people at the top. This kind of response is embarrassing.
On the contrary, I think that many of the rulings during this administration caused a lot of uncertainty among lawmakers
I think this has much more to do with rising nationalism. (I know the EU isn't a country. It's just the best word I can think of to fit. ) It's not like Denmark is saying they plan to use technology from the global south, Asia or are open to options. It's an attitude of "we want to support European companies". That's not inherently bad, but I fear this is just another expression of this isolationism that is becoming more popular in Europe. That's not to say it's exclusive or unique to Europe, but just recognizing the ways it shows up.
Digital euro push is beyond the current US administration if that’s what you are hinting at. The trigger was Big Tech payments (Facebook Libra) and the rise of BTC.
Given how poor it's responding to things like the Draghi report, I wouldn't anticipate success. Just more flailing around and working groups.
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 has an industrial strategy.
For bad or worse, not all European national governments see the world through the same glasses.
I think you transposed some numbers in those dates it's more like 2062-2072. All of those things need to be built first and frankly all the initiatives started long before the current USA situation. The EU has been aware that it is wholly dependent on the USA for a myriad of reasons for a very long time now but barely seemed to care.
We'll see if anything actually happens it's a very thankless thing to push for politicians.
People need to get real here and I've got numbers: Europe is the declining, unstable empire.
The US is the US and in three years there's going to be another president. But the EU's problems are much deeper.
Inflation-adjusted, since the 2008 crisis, the Eurozone's GDP barely grew while both China and the US' GDPs grew like crazy.
2008 to 2025 Eurozone's GDP: $14 trillion USD to $17 trillion USD (+18%, inflation adjusted it's basically zero)
US same period: about $15 trillion to $30 trillion [1]
China same period: $4 trillion to $19 trillion, going from not a quarter of the Eurozone's size in 2008 to surpassing the Eurozone in 2025 FFS! In 17 years. This is jaw dropping.
That's when reality should kick in for people who believe the EU is not declining.
At this rate it's not even declining: it's falling from a cliff.
Now, sure, the Eurozone ain't the entire EU and countries outside the Eurozone like Poland are, thankfully, doing better. But things still look terribly bad.
Moreover The EU managed to shoot itself in the foot by destroying the biggest export of its biggest economy: german cars. They handed over the market to chinese EVs.
The EU also managed, when the US advised it not to, to become dependant on Russia for energy. And of course four years ago we now all know how well that played for Germany: Russia wasn't our friend anymore and energy price --and the industries in Germany do need lots of energy-- skyrocketted.
The EU is destroying itself both economically and culturally. Things are looking terribly bad over here.
I don't know how anyone can look at the US and at China's GDP growth compared to the Eurozone and believe that somehow Europe is doing fine.
Europe is not doing fine: Europe is definitely a declining, unstable (lots of far-right vs far-left parties opposing themselves in elections in many EU countries now) empire.
That said I very much welcome ditching MS software.
[1] round numbers but it is what it is: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP
If this is reality in Europe, which is perhaps likely, then by comparison, the US has devolved into failed-state status. Better a slow decline than a catastrophic fall into the constitutional/regulatory/legal/technological/scientific abyss.
Even if Europe has insurmountable problems, its best move forward is to decouple strategically from the US, and these days, all things strategic are underpinned by information technology. The fact that Europe (soon to be followed by Canada, Australia and New Zealand) is heading down this path is why the US has hit the panic button[0].
Re: "The US is the US and in three years there's going to be another president. But the EU's problems are much deeper."
The US may have another president or even another style of president, but that wont stop this migration away from American technological/strategic hegemony; because at this level and at this scale, complete trust by former allies, once lost, will never be regained. The US century is now over.
Thankfully open source software is there as an alternative to that US software. I guess it's no co-incidence that LibreOffice and Linux both have their roots in Europe.
[0]https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
I understand the former. Can you clarify the details around the later? I hear this often, but the people I hear it from are not the most trustworthy or the most knowledgable.
Usa still don't even have universal social security and medications are overpriced 10 time more. Just to name a few.
Then there is the American debt. Good luck with that when countries are switching from dollar to yen and euro. No really, I think that there are enough challenge to overcome in the states that you don't need to be condescending.
Dead Comment
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 Microsoft, but you need to fund it to be better than Microsoft.
I've already seen online discussions of something similar happening when Valve announced that they're actively contributing to Arch Linux and KDE. But then, it's Valve.
As long as we avoid drowning maintainers with review requests, I'm in.
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 donate back either engineering-time or money, but no need to do complicated "per-user per-year contributions", give them a sum per year, enough to fund the core developers at least and ideally to hire new ones, otherwise hire engineers and let them full-time contribute back.
Luckily, at least in Europe, this is exactly what we're seeing now. The governments who are looking into FOSS are all thinking about how to help fund it, no one seem to be thinking "How can we do this for free?" which is nice thing to see.
For the 1000th time here and elsewhere - look no further than Switzerland. Highly diverse, federated group of people that managed to preserve most direct democracy in the world for 800 years and counting. 'Most free and most armed nation in the world' still holds true without clusterfuck that US gun situation is. Each canton is very self-sufficient, governs local rules, laws and taxation so there is no animosity between various regions - really a mini version of EU.
This is how EU parliament should look like, if (mostly) french and german egos would step down from their pedestals and acknowledge that somebody may figured things out better. Its most capitalistic country in Europe by far while preserving most of what we call social and healthcare net, has top notch free education and so on. Also its not increasing its debt, a clear mark of sustainable economical success of such approach, in contrary with literally any EU country.
According to the CLOUD act, the US government can demand access to data from US companies, regardless of where that data is stored. That must be unacceptable to any sovereign government. I genuinely do not understand why other countries put up with this.
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 around it.
Although the weaning off will take many years, and although European companies and governments will probably never be entirely without American software, and why should they, the American dominance will disappear, little by little. For better or worse, the American Century is coming to an end, also in IT.
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..
Same with Atlassian Confluence / Jira.
(Source: Working in a state owend company in a EU member country)
It won’t be long until the rest of the public sectors follow along. There has already been plenty of consideration and desire to follow through. What’s holding them back typically is not the desire to stay with Microsoft et. al., but the investment needed to make the switch away from a live system.
The parent comment didn't complain that Denmark or its overall government is small. They complained that this agency represents a small fraction of their government.
For example detailed plan for next 5-10 years how gradually everything moves. Now it feels like 1 step ahead 3 steps back, nice pat on the back for doing something, while overall transition will take 2 centuries unless magic happens. Not enough, not at this point when all cards are on the table.
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.
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 specifically written so they could only be fulfilled by Microsoft because it was just a list of their feature tickboxes.
The second best time is now.
The Quality is also Shit. I get some stupid Errors when trying to Access OWA every other day. Then I have to reset cookies/cache and can login again
The lock in only exists in brains of (old) people that can't adapt. MS products can all be replaced, and should be in the EU. You simply cannot trust an American company anymore after Trump.
Transitioning every system wholesale at once, is not gonna happen.
I rather have our governents and agencies do it step by step than not at all.
I want to see (sincerely) a whole government ditch MS
They have an extensive history in this too. The gendarmerie even has their own Linux distro for their workstations.
All change starts small. If these small agencies or very local bits of government successfully pull it off, larger ones may well follow.
The Minister shut this up with "Software is a decision by the employer, the employee has to accept it"
Which then got blown up by the tabloid media, which ran BS Headlines like "OMG Courts and Police not working (because they're childish and refuse to learn another E-Mail Client)
Also Microsoft is playing dirty and lobbying very hard behind the scenes to obstruct it, in Munich they changed their German HQs to Munich and started to pay Taxes there. So suddenly the city changed back to MS
TL;Dr: It's a thankless and tough battle for politicians, because they face lobbying and media pressure against them. Also they will be blamed for any roadblocks, and there is no real upside for them in it, as no one except for a few nerds cares about this
Awwww, poor babies.
The US recently doubled down on using US corporations as vehicles of coercion, sanctioning ICC judges for judging against Israel.
https://www.state.gov/icc-sanctions
This is beyond insane, and every American company causing grief for the staff of a criminal court in which every single civilized nation but the US and Israel (I guess I didn't have to add that but) belongs needs to see enormous fines, and to be marginalized and removed. Microsoft, Google, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal...either they can domesticate in another nation, or get relegated to provincial US operations.
It is absolutely untenable, and every single nation needs to purge all American operations as rapidly as possible.
And...it's happening. This criminal US administration filled with pedophiles and self-dealing garbage overextended. They overplayed their hand, and the result is not only the rapidly accelerated decline of the American empire, it invariably has redoubled China's influence.
I keep seeing prophesying about China invading Taiwan on here. Surely HN knows that won't be necessary, right? Taiwan recently re-engaged in diplomatic unification talks with China (not overtly, but the feelers are obvious to anyone with any sense of the moment), and they're going to make that choice themselves. Now that the US is relegated to worldwide joke/idiocracy, and it really is rapidly becoming a unipolar world, it's really the only rational choice.
But I guess the US has the pathetic joke of the Board of Peace, or their close allies El Salvador and new puppet state Venezuela. What a disgrace.
That's news to me, got any good articles on the topic?
You forgot Trumps best butt-buddy: Putin.
This is insane. This is sacrificing the well-being of your constituents to send a (minor) political message. The amount of service degradation (including actual physical health) that you'd put your citizens through would be unbelievable.
Only those who are extraordinarily stupid or outright malicious decide to deprecate important services before first assessing the needs of every dependent on that service, and then ensuring that a full replacement is in place.
Edgy! But it sounds like really terrible government. As if the failure of a government agency which cannot adapt to losing all its computer systems and therefore "dies" will not negatively effect those who are governed.
So fund it!
Governments burn billions of dollars on defense which really is just an economic waste outside of the deterrent effect it does from getting invaded.
Investing in open source to enable you to be software independent and protected, not only is it providing some measure of electronic and economic defense, it improves software for you and your allies.
You get return on your investment.
Yeah, no. That's not how government works - thankfully. I don't want my water to stop flowing just because someone decided to be drastic about software changes.
I agree with you in that all governments should be using open source software, for the record.
But governments are big machines and you can't steer them like a sports car. In some cases, the massive inertia they have can even be a good thing - a crazy guy can't just be elected one day, start issuing presidential mandates, and then expect them to happen immediately, for example.
"put up with this" implies they have a choice.
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.
Hospitals or Police aren't guarding state secrets too, but if they would loose access to their IT Infrastructure because Donald had some strange brainfart this morning like the Judge of the International Court of Justice it would impact the State critically
No, but almost everything is a potential DDOS. And slight modifications to emails, documents, and calendars can cause a lot of havoc that may be hard to detect.
Either your main architecture handles something or it doesn't get handled.
Ok, and what will be the alternative? I am not talking about the easy part, like documents creation, although I don't see walking away from Excel as LibreOffice alternative is a bit of disappointment. But what about the whole security/networking/permissions area? What is the viable alternative that can scale?
Remember Covid times? In Poland all schools got access to Office 365 (overnight ) and education kept going. 500 000 teachers and a few millions of pupils. Tell me who else except Microsoft or Google have ability to support that?
There are also ready made solutions available for purchase
https://www.univention.com/industries/educational-sector/
Is it OK for a French sovereign government if a German government can demand access to its data?
See https://www.exoscale.com/blog/cloudact-vs-gdpr/
( Though note exoscale, as a European provider has skin in the game here ).
Wake me up when they actually do it.
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 philosophically countered in the popular left-leaning consciousness by the war in Ukraine, where at least one border is seen to be worth defending, and in the mainstream as sovereignty and related conservative ideas are taking hold again, although with a few extra steps to make it palateable to non-conservatives.
The practical philosophy is: we already save a huge amount of money we can spend on benefits by depending on the US for defence; might as well do the same with tech. They probably know everything anyway, and what's to know? This isn't exactly countered yet philosophically, but Donald Trump is making people realise they should at least pay their own way in defense, which is helping to gradually override the prioritising of short-term vote-buying.
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.
Anyone still using OpenOffice probably doesn't realize they would likely be much better off using LibreOffice instead.
OpenOffice doesn't support docx or xlsx but LibreOffice supports them much better.
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.
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.
I don't think so. It's more complicated than that. The state is not a monolith. Different heads are doing different things and it's a enormous bureaucracy. The divisions pumping out Android will eventually catch up to what's going on and the vulnerability they're exposing themselves to. These things take time. It doesn't all happen at once. People (who are not very technical, barely knowing what a computer is) need to understand what's going on and that can take a while. Let's just hope they figure it out before it matters.
It is probably unintentional. I work and worked in such projects (in The Netherlands), and the process is -rightfully- chaotic.
Governments typically don't have a central single team that builds all their android apps. They usually write a tender with loads of requirements and app-agencies will then build it. Or freelancers. Or volunteer teams. Or all of that. So there's no central team governed by one minister who can dictate what should happen today. There's hundreds of companies, teams, freelancers, interims, running around trying to make deadlines
Between writing a spec and the delivered app, there's chasms: could be a year between the specs are written and the first app pushed onto a phone. In a (trump)year a lot can change. But also between how specs are requirements or wishes in real life. "No user data may ever reach a google server" (actual specs are far vaguer and broader) may sound good, but will conflict directly with "user must receive push notifications of Foo and Bar". Or "passport NFC data must be attested for login", requiring a non-rooted, android, signed-by-google hardware attestation thingymajick.
So no, this is not malice. Nor incompetence. This is a sad reality, where we've allowed the monopoly to dictate what we, and users, expect, and to have that monopoly be the only option to provide those expectations.
Btw, NRC has a nice podcast series on the topic. One thing hampering the sovereignty effort is the enormous amounts of Azure/AWS/GCP certified people. Their career is build on these platforms.
- All governments under EU (on almost all levels) are "required" to use and/or produce software as Open Source. The source of "that government app" should be available somewhere (though quite likely is not)¹ So go hunt for the source and start there.
- Look at underlying standards. EU regulation, trickling down into local laws and guidelines, rely on Open Standards almost always. That app you use to log into your tax environment quite probably uses (a weird, hard to recognize) variation of OAUTH2 or OpenID connect, SAML or such. The app that shows the time+dates for garbage-collection, quite probably uses a simple ical-feed under the hood. With that knowledge, you may be able to develop/fork/use open source alternatives without too much effort².
- Show (local) representatives the alternatives. Listen to them. Learn from them. Most representatives are suprisingly open to you as expert. But, I cannot stress enough, learn and listen foremost. IT experts and open source community in particular have an (IMHO well deserved) reputation for being arrogant, know-it-all unfriendly and rediculously single-minded. So don't lecture that councillor for using Twitter instead of Mastodon, riduculing them for not using GPG or scoffing at their insistence on using Microsoft Word over Vim with Markdown (My younger self was such an arrogant neckbeard; I am now convinced I have done actual harm to the Open Source community that way). But ask why twitter, have they tried mastodon, or bluesky? Why not? Why did they leave? What features in MSword do they require? Did they know that Jitsi is an option? Maybe you can show how they could use Nextcloud for at least their own files? Sometimes you can answer some of their questions and help them. More often, you learn a few things that you could use to improve sovereign and open source alternatives and align them slightly more with whats needed.
¹ The details, interpretations and implementations are a mess, but the idea is "open source, unless..." for any software that any government buys, rents, builds, etc. In practice almost all projects fall under "unless...". I spoke to a MSFT account-manager for several local govts and he told me they have f*in training material to "help" govt officials write tenders/requirements in such a way that Open Source is practically excluded and Microsoft the only option. I am appalled, but also not that surprised.
² The ical-finding is how I got my local garbage-collection schedule into my calendar app. And when I told this to someone who happened to work at the municipality, they realized that publishing the urls and docs online helped a lot of citizens. Ironically, the push-back, according to this person, was from a civil-servant whose career was influenced on the success (install counts) of the "municipality app" and who was afraid that if people could add the calendar to their outlook/google cal/ical/other-cal, might no longer install the app. Again, I was appalled at such perverse incentives.
For me the blame is squarely on the technical “experts” who are behind the architecture and implementation of such apps.
Gotta stay polite for HN. No data stored on an American server is secure.
I really really do like Open Suse though, and I think an open source future is possible. Open Suse, Libre Office, etc.
Dead Comment
The only solution is no american companies in the loop at all.
> Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found.
https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-digital-escorts...
After thinking about this for 90 seconds, Microsoft could license Azure tech to Hetzner or something. Keep the servers under EU control, but unless they share source code it’s still a blackbox.
Honestly everything used for anything serious should be open source and regularly audited. We need check each others homework.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47169815 (iPhone and iPad approved to handle classified NATO information)
Without rules of law its literally irresponsible for EU to have this kind of heavy dependency on US corporations.
Brazil is an interesting case. On paper, we have a strong legal mandate. Under Art. 16 of Lei 14.063/2020[0], information and communication systems developed exclusively by public bodies must be governed by an open-source license, allowing use, copying, modification, and distribution without restriction by other public entities.
However, implementation tells a different story. Take PIX, the instant payment system developed by the Brazilian Central Bank. As of today, only the API is open. The core system code remains unpublished[1]. If the system was developed exclusively by the public administration, this seems difficult to reconcile with the letter - and certainly the spirit - of the law.
So the issue is not only whether governments should reduce vendor lock-in. It’s whether they are prepared to follow through on what real openness demands once they commit to it.
[0] https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_Ato2019-2022/2020/Lei... [1] https://d1gesto.blogspot.com/2025/06/brazils-pix-system-face...