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.
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.
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.
Quite a lot of small bits on Denmark are moving towards this, but its still not every much in a country that is one of the most strongly motivated to not depend on the US (because of Greenland).
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.
France have already developed their own (recently posted here) [1][2].
Also, the "there's no drop in replacement" line is just making up excuses for not acting. Yes, you will not get 100% of the Office 365 features out of the box. There will be some friction.
It's simply ridiculous seeing EU bureaucracy preparing e.g. to ban russian oil [3], making life more expensive for all people, and balking on being forced to switch their stupid word processor.
Considering that I doubt most normal office-user people even use features in Word other than changing fonts etc I doubt that will be a big issue anyway.
What France is doing is great but, as you’ll see discussed in that HN comment section, it is hardly an office suite. It’s not a full replacement by a long shot. I hope it will be one day though!
You don't want a drop-in replacement for each service, you want one for the entire system.
Microsofts advantage is ActiveDirectory integration. Centrally managed users and machines, every user, every application, every service authentications through the AD.
Organizations opt for Teams all the time, because it's part of the package and fully integrated. There's no reason they couldn't pick something else, but why deal with it when Teams just work (sort of).
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.
People get a lot of cash, house and other benefits when they pick up suppliers.
And if they don't get a direct bribe, for some reasons, they end up as VP of what ever branch more or less directly related to their previous job as client.
Someone yanked your chain with this one. Nobody gets a house or a job at Microsoft for buying Microsoft, these cases can't even register in the statistic of the total volume of orders. Every tech company would buy you a house if that worked, when a house is always a rounding error on the value of the contracts we're talking about.
They buy it because it's the "safe", "does everything" choice that "everyone else has". It's easier to deal with a single party than it is to get licenses and support from 20 other suppliers that then blame each other when there are issues at the border between 2 of the products. You can talk to anyone else who has Teams, your files are always fully compatible, all of the rest of your software integrates, single identity, etc. A lot of good it is that you have Google Meet and Libre Office when the partners you work closes to have Teams and MS Office.
Users are proficient with the products, you can find skilled admins everywhere. Incumbency has a lot of inertia.
So you have to pay millions in support contracts every year, it's the cost of doing business. So MS gets hacked every other day, what could you have done about it better when even MS (!!!) couldn't?
I have worked in (German) Government, and apart from complacency (and maybe corruption, see Limux) there's nothing stopping the German government (at least at federal level) from adopting open source.
If processes depend on some crappy excel table (created by somebody 20 years ago) or even worse, sharepoint app (commissioned by people who shouldn't be deciding things like this), the processes suck and need to be rebuilt anyhow.
In what way do they need Microsoft Software or Technology except maybe Windows for their Passport Application?
That's special software developed for one customer only anyways. So it's perfectly possible to target another Platform or do this as some kind of WebApp.
And until then run some Windows Desktops for those special applications/services
"So it's perfectly possible to target another Platform or do this as some kind of WebApp."
Yes, it is possible to rewrite software. But currently most of that software was written and licenced for windows.
Just choosing another plattform might, or might not work. And if it doesn't, many people will be angry for not getting tax refunds back, or getting a new passport, or being able to register a new car etc.
Bugs are real. And there is a saying, never change a running system.
So yes, I do agree that the system is not running so well being dependant on Trump and change is required, but this is not just some webapp for fun that needs replacement. We are talking about critical government services, with lots of custom made software, that was often exclusivly written for windows.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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, 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
There is no "good will" argument being made here. The state doesn't care about good, it cares about it's own survival. Being independent from foreign interference in the software they use and having deep insight into what residents within the territory of that state are talking about are critical to that mission. It has nothing to do with morals. It is a machine.
EU chat control is also better than American government spying on American tech companies (which is effectively a kind of EU Chat Control, except its USA who gets to spy). Both are bad, but one is less bad.
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.
I'm not familiar with all current ongoing projects. Because of the situation mentioned above.
Currently I'm involved in projects surrounding https://developer.overheid.nl/kennisbank/security/standaarde... . Have a look there. It's not FLOSS in the way that you can just provide PRs of things you'd like different, but FLOSS in the way that you can get in touch and with enough expertise, have people listen to you.
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.
Most platforms like Nextcloud focus on file storage, email, documents and video conference but don't do anything similar to the identity management, provisioning, policies and SSO that Office 365 provides.
A national government is large enough to run their own Keycloak instance but a regional branch of government would be better off with having a SaaS for that.
It would be great if the EU would subsidize a full alternative to Microsoft 365 and give every government worker in every EU country an account to that. Just grab a random laptop from the shelf, install EUnionOS, log-in to EUnionCloud and have all the required apps for their work install themselves, set all the rights correctly, mail works automatically, automatic access to the correct files. Full disk encryption, theft protection etcetera.
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.
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.
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"?
Yes. The key point of view being from someone outside the US. I cannot speak for those in the US. But the point is techies outside the US had been reduced to merely configuring US products. Speaking where I am from IT organisations were now being led by accountants and lawyers because there wasn't any decision to make, just go with Office 365. The hardest part was negotiating the often opaque licensing. There has been a revitalization of the craft of software development and I think in the long run this will be good for the industry. Yes there might be fragmentation but hopefully standards start getting adopted to counter this fragmentation and interoperability.
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.
Currently in Europe, but I've spent a few years in the states.
(Avoiding specifics, because I think AI will soon make it too easy to mass-doxx HN accounts based on their comment history, and I want to remain employable)
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.
This admin is doing nothing we haven’t seen previous admins do. Blaming the administration for how poorly American privacy is takes the blame away from all other politicians who’ve helped to create the “standards” as we have then today.
This is the first time in decades the current administration has openly threatened Europe with war. Before it was a vague risk. Now it is a matter of national security.
It's true that the cloud act and other data handling issues were already there. There is one thing this US administration did that was unique though, which was to threaten the territorial integrity of an European country.
I beg to differ here. There are multiple things that have been either unprecedented or done in larger scale by this administration. We can start the blame from founding fathers for creating an exploitable system (as Godel had correctly pointed out), but to look elsewhere for the blatant abuse of power and disregarding privacy of citizens by this administration is, in my opinion, a biased take on it.
This administration spends a lot of effort on cultivating a visibly hostile image to its former allies and emphasizing the role of force over diplomacy.
If there was any sort of tacit understanding that certain American power possibilites will only be used in relatively rare contexts (going after terrorists), it is gone. Nowadays the expectation is that the US will use various tools at their disposal even over relatively minor disagreements and conflicts.
I do like this news, but I wonder why they choose LibreOffice. It's the most widely known MS alternative, but things like OnlyOffice [0] and Nextcloud Office [1] (which is based on Collabora Online [2], which in turn is based on LibreOffice) offer much more compelling collaborative features, imho. Just plain office (like it's 1997) is quite a step back, no?
Especially OnlyOffice looks extremely similar to MS Office, I have it on all our Linux laptops at home so the kids don't feel much difference between home and school envs. I think document interoperability (as in: Looks similar) is also better.
OnlyOffice had some controversy around being owned and operated by a Russian company through shell companies. They might even fall under EU sanctions. There is an open German information request to the government that was never answered.
Wether those connections are true or not I can't say, but I do know people that dropped OnlyOffice in their evaluations for this reason.
I checked it, but at $149 per year for the home server (and don't forget to click in the 'information' button on the 'Lifetime' License Duration option), there seems to be a bit of a premium on that MS styling, considering the functionality in competing F/OSS suites.
OnlyOffice, Nextcloud OPffice, Collabora might all have free offerings to a degree, but you'll end up at the mercy of the companies behind those tools and OnlyOffice comes with Enterprise offering that does also cost money.
Costing money isn't necessarily bad, but it's also hard to beat free & libre.
But I have to say that I got quite used to collaborative editing, not something I'd like to give up.
People can get used to buttons moving to other places (imo), but collecting and integrating edits from multiple people via email is not something I look back at fondly.
What are the hurdles from any of the EU governments from:
1. Choosing the best open source options for the various MS replacements
2. Fund an office who's job would be to provide software support, continue development, and make customizations for various departments. They continue to host this as open source.
3. Expanding adoption of the new tools to more gov departments over time. Continue to expand software office accordingly.
4. Eventually, they will have a solution entirely within their control. The costs will initially be higher likely, but way less over time.
If this progresses, then other governments can also adopt those same tools and also provide funding to the software office so that the software is continuously updated for things like security, big fixes, etc. all remains gov sponsored open source.
A lot of good behind this idea if nothing else than to keep Microsoft honest. The Azureware push is nauseating and such a transparent attempt to lock in its monopoly against disruptors. We’re hoping Tritium[1] can provide a free or commercial alternative for legal teams soon.
All that said, it’s easy to underestimate the quality of Microsoft’s office products. They handle millions of edge cases, accessibility, i18n. They are performant and in a lot of cases extended through long-term add ins.
Even Google hasn’t achieved real parity.
It’s Microsoft’s race to lose, but my bet is they’re too distracted by AI to even noticed those coming for them.
This is a good thing, imo. Perhaps, the EU could generally switch to OSS, wherever possible, thus eroding even more the grip of the US tech giants on parts of the digital world.
I'm very happy for all the Europeans getting to use software they like and prefer, but honestly I'm a little tired of reading about it. There's been an awful lot of recent blogging and news about de-Americanising one's stack.
It seems very important to the Europeans that they let everyone else know they're leaving? It's got the air of a thirty-five year old threatening to move out of his parents' basement any day now. Go already! Stop telling us about it. We all
wish you the best. Good luck!
(Don't expect to get much say over how foreign tech platforms operate going forward, if you get the balkanised Internet you seem to yearn for?)
It's an incredibility hot topic here (in the EU) right now. It also provides a lot of (business) opportunities here. I get that this (HN) is not an EU platform, but a lot of us are on here.
Collectively we feel like we are going through an EU/US divorce that is rough and will take years to complete. All our tech is entangled with the US, everything would grind to a halt if Trump would pull some plugs at the moment. It's like everybody just woke up. We lost an ally that we really leaned on.
We even have news like "Dutch Defense dept considers jailbreaking F35s" [0]. Completely nuts of course! But gives a taste of the climate here.
I don't see what you mean with your remark about the balkanized internet, the problems is we've been building our systems in US walled gardens, and now we want our freedom back.
It should be acknowledged that this was at least significantly about lobbying, and shouldn't be considered a cut-and-dry "failed experiment" (though clearly there are lessons that can be learned):
> [Munich Mayor] Reiter wanted Microsoft to move its Microsoft Germany corporate headquarters to to Munich. Microsoft moved and Reiter wants to deliver on his promise to make Munich a Windows-powered city.
Either that or decision makers changed from the decision to drop. The first ones valued sovereignty higher but they moved on and the second ones valued it less.
take your abandon laptop which still runs and install Ubuntu on it ... you will see how easy linux is today ... there is no justification for microsoft windows in 2026
I mean they should be using open source software for this type of stuff, but every time I see these announcements they are either worded strangely or the governments just don't do it, because the end result is always the same.
Can we do a Polymarket bet? I'm taking the Microsoft side. Yeah they suck. Yup, nothing new there, but they'll find a way to keep all these dolts paying.
Ability to make certain kind of software is totally strategic for countries to be independent. Completely relying on some other 3rd party is truly stupid.
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 be hardcore Atlanticists at this point.
You are right, but I have the feeling that the Google, Microsoft, ... and the IA companies think that the EU is a acquired market. It's false, they can shift off the US, they eventually will.
Brazil’s free software initiative in 2000’s was all about technological dependency.
Brazil was hoping to leverage governmental spending to kickstart a national software development industry. Some sort of leap into the future, jumping over first the industrial era and then service-based economy we missed.
It was killed with fire by huge Microsoft (and American, I suppose) lobbying in congress, but then America had a very favorable public view as a nurturing and democratic partner. Some sort of older brother guiding you into adulthood.
Currently, at least in my bubble, the public view of America is more like a predator with Trump as a protodictator. Not necessarily true, understand me, just as that older brother view wasn’t. But it’s public perception.
A good part of that disabling of the Brazil initiative was simply free Google workspace for public universities (which were in the government plan).
I suppose that given the existencial threat level of anxiety caused by current developments will probably make Europe government immune to American lobby (at least in the short term), so I suppose this can actually happen.
Let’s see how it develops when they try to ban Microsoft from the universities. That would be the acid test.
> Copenhagen and Aarhus, which previously announced plans to abandon Microsoft software, citing financial concerns, market dominance and political tensions with Washington.
That's not going to happen, their infrastructure is completely tied to Microsoft Active Directory, it's going to be incredibly expensive to just plan a migration out of that. Trump will be out of office before anything serious can even get startet, and depending on the next US administration, someone will decide that it's not worth the spending.
Plus you'd need to re-train and army of Windows administrators to run, what... Linux and OpenLDAP?
If you can do a successful switch to cloud only Entra (aka. AzureAD) first, you are 90% ready for a migration to Open Source. You need Entra for Licensing anyway. Yes, I'm aware that this is hard.
Univention Nubus (Keycloak + OpenLDAP) or FreeIPA as alternatives for Entra come to mind.
You can even leverage your Powershell expertise.
I don’t think the IT admins are the concern TBH. How about the thousands of people who need to use new software - people who some barely know how to turn the computer on and off?
Trump represents the average American. That part is not changing and that problem is not going away. Joe Average said "Yes! [current mess] is what I want."
Exactly, people saying Trump will be out of office and everything will be back to normal are incredibly naive. If current trends stay, Trump is going to be one of the better ones for what is coming next. The politicians in US are saying worst xenophobic, racist, sexist things and are still getting praised or even promoted to higher positions. At least for a decade, unless something big or drastic happens, nothing is going to change for better in US, politics wise.
No. Trump represented what seemed like a solution to just enough people who were willing to change their votes from one party to another, and didn't represent enough of a threat to most of the people who might have been swayed to switch their vote away from the Republican party.
The issue with voters choosing more right-wing populist parties is not unique to the US.
This is way overblown. Its parts of some ministries. All public IT in Denmark is still bound to Microsoft. Statens IT, the IT systems provider for the public sector, is right now in the middle of rolling out Windows 11.
Easy. Intertia and incompetence. Government is full of paper pushers who hav eno higher wish but to live comfortably on tax payers money until they retire. The key to survival is to do what everyone else is doing, and not to be the first to try anything new.
The good thing is, as soon as someone tries anything new, and it looks like it is a success, the paper pushers will join in as soon as they think it is safe, and try to steal the fame and glory.
This is just how the government and the public sector works.
Yeah, anyone who says 'the government should be ran like a company' has likely never worked in a large corporation. It's full of meaningless work, bullshit jobs and red tape.
Plus, fulfillment of wishes to users as opposed to IT architecture management. Users have been brainwashed to demand certain brands. When you combine this with an IT Management that lacks mid-term risk management or a vision, you get happy users and an IT landscape easily taken hostage by single vendors.
Not exactly governments, but I work with NGOs in Germany, and plenty of them use Teams and other MS products, just because they receive them for free and don't have the budget to pay someone to install open source alternatives. Training is especially costly and in these environments people are not really "digital native". It's not even about age, but about culture: people here will do what they are trained to do and fear doing something they don't know, because they might "do something wrong".
I was responsible for a platform that gives free online storage, chat functions and videocalls (BBB) for NGOs, and had to hear these arguments over and over when discussing migrations.
So unless there is a political drive, together with good trainings and support, the transition is very very difficult.
The big problem, and I say this as someone that appreciates some of the Microsoft technologies, is that it is always first and foremost about Office, and nothing else.
Ah but some of those are FOSS, they are, pity that most money and project steering only flows from one place.
Repeat the same listing exercise for every US big tech company and their influence on the computing industry at large, and possible geopolitcs, that is how we end up with HarmonyOS NEXT with ArkTS.
> Forgotten are Windows, XBox, DirectX, VC++, C#, F#, TypeScript, Github, VSCode, Azure, Teams, SQL Server, SharePoint, Dynamics,.... Ah but some of those are FOSS
They want web apps only running in whatng cartel web engines?
libreoffice? A massive piece of software you can build only with US c++ compilers (MIT and mostly apple)? (the mistake was to use c++ in the first place, well computer languages on an insane level of complexity).
To put it together: it won't be perfect, lines for compromises will have to be drawn, and it will feel like getting out of 'the matrix' for the time (normal "users" won't understand), if you see where I am going. Digital freedom has a "price", efty "price" in a digital world dominated by Big Tech.
Going for a strong independence will have to hurt, or it will be slatted as "posture" more than a real long term/strategic will.
It is not "against" the US, but "in the interest" of the danish people (well, should be EU though...)
Good luck. It’s just not really practical. Office 365 is cheap and training everyone on another platform will cost more and make it harder to onboard new talent than using another system.
I worked for a company that was fully Google and the executives who were highly effective all just paid for excel themselves. It’s just not really practical when you’re going to make a presentation to learn how to do pivot tables in a new software in the crunch time.
I’m not a fanboy. I prefer Mac, but in a high cost labor environment like Europe it’s not worth it to save less than 1% of your labor cost on new software.
If the goal is purely to save costs, then yes. The main reason is actually stated in the title of the article. I recommend clicking the link to see it.
It’s not only costs. It’s the productivity and output of your labor force compared to something that in the grand scheme of things is not really expensive.
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.
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.
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.
Yes. Typically is some town hall shifting to Linux and making a big fuss when literally million others are still running Windows.
Seeing an agency doing it is good, but still less than the French ditching Teams and Zoom altogether as country-wide policy.
But still, this is Denmark’s tech modernization agency. They follow an eat-your-own-dogfood stance.
Transforming the public administration is the logical next step. Something different happening here, not the town hall big fuss approach.
Quite a lot of small bits on Denmark are moving towards this, but its still not every much in a country that is one of the most strongly motivated to not depend on the US (because of Greenland).
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.
I agree. Whilst I think MS products are on a downward trajectory, I'm getting "Maastricht Planning Department switches to Kali Linux" vibes
I want to see (sincerely) a whole government ditch MS
It is actually at least two agencies that is working in that direction, The Danish Road Authorities is also working on it: https://www.fstyr.dk/nyheder/2025/dec/faerdselsstyrelsen-tag...
"I genuinely do not understand why other countries put up with this."
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.
Google has drop in replacements for most of it. But that doesn’t solve the problem of using US tech.
France have already developed their own (recently posted here) [1][2].
Also, the "there's no drop in replacement" line is just making up excuses for not acting. Yes, you will not get 100% of the Office 365 features out of the box. There will be some friction.
It's simply ridiculous seeing EU bureaucracy preparing e.g. to ban russian oil [3], making life more expensive for all people, and balking on being forced to switch their stupid word processor.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46923736
[2] https://github.com/suitenumerique
[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-propose-permanent...
Considering that I doubt most normal office-user people even use features in Word other than changing fonts etc I doubt that will be a big issue anyway.
"Also, the "there's no drop in replacement" line is just making up excuses for not acting"
If you claim, that this is my position, please read at least one more sentence
"So yes, one can (and should) build them. "
Good luck convincing the government (or local councils) of Bulgaria to migrate to an office suite that’s available in French or English only.
That’s beside the sibling comment’s point that this suite is not complete enough (yet).
What France is doing is great but, as you’ll see discussed in that HN comment section, it is hardly an office suite. It’s not a full replacement by a long shot. I hope it will be one day though!
For many services there are drop-in Replacements available. I don't see what's so special about Mail or Calendar from Microsoft vs other vendors.
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
You don't want a drop-in replacement for each service, you want one for the entire system.
Microsofts advantage is ActiveDirectory integration. Centrally managed users and machines, every user, every application, every service authentications through the AD.
Organizations opt for Teams all the time, because it's part of the package and fully integrated. There's no reason they couldn't pick something else, but why deal with it when Teams just work (sort of).
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.
People get a lot of cash, house and other benefits when they pick up suppliers.
And if they don't get a direct bribe, for some reasons, they end up as VP of what ever branch more or less directly related to their previous job as client.
Someone yanked your chain with this one. Nobody gets a house or a job at Microsoft for buying Microsoft, these cases can't even register in the statistic of the total volume of orders. Every tech company would buy you a house if that worked, when a house is always a rounding error on the value of the contracts we're talking about.
They buy it because it's the "safe", "does everything" choice that "everyone else has". It's easier to deal with a single party than it is to get licenses and support from 20 other suppliers that then blame each other when there are issues at the border between 2 of the products. You can talk to anyone else who has Teams, your files are always fully compatible, all of the rest of your software integrates, single identity, etc. A lot of good it is that you have Google Meet and Libre Office when the partners you work closes to have Teams and MS Office.
Users are proficient with the products, you can find skilled admins everywhere. Incumbency has a lot of inertia.
So you have to pay millions in support contracts every year, it's the cost of doing business. So MS gets hacked every other day, what could you have done about it better when even MS (!!!) couldn't?
Have you worked in government services and know what their needs are?
I did not, but as far as I know, they require a bit more more than some office solution, shared drive and some email client.
(How do you imagine how it works internally if you apply for a new passport, they just send some office documents via email around?)
I have worked in (German) Government, and apart from complacency (and maybe corruption, see Limux) there's nothing stopping the German government (at least at federal level) from adopting open source.
If processes depend on some crappy excel table (created by somebody 20 years ago) or even worse, sharepoint app (commissioned by people who shouldn't be deciding things like this), the processes suck and need to be rebuilt anyhow.
I agree, apart from legal entities because iirc they use some software that's available on windows only
In what way do they need Microsoft Software or Technology except maybe Windows for their Passport Application?
That's special software developed for one customer only anyways. So it's perfectly possible to target another Platform or do this as some kind of WebApp.
And until then run some Windows Desktops for those special applications/services
"So it's perfectly possible to target another Platform or do this as some kind of WebApp."
Yes, it is possible to rewrite software. But currently most of that software was written and licenced for windows.
Just choosing another plattform might, or might not work. And if it doesn't, many people will be angry for not getting tax refunds back, or getting a new passport, or being able to register a new car etc.
Bugs are real. And there is a saying, never change a running system.
So yes, I do agree that the system is not running so well being dependant on Trump and change is required, but this is not just some webapp for fun that needs replacement. We are talking about critical government services, with lots of custom made software, that was often exclusivly written for windows.
> 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.
> That's great, but it's always just one agency, or one very local bit of government.
All change starts small. If these small agencies or very local bits of government successfully pull it off, larger ones may well follow.
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.
> The benefit of being US independent has no value in the eyes of the large part of European population
I think this may have changed a bit within the last year or so...
Definitely, at least in Denmark.
And in Greenland. ;)
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.
> Not everything is a state secret.
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.
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
"all Microsoft licenses will be terminated"
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
https://www.univention.com/industries/educational-sector/
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.
>That must be unacceptable to any sovereign government
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, 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.
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.
Slightly off topic, but does anyone know why libreoffice stopped publishing artefacts to mvn repo? https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.libreoffice/libreoffi...
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?
The German State of Schleswig Holstein does
https://euro-stack.com/blog/2025/3/schleswig-holstein-open-s...
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> This is symbolism
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.
denmark spearheads the EU push for chat control , this is a bit of an impediment to the good will argument
There is no "good will" argument being made here. The state doesn't care about good, it cares about it's own survival. Being independent from foreign interference in the software they use and having deep insight into what residents within the territory of that state are talking about are critical to that mission. It has nothing to do with morals. It is a machine.
EU chat control is also better than American government spying on American tech companies (which is effectively a kind of EU Chat Control, except its USA who gets to spy). Both are bad, but one is less bad.
> This is symbolism
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.
I'm not familiar with all current ongoing projects. Because of the situation mentioned above.
Currently I'm involved in projects surrounding https://developer.overheid.nl/kennisbank/security/standaarde... . Have a look there. It's not FLOSS in the way that you can just provide PRs of things you'd like different, but FLOSS in the way that you can get in touch and with enough expertise, have people listen to you.
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.
Because if they were serious about it, they'd have replatformed completely in 5 minutes.
Is there a European alternative to Microsoft 365?
Most platforms like Nextcloud focus on file storage, email, documents and video conference but don't do anything similar to the identity management, provisioning, policies and SSO that Office 365 provides.
A national government is large enough to run their own Keycloak instance but a regional branch of government would be better off with having a SaaS for that.
It would be great if the EU would subsidize a full alternative to Microsoft 365 and give every government worker in every EU country an account to that. Just grab a random laptop from the shelf, install EUnionOS, log-in to EUnionCloud and have all the required apps for their work install themselves, set all the rights correctly, mail works automatically, automatic access to the correct files. Full disk encryption, theft protection etcetera.
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.
[0] https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_Ato2019-2022/2020/Lei... [1] https://d1gesto.blogspot.com/2025/06/brazils-pix-system-face...
The entire American software industry will feel the ramifications here.
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.
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
No data stored on european servers either, see microsoft’s comments in french court to this effect.
The only solution is no american companies in the loop at all.
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.
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.
AWS Outpost might be a reasonable compromise in some situations.
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"?
Yes. The key point of view being from someone outside the US. I cannot speak for those in the US. But the point is techies outside the US had been reduced to merely configuring US products. Speaking where I am from IT organisations were now being led by accountants and lawyers because there wasn't any decision to make, just go with Office 365. The hardest part was negotiating the often opaque licensing. There has been a revitalization of the craft of software development and I think in the long run this will be good for the industry. Yes there might be fragmentation but hopefully standards start getting adopted to counter this fragmentation and interoperability.
To be fair, the same could be said about most other servers too.
I love these posts that are so on the edge that I can't tell if it's sarcastic or for real :)
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.
Which country do you live in?
Currently in Europe, but I've spent a few years in the states.
(Avoiding specifics, because I think AI will soon make it too easy to mass-doxx HN accounts based on their comment history, and I want to remain employable)
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.
This admin is doing nothing we haven’t seen previous admins do. Blaming the administration for how poorly American privacy is takes the blame away from all other politicians who’ve helped to create the “standards” as we have then today.
This is the first time in decades the current administration has openly threatened Europe with war. Before it was a vague risk. Now it is a matter of national security.
Threatened Europe and Canada with war.
It's true that the cloud act and other data handling issues were already there. There is one thing this US administration did that was unique though, which was to threaten the territorial integrity of an European country.
Remotely cutting off European allied nations personnel from IT access to private US companies at the whim of someone having a tantrum? That seems new.
I beg to differ here. There are multiple things that have been either unprecedented or done in larger scale by this administration. We can start the blame from founding fathers for creating an exploitable system (as Godel had correctly pointed out), but to look elsewhere for the blatant abuse of power and disregarding privacy of citizens by this administration is, in my opinion, a biased take on it.
This is not really true.
This administration spends a lot of effort on cultivating a visibly hostile image to its former allies and emphasizing the role of force over diplomacy.
If there was any sort of tacit understanding that certain American power possibilites will only be used in relatively rare contexts (going after terrorists), it is gone. Nowadays the expectation is that the US will use various tools at their disposal even over relatively minor disagreements and conflicts.
> This admin is doing nothing we haven’t seen previous admins do.
Well... lots disagree with that statement.
The level is what matters. That combined with Trump erratic behavior and acting without thinking as shown with the 10 15 tariff change
I do like this news, but I wonder why they choose LibreOffice. It's the most widely known MS alternative, but things like OnlyOffice [0] and Nextcloud Office [1] (which is based on Collabora Online [2], which in turn is based on LibreOffice) offer much more compelling collaborative features, imho. Just plain office (like it's 1997) is quite a step back, no?
Especially OnlyOffice looks extremely similar to MS Office, I have it on all our Linux laptops at home so the kids don't feel much difference between home and school envs. I think document interoperability (as in: Looks similar) is also better.
[0] https://www.onlyoffice.com/
[1] https://nextcloud.com/office/
[2] https://www.collaboraonline.com/
OnlyOffice had some controversy around being owned and operated by a Russian company through shell companies. They might even fall under EU sanctions. There is an open German information request to the government that was never answered.
Wether those connections are true or not I can't say, but I do know people that dropped OnlyOffice in their evaluations for this reason.
I checked it, but at $149 per year for the home server (and don't forget to click in the 'information' button on the 'Lifetime' License Duration option), there seems to be a bit of a premium on that MS styling, considering the functionality in competing F/OSS suites.
OnlyOffice, Nextcloud OPffice, Collabora might all have free offerings to a degree, but you'll end up at the mercy of the companies behind those tools and OnlyOffice comes with Enterprise offering that does also cost money.
Costing money isn't necessarily bad, but it's also hard to beat free & libre.
True.
But I have to say that I got quite used to collaborative editing, not something I'd like to give up.
People can get used to buttons moving to other places (imo), but collecting and integrating edits from multiple people via email is not something I look back at fondly.
Happy to see Schleswig-Holstein switching as well and also it being mentioned in an article on the HN front page. Who would have thought?
They also have their own Mastodon server, which is a great way forward for government institutions!
What are the hurdles from any of the EU governments from: 1. Choosing the best open source options for the various MS replacements 2. Fund an office who's job would be to provide software support, continue development, and make customizations for various departments. They continue to host this as open source. 3. Expanding adoption of the new tools to more gov departments over time. Continue to expand software office accordingly. 4. Eventually, they will have a solution entirely within their control. The costs will initially be higher likely, but way less over time.
If this progresses, then other governments can also adopt those same tools and also provide funding to the software office so that the software is continuously updated for things like security, big fixes, etc. all remains gov sponsored open source.
Am I crazy?
Bit old, from June 13th, 2025, this and similar stories been on HN a bunch of times:
- https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
A lot of good behind this idea if nothing else than to keep Microsoft honest. The Azureware push is nauseating and such a transparent attempt to lock in its monopoly against disruptors. We’re hoping Tritium[1] can provide a free or commercial alternative for legal teams soon.
All that said, it’s easy to underestimate the quality of Microsoft’s office products. They handle millions of edge cases, accessibility, i18n. They are performant and in a lot of cases extended through long-term add ins.
Even Google hasn’t achieved real parity.
It’s Microsoft’s race to lose, but my bet is they’re too distracted by AI to even noticed those coming for them.
[1] https://tritium.legal
> performant
Inexplicably taking two seconds to load the next page in a simple, 10 page .docx document on a completely idle MacBook Air M1 w/ 16GB RAM.
No memory pressure, no heavy processes, no excessive number of apps open.
Yes, it's normally much faster, but not always.
Yes, that is surprising. Though I think modern Office has always struggled on macOS.
Sorry if I sound bit political but this whole trump/usa political issue (hope) helps push more and more opensource and decentralization.
This is a good thing, imo. Perhaps, the EU could generally switch to OSS, wherever possible, thus eroding even more the grip of the US tech giants on parts of the digital world.
I wonder about Vatican policy in regards to similar compromising infrastructure.
I'm very happy for all the Europeans getting to use software they like and prefer, but honestly I'm a little tired of reading about it. There's been an awful lot of recent blogging and news about de-Americanising one's stack.
It seems very important to the Europeans that they let everyone else know they're leaving? It's got the air of a thirty-five year old threatening to move out of his parents' basement any day now. Go already! Stop telling us about it. We all wish you the best. Good luck!
(Don't expect to get much say over how foreign tech platforms operate going forward, if you get the balkanised Internet you seem to yearn for?)
It's an incredibility hot topic here (in the EU) right now. It also provides a lot of (business) opportunities here. I get that this (HN) is not an EU platform, but a lot of us are on here.
Collectively we feel like we are going through an EU/US divorce that is rough and will take years to complete. All our tech is entangled with the US, everything would grind to a halt if Trump would pull some plugs at the moment. It's like everybody just woke up. We lost an ally that we really leaned on.
We even have news like "Dutch Defense dept considers jailbreaking F35s" [0]. Completely nuts of course! But gives a taste of the climate here.
I don't see what you mean with your remark about the balkanized internet, the problems is we've been building our systems in US walled gardens, and now we want our freedom back.
[0] https://tweakers.net/nieuws/244764/defensie-ziet-jailbreak-v...
Who remember the failed experiment of abandoning Micro$oft by Munich
https://www-sueddeutsche-de.translate.goog/muenchen/muenchne...
It should be acknowledged that this was at least significantly about lobbying, and shouldn't be considered a cut-and-dry "failed experiment" (though clearly there are lessons that can be learned):
> [Munich Mayor] Reiter wanted Microsoft to move its Microsoft Germany corporate headquarters to to Munich. Microsoft moved and Reiter wants to deliver on his promise to make Munich a Windows-powered city.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-munich-should-stick-with-l...
It failed because of MS pushback and lobbying. As was reported countless times.
Also because Munich didn't actually want to leave Microsoft, they just wanted a better deal. (Which they got)
So, it can happen again is what you’re saying.
failed due to corrupt government official and M$ bribes
Sounds like a strategy to get money from M$. You can always switch to FOSS later.
I don't. But I remember that the French also just did the same.
Microsoft came back with a far lower cost offer than they had before, and took the new head out for nice lunches
So it sounds like Munich ditching Microsoft wasn't a principled move, but just a business tactic to get the same software for cheaper.
Either that or decision makers changed from the decision to drop. The first ones valued sovereignty higher but they moved on and the second ones valued it less.
The European sovereign tech trend isn’t exclusively a benefit to OSS. SAP must be anticipating a significant windfall of Oracle refugees.
take your abandon laptop which still runs and install Ubuntu on it ... you will see how easy linux is today ... there is no justification for microsoft windows in 2026
I mean they should be using open source software for this type of stuff, but every time I see these announcements they are either worded strangely or the governments just don't do it, because the end result is always the same.
Can we do a Polymarket bet? I'm taking the Microsoft side. Yeah they suck. Yup, nothing new there, but they'll find a way to keep all these dolts paying.
Ability to make certain kind of software is totally strategic for countries to be independent. Completely relying on some other 3rd party is truly stupid.
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 be hardcore Atlanticists at this point.
You are right, but I have the feeling that the Google, Microsoft, ... and the IA companies think that the EU is a acquired market. It's false, they can shift off the US, they eventually will.
Brazil’s free software initiative in 2000’s was all about technological dependency.
Brazil was hoping to leverage governmental spending to kickstart a national software development industry. Some sort of leap into the future, jumping over first the industrial era and then service-based economy we missed.
It was killed with fire by huge Microsoft (and American, I suppose) lobbying in congress, but then America had a very favorable public view as a nurturing and democratic partner. Some sort of older brother guiding you into adulthood.
Currently, at least in my bubble, the public view of America is more like a predator with Trump as a protodictator. Not necessarily true, understand me, just as that older brother view wasn’t. But it’s public perception.
A good part of that disabling of the Brazil initiative was simply free Google workspace for public universities (which were in the government plan).
I suppose that given the existencial threat level of anxiety caused by current developments will probably make Europe government immune to American lobby (at least in the short term), so I suppose this can actually happen.
Let’s see how it develops when they try to ban Microsoft from the universities. That would be the acid test.
Very good news for open source, hopefully.
> Copenhagen and Aarhus, which previously announced plans to abandon Microsoft software, citing financial concerns, market dominance and political tensions with Washington.
That's not going to happen, their infrastructure is completely tied to Microsoft Active Directory, it's going to be incredibly expensive to just plan a migration out of that. Trump will be out of office before anything serious can even get startet, and depending on the next US administration, someone will decide that it's not worth the spending.
Plus you'd need to re-train and army of Windows administrators to run, what... Linux and OpenLDAP?
Far crazier things have happened on this planet than switching to Linux and retraining some IT folk.
If you can do a successful switch to cloud only Entra (aka. AzureAD) first, you are 90% ready for a migration to Open Source. You need Entra for Licensing anyway. Yes, I'm aware that this is hard.
Univention Nubus (Keycloak + OpenLDAP) or FreeIPA as alternatives for Entra come to mind. You can even leverage your Powershell expertise.
I don’t think the IT admins are the concern TBH. How about the thousands of people who need to use new software - people who some barely know how to turn the computer on and off?
Trump represents the average American. That part is not changing and that problem is not going away. Joe Average said "Yes! [current mess] is what I want."
Exactly, people saying Trump will be out of office and everything will be back to normal are incredibly naive. If current trends stay, Trump is going to be one of the better ones for what is coming next. The politicians in US are saying worst xenophobic, racist, sexist things and are still getting praised or even promoted to higher positions. At least for a decade, unless something big or drastic happens, nothing is going to change for better in US, politics wise.
> Trump represents the average American.
If that were true, you wouldn't see such a deeply divided America right now.
Fine. Median American. 2 out of 3 Americans either endorsed this explicitly or were ok with it.
No. Trump represented what seemed like a solution to just enough people who were willing to change their votes from one party to another, and didn't represent enough of a threat to most of the people who might have been swayed to switch their vote away from the Republican party.
The issue with voters choosing more right-wing populist parties is not unique to the US.
The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers
This is way overblown. Its parts of some ministries. All public IT in Denmark is still bound to Microsoft. Statens IT, the IT systems provider for the public sector, is right now in the middle of rolling out Windows 11.
The article says "Danish agency" not a"Denmark"
How could any European govt use MS after Trump ordered MS to sanction an ICC prosecutor and MS complied? I imagine they're all trying to walk away
Easy. Intertia and incompetence. Government is full of paper pushers who hav eno higher wish but to live comfortably on tax payers money until they retire. The key to survival is to do what everyone else is doing, and not to be the first to try anything new.
The good thing is, as soon as someone tries anything new, and it looks like it is a success, the paper pushers will join in as soon as they think it is safe, and try to steal the fame and glory.
This is just how the government and the public sector works.
> This is just how the government and the public sector works.
I work in the public sector, and that isn't remotely my experience.
Could you roughly quantify what faction of public sector workers you believe operate that way, and how you arrived at that belief?
This is not in any way specific to the government or public institution. Many (perhaps most) private companies work the same way.
Yeah, anyone who says 'the government should be ran like a company' has likely never worked in a large corporation. It's full of meaningless work, bullshit jobs and red tape.
Plus, fulfillment of wishes to users as opposed to IT architecture management. Users have been brainwashed to demand certain brands. When you combine this with an IT Management that lacks mid-term risk management or a vision, you get happy users and an IT landscape easily taken hostage by single vendors.
> Government is full of paper pushers who hav eno higher wish but to live comfortably on tax payers money until they retire.
Even billionaires are into getting as much tax payer money as possible. But they get the big numbers.
Report Says Elon Musk's Businesses Have Been Awarded $38 Billion In Government Contracts Since 2003: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/report-says-elon-musks-busine...
Not exactly governments, but I work with NGOs in Germany, and plenty of them use Teams and other MS products, just because they receive them for free and don't have the budget to pay someone to install open source alternatives. Training is especially costly and in these environments people are not really "digital native". It's not even about age, but about culture: people here will do what they are trained to do and fear doing something they don't know, because they might "do something wrong". I was responsible for a platform that gives free online storage, chat functions and videocalls (BBB) for NGOs, and had to hear these arguments over and over when discussing migrations. So unless there is a political drive, together with good trainings and support, the transition is very very difficult.
The big problem, and I say this as someone that appreciates some of the Microsoft technologies, is that it is always first and foremost about Office, and nothing else.
Forgotten are Windows, XBox, DirectX, VC++, C#, F#, TypeScript, Github, VSCode, Azure, Teams, SQL Server, SharePoint, Dynamics,....
Ah but some of those are FOSS, they are, pity that most money and project steering only flows from one place.
Repeat the same listing exercise for every US big tech company and their influence on the computing industry at large, and possible geopolitcs, that is how we end up with HarmonyOS NEXT with ArkTS.
> Forgotten are Windows, XBox, DirectX, VC++, C#, F#, TypeScript, Github, VSCode, Azure, Teams, SQL Server, SharePoint, Dynamics,.... Ah but some of those are FOSS
Which of those are FOSS?
C#, F#, TypeScript, VSCode, under the business friendly OSI approved licenses, MIT and Apache.
From an applications point of view:
They want web apps only running in whatng cartel web engines?
libreoffice? A massive piece of software you can build only with US c++ compilers (MIT and mostly apple)? (the mistake was to use c++ in the first place, well computer languages on an insane level of complexity).
To put it together: it won't be perfect, lines for compromises will have to be drawn, and it will feel like getting out of 'the matrix' for the time (normal "users" won't understand), if you see where I am going. Digital freedom has a "price", efty "price" in a digital world dominated by Big Tech.
Going for a strong independence will have to hurt, or it will be slatted as "posture" more than a real long term/strategic will.
It is not "against" the US, but "in the interest" of the danish people (well, should be EU though...)
Who cares if a piece of open source has American maintainers? The point is not to avoid touching anything American. It is control and sovereignty.
Good luck. It’s just not really practical. Office 365 is cheap and training everyone on another platform will cost more and make it harder to onboard new talent than using another system.
I worked for a company that was fully Google and the executives who were highly effective all just paid for excel themselves. It’s just not really practical when you’re going to make a presentation to learn how to do pivot tables in a new software in the crunch time.
I’m not a fanboy. I prefer Mac, but in a high cost labor environment like Europe it’s not worth it to save less than 1% of your labor cost on new software.
If the goal is purely to save costs, then yes. The main reason is actually stated in the title of the article. I recommend clicking the link to see it.
The articles like 2-3 paragraphs?
It’s not only costs. It’s the productivity and output of your labor force compared to something that in the grand scheme of things is not really expensive.
Oh oh... Time to say goodbye to Greenland. Lets see what is going to happen to LEGO.. Freedom Bricks?
Why do you think there's a connection between the Danish government and LEGO?
Trump has already started talking about taking over Iceland. Where's next?
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yZA7A1fy8yelNvDK2aVesx24jak...