Given that the US forced Microsoft to stop providing email services to the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands via sanctions, I expect moves like this to become more common across Europe. Bert Hubert is a Euro blogger who writes more about this.
aDyslecticCrow · 6h ago
That certainly sets a precedent... if the us can cut off email as a leverage, i wouldn't trust US baking, communication services or cloud providers either if i was a foreign nation. (Ally or not)
akho · 6h ago
nobody in Europe trusts US baking
jimmydddd · 2h ago
To be fair, the US has added a lot of wonderful artisan bakeries over the last ten or so years.
tossandthrow · 6h ago
The thing is that the US use bad ingredients and add too many additives like high fructose sirup.
Good baking requires exactly: clean water, a good sourdough, some well ground non bleached organic flour and just a pinch of salt!
aDyslecticCrow · 6h ago
I present to you; visa, mastercard, and paypal.
gloxkiqcza · 6h ago
We talking about apple pies here /s
aDyslecticCrow · 2h ago
... read my username
qmr · 6h ago
precedent
:)
a_dabbler · 6h ago
precedent*
crossroadsguy · 6h ago
What about email services based in Europe but the domain is, well, a very American thing and eventually completely controlled by it, isn’t it?
notpushkin · 5h ago
ccTLDs are pretty independent in that regard I think. The ICC uses a .int, though, which is managed by IANA (which is in the U.S.).
crossroadsguy · 5h ago
I see. I thought between ICANN ans IANA everything is US controlled eventually. I was wrong it seems.
FirmwareBurner · 6h ago
I hate it that most people are missing the forest form the trees in this case, and see the Microsoft cutting email access as being the main newsworthy issue here, while form my PoV, the gigantic issue of planetary scale is that the US government (not just the Orange one) sees itself and acts above the international law, dismissing the ICC rulings whenever it feels like it, making the ICC a pointless "rules for thee but not for me" type of org at the end of the day.
I feel like the infamous "League of nations" keeps repeating itself since nations only act in self interest, and all these intergovernmental organizations, are just temporary gentlemens' agreements, not worth the paper they're written on, and at the end of the day the rules are still decided and enforced by who has the biggest military like in the past infinity years of human history.
So the current Microsoft issue is just the effect, but not the root cause of this. The root cause is US government becoming more and more of an unaccountable bully, and we need to address that instead of Microsoft since if it's not Microsoft who does something, it will be Google, Apple, AWS, Qualcomm, etc. they all do the bidding of the US administration.
philistine · 5h ago
It’s the international court because more than one nation agrees to its existence. Not because all nations respect it.
diggan · 6h ago
> US government sees itself and acts above the international law, dismissing the ICC rulings whenever it feels like it, making the ICC a pointless "rules for thee but not for me" type of org at the end of the day.
People don't talk about that because it's been obvious for a long time. How is it surprising a country who invades basically any country on a whim, based on false premises, also sees itself as being above international law?
Meanwhile, the cutting of email access is new, and hasn't happened before, so it is quite literally "news", while the other stuff you mention is basically an opinion-piece and not new information.
JumpCrisscross · 6h ago
> How is it surprising a country who invades basically any country on a whim, based on false premises, also sees itself as being above international law?
One, international law hasn’t ever constrained any of the great powers. (China annexed Tibet in 1951, for example.)
Two, the U.S. isn’t a treaty partner to the Rome Statute [1]. The ICC doesn’t have jurisdiction in America. One of the founding principles of the post-war system was treaty-based law—countries cede their sovereignty by agreement, not force.
America generally sees itself as being above international law. But it is far from alone in this. And the ICC isn’t an example of it.
>People don't talk about that because it's been obvious for a long time. How is it surprising a country who invades basically any country on a whim, based on false premises, also sees itself as being above international law?
Nations chose to ally with the US post-WW2 since it was the least worst option at the time. Much better to be a US ally than a USSR ally. The US was a lot more trustworthy at the time and less s.
But this situation has changed now. China is the new second superpower, and trust in the US has hit an all time low. In the past during the cold war, the US would make concessions with its allies so that everyone is happy. Now, the US foreign policy is, "America first, everyone suck our star spangled dick bitches! MAGA!", and has no issues screwing its closest allies and partners over in order to squeeze them, acting more like a mob shakedown.
Given this, it's normal to see the US as much more dangerous ally now than in the past, and try to remove dependency on them.
>Meanwhile, the cutting of email access is new, and hasn't happened before, so it is quite literally "news", while the other stuff you mention is basically an opinion-piece and not new information.
This only happened because the US gov got too comfy doing whatever it wanted and never facing any consequences for it. It's the natural evolution of things. "Spare the rod, spoil the child", as they say.
mslansn · 6h ago
What do you mean "above the law"? Why should whatever the ICC says be above what the US citizens choose for themselves?
bestouff · 6h ago
Because it's the international law. For you USians, it's the same thing when federal law preempts local law.
ensignavenger · 6h ago
Thats not what international law is, and the US isn't part of the ICC treaty.
WrongAssumption · 6h ago
No it isn’t.
FirmwareBurner · 6h ago
So if US chooses to "holocaust" a minority or ethnic group, or to invade and bomb innocent countries into oblivion, the rest of the world should just be OK with it because it's what the US citizens chose?
The ICC has its roots from the trials of Nazi criminals. The US government and its military has often performed similar unspeakable and inhumane acts abroad (see the war on terror leaks and scandals) without any repercussions due to legislature form George Bush saying the US will invade the Hague if its military personnel are ever trialed for war crimes.
So if one country sees itself above the law, what do you think that does to the other countries?
JumpCrisscross · 6h ago
> ICC has its roots from the trials of Nazi criminals
You’re mixing up the ICC and ICJ.
The ICC was formed in 2002 [1]. The U.S. is not a treaty party to its founding document, the Rome Statute. The ICJ was founded because of the Nazis; it has jurisdiction over America [2].
> So if US chooses to "holocaust" a minority or ethnic group, or to invade and bomb innocent countries into oblivion, the rest of the world should just be OK with it because it's what the US citizens chose?
That’s not what I said. But yes, the opposite of “might is right” is an aberration. The only reason Nuremberg occurred is because it was for the Jews. This is the opposite case.
JumpCrisscross · 4h ago
> The only reason Nuremberg occurred is because it was for the Jews
This is entirely ahistoric.
carlosjobim · 6h ago
The rest of the world can do nothing about it. See: Soviet Union, China.
There's biting hypothetical about it.
FirmwareBurner · 4h ago
>The rest of the world can do nothing about it. See: Soviet Union, China.
Of course it can. During the cold war, most US aligned countries had massive trade restrictions with the USSR. The fix is easy on paper: reduce trade with countries that break the rules. Of course, that's easier said than done, but it is doable and effective.
Imagine what can be achieved if Europe, Canada, UK, AUNZ, Korea, Japan, BRICS, would collectively put restrictions on the US whoever the US decides to fling its dick around the world stage. The problem is getting countries to cooperate so it's never gonna happen. Would make a cool novel though.
carlosjobim · 2h ago
Doable and effective? It didn't stop the systemized murder and enslavement of millions in the USSR nor China.
Worth noting, there is this follow-up statement from Microsoft, which is frankly as clear as mud. (Essentially Microsoft saying they didn't cut off services, with no explanation of what did happen)
> A Microsoft spokesperson said that it had been in contact with the court since February “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services.” The spokesperson added that “at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC.”
> Microsoft declined to comment further in response to questions regarding the exact process that led to Khan's email disconnection, and exactly what it meant by “disconnection.”
I think you have described it well. Clear as mud. I think the political impact on Open Source going forward may be very interesting.
pentagrama · 3h ago
> Looks like Denmark's Ministry for Digitization is not in fact moving to Linux right now.
The original interview given by the Danish Ministry said that they planned to move to Linux, but this apparently was a misunderstanding between the Ministry and the outlet.
They've since corrected the article, they're moving to just LibreOffice, but not Linux, at least not in the near future.
Most government positions could use almost anything. The reason many places use Windows is familiarity and cost of government licenses. Also note that modern services may have a term, for example Microsoft has licenses based on a six-year commitment.
There are scenarios where Windows may be problematic. Sometimes drivers for odd equipment are not available in Linux, or only some Linux distros due to fragmentation and not maintained very well.
ta1243 · 6h ago
Most modern enterprises want things like fleet and software management.
My personal kit is linux because it just works and I don't have time to faff around with windows when I'm not being paid. That doesn't work for enterprise though, and the difficulties of using windows are less important than the ease of enforcing policy.
Do Canonical offer a similar solution for identity management - sccm, active directory, intune, end-point-protection, all that sort of stuff? I'm no expert, I don't deal with that at work either, but I do know it's a major consideration.
This isn't the 90s. The problem with linux on the desktop in an enterprise isn't a lack of drivers or even software.
bjackman · 6h ago
> Most government positions could use almost anything.
Having worked for several years on bespoke IT for a megacorp, I think this is massively underestimating the challenge. There are literally hundreds of engineers involved and this is in a very well-established context.
Building a reliable, secure and user-friendly platform is a seriously enormous undertaking. I am honestly kinda skeptical that it's feasible for a smaller European nation to do this at an acceptable cost.
It absolutely needs to be done though. But I have a feeling everyone is doomed to fail if they try to do things on a custom basis. I think it has to be centralised one way or another.
Whether that means growing firms like Canonical, or coming up with some EU-level public engineering institutions, I dunno. I guess the best would be a patchwork of several such solutions.
I just don't really see how any of this can be done quickly enough to free us from US tech within 10 years :/
My fear is that people just don't do it properly. Then we end up with governments that are running on nonfunctional or horribly insecure IT. I don't think this is really better than being constantly fucked by Microsoft and the US govt.
megaloblasto · 6h ago
I'm sure writing drivers for a few pieces of odd equipment is much cheaper then shelling out money to Microsoft for a license. Switching to linux seems like such an obvious move to me.
halffullbrain · 5h ago
Considering just the office suites:
Nearly all of state and local administration uses various 3rd party solutions which have bespoke Office add-ins and rely on close integration with the formats (and security models) on the Office suite -- and are likely shifting more heavily into Microsoft 365 specific features.
So it's not as simple as rolling out LibreOffice and calling it a day. Much less Linux.
curt15 · 6h ago
How is the MDM situation for Linux?
preisschild · 6h ago
> reason many places use Windows is familiarity
And the reason for that is the problem. Too many schools use only Microsoft programs.
aDyslecticCrow · 6h ago
Nah most schools use chromebook now. And many schools use libreoffice to save cost.
pjmlp · 6h ago
That is a US phenomenon, Chomebooks are a rounding error outside the states.
halffullbrain · 5h ago
More that half of Danish municipalities have equipped schoolkids with Chromebooks -- but some failed to limit which services thay could/should use and so effectively send the kids' personal data out of the country, which caused quite the furor.
pjmlp · 4h ago
That is the first European country I am aware of doing such thing.
aDyslecticCrow · 6h ago
I'm European.
pjmlp · 5h ago
Me too, and never seen them elsewhere other than weekly discounts at Media Markt, until the shop finally gets rid of existing stock.
Also at least in Southern Europe, if kids use computers at the school at all, they tend to be desktop like deployments, and if families have to buy them, then Windows laptops get mostly acquired, as it is something actually usable, and in their budget.
deafpolygon · 6h ago
The reason is “CYA”, not familiarity. If the shit hits the fan they want someone to blame, and it better not be them.
Source: worked in government contracting
mythz · 5h ago
Many years ago when I heard Munich City was switching to Linux, I remember thinking it was a reckless decision that was doomed to fail, and turns out it eventually did as they announced in 2020 they were moving back to Windows.
Which is in stark contrast to now where it's now my favorite Desktop OS to use, effectively forced into it after switching away from Windows after 25 years after MS EOL'd Windows 10 and started infesting Windows 11 with ads/spyware. Had some issues at the start with Nvidia/Wayland, but that's now all fixed and Fedora has been a rock solid modern distro for use as my primary driver. Software compatibility turned out much better than I thought with all my daily apps being available for Linux thanks to Chromium/Electron, .NET SDK and JetBrains cross-platform tools. Steam compatibility was an expected surprise with most of my flagship titles working on Linux.
So after 1.5 years of leaving Windows I can't see myself going back, the disconnect of having a Desktop OS that works for you vs being hostage to an OS that Microsoft is using as a marketing channel for spyware and spamming their cloud services will only get worse over time.
techjamie · 4h ago
> Had some issues at the start with Nvidia/Wayland
I'm not sure if it's just the open source NVIDIA drivers that have improved it, but Wayland works very well on my system now. I tried a move from KDE (x11)->Hyprland last year, and it was not viable.
When I upgraded my system to NixOS 25.05 though, I changed a deprecated config option without much consideration, and accidentally migrated myself to KDE (Wayland). It took a little bit to notice anything was really that different.
Out of curiosity, I also installed Hyprland again, and none of the issues that I had previously are present. The only hard casualty in the switch has been Flameshot, and I had to switch my rofi package but it works fine.
martinald · 5h ago
I do get the political nature for this but this is really easier said than done.
Desktop Linux does not have good 'enterprise' group policy support compared to Windows. Neither does Mac. I think ChromeOS comes pretty close though.
And to be honest the need for this is as big if not bigger than on Windows. To take a random example - Control + Alt + F[1-6] switches you to a terminal with no explanation of how to get back. If you are a non technical user hitting that by mistake probably means a call to IT Support which is not advantageous to say the least. In Windows you'd set a group policy to disable that kind of thing, but there isn't a clear group policy 'standard' for Linux. You'd have to write a script that patches xorg.conf to disable it.
That's just one tiny example, I think there will be thousands of these small things. The other big blocker is support for Word/Excel docs. LibreOffice gets you so far there but I suspect there will be thousands (millions?) of complex docs/excel sheets with macros and what not that tend not to play ball. This is a huge job to migrate them all. Ironically this is a much bigger blocker I suspect than software itself as apart from this nearly everything is web based.
It's all very doable but requires a lot of work to get right. Basically someone needs to come along with something like Omakub but for non technical users, with a central server for managing it all.
I haven't really seen any polished projects for this, though maybe the 'enterprise' version of Ubuntu has this kind of stuff nailed?
And perhaps this Danish project actually ends up with something very usable for this. But it is very far from just installing YOLO installing Ubuntu.
donatj · 6h ago
There's a big hubbub in my small town about $60k every 4 years the local government could have avoided by moving the date of local elections to align with national elections that failed by one vote.
I got curious about what our total budget looked like, so I started digging into the towns official budget which is available online. My small town is somehow paying over $70,000 a year for Office 365 seats! Doing the math even at the more expensive government tiers, that's still ~1,000 seats which I can't believe we have anywhere near that many employees.
I'm not close enough to the problem to know if it's practical or not, but it really seems like at the very least we could move the majority of people to LibreOffice and save the town a bit of money.
daoboy · 6h ago
It looks like they're just dropping Office 365 for Libre office. Not switching the entire operating system.
kevinherron · 6h ago
> in a move that exchanges Windows and Office 365 for Linux and LibreOffice.
> It'll migrate about half of the Ministry of Digital Affairs away from Windows this summer
daoboy · 6h ago
The last comment:
>The Politiken article has been corrected. They're dropping Microsoft Office but not Windows. They might in the future, that seems to be the general trend, but in this case the minister said they're dropping Microsoft services and interviewer misinterpreted that as including Windows.
kevinherron · 6h ago
Ahh, did not see/read the comments on the article.
halffullbrain · 6h ago
Dane here.
A lot of debate at the moment about digital sovereignty, with a very trusted ally threatening to annex Greenland while perhaps shifting its internal power structure (courts vs executive powers) while also continuing a trend of increased executive power over private companies (NSL etc.)
Meanwhile, EU is apparently way behind both China and US in high-tech industry and digital infrastructure in general and AI technology in particular.
So it's a welcome discourse - we really should go through the threat scenarios, in light of the changed parameters. My observations:
* Consider: Could the society function if major cloud services (say, Microsoft 365 or Azure's IaaS services) - were suddenly nullrouted from Denmark? (Keep in mind that Denmark is heavily digitalized in both the private and public sectors)
* While that not a likely scenario, it's no longer an unthinkable scenario, which it seemed to be in 2024. If it's not unthinkable, it could quickly become a credible threat. "Surrender Greenland, or else..."
* Public sector Denmark is very much a "Microsoft first" country, 99.9% of desktops, office networks and productivity. On back-ends, MS is maybe not so big at the state-level systems, but quite dominant at regional and municipal levels.
* Due to GDPR (and various related side quests), public Denmark has been slow-ish in moving to cloud infrastructure, but e.g. Microsoft 365 is gaining marketshare over locally or semi centralized hosted Exchange servers. So the blast radius is unclear.
* At the same time, Microsoft is taking home quite substantial license fees. The minister's reaction could also play into that.
However, the thing to note is that the Ministry of Digital Affairs is a small ministry. While they control some key infrastructure components (few of which run on Windows, AFAIK), they are not at all responsible for choosing other administrative bodies' choice of office suite or the bargaining with Microsoft. In practice, that power is held by the Ministry of Finance, as is so much else. They might be seeing things differently.
Interesting times indeed. And certainly long overdue to consider alternatives realistically and reduce vendor lock-in where feasible.
Lerc · 5h ago
There is a problem that is growing increasingly apparent.
Would you use an operating system or cloud services provided by a nation you are at war with?
Not long ago there were many countries that would have considered a future where they are at war with the United States to be impossible. A lot of those countries can now see paths to that happening,
That's good information for the FOSS community. Most people I know could go the same way. They are using an operating system solely to launch a web browser and occasionally office applications.
tossandthrow · 6h ago
I am curios on what these developments (obviously the ones that also transcends just Denmark) will do to something like San Fransisco and it's housing market.
Could this be a Detroit moment?
feverzsj · 5h ago
Only China government succeeded in replacing windows with linux. It's actually much more expensive, but their only concern is security.
ChrisArchitect · 1h ago
Maybe amend the submission title to match the story:
Update: Danish ministry only ditching Microsoft Office, but Windows is staying on their PCs
ChrisArchitect · 1h ago
Previously:
The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
What is the state of games piracy on Linux though? I kind of assume most cracked games are released for Windows, but perhaps they will run just fine on Wine anyway?
teddyh · 5h ago
The Valve Steam Deck runs SteamOS, which is Linux.
phtrivier · 6h ago
Did I miss the part in the article where they write how many machines (as in, you know, how many real life "computers") are actually being migrated ?
(It's not the same newsworthiness if it's 100 thousands thousands, a a few ones in the office of the intern for some underfunded local department.)
onetoo · 6h ago
IIRC it's a single ministry with not a lot of machines (in the order of 100). Definitely not as newsworthy as it's being made out to be, but viability has to be confirmed before a larger rollout can be done, I suppose.
Denmark must become less dependent on the major tech giants when it comes to digital solutions in the public sector. Therefore, the Ministry of Digitalization is now starting to test a new open source solution.
This week, the Ministry of Digitalization is launching a new pilot project, where a group of employees will begin testing an open source alternative to the Microsoft Office suite.
Specifically, the open source platform in question is Collabora, which is based on the open source software LibreOffice. The employees in the Ministry of Digitalization’s department participating in the pilot project will have the Office suite in their case management system replaced with Collabora.
"As minister, I’ve spoken about the need to challenge our digital independence. Now we’re taking the first step ourselves in the Ministry of Digitalization with this new pilot project. I don’t delude myself into thinking that this means we’re ready to kick the tech giants out tomorrow, but I see it as a welcome step in the right direction. As politicians, we have an obligation to ensure that our IT systems in the future aren’t dependent on a few large companies," says Minister for Digitalization Caroline Stage.
The ministry is beginning tests of a new integrated document editing module in the F2 case management system, based on the open source platform Collabora built on LibreOffice. This means that ministry employees will test an alternative to the Microsoft Office suite and use open source document editing tools instead of Microsoft’s solutions like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
The solution will be rolled out for broader testing in the Ministry of Digitalization’s department on June 19, 2025. At that time, a group of departmental employees will have their Office suite in F2 replaced with the open source alternative. In the months that follow, the ministry will monitor and test whether Collabora can support the ministry’s workflows and needs in a satisfactory manner.
The upcoming testing work will focus, among other things, on functionality related to the ministry’s templates, formatting for government cases, use of 'track changes', tables, etc., and whether the solution can handle conversion to and from Word format without altering the layout of documents.
If the test period proceeds satisfactorily, the next step is expected to be a broader rollout of the open source alternative throughout the department.
Good baking requires exactly: clean water, a good sourdough, some well ground non bleached organic flour and just a pinch of salt!
:)
I feel like the infamous "League of nations" keeps repeating itself since nations only act in self interest, and all these intergovernmental organizations, are just temporary gentlemens' agreements, not worth the paper they're written on, and at the end of the day the rules are still decided and enforced by who has the biggest military like in the past infinity years of human history.
So the current Microsoft issue is just the effect, but not the root cause of this. The root cause is US government becoming more and more of an unaccountable bully, and we need to address that instead of Microsoft since if it's not Microsoft who does something, it will be Google, Apple, AWS, Qualcomm, etc. they all do the bidding of the US administration.
People don't talk about that because it's been obvious for a long time. How is it surprising a country who invades basically any country on a whim, based on false premises, also sees itself as being above international law?
Meanwhile, the cutting of email access is new, and hasn't happened before, so it is quite literally "news", while the other stuff you mention is basically an opinion-piece and not new information.
One, international law hasn’t ever constrained any of the great powers. (China annexed Tibet in 1951, for example.)
Two, the U.S. isn’t a treaty partner to the Rome Statute [1]. The ICC doesn’t have jurisdiction in America. One of the founding principles of the post-war system was treaty-based law—countries cede their sovereignty by agreement, not force.
America generally sees itself as being above international law. But it is far from alone in this. And the ICC isn’t an example of it.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Statute
Nations chose to ally with the US post-WW2 since it was the least worst option at the time. Much better to be a US ally than a USSR ally. The US was a lot more trustworthy at the time and less s.
But this situation has changed now. China is the new second superpower, and trust in the US has hit an all time low. In the past during the cold war, the US would make concessions with its allies so that everyone is happy. Now, the US foreign policy is, "America first, everyone suck our star spangled dick bitches! MAGA!", and has no issues screwing its closest allies and partners over in order to squeeze them, acting more like a mob shakedown.
Given this, it's normal to see the US as much more dangerous ally now than in the past, and try to remove dependency on them.
>Meanwhile, the cutting of email access is new, and hasn't happened before, so it is quite literally "news", while the other stuff you mention is basically an opinion-piece and not new information.
This only happened because the US gov got too comfy doing whatever it wanted and never facing any consequences for it. It's the natural evolution of things. "Spare the rod, spoil the child", as they say.
The ICC has its roots from the trials of Nazi criminals. The US government and its military has often performed similar unspeakable and inhumane acts abroad (see the war on terror leaks and scandals) without any repercussions due to legislature form George Bush saying the US will invade the Hague if its military personnel are ever trialed for war crimes.
So if one country sees itself above the law, what do you think that does to the other countries?
You’re mixing up the ICC and ICJ.
The ICC was formed in 2002 [1]. The U.S. is not a treaty party to its founding document, the Rome Statute. The ICJ was founded because of the Nazis; it has jurisdiction over America [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Court_of_Justi...
That’s not what I said. But yes, the opposite of “might is right” is an aberration. The only reason Nuremberg occurred is because it was for the Jews. This is the opposite case.
This is entirely ahistoric.
There's biting hypothetical about it.
Of course it can. During the cold war, most US aligned countries had massive trade restrictions with the USSR. The fix is easy on paper: reduce trade with countries that break the rules. Of course, that's easier said than done, but it is doable and effective.
Imagine what can be achieved if Europe, Canada, UK, AUNZ, Korea, Japan, BRICS, would collectively put restrictions on the US whoever the US decides to fling its dick around the world stage. The problem is getting countries to cooperate so it's never gonna happen. Would make a cool novel though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44032717 ("Microsoft's ICC blockade: digital dependence comes at a cost (techzine.eu)" (205 comments))
https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...
> A Microsoft spokesperson said that it had been in contact with the court since February “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services.” The spokesperson added that “at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC.”
> Microsoft declined to comment further in response to questions regarding the exact process that led to Khan's email disconnection, and exactly what it meant by “disconnection.”
I think you have described it well. Clear as mud. I think the political impact on Open Source going forward may be very interesting.
They've since corrected the article, they're moving to just LibreOffice, but not Linux, at least not in the near future.
Source for that correction: https://www.computerworld.dk/art/291812/caroline-stage-udfas...
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Source: https://mastodon.social/@thelinuxEXP/114692092674707028
There are scenarios where Windows may be problematic. Sometimes drivers for odd equipment are not available in Linux, or only some Linux distros due to fragmentation and not maintained very well.
My personal kit is linux because it just works and I don't have time to faff around with windows when I'm not being paid. That doesn't work for enterprise though, and the difficulties of using windows are less important than the ease of enforcing policy.
Do Canonical offer a similar solution for identity management - sccm, active directory, intune, end-point-protection, all that sort of stuff? I'm no expert, I don't deal with that at work either, but I do know it's a major consideration.
This isn't the 90s. The problem with linux on the desktop in an enterprise isn't a lack of drivers or even software.
Having worked for several years on bespoke IT for a megacorp, I think this is massively underestimating the challenge. There are literally hundreds of engineers involved and this is in a very well-established context.
Building a reliable, secure and user-friendly platform is a seriously enormous undertaking. I am honestly kinda skeptical that it's feasible for a smaller European nation to do this at an acceptable cost.
It absolutely needs to be done though. But I have a feeling everyone is doomed to fail if they try to do things on a custom basis. I think it has to be centralised one way or another.
Whether that means growing firms like Canonical, or coming up with some EU-level public engineering institutions, I dunno. I guess the best would be a patchwork of several such solutions.
I just don't really see how any of this can be done quickly enough to free us from US tech within 10 years :/
My fear is that people just don't do it properly. Then we end up with governments that are running on nonfunctional or horribly insecure IT. I don't think this is really better than being constantly fucked by Microsoft and the US govt.
Nearly all of state and local administration uses various 3rd party solutions which have bespoke Office add-ins and rely on close integration with the formats (and security models) on the Office suite -- and are likely shifting more heavily into Microsoft 365 specific features.
So it's not as simple as rolling out LibreOffice and calling it a day. Much less Linux.
And the reason for that is the problem. Too many schools use only Microsoft programs.
Also at least in Southern Europe, if kids use computers at the school at all, they tend to be desktop like deployments, and if families have to buy them, then Windows laptops get mostly acquired, as it is something actually usable, and in their budget.
Source: worked in government contracting
Which is in stark contrast to now where it's now my favorite Desktop OS to use, effectively forced into it after switching away from Windows after 25 years after MS EOL'd Windows 10 and started infesting Windows 11 with ads/spyware. Had some issues at the start with Nvidia/Wayland, but that's now all fixed and Fedora has been a rock solid modern distro for use as my primary driver. Software compatibility turned out much better than I thought with all my daily apps being available for Linux thanks to Chromium/Electron, .NET SDK and JetBrains cross-platform tools. Steam compatibility was an expected surprise with most of my flagship titles working on Linux.
So after 1.5 years of leaving Windows I can't see myself going back, the disconnect of having a Desktop OS that works for you vs being hostage to an OS that Microsoft is using as a marketing channel for spyware and spamming their cloud services will only get worse over time.
I'm not sure if it's just the open source NVIDIA drivers that have improved it, but Wayland works very well on my system now. I tried a move from KDE (x11)->Hyprland last year, and it was not viable.
When I upgraded my system to NixOS 25.05 though, I changed a deprecated config option without much consideration, and accidentally migrated myself to KDE (Wayland). It took a little bit to notice anything was really that different.
Out of curiosity, I also installed Hyprland again, and none of the issues that I had previously are present. The only hard casualty in the switch has been Flameshot, and I had to switch my rofi package but it works fine.
Desktop Linux does not have good 'enterprise' group policy support compared to Windows. Neither does Mac. I think ChromeOS comes pretty close though.
And to be honest the need for this is as big if not bigger than on Windows. To take a random example - Control + Alt + F[1-6] switches you to a terminal with no explanation of how to get back. If you are a non technical user hitting that by mistake probably means a call to IT Support which is not advantageous to say the least. In Windows you'd set a group policy to disable that kind of thing, but there isn't a clear group policy 'standard' for Linux. You'd have to write a script that patches xorg.conf to disable it.
That's just one tiny example, I think there will be thousands of these small things. The other big blocker is support for Word/Excel docs. LibreOffice gets you so far there but I suspect there will be thousands (millions?) of complex docs/excel sheets with macros and what not that tend not to play ball. This is a huge job to migrate them all. Ironically this is a much bigger blocker I suspect than software itself as apart from this nearly everything is web based.
It's all very doable but requires a lot of work to get right. Basically someone needs to come along with something like Omakub but for non technical users, with a central server for managing it all.
I haven't really seen any polished projects for this, though maybe the 'enterprise' version of Ubuntu has this kind of stuff nailed?
And perhaps this Danish project actually ends up with something very usable for this. But it is very far from just installing YOLO installing Ubuntu.
I got curious about what our total budget looked like, so I started digging into the towns official budget which is available online. My small town is somehow paying over $70,000 a year for Office 365 seats! Doing the math even at the more expensive government tiers, that's still ~1,000 seats which I can't believe we have anywhere near that many employees.
I'm not close enough to the problem to know if it's practical or not, but it really seems like at the very least we could move the majority of people to LibreOffice and save the town a bit of money.
> It'll migrate about half of the Ministry of Digital Affairs away from Windows this summer
>The Politiken article has been corrected. They're dropping Microsoft Office but not Windows. They might in the future, that seems to be the general trend, but in this case the minister said they're dropping Microsoft services and interviewer misinterpreted that as including Windows.
A lot of debate at the moment about digital sovereignty, with a very trusted ally threatening to annex Greenland while perhaps shifting its internal power structure (courts vs executive powers) while also continuing a trend of increased executive power over private companies (NSL etc.)
Meanwhile, EU is apparently way behind both China and US in high-tech industry and digital infrastructure in general and AI technology in particular.
So it's a welcome discourse - we really should go through the threat scenarios, in light of the changed parameters. My observations:
* Consider: Could the society function if major cloud services (say, Microsoft 365 or Azure's IaaS services) - were suddenly nullrouted from Denmark? (Keep in mind that Denmark is heavily digitalized in both the private and public sectors)
* While that not a likely scenario, it's no longer an unthinkable scenario, which it seemed to be in 2024. If it's not unthinkable, it could quickly become a credible threat. "Surrender Greenland, or else..."
* Public sector Denmark is very much a "Microsoft first" country, 99.9% of desktops, office networks and productivity. On back-ends, MS is maybe not so big at the state-level systems, but quite dominant at regional and municipal levels.
* Due to GDPR (and various related side quests), public Denmark has been slow-ish in moving to cloud infrastructure, but e.g. Microsoft 365 is gaining marketshare over locally or semi centralized hosted Exchange servers. So the blast radius is unclear.
* At the same time, Microsoft is taking home quite substantial license fees. The minister's reaction could also play into that.
However, the thing to note is that the Ministry of Digital Affairs is a small ministry. While they control some key infrastructure components (few of which run on Windows, AFAIK), they are not at all responsible for choosing other administrative bodies' choice of office suite or the bargaining with Microsoft. In practice, that power is held by the Ministry of Finance, as is so much else. They might be seeing things differently.
Interesting times indeed. And certainly long overdue to consider alternatives realistically and reduce vendor lock-in where feasible.
Would you use an operating system or cloud services provided by a nation you are at war with?
Not long ago there were many countries that would have considered a future where they are at war with the United States to be impossible. A lot of those countries can now see paths to that happening,
Could this be a Detroit moment?
Update: Danish ministry only ditching Microsoft Office, but Windows is staying on their PCs
The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234552
Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44255352
(It's not the same newsworthiness if it's 100 thousands thousands, a a few ones in the office of the intern for some underfunded local department.)
The minister of IT and digitalisation has communicated that her department would try to move from windows to FOSS.
Look it up. And stop believing these sensational stories.
Do you have a better source?
https://www.digmin.dk/digitalisering/nyheder/nyhedsarkiv/202...
Denmark must become less dependent on the major tech giants when it comes to digital solutions in the public sector. Therefore, the Ministry of Digitalization is now starting to test a new open source solution.
This week, the Ministry of Digitalization is launching a new pilot project, where a group of employees will begin testing an open source alternative to the Microsoft Office suite.
Specifically, the open source platform in question is Collabora, which is based on the open source software LibreOffice. The employees in the Ministry of Digitalization’s department participating in the pilot project will have the Office suite in their case management system replaced with Collabora.
"As minister, I’ve spoken about the need to challenge our digital independence. Now we’re taking the first step ourselves in the Ministry of Digitalization with this new pilot project. I don’t delude myself into thinking that this means we’re ready to kick the tech giants out tomorrow, but I see it as a welcome step in the right direction. As politicians, we have an obligation to ensure that our IT systems in the future aren’t dependent on a few large companies," says Minister for Digitalization Caroline Stage.
The ministry is beginning tests of a new integrated document editing module in the F2 case management system, based on the open source platform Collabora built on LibreOffice. This means that ministry employees will test an alternative to the Microsoft Office suite and use open source document editing tools instead of Microsoft’s solutions like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
The solution will be rolled out for broader testing in the Ministry of Digitalization’s department on June 19, 2025. At that time, a group of departmental employees will have their Office suite in F2 replaced with the open source alternative. In the months that follow, the ministry will monitor and test whether Collabora can support the ministry’s workflows and needs in a satisfactory manner.
The upcoming testing work will focus, among other things, on functionality related to the ministry’s templates, formatting for government cases, use of 'track changes', tables, etc., and whether the solution can handle conversion to and from Word format without altering the layout of documents.
If the test period proceeds satisfactorily, the next step is expected to be a broader rollout of the open source alternative throughout the department.