Comment by bradley13
16 hours ago
That's great, but it's always just one agency, or one very local bit of government. If we (Europeans) really mean it - and we should - the top level of government just needs to make the declaration: as of X, all Microsoft licenses will be terminated. No exceptions. Adapt or die.
According to the CLOUD act, the US government can demand access to data from US companies, regardless of where that data is stored. That must be unacceptable to any sovereign government. I genuinely do not understand why other countries put up with this.
I am Danish, working with IT in the private sector, but with regular contact to the public sector.
I can assure you that there is plenty of other agencies, ministries, municipalities, private companies etc. in both Denmark and other European countries looking into switching to non-American software.
"Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier. Everybody asks about it it. Everybody plans around it.
Although the weaning off will take many years, and although European companies and governments will probably never be entirely without American software, and why should they, the American dominance will disappear, little by little. For better or worse, the American Century is coming to an end, also in IT.
> "Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier.
I hope you're right! I'm a backend dev and engineer, and I would love to specialize in helping companies off US cloud. Haven't found a lot of interest here in Norway so far..
In my experience, companies are perfectly happy with US companies, as long as the data doesn't leave Europe. This means we have to prove we only store data in European datacenters.
I guess that's fine for now, but it would be better if we could get European alternatives to AWS or GCP.
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I really hope the EU is serious about this and doesn't change its mind with the next American administration who offers hugs and kisses.
Second that, even though it seems that there is nothing happening yet, many companies and government agencies in all of Europe are aware of their hard Microsoft dependency and are looking / coordinating to leave.
Same with Atlassian Confluence / Jira.
(Source: Working in a state owend company in a EU member country)
Everyone in the American IT world has been trying to leave Microsoft and Google for decades. In that case, the problem isn't IT push, it's that users refuse to learn new software. I can guess it's the same in Europe.
It's maybe harder in Europe, because you also have fragmentation. For example, Californians are fine using software from New York. Same, same. But Germany prefers to use German software, so far. This makes it even harder, I would guess, for EU developers to establish a thriving standard.
What counts as data sovereignty in your book? Are the sovereign clouds of AWS, MS, Google acceptable? If not, who are your preferred providers?
There are no such thing as sovereign AWS/Google cloud in Europe. Marketing-wise maybe.
They're largely not unless you are looking to appease your superiors.
OVH, Telecity, Hezner, Bahnhof, Tele2 etc;etc;etc;etc;etc; are all valid suppliers without the need to buy from hyperscalers.
I think what tends to work though is the idea that someone in redmond can't arbitrarily decide to shut you down as an individual or exert pressure. So it goes in order of importance:
A) Can we buy the software and use it in perpetuity
B) If we can't buy the software in perpetuity, do we at least control who has access to the software and our data
C) If we can't control who has access to the data then can we at least ensure we always have access to it?
D) If we can't ensure we have access to our own data then what are we even doing here?
Depending on where you fall on this line (which is a decision each government must make) you'll have to claw back something because right now we're all on D.
Should we discuss DNS root servers at some point too?
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The US passed the CLOUD Act which subject all those sovereign clouds run by US companies completely subject to US spying and hijack.
Those offerings are garbage for anyone outside the US.
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> If not, who are your preferred providers?
Can we have fully decentralized mesh networking yet?
I love how some hyper-sci-fi settings have the concept of a "datasphere" (analogous to atmosphere): an actual physical cloud of ubiquitous nanorobots that provide connectivity, storage and computation.
Wouldn't that also be ideal for AI too the way it's shaping up to be? Any device anywhere would just need to connect to a signal "neuron" of the global brain (possibly becoming a neuron itself) and it should theoretically be able to fetch anything.
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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.
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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).
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Investment and long term maintenance costs are usually not worth it. All is good until there’s a self induced outage and your boss has to take the blame (and not Microsoft)
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.
> If we (Europeans) really mean it - and we should - the top level of government just needs to make the declaration: as of X, all Microsoft licenses will be terminated. No exceptions. Adapt or die.
This is insane. This is sacrificing the well-being of your constituents to send a (minor) political message. The amount of service degradation (including actual physical health) that you'd put your citizens through would be unbelievable.
Only those who are extraordinarily stupid or outright malicious decide to deprecate important services before first assessing the needs of every dependent on that service, and then ensuring that a full replacement is in place.
"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.
Well, if your goal is to be 100% the same as what Microsoft offer, then sure no there's not. But that's letting them set the goalposts.
If you look at the features you actually need and are willing to explore different ways of doing things that are not exactly like M365 there's more options. France and Germany are also working on freeing themselves from M365.
This kinda thing sounds a lot like those RFPs that were specifically written so they could only be fulfilled by Microsoft because it was just a list of their feature tickboxes.
> But that's letting them set the goalposts.
This is missed in so, so very many discussions out there.
You can reproduce about 50-75% of what MS offers with FOSS and work on writing the rest in-house/in-EU.
Would a bunch of workflows suffer initially? Sure, but not even trying is just preseving the status quo.
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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://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-propose-permanent...
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The problem is that Google only covers "most of it", so even if it covers 99% of use cases, for that cases where it doesn't, companies still need MS Office.
I worked for a startup that was all OSX desktops and Google Docs. Then when we hit 100 employees, the finance department required MS Office, so they used Office for Mac, then as we grew, they needed real MS Office running in Windows, so they ran Windows in Parallels, then as we continued to grow they moved to full Windows laptops. When I left the company (at around 1000 employees), almost a third of the company was on Windows (mostly in Finance, Sales, and other business departments). And the team supporting the 2/3 Mac desktops was about 1/3 the size of the team supporting Windows.
Though I suppose it's easier for a government to move off Microsoft. When an investor tells you to use their financial modeling software that only works with MS Excel, it's pretty hard for a small company to refuse, but a government has more power to force others to conform to their choice.
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They're competitive but they're not drop-in replacements. Even office for Mac is not a drop-in replacement for office on Windows. It's pretty trivial to find significant differences that will be in use in any large organization.
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After using both extensively, there is no comparison between Google and the MS suite. Google’s apps are like a toy version of MS Office.
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The best time to do this was ~2010 before all of the cloud lock-in stuff.
The second best time is now.
What I find interesting, and reflects my ignorance of how these things are used, is that if you look at, say, FAANG companies, Office isn't used. I've worked for two FAANGs over the past couple of years, and everything is done via Google docs. Replacing a giant suite like Office looks hard, replacing something simpler like Google docs looks very much simpler, and surely should suffice?
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
Its not the basic mail and calendar functionality that drives large business to Microsoft (and to a lesser degree Google). It's really not anything that a normal user would see in an average role.
Email in a large organization requires things like central management, compliance with retention policies and other regulations, data loss prevention, encryption standards, auditing and ediscovery capabilities, etc.
Yes and they keep blocking features in Firefox on Linux. When I change the user agent to match edge on windows things suddenly work fine.
When it's set to Firefox attachment uploads don't work and ever morning it jumps to "please wait while we're signing you out..." when i never asked for that. When it thinks it's edge it just stays signed in.
Not to mention the huge amount of telemetry I need to block with ublock origin.
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).
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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.
> The lock in only exists in brains of (old) people that can't adapt.
I think this is a little superficial. There will be mountains of existing Word/Excel/Powerpoint documents that would need converting, as well as configured permissions structures and remotely managed laptop configurations that currently are working well. Of course anything is possible given enough time and money. The real issue isn't to do with your ageism. It's whether that time and money is best spent on this particular area.
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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.
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There's not even a reasonable FOSS calendar for Linux that integrates with email. Thunderbird has it, but it doesn't work with Google's Advanced Protection for instance.
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> Sharepoint (god I fucking hate Sharepoint)
Same with SharePoint here. I've never seen it not turn into a steaming pile of shit within months of deployment where nobody can find anything.
The way teams and yammer auto create groups left right and center in it doesn't help. And its search function is less than useless.
This is in fact the main thing I use copilot for, to find stuff in that mess.
Okay... and what about Intune? (Device management)
Entra? (User management and policy)
Office 365 Exchange?
Excel? (Finance runs on custom Excel macros and sheets)
Teams?
Office 365 in general, security, DLP, MFA?
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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?)
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> [...] anymore after Trump.
We shouldn't have waited until Trump, we had clear signs of distrust when the Americans were spying on Angela Merkel and other European officials [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spie...
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> That's great, but it's always just one agency, or one very local bit of government.
Transitioning every system wholesale at once, is not gonna happen.
I rather have our governents and agencies do it step by step than not at all.
It won’t but it creates a sense of urgency.
Not exactly the best conditions for making good and measured choices, I'd prefer if we didn't add more urgency than what most of us (Europeans) feel already. Everyone already have it on their mind when making purchasing decisions now, no need to also make those people do rash decisions.
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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
See la suite in France.
They have an extensive history in this too. The gendarmerie even has their own Linux distro for their workstations.
> 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.
I don't believe that's true any longer. The U.S. moves over Greenland have a large part to play in this, but I think the sanctioning of the International Criminal Court is much more relevant.
Overnight ICC officials couldn't access email, documents etc, all because the U.S. government leaned on Microsoft. If they can do it to a United Nations court they can and will do it to anyone.
Spending money on a system you don't have any control over doesn't make sense. The public understand this.
> 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...
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Framing lobby as corruption would take care of those Mega corporations.
That was true in the time when Munich went Linux yes.
It's no longer true. There's a huge public moment to move away from all things American since Trump and his tariff wars and putting NATO at risk. A lot of people I know are now factoring this in to their purchasing choices and there's a lot more empathy for employers changing things.
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> It's a thankless and tough battle for politicians, because they face lobbying and media pressure against them.
Awwww, poor babies.
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...
> 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.
Every journey starts with the first step... And those steps are finally being taken now. Don't see why this kind of naysaying would be the top comment here
> 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.
"put up with this" implies they have a choice.
> Adapt or die.
Yeah, no. That's not how government works - thankfully. I don't want my water to stop flowing just because someone decided to be drastic about software changes.
I agree with you in that all governments should be using open source software, for the record.
But governments are big machines and you can't steer them like a sports car. In some cases, the massive inertia they have can even be a good thing - a crazy guy can't just be elected one day, start issuing presidential mandates, and then expect them to happen immediately, for example.
A lot of hospitals run Microsoft. So it would be literal death you are talking about.
A lot of hospitals and healthcare systems in Europe use the open source EMR platform. No ones charts are in .docx format, it is not life or death, lets be serious.
Hospitals are also planning documents, budgets, schedules, grants, reports, all with different access levels, privacy requirements, and legal regulations.
They're far more than just patient care in the moment.
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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
There's no point in having a parallel software "infrastructure". In fact, it's a choice well known for never working.
Either your main architecture handles something or it doesn't get handled.
> That must be unacceptable to any sovereign government.
Is it OK for a French sovereign government if a German government can demand access to its data?
>top level of government just needs to make the declaration: as of X, all Microsoft licenses will be terminated. No exceptions. Adapt or die
This is unrealistic populism. The type that gets upvoted on HN, apparently. It's not possible to just ditch all Microsoft licenses in a year, or in 5 years, or in 10 years. There are hundreds of critical systems that can't just be migrated to Linux overnight (or ever). And "just dying" is... not an option for a government branch. What is this even supposed to mean.
But we can limit American bigtech by 90%, and we should. Especially everything in the cloud.
It honestly doesn't make any sense. Interestingly, India was bold enough to move its government infra to Zoho's office suite cutting all reliance on Microsoft. It's only sane that other countries do the same.
Indeed. I also fail to see how the existence of the CLOUD act, and thus use of any US company, is compatible with GDPR.
See https://www.exoscale.com/blog/cloudact-vs-gdpr/
( Though note exoscale, as a European provider has skin in the game here ).
Well governments need to wake up and realize that if they aren't the US and even if they are the US, open source provides most of the basic building blocks of what you're going to build independent non-corporate controlled and non-external-state controlled software
So fund it!
Governments burn billions of dollars on defense which really is just an economic waste outside of the deterrent effect it does from getting invaded.
Investing in open source to enable you to be software independent and protected, not only is it providing some measure of electronic and economic defense, it improves software for you and your allies.
You get return on your investment.
>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 (not overtly, but the feelers are obvious to anyone with any sense of the moment), and they're going to make that choice themselves. Now that the US is relegated to worldwide joke/idiocracy, and it really is rapidly becoming a unipolar world, it's really the only rational choice.
But I guess the US has the pathetic joke of the Board of Peace, or their close allies El Salvador and new puppet state Venezuela. What a disgrace.
>Taiwan recently re-engaged in diplomatic unification talks with China
That's news to me, got any good articles on the topic?
Why shouldn't the USA sanction a clear overstep of authority? Neither the USA or Israel are part of the ICC.
Overstep?
ICC members make judgements that are abided by ICC member states. They have every authority to make those judgments, and it does not matter what the busted idiocracy US of A, acting as a pathetic supplicant state for their boss Israel, thinks about it.
Maybe Trump can complain to his unbelievably pathetic Board of Peace. Christ.
The war criminal Netanyahu can stick to the rogue shitholes he is welcomed at. The US -- which btw is currently engaged in BLATANTLY criminal activities in a number of venues -- can get fucked. The US has *ZERO* authority to tell members of the ICC who or what they can declare a warcrime, or who members of the ICC will hold to account if they enter their country.
What a bizarre take.
And yes, the US can sanction whoever they want, but such actions are far from free.. When every American firm is sent packing, enjoy the results. And yes, American payment processors are discovering in super-rapid quicktime how this rogue cabal of war criminal, paedos and criminal grifters are destroying their future.
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> 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.
You forgot Trumps best butt-buddy: Putin.
Also, they haven't actually done it yet. Announcements are easy. Implementation is hard, and most of them fail.
Wake me up when they actually do it.
"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?
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.
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/
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.
Time is not a problem. Keeping up with Microsoft takes time and investment too. Especially right now as they're changing stuff around on a monthly basis in their rabiate urge to sell copilot.
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 UK was evil for wanting more sovereignty vs the EU
I don't think many thought the UK was evil.
I think many thought the UK had been sold a bag of lies, and that exiting based on a very slim majority of voters on a referendum was a bad idea.
Have you ever even used OpenOffice? It's 50 years behind.
OpenOffice is 15 or so years behind but LibreOffice isn't. LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice in 2011 and the vast majority of volunteers working on it left the OpenOffice project and kept working on LibreOffice.
Anyone still using OpenOffice probably doesn't realize they would likely be much better off using LibreOffice instead.
OpenOffice doesn't support docx or xlsx but LibreOffice supports them much better.
Or at least a decade behind, which should be surprising given that it hasn’t been actively developed in about a decade.
Honestly, I hadn't used Microsoft Office in 15 years, and it somehow went 20 years backwards in that time.
You make it sound like a noble act of sacrifice but the employees are all still getting paid. The real people who will be hurt are the citizens relying on their government to function, and telling a bunch of government employees of varying competence levels to "suck it up and adapt to your workflow being broken" will throw a real wrench in that.
> telling a bunch of government employees of varying competence levels to "suck it up and adapt to your workflow being broken" will throw a real wrench in that.
I will weep on the day when the great Europe is defeated by people being unable to use a slightly different spreadsheet program, word processor, or a file sharing solution.
But yeah, the argument about "adapt or die" is also way off base. Ideally it'd be a gradual migration, all low hanging fruit first, seeing what works and what doesn't.
> The real people who will be hurt are the citizens relying on their government to function
You make it sound like the current Microsoft stack is so insanely great it will be impossible to replace.
Yes, change is hard, but there are also massive upsides in switching to something better.