ICC ditches Microsoft 365 for openDesk

Have you tried LibreOffice ( https://www.libreoffice.org/ ) or OnlyOffice ( https://www.onlyoffice.com/desktop )? Both are pretty decent, and free, and also have commercial versions.

flexagoon• 9 months ago

It seems to be just a collection of various open source components in an enterprise package with a bunch of features and integrations for companies. If you just want someone for personal use, check out Cryptpad, which is what openDesk uses for it's office component.

schnatterer• 9 months ago

OpenDesk is basically a huge helm file that configures the individual apps. Given enough RAM it should be rather simple to deploy. You can start right away, there is a community edition: https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/deployment/opendesk

bix6• 9 months ago

No Excel replacement? :/

dybber• 9 months ago

From openDesk website:

Create, edit and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations with full support for all major file formats

turtlebits• 9 months ago

It's missing from the list of their products though :(

https://www.opendesk.eu/en/product

opencl• 9 months ago

The document editing portion just uses Collabora which is based on Libreoffice.

erk__• 9 months ago

The Excel replacement they use is this one: https://www.collaboraonline.com/calc/

pjmlp• 9 months ago

After Microsoft left politics mess up with their customer base something like that was to be expected.

bhouston• 9 months ago

Microsoft has to follow US sanctions, even if they are misplaced. This isn't a choice on Microsoft's part here.

The ICC was applauded in the US in the when it went after Russia but when it goes after Israel it is sanctioned. It unfortunately hard to be impartial, like the ICC is, when it comes to international war crimes. The big players want you to play towards their favourites and only hold their enemies accountable.

The US is also sanctioning Palestinian human rights groups, and kicking them off of US platforms like YouTube, because they make Israel look bad: https://theintercept.com/2025/11/04/youtube-google-israel-pa...

sdoering• 9 months ago

Exactly what the big German corporations (as well as Ford by the way) did in the 1930s.

reubenmorais• 9 months ago

Nobody has to do anything, least of all massive corporations with country-sized revenues. It's /always/ a choice to comply or to put up a fight and deal with the consequences.

guiriduro3• 9 months ago

MS could always refocus themselves as a global company (in the legal rather than marketing-only sense), and move their HQ out of the US, then there could be no Trump tantrums affecting other countries, the worse that could happen would be some sanctions on what would then be their in-country US affiliate, with no ability to affect their other global operations whatsoever. Why haven't they followed this approach? Haven't lost enough customers yet?

JumpCrisscross3• 9 months ago

Microsoft has to follow US sanctions

Microsoft has to follow US law. If it believes an order has been issued unlawfully, it—and everyone who works there who follows the order—has a civic duty to oppose the order in court.

impossiblefork• 9 months ago

Microsoft employees in the EU are committing a crime if they do participate in the sanctions though.

There's an EU law, 'blocking statue' which also means that contracts can't be broken with reference sanctions even if the contracts themselves say they can be, and the services must be provided anyway.

This isn't GDPR type stuff. This is a path to infinite fines. Ending up jail for years is also a distinct possibility if you help people access their data, since spying on these institutions is actually treated as espionage. We recently passed a law here in Sweden forbidding espionage against international organizations in which Sweden is part.

marcosdumay• 9 months ago

As soon as they stole control from their customers computers, "leaving politics mess up with their customer base" was inevitable.

Or rather, stealing control from their customers computers is already leaving politics mess up with the customers.

bawolff9• 9 months ago

I think the bigger question is why they were using microsoft products in the first place.

USA has been very hostile to the ICC under trump, but its not exactly a huge shift, bush was also incredibly hostile. It seems borderline incompetent to use a microsoft cloud offering given the political situation.

Not to mention given the type of work they do, seems like hosting stuff off site at all is a bad plan.

lysace3• 9 months ago

USA has been very hostile to the ICC since way before Trump.

The ICC was created in 1998 when Bill Clinton was president of the USA. He never ratified the Rome treaty. And then GW, Obama, Trump and Biden didn't either.

Very few americans batted an eye as far as I could tell. Your are after all by definition exceptional. (/s)

chvid2• 9 months ago

No one thought the US would get this insane.

tharne2• 9 months ago

This is not a U.S. specific issue. Once you strip away all of the formalities, titles, and ceremonies, you'll realize there's no such thing as international law, at least not in any meaningful sense of the word.

The law, by definition is a rule backed up by the use of force, specifically state-sanctioned violence. If you write a law but do not have the ability to use a sufficient amount violence to enforce it when needed, you don't have a law at all, you just have a suggestion around how you'd like people and countries to behave.

The only way you could ever have anything resembling "international law", would be to have some sort of global military or police force capable of exerting enough violence to ensure that the law is followed, and I'm not even sure how such a thing would work.

epistasis2• 9 months ago

Bill Clinton was president of the USA. He never ratified the Rome treaty. And then GW, Obama, Trump and Biden didn't either.

Small point of order, but it is the Senate that ratifies treaties and not presidents. The Senate is heavily biased to overrepresent rural areas, which tend to be very conservative, and only 40% of senators can stop any ratification. The ICC has been the subject of massive amounts of conspiracy theories and misinformation in conservative media, so there's approximately zero chance that it could ever be ratified, unless the Senate's structure was made more representative of the people of the US rather than a conspiracy-minded subset.

If the Senate was a democratic representation of the will of the US it would not be hard to ratify the treaty.

kergonath2• 9 months ago

I think the bigger question is why they were using microsoft products in the first place.

There used to be this quaint idea of rule of law and things like that. We can always argue that governments were happy to get dirty and occasionally illegal, and they certainly were. But a) it was universally seen as a bad thing, and b) no country would have done it so blatantly and openly. Perversely, this narrative was important to advance the US’ interests because it opened opportunities for American companies to go deep into foreign administrations. Which they did.

So yeah, the clock ticked and now we’re in a new and exciting era for geopolitics and who knows what system will prevail in the end. What is certain is that the US abdicated their leadership.

USA has been very hostile to the ICC under trump, but its not exactly a huge shift, bush was also incredibly hostile. It seems borderline incompetent to use a microsoft cloud offering given the political situation.

There is a difference between hostility as in "we won’t take part and won’t cooperate in any way" and "we’re also going to pressure private companies to steal your stuff". The ICC is also full of NATO countries and allies so any form of hostility has to be calibrated to keep them on your side. If you care about alliances, that is.

Not to mention given the type of work they do, seems like hosting stuff off site at all is a bad plan.

Indeed. To be fair, it seems like a bad plan for most large companies with anything that looks like industrial secrets, let alone a government or such a supra-national organisation.

themgt• 9 months ago

So yeah, the clock ticked and now we’re in a new and exciting era for geopolitics and who knows what system will prevail in the end. What is certain is that the US abdicated their leadership.

In fact John Yoo, most famous for authoring the "Torture Memos" for Dubya over 20 years ago, has been perhaps the most prominent legal thinker arguing in favor of the actions Trump's taken against the ICC:

What can the incoming Trump administration do? It could impose severe sanctions on the ICC judges and its prosecutor, Karim Ahmad Khan, who engineered this debacle, by blocking their ability to transact business through our banking system, for example. It could threaten severe sanctions against any nation that arrested Netanyahu or Gallant pursuant to the ICC warrants. It could also display its contempt for the ICC by inviting the Israeli premier to the White House and Congress.

Furthermore, the Trump administration should take action against nations that are funding and supporting the ICC so generously. Some of the ICC’s largest financial benefactors, including Japan and the European Union nations, are also dependent on the United States for their security. Yet while asking Washington, D.C., to protect them, they finance a global institution that hamstrings our ability to do so. If Tokyo, for example, wants the United States to lead a new alliance to contain China, Trump can demand that Japan eliminate its subsidy for an international institution that seeks to undermine the American national sovereignty he was elected to restore.

There's a nearly straight through-line from the logic and approach to executive power Yoo helped architect under Bush and these attacks on the ICC under Trump. It's just that many have decided to bizarrely retcon the Bush administration into respected elder statesman instead of the lawless war criminals they were and are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_Memos

https://www.aei.org/op-eds/why-international-arrest-warrants...

munk-a2• 9 months ago

Lobbying - and likely a fair amount of network pressure from legal systems in various nations that lean towards using office for internal documents as a default.

repelsteeltje2• 9 months ago

That, and it's solid, well supported software most people are familiar with.

From those doing the paperwork with Microsoft procurement for Dutch government I learned there have been legal disputes going on for years about what even constitutes "telemetry". That was a decade ago, and even then there was push to move away from Microsoft in the government. Toward open source, or even Oracle.

I suppose that with the Dutch being Dutch all the lobbying M$ needed was suggesting a discount.

iso16312• 9 months ago

No doubt they started using it in the 90s when you bought a copy of software, and Microsoft had no control over your computer.

thewebguyd• 9 months ago

The story of Microsoft's stack in a nutshell and why everyone is still so dependent on it. Migration is hard, and it only gets harder the longer you've built yourself on top of a particular technology.

Microsoft offered what basically amounted to "IT in a box." You got identity, email/groupware, an office suite, and an OS that ran on just about any IBM compatible PC and your own servers. You paid for the license, and then you controlled and hosted it after that. Microsoft was content to let you do whatever the hell you wanted with their software, and stuck to their promise to not break shit (backward compatibility for Win32).

That everything is now cloud hosted and stuffed with telemetry was a big rug pull, but it's not like everyone could just up and migrate to something else (and what else, for that matter, there's not much out there that matches). It was literally just this year that on-prem exchange support ended for the one-time purchase license, but even then on-prem is still available via subscription.

Microsoft gave every incentive in the world to get enterprises to stick with their stack, and it worked, so it's no wonder people are just now starting to panic a little and look for alternatives.

bawolff9• 9 months ago

They were created july 2022. USA started threatening one month later in august.

nitwit0052• 9 months ago

It's basically the "No one gets fired for buying IBM" effect. Microsoft became the default. Everyone was familiar with it, and knew it would work.

tharne2• 9 months ago

People tend to underestimate the value of a solution that folks, especially less technical folks, are already trained on, comfortable with, and one that is known to work as expected.

guerrilla• 9 months ago

I'm sure people get killed all the time for using American services. It's just that they were all brown "terrorists", not liberal Intitutions situated in Europe, until now that is.

DeathArrow• 9 months ago

I know how to use MS Office. All my colleagues know how to use MS Office. People want to solve their daily problems, not learn how to use new software.

margorczynski• 9 months ago

That's a very simplistic view of what Microsoft offers. They don't sell an office software package but a very robust solution for running the software side of a business.

The OS, office package, email (server and client), calendar, cloud & backup, BI, etc. all aligned work almost seamlessly with each other (compared to the alternatives for sure).

Nothing on the market comes close and that is the reason they are worth trillions, not because they use closed formats.

SuperNinKenDo• 9 months ago

I agree this is a big part of it.

Office sucks?: "Man Office sucks these days."

The "weird" alternative you expended political capital to put everyone on works slightly differently or lacks a feature out of the box?: "What were you thinking?!"

amelius• 9 months ago

It was basically "if the US ever plays this card, all hell will break loose for their IT companies". So ICC and others simply assumed it would not happen.

Johnny5552• 9 months ago

The same reason most organizations use it -- inertia and because it's been the standard for so long, it's the best at what it does.

The startup I used to work at was exclusively on OSX + GoogleDocs, when we were small, but as we grew (and especially when the Finance team grew) more and more employees found a need for the MS Office Suite as well as apps that only run on Windows, so they started rolling out Windows VM's and then full Windows machines.

booi• 9 months ago

I'm curious which apps only run on Windows. We are also a MacOS + Google Workspace shop and the microsoft requirements have been slowly seeping in.

vladms2• 9 months ago

How much do you think they should spend on IT to be independent from Microsoft (serious question) ? Wikipedia mentions they employ 800 persons working in several buildings and a detention center for a budget of 141 million USD.

Microsoft O365 Business Premium per person is 22 USD per month so total per year is ~200k USD (online price, I imagine they can negotiate a bit for that amount of people).

spwa42• 9 months ago

Do you mean just the ICC ... or all government organizations in the same boat, just not necessarily realizing it yet, inside the EU?

bawolff9• 9 months ago

I think its a core requirement of their mission, so essentially whatever is neccesary.

Their job is to investigate war criminal despite the usa trying to block them. Its not out of the question that nsa/cia/etc would use their ties at microsoft to try and get an advanced peek at the prosecution's case.

Yes all this is expensive. Their mission is not a cheap one. Doing it right costs money.

P.s. initially i mistead and got a laugh out of the idea of wikipedia operating a detention center.

cge• 9 months ago

I think the bigger question is why they were using microsoft products in the first place.

Public institutions in Europe, in my experience, often have a confusing insistence on using Microsoft cloud products. Universities heavily push Office 365 and Teams, often trying to demand that faculty use them, while faculty continue to use alternatives as much as possible in order to actually work effectively. During the pandemic, the only online conferences I attended that insisted on running via Teams, against all reason, were run by a UK public institution, and they had as many embarrassing technical problems as might be expected.

This is despite Microsoft's cloud services being generally designed for businesses and often poorly suited for public institutions, especially universities. The services are fundamentally built with the assumption that work will primarily take place within a single organization, with clearly defined employees. European research collaborations constantly seem to be hobbled by needing to use hacks around this assumption, but the inexplicable importance of using Microsoft seems to outweigh these problems. In the most ridiculous case, a conference online during the pandemic asked everyone during registration to please not register using their university email address, but to use a personal one not associated with any Office 365 account, because they had no way of allowing access to Teams if the email address was managed by Microsoft at a different university. Yet still the importance of using Teams was paramount to the organizers.

I have had no clear explanation of why using Microsoft services is so important, despite them being so poorly suited to the institutions, so opposed (and often just not used) by many of the actual users, and arguably being used in ways that they are not really intended to be used. I've had some people claim it is necessary for GDPR compliance, despite the GDPR compliance of any US company being on shaky ground. Microsoft itself has described what seem like rather extensive contingency plans around US-enforced GDPR violations or requirements for service cutoffs (there is a blog post somewhere), but these must also imply a fear that such things could actually happen (and, of course, actually did happen with the ICC). It all seems rather strange.

tiahura• 9 months ago

Because libreoffice is so poor.

tptacek• 9 months ago

Does someone have an English language link for this?

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

perihelions2• 9 months ago

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/31/international_crimina... ("International Criminal Court kicks Microsoft Office to the curb / "Rough justice? Redmond out as Germany's openDesk judged a better fit" (Oct. 31))

Elfener3• 9 months ago

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/31/international_crimina...

(was submitted to HN 3 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45797515)

firefax• 9 months ago

Firefox translate seems to work fine on it.

Elfener3• 9 months ago

It's actually not called Microsoft 365, but "the Microsoft 365 Copilot app" (not to be confused with Microsoft Copilot (a slop generator with the same logo))

iammjm• 9 months ago

It IS called Microsoft 365

Elfener3• 9 months ago

No, they've renamed it due to "now with the power of AI": https://www.office.com/

Edit: and actually, just recently it was even more direct with it: https://web.archive.org/web/20251105125410/https://www.offic...

bonyt• 9 months ago

Looks like openDesk uses Collabora Online, which is itself based on libreoffice online - web based libreoffice.

https://www.opendesk.eu/en/product#document-management ("Collabora Online powers openDesk with a robust office suite designed for efficient teamwork and secure document editing.")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collabora_Online ("Collabora Online (often abbreviated as COOL) is an open-source online office suite developed by Collabora, based on LibreOffice Online, the web-based edition of the LibreOffice office suite.")

trelane• 9 months ago

More than that--Collabora is a major (maybe the biggest) contributor to LibreOffice.

slwvx• 9 months ago

The lack of anything at all on the roadmap page [1] and lack of a link to their code repository on a blog post touting their open-source cred [2] does not build confidence. I found their code repo link in the comments here, after not finding it easily on their site.

EDIT: to be clear, I'm all for open source software, and for more options to tools from big tech firms.

[1] https://www.opendesk.eu/en/roadmap

[2] https://www.opendesk.eu/en/blog/open-source-software-trust

Lapel2742• 9 months ago

At least they seem to be actively working on it:

https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk

They have some real users too. I know of some out of my head. According to ChatGPT:

- Robert Koch Institute (RKI) – entered a contract on 11 June 2025 to use openDesk as the technical basis for the “Agora” platform for public‑health authorities.

- BWI GmbH – the IT infrastructure provider for the German armed forces (Bundeswehr); signed a framework contract for openDesk.

- Bundesamt für Seeschifffahrt und Hydrographie – also mentioned as an early adopter of openDesk.

- Föderale IT‑Kooperation (FITKO) – listed as a user in the EU OSS Catalogue entry for openDesk.

I think I read that some German states use the software too.

You never know what will happen in the long run but the solution will probably be maintained for some time given it's backing by the federal government of Germany.

robertlagrant• 9 months ago

Robert Koch Institute (RKI) – entered a contract on 11 June 2025 to use openDesk as the technical basis for the “Agora” platform for public‑health authorities.

Wow - I was just thinking this would be good. Here in the UK Microsoft are slowly taking over healthcare with their terrible Dynamics 365 platform, and some competition would be really nice.

jraph• 9 months ago

I work for one of the several European companies building open source software that has been chosen as components of openDesk.

openDesk is solid, legit and serious.

Open source is a requirement. As such, money doesn't go to a startup building proprietary software that get bought a few years later by a big tech company and then all the investment is lost. They audit and check that licenses are open source and that the dependencies have compatible licenses.

It's publicly funded, by Germany* (for their needs, but it will grow larger than them). Their strategy is to give money to established European open source software companies so they improve their software in areas that matter to them, including integration features (user management, for instance, or file / event sharing with other software, many things) as well as accessibility. They take all these pieces of software and build a coherent (with a common theme / look & feel), turn-key, feature-rich suite. This strategic decision that has its drawbacks allows to get something fast with what exists today.

I'm not sure communication and the business strategy is all figured out / polished yet, but with the high profile institutions adopting it, it will come. Each involved companies wants this to succeed too.

I think this is huge. I'm quite enthusiastic. Software might not be perfect but with the potential momentum this thing has, it could improve fast, and each piece of open source software that is part of this as well along the way.

* see also caubin's comment

evolve2k• 9 months ago

Lawyers historically are notoriously linked to Microsoft and its formats as a somewhat unintentional industry side standard.

Moves like this hearten me as for certain lawyers the formats and standards they now will be expected to follow has just shifted, towards open source no less.

mikestew2• 9 months ago

I remember when lawyers historically used WordPerfect for the same reasons. Now, I don’t know the details of how that industry shifted (MS dominance and WP shitting the bed with their GUI versions would be my guess), but it shows that it is possible.

jeffwask• 9 months ago

I did MS Word support in the long long ago during its transition to dominance. There was nothing worse than getting a call from a lawyer who was forced off Word Perfect.

vincvinc• 9 months ago

"IMPOSING SANCTIONS ON THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT" (white house, feb 2025) https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/impo...

Microsoft admits in French court it can't keep EU data safe from US authorities (jul 2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45822902

yupyupyups• 9 months ago

Microsoft admits in French court it can't keep EU data safe from US authorities

Snowden leaked that fact before Microsoft made the admission. But it's good that it's coming from them officially nonetheless.

tokai• 9 months ago

It kind felt like the ramifications of Snowden's leak were so wast that everyone just chose to forget about it.

KaiserPro3• 9 months ago

Theres a difference between as an intelligence organisation having access to data, and "someone in power is angry because they watched a TV advert, I want to see what they know"

but, your over all picture is still, sadly correct.

whatever13• 9 months ago

I don’t understand why this is the case though.

Could MS create a new EU based company in which it just owns shares ?

Or is the US cloud act so wide that they can demand data from all the companies a us based company has equity in?

NoboruWataya• 9 months ago

MSFT already operates in Europe via subsidiaries for a whole host of reasons. But hiving certain assets off in a subsidiary is very rarely effective to avoid laws and regulations that apply to the parent. The parent controls the subsidiary so a court or regulator having jurisdiction over the parent could order it to get what it needs from the subsidiary. This is particularly so in the US, which is kind of known for enacting overreaching extraterritorial laws.

shiandow• 9 months ago

I'd be surprised if this isn't already the case. The extent to which you can do business in the EU without legal presence is limited.

It is not a huge amount of protection though. I mean we've already established that selling to 'terrorists' can be sanctioned even when selling through an intermediary. So what's stopping the US from ordering Microsoft to stop selling licenses to the ICC?

And then we've not touched on who is in control of the closed source of the many proprietary applications.

mattmaroon• 9 months ago

If you’re Microsoft do you really want to anger the federal government? Companies aren’t as cavalier about taking them on as they used to be. They’re likely Microsoft’s largest customer by far, and they have the power to end you (which they nearly did once).

KaiserPro3• 9 months ago

Could MS create a new EU based company in which it just owns shares ?

That would be a seperate company, plus if its licensing tech from MS then it's still vulnerable to supply chain attacks.

johannes1234321• 9 months ago

There are attempts to lösen the control from the U.S. side like a cooperation between Microsoft/Azure and SAP or Google and T-Systems (deutsche Telekom) where the German side would run an "air gapped" region of those cloud stacks.

However I believe the rates in the end were too high to win notable contracts, but I haven't followed along in a while.

https://www.heise.de/news/Digitale-Souveraenitaet-Microsoft-...

https://t3n.de/news/t-systems-sovereign-cloud-google-verwalt...

caubin• 9 months ago

Hei hei,

I'm working for the XWiki and CryptPad projects, which are integrated in openDesk. Here are a couple links / infos that can be interesting to understand the context of openDesk.

The openDesk project comes initially from an initiative of the Ministry of Interior of Germany in 2021, to build the alternative to Office 365. The project was progressively transferred in 2025 to a state-owned organization, the ZenDis (https://zendis.de), which oversees the global development of openDesk.

The source code is mainly available on https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk, where you will find mirrors of every project which is bundled into openDesk (Nextcloud, Collabora, Element, Univention, XWiki, Jitsi, OpenXchange, CryptPad, OpenProject, …)

There was also a couple public presentations about openDesk at FOSDEM during the past years :

* In 2024 : https://archive.fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3...

* In 2025 : https://archive.fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5...

evanjrowley• 9 months ago

I appreciate your comment. I'm thrilled to learn that CryptPad is part of the openDesk solution.

CryptPad was selected to join the German "Sovereign Workplace" project, now called openDesk.

https://blog.cryptpad.org/2025/01/28/CryptPad-Funding-Status...

Many more details in this blog post from XWiki: https://xwiki.com/en/Blog/XWiki-CryptPad-knowledge-managemen...

hda111• 9 months ago

CryptPad isn’t used for word processing or table calculations in openDesk. It’s super confusing how the tools were put together.

fxtentacle• 9 months ago

I find it fascinating to see how much power Germany's "digital sovereignty" initiative has gained. In the beginning, it looked like yet another government thingy that nobody will use. But by now, they must be well above 100k government employees using it daily.

Also, in case you missed that: StackIt is the AWS / G Cloud competitor by LIDL: https://www.stackit.de/en/ It's the basebone for their app strategy with 100 mio+ client installs and about 500k employees.

jacquesm4• 9 months ago

Every time this happens Microsoft either threatens to move out or promises to move in with a chunk of their operation. Blackmailing with jobs has been very effective for them.

testing22321• 9 months ago

It seems likely the ICC will issue an arrest warrant for Trump in the coming years. I see all their recent moves as a signal they want to distance themselves from the US so they can actually issue that warrant.

PenguinCoder• 9 months ago

There are quite a few reasons that should happen, but I won't hold my breath. And I that issuance really won't do anything worthwhile, except be a footnote in a history book.

mdhb• 9 months ago

I don’t think there is any way in hell the US is going to be welcome back on the world stage as a partner to any of their former allies again unless among many other things they put themselves under the ICCs jurisdiction.

ncr1003• 9 months ago

Trump's life-span is likely to not be a very large number of years from today given his age, and systemic health problems.

SO I expect ICC would find other people, e.g. Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, who are helping to commit these areguably war-crimes in the Pacific and Caribbean seas, the missile strikes against civilian non-US vessels.

pfortuny• 9 months ago

There seems to be no spreadsheet…

spwa42• 9 months ago

Will it matter if the whitehouse realizes that they control accepting of email from the icc's domains for at least 80% of the worlds' email addresses?

sixothree• 9 months ago

I think the more concerning thing is what happens when the trickle turns into a deluge

dang• 9 months ago

Related ongoing thread:

OpenDesk – a flexible all-in-one office suite for the public sector - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45838239 - Nov 2025 (19 comments)

amriksohata• 9 months ago

ditches is a strong word here, we change software providers for different tooling all the time

dependency on american corps is a bit weird, when they wont move away from windows just for one presendential term surely? trump will be out in X years. whats the point?

some of these organisations are now more politically aligned than ever questioning their neutrality

uvesten• 9 months ago

So, reading the documentation in the [repo](https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/deployment/opendesk/...) it’s immediately made clear that you should use the Enterprise Edition for production use. (Since the German state is behind this, why not focus on totally free software for production use?)

But what really surprised me are statements like this in the README:

” Nextcloud Enterprise: openDesk uses the Nextcloud Enterprise to the build Nextcloud container image for oD EE. The Nextcloud EE codebase might contain EE exclusive (longterm support) security patches, plus the Guard app, that is not publicly available, while it is AGPL-3.0 licensed.

And

COOL Controller container image and Helm chart: Source code and chart are using Mozilla Public License Version 2.0, but the source code is not public. It is provided to customers upon request. ”

This, according with other paragraphs describing percentages of free and non-free code in certain components really makes me wonder…

bayindirh3• 9 months ago

It's a misconception that (A)GPL source code should be publicly available.

GPL family mandates source code access to people who can access to the software itself. So as long as ICC gets the source code of the NextCloud EE and the Guard app, the GPL is fulfilled.

This is how RedHat operates, and is not a violation of GPL.

Also, this is how you can build a business around GPL. You only have to provide source code to people who buys your software, or you can sell support to it.

Another example: Rock Solid curl [0].

[0] https://rock-solid.curl.dev/

drnick1• 9 months ago

But presumably, under the GPL, someone who obtained the source code, perhaps by paying for it, can freely publish that source code, and non-disclosure agreements are void.

eeasss• 9 months ago

All else aside, Microsoft 365 as an office suite screams for disruption. If you don't believe me try actually using their copilot and observe the poor integrations with core products such as Excel/Word/Powerpoint. Sorry for the offtopic but it really hurts for those of us who are forced by their CIO to use this thing.

onemoresoop2• 9 months ago

Yes, the product is terrible and easily beat out by a competitor. However, most people who are forced to use it is by dictate their own company CIO, hence MS has captive audiences.

lordofgibbons• 9 months ago

I can't find a single screenshot of opendesk applications anywhere - including their own website. This is extremely strange.

baumschubser• 9 months ago

Meanwhile in southern Germany.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Bavaria-wants-to-move-to-Micros...

frm88• 9 months ago

Depressing. I wonder what convinced them of that decision considering national security and the price-tag of several billions. Also, Palantir. Do you think it's conservative attraction to the current U. S. administration?

jacquesm4• 9 months ago

Rightly so. They should have never used it in the first place. What with the US not recognizing the court it always made very little sense to me that they would rely on the infrastructure components to be supplied by the USA. The latest sanctions are just another step in something that was already in motion from day #1.

The world order at the highest level relies on the nations themselves to behave, especially the largest ones because nobody has the practical power to enforce the decisions of the court in case defendants are in places where the court is not recognized. To USA not recognizing the court has always shown that they don't care about the crimes they commit.

dylan604• 9 months ago

To USA not recognizing the court has always shown that they don't care about the crimes they commit.

I'd nitpick the "don't care" part. To me, it's that they do care precisely because they know they are guilty. I think Trump is guilty for the boats being shot. Obama guilty for the drone strikes. W guilty for well, the whole shit show. Didn't really pay attention to Biden, but I'd assume drone strikes continued there too. From Clinton on back, I admit I just wasn't paying attention to those kinds of issues.

aidenn0• 9 months ago

My understanding is that most of the post-cold-war targeted killings of dubious legality happened after 9/11; wikipedia claims that there were US norms against "targeted killings" from '76 to '01. Certainly the CIA did some shady stuff post 1976, but the President at least maintained the appearance of not knowing about them.

davkan3• 9 months ago

Pragmatically what does the US gain from joining? From a US perspective it would just be ceding power no?

Only a year after Clinton signed the statute 9/11 was perpetrated. I can’t imagine any of the most powerful countries would have ratified it if they were in the midst of prosecuting a war.

Since then the US has softened on the ICC as it benefits them to maintain a relationship but, at this point why sign other than for ideological reasons.

And even if there was an intent to join there would likely be stipulations from the US. And it would have to pass the divided senate, after which it would likely go to the Supreme Court who with the current bench would certainly strike it down, meaning a constitutional amendment would be needed. It’s less feasible to join now than it ever has been unfortunately.

ultim8k2• 9 months ago

Agreed. And I think European countries really need to start eating our own dog food and stop being 100% reliant on US software and hardware. It's not (only) about opposing certain political behaviours, but (also) about supporting our financial independence and wellbeing.

jacquesm4• 9 months ago

You can toss China in there as well while we're at it. We are just replacing one dependency with another.

ebbi• 9 months ago

Good. It is not befitting of the ICC to be using tools, and thereby funding, a company that has been helping states carrying out war crimes.

ncr1003• 9 months ago

Good move for ICC.

Especially since USA, home country of Microsoft corporation, is exhibiting military junta techniques.

USA is killing citizens of foreign countries, weekly via the "U.S. military conducting missile strikes against boats in the Caribbean and Pacific claiming they are shipping drugs".

These non-military victims, citizens, being killed intentionally are a violation of human rights.

throw10920• 9 months ago

non-military victims

These people are members of international drug trafficking cartels that are highly armed and organized and kill thousands of people directly (and tens of thousands indirectly) every year. They are military combatants actively waging war against the US, and this is self-defense.

The US has been waiting for the host countries of these cartels to stop them for decades now, at the cost of millions of lives. To defend their behavior and claim that the US shouldn't defend its own citizens from foreign military powers is absolutely disgusting.

ncr1003• 8 months ago

They are military combatants actively waging war against the US

That is false. They're civilian. They are not proven to be "foreign military powers".

And in the case I'm misunderstanding what is written, above, perhaps this is a semantics issue?

I'd suggest perhaps "militarized" ..

I agree the direct/indirect death is true, deriving from these peoples' behavior. That in and of itself does not make them a military, but certainly a threat. And legally there is a due-process for handling that threat - missile strikes are not legal, here.

And there are lots of threats, with many ways that are appropriate to handle. For example, lots of people kill lots of other people, too - e.g. Trump killed 400,000 of us in his first term (mis-led us around COVID risks / mitigation), and has killed 600,000 foreigners in his second term (USAID sudden shut-down w/o replacement), that makes a MILLION DEAD ...

... given that, does this mean Trump deserves to be physically attacked by our military's missile command? I'd say "no, he should face legal action for his predictably hazardous mis-leadership."

- https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/11/new-revelations...

- https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary...

==> "As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children."

maxglute• 9 months ago

Maybe it's time for UN to start rolling out their own global linux distro / mobile OS, Cue UN getting sanctioned in 3...2... But jokes aside seems like a useful global good.

blackoil• 9 months ago

Isnt UN most bureaucratic organization possible. Would be funny to see all nations discussing/voting on features in next version.

zie2• 9 months ago

I wonder if this will be like Germany's rush to run Linux across their entire fed. govt and it will only last a few years. Germany gave up eventually. I wonder if the ICC will too, or if it will actually stick this time around.

I hope it sticks, but I'm not holding my breath.

Surac• 9 months ago

I find it hard to compare o365 to OpenDesk. O365 is just a bag of programs using vaguely the same UX concept and openDesk is a full integrated environment. I myself changed to Nextcloud with integrated collab office and will never go back to MS

ICC ditches Microsoft 365 for openDesk

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