Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

https://dub.uu.nl/en/news/can-dutch-universities-do-without-microsoft

by robtherobber • 8 months ago

322 371 8 months ago

dub.uu.nl

Europe's failure to facilitate a competitive tech scene in the early 2000's (and even still ongoing today) will haunt them for decades. Such an enormous fumble that people still celebrate as a win.

petcat• 8 months ago

EU is in a really tough situation. They're getting squeezed on all sides economically by USA and China while also facing a belligerent Russia on their eastern borders. And their internal politics and governance makes it very difficult to align in a direction that could enable them to start digging out of so much globalized dependence.

js82• 8 months ago

Yes. Unfortunately, the EU institutions have been designed during heyday of globalization and neoliberalism. So they are unable to adapt to (or even recognize) the end of it.

seanieb5• 8 months ago

A recent analysis of the Trump Tarrifs on the EU concluded that while “some regions and industries could suffer”, for Europe overall the hit may be “limited but not negligible.

The EU is quietly investing massively in diversifying away from the US market. there are trade negotiations or agreements in process (or being advanced) with countries/regions including India, the countries of the Mercosur bloc, Mexico, and Middle-East countries.

bojan4• 8 months ago

"Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity. Yes, we have European Union which helps a lot, but it is not complete (and certainly wasn't in the time when Microsofts and Googles of this world started), making that all-important initial scaling way more difficult than it is in the US.

saubeidl5• 8 months ago

"Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity

It really needs to be, though, that's kind of the crux of it.

Federate or die off, it's time to get rid of old tribal thinking. We're all Europeans.

skirge2• 8 months ago

if we talk beaurocracy EU is very well consolidated: "you can't do that", everyone says consistently.

TulliusCicero4• 8 months ago

This is true, but it's also a fixable problem.

The issue I've seen is that there isn't really the political will to fix it. Europeans broadly seem uncomfortable giving up national sovereignty when it comes to digital issues (including those that impact scaling businesses), so they implicitly choose the status quo that makes it hard for software/internet businesses to succeed.

Literally in this thread you can see Europeans who are against greater federalization. And their objections are entirely understandable, but at the same time, can't exactly have your cake and eat it too. If you insist on 27 different sets of regulations to protect certain interests, however valid, you can't exactly be surprised when that makes scaling businesses rather challenging.

dmitrygr2• 8 months ago

Excuse denied. All they had to do was nothing. Instead they over-regulated way too early, before the industries could grow enough to support operating in such an environment. Now they are behind and will likely never catch up. The future of European tech is government handouts/scraps, collected by force from American companies.

baby• 8 months ago

Right but as an entity it can also do quite the damage. Cookie popups come to mind.

SunshineTheCat2• 8 months ago

It feels like an emphasis has been placed more on legislating or policing what other people make rather than making anything of value themselves (as far as tech goes).

Being a barnacle on the side of a boat might be a nice free ride for a while until it goes somewhere you don't want to.

amarant2• 8 months ago

I feel like this sentiment comes at least partially from American companies(especially Microsoft) habit of buying successful European tech companies, making people believe they're American and not European.

There is plenty of European tech success stories, but plenty of them will be mistaken for American ones after Microsoft bought them(and more often than not ruined the product, see Skype for example)

qoez• 8 months ago

AI is gonna be even worse. At least there's some competition from scandinavia and germany and france's tech scenes. For AI there's basically none.

vanviegen6• 8 months ago

Yeah, but unless there's AGI right around the corner, it's starting to look more and more like there's no real moat in the trillions being invested. As switching between AI providers is easy (especially when compare the stranglehold say Microsoft has on organizations), catching up may be relatively easy and cheap for latecomers.

jimbohn2• 8 months ago

Along with Europe's incompetence and divisiveness, you must also consider that the US has kept it so tight under its umbrella that it has squeezed it. The US wants a rich market to sell into, a suitable ally for oil campaigns, but not a competitor.

The US is also still cultivating divisiveness, at the EU level, they groom a politically aligned minority that conveniently opposes any long-term improvement (Looking at Meloni's Italy, Hungary, etc.), at the country level, where possible, they again groom divisiveness by propping up yet another sovranist party.

Of course, that's what a "normal" competitor does, and of course China russia are also taking part in it. But the ambiguous situation of the USA-EU friendship needs to be solved.

I don't see how the EU can get out of this without recognizing that the US is not a friend anymore, and enduring a few decades of protectionism at the services level to try to pull a china on key sectors.

Workaccount24• 8 months ago

As long as the European psyche is at "40 days PTO, 4 day work weeks, and generous worker protections" the US doesn't have to worry about Europe getting out from under it.

Europe is in the intractable situation of needing to double defense spending, slash taxes, gain energy independence and bankroll it with an aging population skilled in mostly legacy industries. And doing all this with a working population that has only ever known generous work/life conditions.

hulitu2• 8 months ago

They tried. They were either spied on (Earth - then developed by Google) or aquired (Star Office by Sun).

t0mas88• 8 months ago

AWS had announced a sovereign European cloud, probably to avoid a loss of business in the long term due to these initiatives. But it's questionable whether this would survive strong political pressure from the US government.

saubeidl5• 8 months ago

As long as there's any American ownership in the chain, this is not to be trusted.

I'm assuming AWS wouldn't fully divest from this European business unit and split it off as a completely separate entity?

hedora• 8 months ago

The US CLOUD Act says that if Amazon has the technical ability to access those machines, they must do so if the US government asks them to.

So, unless it’s a separate legal entity, and also shares no authentication, software deployment, or related infrastructure with the US part of Amazon, it’s either not providing sovereignty or is being offered in violation of US law.

It’s unclear to me if they’d have to comply with requests to (for example) backdoor their IAM service backend and push the binaries to Europe, or not. (I’m not a lawyer.)

kenjackson3• 8 months ago

And it certainly would not survive strong political pressure from the EU and US governments. Local governments still can be adversely impacted.

ttkari• 8 months ago

I'm not sure I understand how an American company would be able to provide any service that could be "sovereign European".

Vespasian• 8 months ago

In theory Amazon could license the stack to a European Operator while having no operative access themselves.

I think this is already done in some cases altough the political reliability has not yet been tested.

Balinares2• 8 months ago

By providing the software to be installed in clusters owned and operated by European companies.

The sovereign cloud spec designed by the folks at France's ANSSI agency is tight.

vander_elst• 8 months ago

How I can imagine it works: Amazon only provides the packaged software, the infra and the ops are officially driven by a 100% European company. AWS probably provides support, but they don't have the encryption keys not any access to the installation.

Havoc• 8 months ago

The Microsoft effort was not terrible - run by EU nationals etc but yeah calling it sovereign is optimistic.

p2detar3• 8 months ago

Is this new? Microsoft already offer that and I think already for quite a while.

gcanyon• 8 months ago

crazygringo2• 8 months ago

Short answer: to Google it's not so bad but it's not like the legal risks are any different from Microsoft. And to the rest -- yes it is very hard.

Universities need cloud storage with online collaboration and a fully functioning office suite.

LibreOffice doesn't work because it's desktop-only and has no collaboration. However, there's an online-collaboration fork called Collabora Online, and you can use something like Nextcloud to provide your own privately hosted cloud backend. But obviously this is a gigantic effort for the university's IT department to provide and maintain with reliable redundancies and backups.

Also, LibreOffice/Collabora is pretty good if you stick to its native formats, but its interoperability with MS Office files has a lot of bugs.

In the end, it's just cheaper and more reliable to use MS or Google like everyone else. Students, professors and administrators wind up having basically the same needs around office software as businesses do.

abdullahkhalids• 8 months ago

How much is the typical dutch university paying MS/Google? Maybe 10k students x 200EUR/year = 2 million EUR/year.

Twenty universities come together to move to make Collabora+NextCloud work for them. That's 40 million EUR/year. How much do they need to actually spend on developers + infrastructure to make it happen?

omnimus2• 8 months ago

At 4 european universities i studied/taught this has never been the case. Most universities are used to run their infra, they ran their email servers way before google existed and they run big fleets of servers for thin clients. Afaik they still kept their own internal messaging as backup but it was still email servers hidden behind web gui.

What happened was that the big tech came in and made everything for them free. It is really hard to compete with free. They get windows for free, they get gmail for free at some point even unlimited google drive for free.

Now the situation is changing as the corps are tightening. I've seen 40k student university switch from gmail to office360 in two months because google suddenly wanted money and microsoft didn't. Now Microsoft also wants money. And it's not small money. So the school is doing cost assesment - you can give it to european third party provider that will be way cheaper tham microsoft. Or you go back to your own infra.

Turns out that what to be really expensive when google was giving people 30gb of free space to everyone in 2012 now is actually not that bad and you own your future. My guess is they will pay Microsoft for a year while they transition their email to their infra. The other parts gonna come later. But the students are required to use libre office (or latex) for writing their thesis so i don't think they see google docs as big blocker.

Jaxan• 8 months ago

Yes. Because sometimes even the fundamental sign-in is through Microsoft.

Word and excel are not the difficult part. Mail, calendars, management, storage, security measures, etc are hard.

tgv• 8 months ago

IIRC, Dutch unis have another account managing system, run by SURFnet. OAuth2, I think.

kenjackson3• 8 months ago

At this point all tech is big business. Microsoft or Apple. Azure or AWS. Google Apps or Office. Even dealing with Red Hat feels like you’re dealing with big tech.

And the thing is 99.99% of the time everything works just fine. I think these governments often struggle with moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want.

dietr1ch• 8 months ago

moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want.

Until you have companies trying to intervene.

If Universities are publicly funded by the government, and those companies do stuff like spying on, or silencing public officials, then why should the government finance those companies?

I think its nuts that the EU has seen spying, access from services taken away, yet continues to fund those foreign companies. Are the Open Source alternatives worse? Would change suck even if the alternatives were better? It doesn't matter really. It makes no sense to pay to keep your bad deal running.

kenjackson3• 8 months ago

Unfortunately part of it is that it likely goes both ways. For example illegal subsidies to Airbus. And US companies still buy Airbus. I think all of these go into the calculus of the decisions to purchase though. It’s likely you value open source much higher than they do based on your own principles.

LtWorf2• 8 months ago

USA does corruption and also does threatening if you try to not use their companies. I've read an interview to a mexican minister who basically got direct threats from the USA ambassador when the government decided to stop using windows.

vikingtoby• 8 months ago

Red Hat is IBM, the OG big tech really

hx8• 8 months ago

I'd say Bell is the OG, which was founded about 40 years before IBM.

exasperaited• 8 months ago

Governments also don't move to open standards because open standards doesn't have a hospitality suite to invite them to at football matches or Cheltenham.

One of the most remarkable things in British politics in the last 25 years went almost unremarked upon, in part because it happened in a reactionary way.

Blair/Brown's New Labour got so deeply into bed with Microsoft that it caused the coalition government that replaced them to develop a point of agreement and move government functions off Microsoft to open standard formats, and that change stuck. Hence this weird little country that has so many problems has accidentally good IT for anything that they rolled out, there's a lot of open data etc. etc.

That would never have happened if their decision was being guided only by lobbyists; it happened that it was so strengthened by the major tech giants working with the other side.

EU governments can absolutely do this; I find it difficult to believe universities cannot.

graemep5• 8 months ago

That is a tiny part of it though. Lots of government functioning depends on big tech clouds. The NHS depends on AWS. A lot of the private sector does too. Everyone depends on Apple or Android phones. Card payments (and the government is pushing a move to cashless) rely on Mastercard and Visa. Windows increasingly requires logging in with an MS account. In the meantime govt and big business are pushing people to use mobile apps more, increasing this dependence.

Moving to a different mail server and office suite keeps the ICC working, but does not really protect people at the ICC from US sanctions. Their lives can be made very difficult: https://www.heise.de/en/news/How-a-French-judge-was-digitall...

I think this bit of the article is a critical problem:

By outsourcing the management of IT systems, these educational institutions are losing technical knowledge and control. As a result, they are becoming increasingly dependent on big tech, putting academic freedom and independence at risk.

All of this is fixable but its expensive to fix. No one is motivated enough to spend the money.

Workaccount24• 8 months ago

It's like the proposals to get rid of daylight savings time. People get ruffled when the time jump happens, so conversation of getting rid of it bubbles up.

But then a week later everyone has adjusted and the motivation to fix it is forgotten.

whynotmaybe• 8 months ago

Gov don't move because it's not worth the risk for people with decision power. If you succeed, there's no big win to tag on your resume, if you fail (the most likely to happen) you're out.

Moreover, the people working for the teams that should make the migration usually don't want a migration, so you have to perpetually convince them of the future gains.

For the last 10-15 years, very few revolution have been made in gov ICT. Most of the job is usually rewriting existing app in a recent language or creating apps for not critical features.

hayleox• 8 months ago

Obviously terrible seeing the US government harm its own international standing for no real gain, but if it results in Europe developing viable alternatives to American big tech services, that'd be fantastic.

sabas123• 8 months ago

The problem is that we already can provide an alternative, but we don't switch to them. Which might be even worse.

jwithington• 8 months ago

The lock-in is around identity services, right?

Servicing the jobs-to-be-done of the core applications is pretty straightforward I think.

I'm not sure what keeps people locked in besides identity. Article doesn't really specify.

martijnvds2• 8 months ago

Familiarity, convenience and habit.

Familiarity: "I've used MS Word/Excel/Teams before so I can use it here"

Convenience: "We have MS Entra, might as well go all-in"

Habit: "We never really investigated alternatives, this is just what 'everyone' uses."

calvinmorrison• 8 months ago

step 1. have syadmins run your stuff, recruit ITSM kids to help run it! We all learn and maintain our own hardware, software and get to poke at the fun internals of email, storage, etc.

step 2. cost savings by firing them all

step 3. we get locked in

step 4. oh no how did this happen

seanieb5• 8 months ago

I spent the past year working for a company that relies heavily on Microsoft for email, productivity tools, and identity management. After that experience, I can say with confidence: never again. The support is astonishingly poor, and user experience feels like an afterthought.

More importantly, using Microsoft at scale can leave your organization fundamentally insecure. The obscure, insecure defaults are, at best, dangerous missteps and, at worst, borderline negligent. I’m convinced that only a small fraction of enterprises using Microsoft have the expertise and budget required to secure it properly.

My personal view is that if your organization depends heavily on Microsoft, it’s not serious about security, whether they’re aware of it or not.

LPisGood• 8 months ago

What kind of obscure insecure defaults are there?

seanieb5• 8 months ago

Direct Send was my favorite. Direct Send allows devices to send unauthenticated email to internal recipients using your organization’s domain, which can expose you to internal emails for phishing etc. It bypasses user authentication, making sender identity difficult to verify or audit. For all orgs made before mid 2025 it was enabled by default.

I saw a great Blackhat talk this year about Entra misconfiguration that got Microsoft's own sensitive internal services owned by a researcher, one of them owned by their security team. After the report they reconfigure their services, didn't pay a bounty and considered the problems solved. What about their customers making the same config errors as the Microsoft team... no changes planned.

There's much much more...

e12e• 8 months ago

One not-so-obscure problem is how hard it is to only elevate yourself to admin when you need it (and run as a regular user the other time).

Essentially you need to pay double license for admin users so they can have two logins; and it's a pain to quickly elevate privilege to do day to day admin tasks.

So if your friendly domain admin clicks the wrong link, your entire network is owned.

downrightmike• 8 months ago

Everything on by default in general has plagued them, because they don't want users to complain it doesn't work.

mr_mitm3• 8 months ago

Check out the Microsoft baseline security guidelines for Windows 11. It's about 400 entries. 400 settings that Microsoft themselves recommend changing from the defaults to achieve a baseline security.

Why does windows 11 show stock values in the task bar by default? Why does it show ads, games and yellow press headlines when you click on it? On the enterprise edition! Xbox services are installed and running by default. Why?

machomaster7• 8 months ago

Obscure from a typical user's POV: the fact that file extensions are not being shown by default. This makes it possible for the user to click on a file that has the extension and the icon of a picture (imbedded inside), but turns out to be an executable file.

project2501a4• 8 months ago

Where do I find money to fund my rewrite of Kerberos 5 in Rust, removing the dumb options and Kerberos 4 compatibility and eventually create Kerberos 6 + AD that will solve a metric buttload of issues in Linux and knock a major peg of MS off?

NuclearPM• 8 months ago

Did you respond to the wrong comment?

cyberax2• 8 months ago

Ask IBM/RedHat. They did a lot of foundational work with SSSD (aka "too many 'S' D").

Kerberos is not a great protocol, though.

mr_mitm3• 8 months ago

Memory safety or type safety are the least of Kerberos' issues. The protocol itself is fundamentally flawed.

lokar3• 8 months ago

Kerberos solves the problem that doing public key authentication is slow on a i386

nightfly• 8 months ago

What issues on Linux would this actually solve?

mcv6• 8 months ago

I work for a company that now uses everything from Microsoft. They used to have Jira, AWS and tons of other different products, but now everything is Microsoft, and it's terrible. Azure DevOps is particularly horrific. It's like Jira+Jenkins except you can never find anything. Nothing about it makes sense to me.

As far as I can tell, the databases on Azure are all either slow, expensive, or both.

And of course it means we hand over all of our highly sensitive data to a company that has said that US law will overrule EU law. How can anyone trust a company that says they will not obey the law?

another_twist• 8 months ago

Dont know why employers do this. Why pay for shitty tools your employees hate ?

shakna• 8 months ago

Because I can't help it, and ADO is my pain:

Type the same id number into a bug related links twice. It'll have no match, and then a match.

BenFranklin1003• 8 months ago

This is blatant nonsense. The best security choice for any small business that doesn’t have a dedicated full time security staff is Microsoft 365.

seanieb5• 8 months ago

Have you admined a Google Apps account and an MS365 account? I'm curious why you think Microsoft is more secure? For me they are completely different, Google is secure by default, Microsoft is not. Do you have "Direct Send" enabled on your account for example?

isk517• 8 months ago

I'm always amazed at how needlessly complicated and useless administration of Microsoft products and services are. So much of 365 feels like it is 75-90% completed then abandoned. Every time I find something that sounds like it should be really useful, it turns out to lack at least one function or feature needed to do what I would need it to.

abhiyerra• 8 months ago

Like Azure. 90% in the UX and the one feature that you need that is only accessible on the cli…

mmcnl• 8 months ago

For every Microsoft service there are 5 tiers of certifications that are needlessly updated every few years.

Spooky23• 8 months ago

Even if you do, you’re still going to get breached. They drop features all of the time that open potential vulnerabilities.

I used to run a Microsoft productivity ops team. Email/SharePoint/etc. Our headcount was about 20-24. O365 dropped that to ~8. Now? I’m told it’s about 60, much of it relating to security.

arethuza• 8 months ago

When I did a 4 year CS degree at a UK university in the 1980s I don't think I touched anything from Microsoft for the entire time I was there!

aeyes• 8 months ago

Because for a CS degree students are expected to work with other systems and the software needed to complete the course work is usually low level. Even when I did my CS degree 20 years ago our labs were Linux and Solaris.

For other degrees you need software which only runs on Windows.

It might also help that Microsoft was totally irrelevant in the professional world in the 80s.

cuttothechase• 8 months ago

I am pretty sure you wouldn't have touched anything from google and meta as well.

blibble• 8 months ago

same for me in the 2000s

unfortunately the university has gone full MS since then

pjmlp8• 8 months ago

It was much easier in 1980's, unless you would be using CP/M or MS-DOS.

godzillabrennus• 8 months ago

Students go to university to get an education and obtain employment. All larger employers use Microsoft. Universities would be failing students by not giving them an education on their technologies. Microsoft gives the Universities and their students steep discounts or free software to propagate this.

venturecruelty2• 8 months ago

Companies can pay to train their employees on the software that they use. This is neither the responsibility of the secondary education system nor the Dutch taxpayers.

Avshalom• 8 months ago

I did a 4 year degree in earth science minor in CS graduating in 2019 and had to touch microsoft for arcgis in one class, and an excel spreadsheet in another.

Like yeah if you have a lot of pre-existing infrastructure migration can be a pain but MS is not in anyway necessary.

mseri• 8 months ago

As much as I agree with the need for digital independence and the fact that universities (and governments) in Europe are over reliant on US tech, it is not as simple as you describe.

There is a lot more happening in the administrative and infrastructural side of things in most universities that one barely observes as student. So every change needs to take also that into account, the management and maintenance of services and infrastructures that must reliably support thousands of users, with relatively strict privacy and security standards, and their migration.

hbn• 8 months ago

And surely nothing has changed about the world in the last 40 years

WalterBright• 8 months ago

When I did a 4 year stint in college, nobody had ever heard of Microsoft.

fuzzfactor2• 8 months ago

My first experience with an original IBM PC, I wondered what this thing called Microsoft was.

It just didn't seem right. Why would you need that?

What if you just wanted a plain IBM computer? Why isn't that the mainstream without need for any third party software? Or is it software? How do people do without it? What if you just want to compute? Not use the PC as an office machine or do any gaming?

Is this Microsoft content really essential?

Isn't the hardware any good without a Microsoft?

How would you go about doing that?

I guess Linus eventually asked himself the same kind of things and drove it home :)

canpan• 8 months ago

Same here in 2000s, studying CS was completely MS free. The professors mostly used linux or Mac anyhow. The university system for students was web based. Papers were written in LaTeX with official template. The email system was hosted by the university and not based on outlook. Math related professors did not even use a PC at all during class but a blackboard/OHP/paper. So I don't see a problem for the netherlands..

yupyupyups• 8 months ago

Oh it's not only Dutch universities.

ramon1562• 8 months ago

I can guarantee some dutch banks are also locked into MS. Maybe not the big ones that actually need to care about tech, but the ones that don't care about tech went head-first into Microsoft Suite these last few years.

Its' an awful sight. What's worse is that there's no argument for this extra cost (apart from maybe vendor lock-in), and now no one knows who to blame for the big bill that comes in every month.

Muromec2• 8 months ago

The big green one absolutely is ms heavy place.

bojan4• 8 months ago

We switched completely to Microsoft/Azure a couple of years ago. My previous employer as well.

There was no stopping it, I'd tried and they looked at me like I'm crazy. "Everybody else is doing it" is a very strong argument.

At the same time, a very popular open source security package that I wanted to use was deemed a security risk because the maintainer has placed Ukrainian and Palestinian flags in the readme.

lbreakjai• 8 months ago

I worked on the migration to Azure for the big orange one. They absolutely went all-in on it.

denimnerd422• 8 months ago

at work I don't need MS at all. It's just used because the IT department prefers it to manage things. I wish we could just use Fedora or Ubuntu.

nxm2• 8 months ago

IT has to cover much less technical users than someone who would prefer to use Linux

graemep5• 8 months ago

Most people barely know what OS they are using. its just a way to start apps.

As long as they have an obvious way of opening a web browser, an office suite, and maybe an email and calendering client, the average office worker will barely notice the OS.

denimnerd422• 8 months ago

Nah it's a skill issue. They don't know how and don't want to learn.

pjmlp8• 8 months ago

Depends.

Can they get rid of Typescript, npm, Github, VS, VSCode, .NET, C#, F#, C++ / DirectX, Next.js, vcpkg, Microsoft contributions to Java, Rust, and Linux kernel, on their students teaching materials?

If they can switch to UNIX FOSS technologies with zero trace of Microsoft's money sponsorship, and hinder the students careers in specific job markets, then surely.

People usually never look beyond getting rid of Office and Windows.

fph• 8 months ago

Why should they get rid of the Linux kernel?

pjmlp8• 8 months ago

Because Microsoft contributions, including being one of the Rust on the kernel sponsors.

breve7• 8 months ago

The problem is described in the first two sentences of the article:

"The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court suddenly couldn't access his email. According to Microsoft, that's because of US sanctions against the court's employees."

Nothing you've listed relates to that.

If American services and platforms have become unreliable and untrustworthy because the American government is erratic, then it's only natural that European organisations will look for alternatives.

DirectX is a funny one to list because 90% of Windows games run on Linux. WINE and Proton solve that problem for you:

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/nearly-90-percen...

pjmlp8• 8 months ago

Yes it is, see my last sentence.

Without Windows developers, game studios using Windows, Visual Studio and DirectX, SteamOS would have no games.

Proton represents Valve's failure to make a business out of Steam OS native games.

Funny will be when Microsoft decides Proton is a relevant target to aim for, and shot down by all means necessary.

lysace• 8 months ago

In the 90s I used to sort of tease/banter our sysadmin guy at a small, developer-centric company in Europe (SunOS/Linux/etc-focused) in a friendly way with something like:

"It seems to me like all the things you're doing can and should be automated at a larger scale."

Ten years ago when I recalled this I felt sort of good about the prediction. What I predicted pretty much happened.

That sysadmin guy has become some sort of CIO and seems to be doing well.

I did not anticipate the loss of data sovereignty.

.... and now I'm doing like 50% SRE/devops. Who's the sysadmin now, but without physical control of our data?

rzerowan3• 8 months ago

For one reasono another im not seeing any of the currently OSS solutions like LibreOffice/OpenOffice.orgwould not gain much traction and will remain niche even as the MS/Goog options remain entrenched.

The path taken by Blender(propreiety initially to open source) to reach industry lead would to me seem the most viable to make a dent.

In that i think best cost effective options like WPSOffice or Corel Suite , would be a good option.They have the professional usability in the interface and functionality.

Corel is basically leaving the market wide , by mostly collecting rent from lawfirms as they are well taken care of there.Considering they used to have viable Linux options , seems a lack of vision theer to pick up marketshare.

d3Xt3r2• 8 months ago

If UI is your concern, check out Collabora and OnlyOffice, both have a modern ribbon-like interface and looks similar to MO.

rzerowan3• 8 months ago

Not just the UI ,as you can see with Blender it goes toe-to-toe with the paying big suites like Maya and Autodesk, a legacy of its dvelopment being proprietary.Comparad to GIMP et al difference is stark.

Most of those UI/usability changes are market specific, like in my post Corel has speciaized to cater to lawyers so their workflow reflets that. LibrOffice and the others are highlygeneric , even MO as bloated as it is has specific workflows that hook their respective nicehe business verticals.

timvisee• 8 months ago

In my 5 years I was basically only allowed to use Microsoft tools. It's one of the most stupid things I've ever seen.

amoshebb2• 8 months ago

I have found daily-driving Ubuntu at Delft shocking pleasant. Chrome, zotero, obsidian, zoom, and so on all work great. Outlook, teams, and the office suite, and signing pdfs are all the sharpest edges by far.

I feel if the TUs were required to dogfood this, especially if generously funded such that startups could come along and provide the same service and support, that it could be a great positive externality

letmetweakit• 8 months ago

Why would you need Outlook? Can't you use it in a browser?

anonymouskimmer3• 8 months ago

Yes, and the same can be done with Teams. That's what I do on my Linux laptop.

amoshebb2• 8 months ago

Yes, chrome gives me a little “PWA” so I can even have an icon in my dock, but it’s not as nice

aquariusDue2• 8 months ago

PDF signing is the bane of my existence, luckily I can get by with a cloud solution but it's nowhere near how easy I wish it would be. Sadly I'm still forced to use a Windows VM or dual-boot because the tax authority in my country requires a root/digital certificate for login to their web system, at least for incorporated entities.

anonymouskimmer3• 8 months ago

Would this procedure work with the certificates you need to use?

https://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/lab-infrastructure/install...

Spunkie• 8 months ago

I can find a dozen solutions to sign a PDF on linux without much trouble. Now redacting seems a whole nother story.

I've failed to find even a single option on linux that does real PDF redaction like adobe acrobat. Most don't do redaction at all or worse they say they redact but it's actually just black highlighter on black text or some other kind of overlay that leaves the underlying text data intact.

ta202405285• 8 months ago

If China can survive — and even start to thrive without ASML and TMSC, then have no doubt that should push come to shove Europe will be able to run a mail server and some office tools.

They’re just hedging that American politics will stop licking the car battery.

throwawaysleep• 8 months ago

Push has come to shove and has been shoving for nearly a decade. Europeans continue to be incapable. As a Canadian I wish they were not, but they are.

vladms2• 8 months ago

It's more a risk management issue. A country that wants to do everything by itself (from food, to shovels, to cars, to computers) will not be the most efficient and will loose a lot. Before '90s communist countries were "proud" that everything was produced locally - except many things were breaking or bad quality or unavailable (not all, but many).

I would claim that today is a much better moment to switch than it was 20 years ago - much more open source options, so less overall costs.

anonzzzies5• 8 months ago

The problem is , there are very few Europeans or EUans. There are French and Germans and Spanish etc; they all want their country first and sure open markets but their country first. That is how they vote (certainly these days). Most people do not feel EU unfortunately. Language is one thing: it is getting better but having language not unified (English, Spanish, Mandarin; pick one) is a massive and real issue keeping people's minds and efforts local instead of, at least EU wide. It is slowly getting better but the EU should made easier accessible and far higher funds for pan EU projects. Currently it is a serious pain to get access to EU funds and many just get eaten by the few massive consultancy corps who have dedicated teams going for any funding and tender in any locality and language.

YC398739847• 8 months ago

EU politicians are just too dependent on keeping the status quo of the last decade. The status quo is how they got to their position so they have no incentive to change anything (Starmer, Merz, Marcon, Von der Lyen. Yuck). By the time they finally get the shove they need to rapidly decouple, e.g. when America invades The Hague* to rescue Netanyahu from war crimes charges, it will be when they're already on the edge of the proverbial cliff.

*: https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...

ta202405285• 8 months ago

The usa couldnt handle Aghanistan. Now they are invading continental Europe?

As I said, still licking the car battery.

wiseowise2• 8 months ago

Only invasion, or a real threat of invasion, from Russia, US or China can shook Europe into real change.

athrowaway3z• 8 months ago

The EU has - just like the US - a generation of boomer senators and presidents in (voting) power for more than 2 decades at this point.

In the coming decade, that will change.

Hopefully for the better.

graemep5• 8 months ago

Europe is not a political entity or an organisation. Who exactly will do it? The EU, some EU country, Russia, the UK, Switzerland, some cooperative agreement...?

trinix9125• 8 months ago

We're talking about running a few mail server, network shares, and an office suite (LibreOffice if you want). Any university's in-house IT department should be able to pull that off, and it's exactly what many did for a very long time.

rambambram• 8 months ago

Already heard about the plans of the European Union to spend 200 billion on AI Factories?

graemep5• 8 months ago

China is bigger, and a lot more ambitious, and is willing to put resources into it.

European countries (except maybe Russia!), in the EU and outside, are very complacent.

trinix9125• 8 months ago

It's not as much about complacency as it is about the lack of funding and resources. We're talking about countries with government budgets as low as 20 billion USD. Looking at common election promises, people here would rather see that money spent on non-profit housing, healthcare, infrastructure, than some ambitious AI or tech project that they likely wouldn't directly benefit from - at least compared to the things mentioned before - so there's little money left for "developing our own MS Office / LLM / Google".

Whereas China not only has a much bigger budget than individual EU countries, but also central planning on a large scale, so they can just "force" things be done, no matter whether people like it or not. China giving 0.01% for such projects is way more money than a small EU country giving the same %. And it's not like they'll vote the party out for a failed project (which happens in EU countries quite often).

Joel_Mckay• 8 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Apparently the answer is "No." =3

firefax• 8 months ago

But what's the alternative? Most people use either O365 or Google Docs.

I hate that people are incapable of using Libreoffice and mailing documents around, but modern users are addicted to "the cloud", and it's my understanding there's no EU centric competitor to those two giants.

ChicagoDave• 8 months ago

Microsoft is destroying their monopoly from within. Office 365 was a staple of the global business landscape.

By injecting CoPilot into it without customer validation is going to be very costly.

Insanity• 8 months ago

An exception to Betteridge's Law! I would love to see more universities move away from proprietary software and opting for open source equivalents.

herbst• 8 months ago

I have time so I tried to study one or two things. The harsh reality is that every university that supports remote studies I have looked at explicitly or implicitly required apple or even worse windows hardware.

anonzzzies5• 8 months ago

for example, by using its own mail server.

I was one of the people fighting for keeping Unix when the UU went to Exchange. It was a drama: instable af, the MS consultants could not keep it running even for 24 hours at a time while unix had 0 issues and kept chugging along (I don't remember what Unix: I think it was SunOS/Solaris). It was forced through at great cost and effort but of course sponsored by MS. It sucked for years to come.

I was at the UvA too when they moved to, equally instable MS stuff too: I worked behind some of the last Sun machines and got to take a palet of sparcstations, ultras and an e450 home when they got phased out (I still have them and they are still working, of course). Could have all been Linux now but MS was so aggressive and no one listened to profs or students, even in all tech deps who were all vehemently against the move.

vid2• 8 months ago

I completely support not being dependant on a foreign company (or any company at all, standards FTW) and I don't think there should even be a shadow of possibility that an organization like the ICC could be cut off from services due to a foreign directive, but while I have seen it repeated many times, I think the article's opening assertion is not true; https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...

It is very distressing how many organizations have become dependant on Microsoft and the US cloud for core services. I hope that an unintended consequence of the current US administration's approach is that this becomes less so.

vanschelven2• 8 months ago

It's not strictly true, but the distinction between the truth and the assertion is small enough that the ICC itself draws the conclusion that Microsoft didn't yet:

https://www.techradar.com/pro/the-international-criminal-cou...

anonymous908213• 8 months ago

I think the article's opening assertion is not true

The link you provided does not appear to contradict the assertion in any way. "We have not cut off services to the ICC" != "We have not cut off services to one specific sanctioned individual who just so happened to coincidentally be on the ICC". The linked article even mentions Microsoft were pressed on the specific subject of the individual rather than the ICC as a whole, but declined to comment, so it looks like a regular case of weasel wording to distort the truth.

vid2• 8 months ago

Difficult to say exactly, and that's part of the problem, which is why my comment is about not being dependant on closed foreign companies.

sega_sai• 8 months ago

I am sure UK universities cannot go without Microsoft. I believe the absolute majority rely on it. And I can see how they rely more and more on it, by stopping using non-Microsoft/local solutions and switching to Microsoft's ones.

venturecruelty2• 8 months ago

I mean, what did they do before Microsoft? The Netherlands is a bit older than Microsoft, and so, presumably, is its universities.

fuzzfactor2• 8 months ago

to be honest, Microsoft is making it increasingly attractive to switch. Now that the company is putting AI in everything, everything is becoming more annoying to use."

djij• 8 months ago

Can Dutch universities do with Microsoft? Genuinely how far gone are we that this is a question?

bell-cot• 8 months ago

Dependence on Redmond and Washington (for high-complexity software, national security, and any other "really hard" stuff) is a very easy, comfy local optimum.

Actual independence would require a great deal of competence, expenditure, hard work, long-range planning, and time living unhappily far from any optimum.

While the Dutch obviously know how to do that - nobody in America is keeping the North Sea at bay for them - I would not bet that they'll actually do it here.

arianvanp4• 8 months ago

I studied at Utrecht University and all the programming classes in the Bachelor were C#, Visual Studio, XNA, DirectX. Windows. Database class i had to learn in Proprietary Microsoft tools too. All Microsoft stuff. Sure nobody would complain if you did stuff on Linux but all the support by TAs and teachers was on Microsoft platforms only.. The Master was much better but the Bachelor basically was grooming people to become Microsoft consultants.

If the rot starts at the core of your education curriculum there is no saving your dependence on Microsoft.

I always found this choice puzzling to teach people proprietary technologies in a public institution. This was before DotNet core and VSCode was a thing and Microsoft hadnt whitewashed themselves to look like an open source friendly brand yet.

philipp-gayret• 8 months ago

I had a similar experience at a different university in NL, practically the entire curriculum was Oracle & Cisco.

pbreit2• 8 months ago

I've gone without Microsoft products for many years now. It's SOOOOO much better.

Razengan• 8 months ago

I went for a decade without using any Microsoft products until they bought GitHub

xcf_seetan2• 8 months ago

I ditch Windows in 1996 and went Linux. Really SOOOOO much better. :D

vanschelven2• 8 months ago

Surely not _all_ the courses... Utrecht was and is big on Haskell as you know... Given that you TA'd a course on it :)

arianvanp4• 8 months ago

Well I guess at the time large part of GHC development technically was Microsoft Research ;) . But yeh the Functional Programming and Compilers course were nice exceptions to the Microsoft trend. That's also why I ended up following that path in my master's programme :')

dmos624• 8 months ago

And same goes for less technical disciplines too. Adobe, Autodesk, Archicad, etc. It's pretty bad software: expensive, very buggy, poor extensibility, poorly maintained, closed-source, rapid tech debt accumulation requires upgrading your pc every few years. If only a minor percentage of organizations licensing it would instead spend that budget financing an open source project, that would have a very positive effect for everyone. I can somewhat understand private businesses not thinking long-term, but public institutions paying licensing fees instead of financing open-source seems like plain incompetence. Then again, maybe there's a lack of open-source initiatives willing to spearhead this.

tokioyoyo2• 8 months ago

But if students learn some open-source software that doesn’t get used in private industry, will they be able to land a job that’s asking Autodesk et al. knowledge as a requirement?

jama211• 8 months ago

I agree with your point generally, but wouldn’t call adobe software buggy or poorly maintained. That’s a bit of a stretch.

baranul2• 8 months ago

Good points. Funding the open-source equivalents, even at a fraction of what they are spending on close-source, would have circumvented the problem of being "trapped" in the first place. Even more, the universities would be able to contribute code to the projects, if they wanted to.

It was always pretty obvious what Microsoft wanted and was trying to do. Now trying to escape, will be painful, but that's the price they will have to endure if they want freedom and data sovereignty.

edolstra• 8 months ago

It wasn't always that way. When I began studying CS at Utrecht University, there was no Windows at all. It was Solaris, IRIX and a bit of HP-UX.

arianvanp4• 8 months ago

And it should've been NixOS after!

It did slowly sneak in over time I guess. In my last year of my master's eventually the faculty was forced to stop hosting its own intranet and mailing lists and migrate everything to the "cloud" (Microsoft 365 and Blackboard).

I have a copy at home of all the old wiki content and the old cs.uu.nl website. The university themselves didn't even think they should archive it so I archived it myself.

I hope there's other people with copies too. My archive isn't complete

tester7565• 8 months ago

Visual Studio is world class IDE, C# is one of the better designed languages and ecosystems, Windows is everywhere - from home, to enterprise.

taurath• 8 months ago

Looks like your education was well received if you went to those uni's!

mejutoco• 8 months ago

X is great; Y is great; Z is everywhere!

Probably not intended, but had to laugh a bit at that.

greatgib2• 8 months ago

Visual studio code sucks badly, just most common developers started with it and are used to it in the same way that Windows was "the os" for the same kind of developers at a specific point in the past.

It is even worse know that vscode and all the clones are packed with llm agents that such devs can't live without.

For one thing for example, the latency of the editor is crazy for someone that worked with native editors.

theLiminator• 8 months ago

The things that's puzzling is that I overall find it much harder getting my toolchains and stuff working on windows.

In my experience, getting the periphery stuff is harder than the contents of the course a good chunk of the time for beginners.

makeitdouble• 8 months ago

if the rot starts at the core of your education curriculum there is no saving your dependence on Microsoft.

TBF, the curriculum being MS based can mean very little if the concepts taught in are valuable enough. I've briefly looked at the project linked in your user description, and they don't look nice and absolutely not tinted by MS influence.

It is indeed dancing with the devil, but if MS forks the money to renew the whole university's computer park, clear all the licensing issues and train part of the staff, it can be a boon for the university.

My uni had a deal with Sun (RIP), many basic courses were in Java, all our system programming course we're Solaris targeted, all servers were Solaris anyway so our code had to run there. It's a pretty basic arrangement IMHO.

tamimio• 8 months ago

Not just in education, but even at work, companies or even governments would rather have MS, for example, paying them hefty contracts, while hiring borderline minimum wage workers to run such systems. I remember I had similar arguments with an executive before, and I recommended hiring competent people and using alternative tools. The answer was simple: "We don't want to have XYZ department relying on this person/group, but rather on this big popular company." They thought they were mitigating the risk, only to put all their eggs in one basket!

permo-w• 8 months ago

tangentially, US (and other) universities are massively dependent on/hamstrung by a Dutch company, Elsevier

einpoklum2• 8 months ago

Can they do without Microsoft, however? Can they work without Office, Outlook, Teams and OneDrive?

FOSS to the rescue:

* LibreOffice, instead of MS Office.

* Thunderbird, instead of Outlook (even though I don't like the direction Thunderbird has been going).

* NextCloud, instead of one drive (and there are other alternatives, more FOSS-friendly or less so)

* Matrix/IRC client plus Jitsi, instead of Teams.

and they will do just fine - on Windows or on Linux.

jetbalsa• 8 months ago

What email server are they going to use? what about anti-spam / anti-malware in there. and compliance... oh my compliance

einpoklum2• 8 months ago

What email server are they going to use?

Same one they were using before I would think. Nobody said they were using MS Exchange server.

and compliance... oh my compliance

Is that a magic word? :-) ... Compliance with what?

SapporoChris• 8 months ago

Anyone knowledgeable of history knows the Dutch universities existed for four centuries before Microsoft even existed. With that knowledge the question becomes farcical.

jongjong• 8 months ago

Functionally, they can easily do without Microsoft... I'm more worried about the implications in terms of PsyOps and repercussions... Like they pulled with that ICC judge.

Telaneo• 8 months ago

Europe can do without Microsoft, however it will require a kick in the rear to get there.

I was kind of hoping that the GDPR would be that kick, as it's clear to anyone that Microsoft, or really any other major US corporation, can't actually satisfy that completely as long as they have their tendrils in its European subsidiaries and that the US can compel them give up the information they care about. But this is a rather large elephant the EU has elected to ignore since that's the path of least resistance.

The EU actually realising the using Microsoft as your foundation does break the GDPR and fining the relevant institutions (and fixing itself on that same front!), or relevant institutions being embargoed to the point of not being able to use Microsoft products, as is apparently now the case with the ICC, will probably kick Europe into gear, but it needs to be a solid kick, and not just an institution here and there.

octaane• 8 months ago

So, I'm going to chip in with a different perspective from that of some other commentators on here. The overwhelming majority of computers in the entire world, used by our entire species, have windows as their OS.

While I applaud the use of alternatives to windows and it's apps, universities teach it because it is what their graduates will use in the real world. Governments use it because while it has it's flaws, it mostly works and is a universal standard. It's the toyota of operating systems. The parts and manpower to repair it and use it are available everywhere, and it's cheap and reliable.

quamserena• 8 months ago

I am in university currently and I run Linux, and the only thing that I have needed Windows for has been SolidWorks. Everything else has worked just fine. We’re actually provided Linux VMs because so much software development happens in Linux (or MacOS); you need to know *nix to be job-ready in CS. I’m not sure what world you live in.

xcf_seetan2• 8 months ago

and manpower to repair it and use it are available everywhere

So why each time i announce myself as working with computers, there is always someone that approaches me saying "great, i have a problem with my computer, can you ..."? I just make them stop and ask "Are you talking about Windows?", and when the answer is affirmative i just say "Sorry, I only work on Linux." and they go "What is that?", lol, i would like you to see their faces when i say "It's a professional system!" and leave. :)

akoboldfrying• 8 months ago

I think you do know the answer, and are just being coy.

In case you don't: The products that people report problems with are the products that people actually use frequently. When "Linux as daily driver" market share is the same order of magnitude as Windows, then such observations will tell us something about the two systems' relative usability.

mips_avatar• 8 months ago

Microsoft is not the Toyota of operating systems. That would imply some kind of culture of continuous improvement absent from Microsoft. It’s the General Motors of operating systems

bevr1337• 8 months ago

The overwhelming majority of computers in the entire world, used by our entire species, have windows as their OS

The majority of computers in the world run Linux. Windows only has majority share in the desktop space .

alvineh• 8 months ago

Hello, this is my second comment I will answer any question

tdrz2• 8 months ago

I read quite a lot of bashing of various national and transnational European institutions for relying so much on US tech. But what about YOU, european? gmail, facebook, instagram, twitter, whatsapp, macbook, iphone, uber, steam etc etc are all working fine for you?

cobbaut• 8 months ago

European from Antwerp here. I only use two of those, and see more and more of my friends migrate away from some, albeit slowly.

tdrz2• 8 months ago

I (also European), for one, find it virtually impossible to convince people to give up on most of those.

dijit• 8 months ago

yep, but for most of those its not very good for us.

Like fast food, it makes satiates a short term desire for a long term problem.

At least, facebook, instagram and an argument can be made for gmail.

I think goods are a different thing altogether though, nobody tells you what to do with your washing machine after you buy it, but social media engines use your data against you and change the rules/system on a whim.

thenthenthen• 8 months ago

In my experience it went something like this: Before covid it seemed to be run mainly locally, during covid there was a massive lobby by MS to push teams and most Unis caved and thats how most unis ended up in the MS eco system.

vanviegen6• 8 months ago

Yes, this is what happened. 'The only way' to scale up Teams video conferencing such that everybody could use it, was to move everything to the cloud. Never waste a good crisis!

kkfx• 8 months ago

Yes, of course, when their teachers learn to use a FLOSS desktop for all tasks, starting with writing theses and papers in LaTeX... In other words, when they run courses for students to recover what they didn't learn in high schools.

Today, a desktop is the primary epistemological tool; only a FLOSS one is suitable for study, as it reveals what it does and is, or at least can be, shaped according to need. Most are simply IT illiterate, like professors from the 1950s unable to read and write fluently, except they still haven't realised it...

gtech1• 8 months ago

Germany's ZenDIS with OpenDesk is actively working on the issue too

phendrenad2• 8 months ago

If a viable Office 365 alternative appears, it won't be a big top-down bureaucratic initiative from the government, or even the universities. It'll be a nimble EU-based startup company building a full office suite and making it available not just to government organizations via a "contact sales" link (you hear that, NextCloud and OpenDesk?), but via one-click deploy to AWS EU region, docker/k8s, and whatever EU-based cloud hosts exist, so you and your friends can test it out at home.

(If the EU never figures out how to allow nimble startups companies to exist, then forget about it)

okillbite• 8 months ago

I think a better question is if there is an operating framework that would remove Microsoft's ability to sanction individuals on the whim of the current US administration in lieu of the appropriate EU institutions.

Microsoft's partnership/JV with 21Vianet in China shows that it can be done (with limitations on features) and this is probably the right direction to go.

maxglute• 8 months ago

Not exactly a sales pitch but TFW north korea has more of a soveign software ecosystem than EU.

Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

Related Stories