Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

https://therecord.media/denmark-digital-agency-microsoft-digital-independence

by robtherobber • 5 months ago

842 434 5 months ago

jjgreen• 5 months ago

The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers

okintheory• 5 months ago

How could any European govt use MS after Trump ordered MS to sanction an ICC prosecutor and MS complied? I imagine they're all trying to walk away

abc123abc123• 5 months ago

Easy. Intertia and incompetence. Government is full of paper pushers who hav eno higher wish but to live comfortably on tax payers money until they retire. The key to survival is to do what everyone else is doing, and not to be the first to try anything new.

The good thing is, as soon as someone tries anything new, and it looks like it is a success, the paper pushers will join in as soon as they think it is safe, and try to steal the fame and glory.

This is just how the government and the public sector works.

kachnuv_ocasek• 5 months ago

This is not in any way specific to the government or public institution. Many (perhaps most) private companies work the same way.

Frieren• 5 months ago

Government is full of paper pushers who hav eno higher wish but to live comfortably on tax payers money until they retire.

Even billionaires are into getting as much tax payer money as possible. But they get the big numbers.

Report Says Elon Musk's Businesses Have Been Awarded $38 Billion In Government Contracts Since 2003: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/report-says-elon-musks-busine...

olav• 5 months ago

Plus, fulfillment of wishes to users as opposed to IT architecture management. Users have been brainwashed to demand certain brands. When you combine this with an IT Management that lacks mid-term risk management or a vision, you get happy users and an IT landscape easily taken hostage by single vendors.

CoastalCoder2• 5 months ago

This is just how the government and the public sector works.

I work in the public sector, and that isn't remotely my experience.

Could you roughly quantify what faction of public sector workers you believe operate that way, and how you arrived at that belief?

seu• 5 months ago

Not exactly governments, but I work with NGOs in Germany, and plenty of them use Teams and other MS products, just because they receive them for free and don't have the budget to pay someone to install open source alternatives. Training is especially costly and in these environments people are not really "digital native". It's not even about age, but about culture: people here will do what they are trained to do and fear doing something they don't know, because they might "do something wrong". I was responsible for a platform that gives free online storage, chat functions and videocalls (BBB) for NGOs, and had to hear these arguments over and over when discussing migrations. So unless there is a political drive, together with good trainings and support, the transition is very very difficult.

pjmlp4• 5 months ago

The big problem, and I say this as someone that appreciates some of the Microsoft technologies, is that it is always first and foremost about Office, and nothing else.

Forgotten are Windows, XBox, DirectX, VC++, C#, F#, TypeScript, Github, VSCode, Azure, Teams, SQL Server, SharePoint, Dynamics,....

Ah but some of those are FOSS, they are, pity that most money and project steering only flows from one place.

Repeat the same listing exercise for every US big tech company and their influence on the computing industry at large, and possible geopolitcs, that is how we end up with HarmonyOS NEXT with ArkTS.

ndsipa_pomu2• 5 months ago

Forgotten are Windows, XBox, DirectX, VC++, C#, F#, TypeScript, Github, VSCode, Azure, Teams, SQL Server, SharePoint, Dynamics,.... Ah but some of those are FOSS

Which of those are FOSS?

tick_tock_tick7• 5 months ago

Europe still buys Russian gas and just signed a trade deal with India to whitewash it buying of Russian gas after they "stop".

nunobrito3• 5 months ago

Very good news for open source, hopefully.

embedding-shape4• 5 months ago

Bit old, from June 13th, 2025, this and similar stories been on HN a bunch of times:

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

9999000009992• 5 months ago

The entire American software industry will feel the ramifications here.

Gotta stay polite for HN. No data stored on an American server is secure.

I really really do like Open Suse though, and I think an open source future is possible. Open Suse, Libre Office, etc.

data_maan• 5 months ago

I love these posts that are so on the edge that I can't tell if it's sarcastic or for real :)

titanomachy2• 5 months ago

The perception in the rest of the world is that America has gone completely off the rails and could do almost literally anything at any time. I don't think this comment is that strange.

maypeacepreva1l3• 5 months ago

Which part is sarcastic here? As far as Europe as market goes, Software industries have already started to feel the pinch. Right now data protection and privacy rights of common people in the US is at lowest point, as we have seen in the news, anything goes for this administration. One must be living in an alternate reality to not see these things happening.

gammalost• 5 months ago

I do not know what you mean. The US and US-based companies have now become a liability. Global politics change on a day-by-day basis, EU has frozen trade agreement discussions because the tariff situation is unclear. There are open discussions in Sweden about how we can reduce our dependence on US-based companies, because we do not know whether that dependency will be wielded as a political tool against us.

rockskon• 5 months ago

To be fair, the same could be said about most other servers too.

cyberpunk• 5 months ago

No data stored on european servers either, see microsoft’s comments in french court to this effect.

The only solution is no american companies in the loop at all.

9999000009992• 5 months ago

TBF I also sorta just think Microsoft is generally stupid.

Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found.

https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-digital-escorts...

After thinking about this for 90 seconds, Microsoft could license Azure tech to Hetzner or something. Keep the servers under EU control, but unless they share source code it’s still a blackbox.

Honestly everything used for anything serious should be open source and regularly audited. We need check each others homework.

isodev2• 5 months ago

Not will, they already do. My day job big corp hasn’t renewed a single US contract or license this year. We’re also in the process of ditching Office 365. Even Azure is no longer allowed for new deployments

mmsimanga2• 5 months ago

I am often amused at how people outside the US don't like the current US government yet if it wasn't for the current US government the whole world would have been sleep walking into Office 365 and Teams. I don't hold any political opinion but do like that we are now going to have alternatives and true competition.

Drakim• 5 months ago

I'm not sure I follow, are you saying that because the current US government is so bad that people are rejecting Microsoft products, the rest of the world should be thankful to the US for "waking them up"?

mghackerlady• 5 months ago

SUSE and its children in openSUSE are freaking awesome. The tumbleweed release is the most stable rolling release ever, they have slowroll if you want something even more stable, and leap for basically a free version of SLE. Genuinely surprised that SLES hasn't overtaken redhat

harambae• 5 months ago

For all of the talk of the downfall of Americans software here on HN and how all the Europeans are moving away, this happened today as well...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47169815 (iPhone and iPad approved to handle classified NATO information)

trilogic• 5 months ago

I wonder about Vatican policy in regards to similar compromising infrastructure.

Mashimo• 5 months ago

I work in software development for Danish hospitals, and some regions already used OpenOffice, now libre office, for .. well over 15 years. At least in parts.

We integrate with an API into libreoffice, and it more or less did not change in well over a decade. But sometimes libreoffice crashes and you can't figure out why. There are just no logs. It feels like a black box at times.

But I don't think they will be switching away from Teams as quickly. Will be interesting for sure.

Slightly off topic, but does anyone know why libreoffice stopped publishing artefacts to mvn repo? https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.libreoffice/libreoffi...

deanc• 5 months ago

I think if we're to move to away from these US products to open source ones, then governments should also provide resources or funding to develop them using the licensing fees they save. Is the Danish government contributing back to libreoffice?

hermanzegerman9• 5 months ago

The German State of Schleswig Holstein does

https://euro-stack.com/blog/2025/3/schleswig-holstein-open-s...

toomuchtodo• 5 months ago

Indeed, take what you're paying US Big Tech and direct it to domestic EU enterprises, corporate or non profit.

trinsic211• 5 months ago

Agreed. There should be some structure setup for open source projects to request contribution fees. Having stuff like this in plain sight might help orgs play nice.

staticlibs• 5 months ago

sometimes libreoffice crashes and you can't figure out why why libreoffice stopped publishing artefacts to mvn repo

I think both questions would be a perfect fit for the paid support bugtracker of LibreOffice maintainers. Hopefully paid by some hospital funds that are not spent on MS Office licenses.

andix4• 5 months ago

Switching from Word/Excel to LibreOffice is comparably easy. A lot of other Microsoft Products are much harder to get rid of.

I've never seen a European corporation that doesn't do user management with ActiveDirectory. Some still have it on their own Windows servers, but most browser based applications still go through Entra (Azure Cloud based AD). Just shut off their Entra/AAD and most of their software is blocked because nobody can log in.

dijit3• 5 months ago

Agreed, and even things like Keycloak/FreeIPA are only partial solutions.

FreeIPA in particular is a beast to maintain, it puts kubernetes-cowboys to shame.

close047• 5 months ago

This is the elephant in the room that most comments on this page miss. Office may be hard to replace, Teams maybe even harder, but the real pain comes when you touch identity and access management. The usual initial optimism that "yeah but [insert solution name here] does this, problem solved" dissolves very fast as you start going through the inventory of requirements for managing users, devices, authentication, etc.

It's not just the technical hurdle which maybe you'll whip your admins into finding workarounds (-keep praying that your admins don't leave because it will be painful to find replacements who understand and can maintain the spaghetti pasta monster your infra ended up being-). In overall non-technical organizations the user experience always ends up hobbled even just by asking people to keep track of multiple identities.

MS is still entrenched because they give a turnkey solution with Eeeeeverything™ and your CTO doesn't need to struggle with any uncertainty. SaaS made it so easy to just "outsource" everything to MS, they'll be responsible and accountable for operations, infra, security, processes, etc. Even less headache for your C-level people. See no evil, hear no evil, you pay MS to take the shit and your job is safe. If you throw a stone out the window you'll hit someone with general "MS administration" skills. And users are usually familiar with MS tools, Windows, Office, so they aren't bothered (you hear a lot of complaints about Teams on HN but not so much from normal users). So this covers the tech, the skills, and the UX.

buovjaga4• 5 months ago

LibreOffice release builds should offer to send a crash report. Ideally, you should then create a bug report referencing the crash report. Besides that, you can do your own build with debug symbols and get backtraces or debug the program.

At The Document Foundation we are always interested in helping deployments. It is also nice to do writeups for our blog. Let me know, if your organisation needs help: ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org

I recommend to consider our certification program: https://www.documentfoundation.org/certification-program/

I asked about the Maven artifacts and our release engineer will update them later this week.

rbanffy3• 5 months ago

you should then create a bug report referencing the crash report

Reducing friction would be nice here - I don't remember encountering the crash log screen, but if you could file a bug report right from that screen, that'd be perfect. A lot of information can be pre-collected at that stage - precise version, build, OS, architecture, processor type, etc. All that'd be left is the "What I was trying to do", my e-mail, and a checkbox if I agree with the privacy policies and if I want to receive e-mail updates about this bug report.

you can do your own build with debug symbols

It'd be great if the Document Foundation helped distros to offer libreoffice-*-debug packages for this case - if it's crashing for you, install the debug version and your crash logs will be a lot easier to read.

trinsic211• 5 months ago

Why does libreoffice have such an annoying document recovery mechanism that I can't turn off or modify? It takes like three clicks to cancel that process every time I open a new doc

flopsamjetsam• 5 months ago

But I don't think they will be switching away from Teams as quickly.

I'm interested to know why Teams is so sticky for the team. Are there not good replacements available? I've used it a little, but am by no means a power user.

wiredpancake• 5 months ago

Because 'Teams' isn't just a simple meeting application. It's very feature rich. If you ever have to deal with the admin.teams.microsoft portal you'll know how many options and toggles it has.

Alongside this many businesses deploy 'Teams Supported' or 'Teams Enabled' devices into meeting and conference rooms. Yealink is a popular brand, they don't have baked in support for LibreMeet or whatever meeting products exist.

close047• 5 months ago

On top of what sibling comment says, Teams benefits from other network effects. If all your partners use Teams and the federation is a enabled, next time you consider a replacement that can do all of this, the bar will be that much higher to find a suitable alternative.

If an inter-operable protocols were enforced by some regulation it would alleviate the situation a bit.

trinsic211• 5 months ago

It's buggy as hell. That's one thing. But they rolled teams out with office anti-competitively to lock orgs in and on that premise it should be abandoned. Market saturation by a company that is contributing to an authoritarian government by way of anti-competition needs to be black listed everywhere.

trinsic211• 5 months ago

Did you try running Libra office from command line to see the console output?

PeterStuer• 5 months ago

Could you expand on the Teams remark? What exactly is the lock=in?

ulrikrasmussen2• 5 months ago

And meanwhile the exact same agency spits out government Android apps that use Play Integrity so citizens cannot ditch Google for GrapheneOS. This is symbolism, the minister does not actually care about digital sovereignty for the citizens.

guerrilla3• 5 months ago

This is symbolism

I don't think so. It's more complicated than that. The state is not a monolith. Different heads are doing different things and it's a enormous bureaucracy. The divisions pumping out Android will eventually catch up to what's going on and the vulnerability they're exposing themselves to. These things take time. It doesn't all happen at once. People (who are not very technical, barely knowing what a computer is) need to understand what's going on and that can take a while. Let's just hope they figure it out before it matters.

Aeglaecia• 5 months ago

denmark spearheads the EU push for chat control , this is a bit of an impediment to the good will argument

isodev2• 5 months ago

I think it has more to do with ignorance. Device attestation is not trivial to adopt while both Apple and Google promise you a very simple abstraction. So it takes being informed and having leverage in the process to be able to make a difference.

For me the blame is squarely on the technical “experts” who are behind the architecture and implementation of such apps.

azalemeth• 5 months ago

Device attestation is precisely the thing I do not want my government to ever adopt. I have a Danish CPR number. They've given me a FIDO secure token generator as my phone is degoogled for MitID. Most Danes don't know what those words mean, and if they did, wouldn't understand why I distrust (all) governments (and indeed things! Three default scientific position is scepticism, albeit with varying degrees of priors)

ulrikrasmussen2• 5 months ago

The thing is, device attestation is fundamentally incompatible with digital freedom so governments should never adopt it to begin with. We lived without digital solutions that depended on device attestation and we will continue to do so.

berkes3• 5 months ago

This is symbolism

It is probably unintentional. I work and worked in such projects (in The Netherlands), and the process is -rightfully- chaotic.

Governments typically don't have a central single team that builds all their android apps. They usually write a tender with loads of requirements and app-agencies will then build it. Or freelancers. Or volunteer teams. Or all of that. So there's no central team governed by one minister who can dictate what should happen today. There's hundreds of companies, teams, freelancers, interims, running around trying to make deadlines

Between writing a spec and the delivered app, there's chasms: could be a year between the specs are written and the first app pushed onto a phone. In a (trump)year a lot can change. But also between how specs are requirements or wishes in real life. "No user data may ever reach a google server" (actual specs are far vaguer and broader) may sound good, but will conflict directly with "user must receive push notifications of Foo and Bar". Or "passport NFC data must be attested for login", requiring a non-rooted, android, signed-by-google hardware attestation thingymajick.

So no, this is not malice. Nor incompetence. This is a sad reality, where we've allowed the monopoly to dictate what we, and users, expect, and to have that monopoly be the only option to provide those expectations.

teekert5• 5 months ago

As someone in the Netherlands, and also with a company in this space, could you point me to some relevant resources (like ongoing projects)? I'd love to help our country get more sovereign (in small steps).

Btw, NRC has a nice podcast series on the topic. One thing hampering the sovereignty effort is the enormous amounts of Azure/AWS/GCP certified people. Their career is build on these platforms.

berkes3• 5 months ago

Since a few people ask "What can I do to help my govt/region/country to become more sovereign", here's my tips on this:

- All governments under EU (on almost all levels) are "required" to use and/or produce software as Open Source. The source of "that government app" should be available somewhere (though quite likely is not)¹ So go hunt for the source and start there.

- Look at underlying standards. EU regulation, trickling down into local laws and guidelines, rely on Open Standards almost always. That app you use to log into your tax environment quite probably uses (a weird, hard to recognize) variation of OAUTH2 or OpenID connect, SAML or such. The app that shows the time+dates for garbage-collection, quite probably uses a simple ical-feed under the hood. With that knowledge, you may be able to develop/fork/use open source alternatives without too much effort².

- Show (local) representatives the alternatives. Listen to them. Learn from them. Most representatives are suprisingly open to you as expert. But, I cannot stress enough, learn and listen foremost. IT experts and open source community in particular have an (IMHO well deserved) reputation for being arrogant, know-it-all unfriendly and rediculously single-minded. So don't lecture that councillor for using Twitter instead of Mastodon, riduculing them for not using GPG or scoffing at their insistence on using Microsoft Word over Vim with Markdown (My younger self was such an arrogant neckbeard; I am now convinced I have done actual harm to the Open Source community that way). But ask why twitter, have they tried mastodon, or bluesky? Why not? Why did they leave? What features in MSword do they require? Did they know that Jitsi is an option? Maybe you can show how they could use Nextcloud for at least their own files? Sometimes you can answer some of their questions and help them. More often, you learn a few things that you could use to improve sovereign and open source alternatives and align them slightly more with whats needed.

¹ The details, interpretations and implementations are a mess, but the idea is "open source, unless..." for any software that any government buys, rents, builds, etc. In practice almost all projects fall under "unless...". I spoke to a MSFT account-manager for several local govts and he told me they have f*in training material to "help" govt officials write tenders/requirements in such a way that Open Source is practically excluded and Microsoft the only option. I am appalled, but also not that surprised.

² The ical-finding is how I got my local garbage-collection schedule into my calendar app. And when I told this to someone who happened to work at the municipality, they realized that publishing the urls and docs online helped a lot of citizens. Ironically, the push-back, according to this person, was from a civil-servant whose career was influenced on the success (install counts) of the "municipality app" and who was afraid that if people could add the calendar to their outlook/google cal/ical/other-cal, might no longer install the app. Again, I was appalled at such perverse incentives.

simonh4• 5 months ago

Because if they were serious about it, they'd have replatformed completely in 5 minutes.

fbn79• 5 months ago

Who remember the failed experiment of abandoning Micro$oft by Munich

https://www-sueddeutsche-de.translate.goog/muenchen/muenchne...

c03• 5 months ago

I don't. But I remember that the French also just did the same.

cromka2• 5 months ago

It failed because of MS pushback and lobbying. As was reported countless times.

xienze• 5 months ago

So, it can happen again is what you’re saying.

petcat2• 5 months ago

Also because Munich didn't actually want to leave Microsoft, they just wanted a better deal. (Which they got)

Kampfschnitzel• 5 months ago

failed due to corrupt government official and M$ bribes

amelius• 5 months ago

Sounds like a strategy to get money from M$. You can always switch to FOSS later.

iso16312• 5 months ago

Microsoft came back with a far lower cost offer than they had before, and took the new head out for nice lunches

petcat2• 5 months ago

So it sounds like Munich ditching Microsoft wasn't a principled move, but just a business tactic to get the same software for cheaper.

jamesbelchamber• 5 months ago

It should be acknowledged that this was at least significantly about lobbying, and shouldn't be considered a cut-and-dry "failed experiment" (though clearly there are lessons that can be learned):

[Munich Mayor] Reiter wanted Microsoft to move its Microsoft Germany corporate headquarters to to Munich. Microsoft moved and Reiter wants to deliver on his promise to make Munich a Windows-powered city.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-munich-should-stick-with-l...

mrweasel2• 5 months ago

Copenhagen and Aarhus, which previously announced plans to abandon Microsoft software, citing financial concerns, market dominance and political tensions with Washington.

That's not going to happen, their infrastructure is completely tied to Microsoft Active Directory, it's going to be incredibly expensive to just plan a migration out of that. Trump will be out of office before anything serious can even get startet, and depending on the next US administration, someone will decide that it's not worth the spending.

Plus you'd need to re-train and army of Windows administrators to run, what... Linux and OpenLDAP?

throwawaysleep2• 5 months ago

Trump represents the average American. That part is not changing and that problem is not going away. Joe Average said "Yes! [current mess] is what I want."

maypeacepreva1l3• 5 months ago

Exactly, people saying Trump will be out of office and everything will be back to normal are incredibly naive. If current trends stay, Trump is going to be one of the better ones for what is coming next. The politicians in US are saying worst xenophobic, racist, sexist things and are still getting praised or even promoted to higher positions. At least for a decade, unless something big or drastic happens, nothing is going to change for better in US, politics wise.

CoastalCoder2• 5 months ago

Trump represents the average American.

If that were true, you wouldn't see such a deeply divided America right now.

tallanvor• 5 months ago

No. Trump represented what seemed like a solution to just enough people who were willing to change their votes from one party to another, and didn't represent enough of a threat to most of the people who might have been swayed to switch their vote away from the Republican party.

The issue with voters choosing more right-wing populist parties is not unique to the US.

littlecosmic• 5 months ago

Far crazier things have happened on this planet than switching to Linux and retraining some IT folk.

oellegaard• 5 months ago

I don’t think the IT admins are the concern TBH. How about the thousands of people who need to use new software - people who some barely know how to turn the computer on and off?

zweifuss• 5 months ago

If you can do a successful switch to cloud only Entra (aka. AzureAD) first, you are 90% ready for a migration to Open Source. You need Entra for Licensing anyway. Yes, I'm aware that this is hard.

Univention Nubus (Keycloak + OpenLDAP) or FreeIPA as alternatives for Entra come to mind. You can even leverage your Powershell expertise.

adornKey• 5 months ago

Oh oh... Time to say goodbye to Greenland. Lets see what is going to happen to LEGO.. Freedom Bricks?

ndsipa_pomu2• 5 months ago

Why do you think there's a connection between the Danish government and LEGO?

simonh4• 5 months ago

Trump has already started talking about taking over Iceland. Where's next?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yZA7A1fy8yelNvDK2aVesx24jak...

prathje• 5 months ago

Happy to see Schleswig-Holstein switching as well and also it being mentioned in an article on the HN front page. Who would have thought?

andypiper• 5 months ago

They also have their own Mastodon server, which is a great way forward for government institutions!

piker2• 5 months ago

A lot of good behind this idea if nothing else than to keep Microsoft honest. The Azureware push is nauseating and such a transparent attempt to lock in its monopoly against disruptors. We’re hoping Tritium[1] can provide a free or commercial alternative for legal teams soon.

All that said, it’s easy to underestimate the quality of Microsoft’s office products. They handle millions of edge cases, accessibility, i18n. They are performant and in a lot of cases extended through long-term add ins.

Even Google hasn’t achieved real parity.

It’s Microsoft’s race to lose, but my bet is they’re too distracted by AI to even noticed those coming for them.

[1] https://tritium.legal

bayindirh• 5 months ago

performant

Inexplicably taking two seconds to load the next page in a simple, 10 page .docx document on a completely idle MacBook Air M1 w/ 16GB RAM.

No memory pressure, no heavy processes, no excessive number of apps open.

Yes, it's normally much faster, but not always.

piker2• 5 months ago

Yes, that is surprising. Though I think modern Office has always struggled on macOS.

motoboi• 5 months ago

Brazil’s free software initiative in 2000’s was all about technological dependency.

Brazil was hoping to leverage governmental spending to kickstart a national software development industry. Some sort of leap into the future, jumping over first the industrial era and then service-based economy we missed.

It was killed with fire by huge Microsoft (and American, I suppose) lobbying in congress, but then America had a very favorable public view as a nurturing and democratic partner. Some sort of older brother guiding you into adulthood.

Currently, at least in my bubble, the public view of America is more like a predator with Trump as a protodictator. Not necessarily true, understand me, just as that older brother view wasn’t. But it’s public perception.

A good part of that disabling of the Brazil initiative was simply free Google workspace for public universities (which were in the government plan).

I suppose that given the existencial threat level of anxiety caused by current developments will probably make Europe government immune to American lobby (at least in the short term), so I suppose this can actually happen.

Let’s see how it develops when they try to ban Microsoft from the universities. That would be the acid test.

marcosdumay2• 5 months ago

It was killed with fire by huge Microsoft (and American, I suppose) lobbying in congress

Well... the bad quality of the decree itself helped at least as much as Microsoft.

Government organizations often discover it's easier to publish their software in github than to make the publishing agency accept it.

There was no migration plan, and the option that was actually pushed from the central organizations required constant contracts that were about as expensive and hard to manage as the ones with Microsoft, but hiring the government.

At the same time, the same organization that others were supposed to contract was getting delisted worldwide for bad security practices.

goldman7911• 5 months ago

Sorry if I sound bit political but this whole trump/usa political issue (hope) helps push more and more opensource and decentralization.

blue_hex• 5 months ago

This is a good thing, imo. Perhaps, the EU could generally switch to OSS, wherever possible, thus eroding even more the grip of the US tech giants on parts of the digital world.

sylware2• 5 months ago

From an applications point of view:

They want web apps only running in whatng cartel web engines?

libreoffice? A massive piece of software you can build only with US c++ compilers (MIT and mostly apple)? (the mistake was to use c++ in the first place, well computer languages on an insane level of complexity).

To put it together: it won't be perfect, lines for compromises will have to be drawn, and it will feel like getting out of 'the matrix' for the time (normal "users" won't understand), if you see where I am going. Digital freedom has a "price", efty "price" in a digital world dominated by Big Tech.

Going for a strong independence will have to hurt, or it will be slatted as "posture" more than a real long term/strategic will.

It is not "against" the US, but "in the interest" of the danish people (well, should be EU though...)

robinei• 5 months ago

Who cares if a piece of open source has American maintainers? The point is not to avoid touching anything American. It is control and sovereignty.

sylware2• 5 months ago

This is what I implied: this is not against the US, which have actually the most control and sovereignty on critical software.

It is much cheaper and easier to have control and sovereignty on less complex software, including the SDK.

Usually you get developer lock-in via non-pertinent complexity, often including the SDK namely the computer language.

daft_pink2• 5 months ago

Good luck. It’s just not really practical. Office 365 is cheap and training everyone on another platform will cost more and make it harder to onboard new talent than using another system.

I worked for a company that was fully Google and the executives who were highly effective all just paid for excel themselves. It’s just not really practical when you’re going to make a presentation to learn how to do pivot tables in a new software in the crunch time.

I’m not a fanboy. I prefer Mac, but in a high cost labor environment like Europe it’s not worth it to save less than 1% of your labor cost on new software.

hapidjus• 5 months ago

If the goal is purely to save costs, then yes. The main reason is actually stated in the title of the article. I recommend clicking the link to see it.

daft_pink2• 5 months ago

The articles like 2-3 paragraphs?

It’s not only costs. It’s the productivity and output of your labor force compared to something that in the grand scheme of things is not really expensive.

pu_pe3• 5 months ago

One aspect of the AI bubble that is not talked about very much is how the European market is a key factor in any serious calculation about future revenue. If Europe decides to, or is forced to decouple its digital infrastructure from the US, that essentially slashes the addressable market of a company like chatGPT by a third. And Europe has some of the richest customers too.

In other words, Sam Altman et al. should be hardcore Atlanticists at this point.

_ache_• 5 months ago

You are right, but I have the feeling that the Google, Microsoft, ... and the IA companies think that the EU is a acquired market. It's false, they can shift off the US, they eventually will.

enaaem• 5 months ago

It also destroys the winner takes all market. Investors would count on the winner takes all market and give infinite VC money to a start up, so that they would make a product that is slightly better than the competitor and kill the competition early on.

kyboren4• 5 months ago

Maybe this will happen eventually but decoupling any time soon is a pipe dream. For the foreseeable future, Europe's BATNA is shit.

Forget Microsoft and Google services, what about the hardware? To support all this new demand for European infrastructure you'll have to buy tons of new gear from mostly American companies: AMD, INTC, NVDA, MU, etc.

Are cutting-edge European competitors going to suddenly spring into existence to satisfy that demand? Is TSMC gonna allocate wafer spins to some scrappy EU startup instead of NVDA, AAPL, AMZN, MSFT, AMD, INTC, AVGO, QCOM?

I dunno if you've been paying attention to the market but demand for all data center components has gone through the roof and supply is already spoken for for years to come. The hardware you'd need to decouple simply isn't available, when it becomes available you'll be competing with nearly $1T in annual hyperscaler CapEx, and Europe has no capability to produce domestic alternatives.

pu_pe3• 5 months ago

Decoupling would be painful and certainly hardware would be the most difficult challenge. However, consider that for all those companies you mentioned, Chinese alternatives are starting to appear and will be very competitive in the next few years. Europe also has some key strategic cards to play when it comes to hardware, such as access to TSMC.

The most likely scenario in my view is that Europe will be a consumer/bystander in the AI race, not a protagonist. For that, you don't need a lot of hardware. China and the US will compete for the European market, with the US already far ahead and earning billions from European customers. But it can lose that post in the future, either through crazy foreign policy or simply being outcompeted by the Chinese.

whh• 5 months ago

I think a move to Open Source would be great in Europe, but only if the governments using the technologies are actively funding their development.

This doesn't just mean once-off grants, or a bit of cash donated here and there. I would like to see per-user per-year contributions to the organisations that develop these tools on-par with the current spend going towards Microsoft Cloud products.

It can be better than Microsoft, but you need to fund it to be better than Microsoft.

embedding-shape4• 5 months ago

It can be better than Microsoft, but you need to fund it to be better than Microsoft.

Lol no. Microsoft profits more than the value they provide, not exactly we should want to copy. We need to prevent hypercapitalism from reaching us in Europe, not make it worse, as we now seen exactly what it does to countries when you let it grow unfettered.

But I agree in general, governments and companies that use FOSS should donate back either engineering-time or money, but no need to do complicated "per-user per-year contributions", give them a sum per year, enough to fund the core developers at least and ideally to hire new ones, otherwise hire engineers and let them full-time contribute back.

Luckily, at least in Europe, this is exactly what we're seeing now. The governments who are looking into FOSS are all thinking about how to help fund it, no one seem to be thinking "How can we do this for free?" which is nice thing to see.

hbn2• 5 months ago

Governments funding FOSS is not Microsoft's business model and it's not capitalism.

kakacik2• 5 months ago

Europe as in EU can certainly use a bit more capitalism. Nothing brutal like US or China have where individuals are often crushed by system or situation with no help in sight, but Europe got lazy, complacent, used to over-generous unsustainable easy to abuse social system and generally living off debt to future generations. Self-serving massive bureaucracy and corruption. Companies like car makers are already being hit badly and its going to get a lot worse with global competition.

For the 1000th time here and elsewhere - look no further than Switzerland. Highly diverse, federated group of people that managed to preserve most direct democracy in the world for 800 years and counting. 'Most free and most armed nation in the world' still holds true without clusterfuck that US gun situation is. Each canton is very self-sufficient, governs local rules, laws and taxation so there is no animosity between various regions - really a mini version of EU.

This is how EU parliament should look like, if (mostly) french and german egos would step down from their pedestals and acknowledge that somebody may figured things out better. Its most capitalistic country in Europe by far while preserving most of what we call social and healthcare net, has top notch free education and so on. Also its not increasing its debt, a clear mark of sustainable economical success of such approach, in contrary with literally any EU country.

Thanemate• 5 months ago

I would replace "funding" with at minimum "contributing", because there are people who would think having a government actively dipping their toes in a product gives them right over actively piloting the direction of that product.

I've already seen online discussions of something similar happening when Valve announced that they're actively contributing to Arch Linux and KDE. But then, it's Valve.

leke• 5 months ago

I would like to see tech related educational institutions incorporate contributing to open source as part of their curriculum. A lot of these institutions are funded by the government anyway, so it would make sense to support the technology running your country which funds you.

rbanffy3• 5 months ago

I would like to see tech related educational institutions incorporate contributing to open source as part of their curriculum

As long as we avoid drowning maintainers with review requests, I'm in.

tokai• 5 months ago

This is way overblown. Its parts of some ministries. All public IT in Denmark is still bound to Microsoft. Statens IT, the IT systems provider for the public sector, is right now in the middle of rolling out Windows 11.

Braxton19802• 5 months ago

The article says "Danish agency" not a"Denmark"

bradley13• 5 months ago

That's great, but it's always just one agency, or one very local bit of government. If we (Europeans) really mean it - and we should - the top level of government just needs to make the declaration: as of X, all Microsoft licenses will be terminated. No exceptions. Adapt or die.

According to the CLOUD act, the US government can demand access to data from US companies, regardless of where that data is stored. That must be unacceptable to any sovereign government. I genuinely do not understand why other countries put up with this.

skrebbel• 5 months ago

That's great, but it's always just one agency, or one very local bit of government.

All change starts small. If these small agencies or very local bits of government successfully pull it off, larger ones may well follow.

lukan4• 5 months ago

"I genuinely do not understand why other countries put up with this."

Maybe because there is no drop in replacement of microsoft and microsoft dependant tools?

So yes, one can (and should) build them. But the market right now is not offering this yet.

Gigachad3• 5 months ago

Google has drop in replacements for most of it. But that doesn’t solve the problem of using US tech.

lpcvoid8• 5 months ago

There's Nextcloud/OCIS/Owncloud for Sharepoint (god I fucking hate Sharepoint) and Onedrive, there's Libreoffice/Collabora (and Onlyoffice, but that's russian...), there's Thunderbird for Email. Windows is absolutely replaceable also, of course, maybe even easier than the Office365 subscription mentioned above.

The lock in only exists in brains of (old) people that can't adapt. MS products can all be replaced, and should be in the EU. You simply cannot trust an American company anymore after Trump.

hermanzegerman9• 5 months ago

For many services there are drop-in Replacements available. I don't see what's so special about Mail or Calendar from Microsoft vs other vendors.

The Quality is also Shit. I get some stupid Errors when trying to Access OWA every other day. Then I have to reset cookies/cache and can login again

wolvoleo9• 5 months ago

Well, if your goal is to be 100% the same as what Microsoft offer, then sure no there's not. But that's letting them set the goalposts.

If you look at the features you actually need and are willing to explore different ways of doing things that are not exactly like M365 there's more options. France and Germany are also working on freeing themselves from M365.

This kinda thing sounds a lot like those RFPs that were specifically written so they could only be fulfilled by Microsoft because it was just a list of their feature tickboxes.

rconti2• 5 months ago

The best time to do this was ~2010 before all of the cloud lock-in stuff.

The second best time is now.

throwyawayyyy• 5 months ago

What I find interesting, and reflects my ignorance of how these things are used, is that if you look at, say, FAANG companies, Office isn't used. I've worked for two FAANGs over the past couple of years, and everything is done via Google docs. Replacing a giant suite like Office looks hard, replacing something simpler like Google docs looks very much simpler, and surely should suffice?

hermanzegerman9• 5 months ago

Well the State of Schleswig Holstein is ditching Microsoft completely. But it's a difficult political uphill battle, because some Users won't change their habits and cry about it.

The Minister shut this up with "Software is a decision by the employer, the employee has to accept it"

Which then got blown up by the tabloid media, which ran BS Headlines like "OMG Courts and Police not working (because they're childish and refuse to learn another E-Mail Client)

Also Microsoft is playing dirty and lobbying very hard behind the scenes to obstruct it, in Munich they changed their German HQs to Munich and started to pay Taxes there. So suddenly the city changed back to MS

TL;Dr: It's a thankless and tough battle for politicians, because they face lobbying and media pressure against them. Also they will be blamed for any roadblocks, and there is no real upside for them in it, as no one except for a few nerds cares about this

lnsru• 5 months ago

You’re absolutely right. The benefit of being US independent has no value in the eyes of the large part of European population. The politician fighting for it is fighting uphill battle against mega corporation with endless lobbying budget and simultaneously digging a grave for the political career.

Ylpertnodi• 5 months ago

It's a thankless and tough battle for politicians, because they face lobbying and media pressure against them.

Awwww, poor babies.

Izmaki2• 5 months ago

The “that’s nice but Denmark is small” comment is getting tiresome. Whether the country had 6 million or 60 million the bureaucracy is the same. It’s not about the size or the economics, it’s about the message.

It won’t be long until the rest of the public sectors follow along. There has already been plenty of consideration and desire to follow through. What’s holding them back typically is not the desire to stay with Microsoft et. al., but the investment needed to make the switch away from a live system.

quietbritishjim• 5 months ago

The “that’s nice but Denmark is small” comment is getting tiresome.

The parent comment didn't complain that Denmark or its overall government is small. They complained that this agency represents a small fraction of their government.

kakacik2• 5 months ago

But those investments will only get bigger over time and vendor lock-in will get more complex. I get that there is no unlimited budget to this but proper will to migrate for good would look very differently.

For example detailed plan for next 5-10 years how gradually everything moves. Now it feels like 1 step ahead 3 steps back, nice pat on the back for doing something, while overall transition will take 2 centuries unless magic happens. Not enough, not at this point when all cards are on the table.

nxm• 5 months ago

Investment and long term maintenance costs are usually not worth it. All is good until there’s a self induced outage and your boss has to take the blame (and not Microsoft)

Tarq0n• 5 months ago

Not everything is a state secret. There's no need to immediately migrate every trivial email and permit request, but having a parallel infrastructure for the stuff that needs it should be a no-brainer.

heikkilevanto• 5 months ago

Not everything is a state secret.

No, but almost everything is a potential DDOS. And slight modifications to emails, documents, and calendars can cause a lot of havoc that may be hard to detect.

hermanzegerman9• 5 months ago

It's not about state secrets, it's about being able to provide services when the US is turning Hostile.

Hospitals or Police aren't guarding state secrets too, but if they would loose access to their IT Infrastructure because Donald had some strange brainfart this morning like the Judge of the International Court of Justice it would impact the State critically

marcosdumay2• 5 months ago

There's no point in having a parallel software "infrastructure". In fact, it's a choice well known for never working.

Either your main architecture handles something or it doesn't get handled.

llm_nerd5• 5 months ago

That must be unacceptable to any sovereign government

The US recently doubled down on using US corporations as vehicles of coercion, sanctioning ICC judges for judging against Israel.

https://www.state.gov/icc-sanctions

This is beyond insane, and every American company causing grief for the staff of a criminal court in which every single civilized nation but the US and Israel (I guess I didn't have to add that but) belongs needs to see enormous fines, and to be marginalized and removed. Microsoft, Google, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal...either they can domesticate in another nation, or get relegated to provincial US operations.

It is absolutely untenable, and every single nation needs to purge all American operations as rapidly as possible.

And...it's happening. This criminal US administration filled with pedophiles and self-dealing garbage overextended. They overplayed their hand, and the result is not only the rapidly accelerated decline of the American empire, it invariably has redoubled China's influence.

I keep seeing prophesying about China invading Taiwan on here. Surely HN knows that won't be necessary, right? Taiwan recently re-engaged in diplomatic unification talks with China (not overtly, but the feelers are obvious to anyone with any sense of the moment), and they're going to make that choice themselves. Now that the US is relegated to worldwide joke/idiocracy, and it really is rapidly becoming a unipolar world, it's really the only rational choice.

But I guess the US has the pathetic joke of the Board of Peace, or their close allies El Salvador and new puppet state Venezuela. What a disgrace.

bytehowl• 5 months ago

Taiwan recently re-engaged in diplomatic unification talks with China

That's news to me, got any good articles on the topic?

wiseowise• 5 months ago

But I guess the US has the pathetic joke of the Board of Peace, or their close allies El Salvador and new puppet state Venezuela. What a disgrace.

You forgot Trumps best butt-buddy: Putin.

tick_tock_tick7• 5 months ago

Why shouldn't the USA sanction a clear overstep of authority? Neither the USA or Israel are part of the ICC.

jbreckmckye• 5 months ago

I agree. Whilst I think MS products are on a downward trajectory, I'm getting "Maastricht Planning Department switches to Kali Linux" vibes

I want to see (sincerely) a whole government ditch MS

wolvoleo9• 5 months ago

See la suite in France.

They have an extensive history in this too. The gendarmerie even has their own Linux distro for their workstations.

piokoch• 5 months ago

"all Microsoft licenses will be terminated"

Ok, and what will be the alternative? I am not talking about the easy part, like documents creation, although I don't see walking away from Excel as LibreOffice alternative is a bit of disappointment. But what about the whole security/networking/permissions area? What is the viable alternative that can scale?

Remember Covid times? In Poland all schools got access to Office 365 (overnight ) and education kept going. 500 000 teachers and a few millions of pupils. Tell me who else except Microsoft or Google have ability to support that?

hermanzegerman9• 5 months ago

In my part of Germany we used BigBlueButton after a short time when Zoom was used. E-Mail and a LDAP account was also always available for students. It's not exactly Rocket Science.

There are also ready made solutions available for purchase

https://www.univention.com/industries/educational-sector/

mastermage• 5 months ago

Also the IT Administrators that may be skilled in Windows Server and similar but less so in Linux. Thats something that beeds to be taken into account. Can be changed they can learn new things, but that takes time.

xylifyx2• 5 months ago

99% of users, could just as well use another form of spreadsheet. Only complex macros or custom integration does. Perhaps very large spreadsheets, I don't know.

erk__• 5 months ago

It is actually at least two agencies that is working in that direction, The Danish Road Authorities is also working on it: https://www.fstyr.dk/nyheder/2025/dec/faerdselsstyrelsen-tag...

justin66• 5 months ago

the top level of government just needs to make the declaration: as of X, all Microsoft licenses will be terminated. No exceptions. Adapt or die.

Edgy! But it sounds like really terrible government. As if the failure of a government agency which cannot adapt to losing all its computer systems and therefore "dies" will not negatively effect those who are governed.

philipallstar3• 5 months ago

This is a clash of semi-overlapping, transitioning philosophies.

The global, liberal hegemony philosophy is that you can trust other countries, and countries are just economic zones with mildly different food and weather. Country dividing lines for any other purpose are bad. The UK was evil for wanting more sovereignty vs the EU; what's the difference? Open the borders. Let anyone vote. This has only recently been philosophically countered in the popular left-leaning consciousness by the war in Ukraine, where at least one border is seen to be worth defending, and in the mainstream as sovereignty and related conservative ideas are taking hold again, although with a few extra steps to make it palateable to non-conservatives.

The practical philosophy is: we already save a huge amount of money we can spend on benefits by depending on the US for defence; might as well do the same with tech. They probably know everything anyway, and what's to know? This isn't exactly countered yet philosophically, but Donald Trump is making people realise they should at least pay their own way in defense, which is helping to gradually override the prioritising of short-term vote-buying.

macintux• 5 months ago

The UK was evil for wanting more sovereignty vs the EU

I don't think many thought the UK was evil.

I think many thought the UK had been sold a bag of lies, and that exiting based on a very slim majority of voters on a referendum was a bad idea.

usrbinbash• 5 months ago

That's great, but it's always just one agency, or one very local bit of government.

Transitioning every system wholesale at once, is not gonna happen.

I rather have our governents and agencies do it step by step than not at all.

tchalla3• 5 months ago

It won’t but it creates a sense of urgency.

flexie• 5 months ago

I am Danish, working with IT in the private sector, but with regular contact to the public sector.

I can assure you that there is plenty of other agencies, ministries, municipalities, private companies etc. in both Denmark and other European countries looking into switching to non-American software.

"Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier. Everybody asks about it it. Everybody plans around it.

Although the weaning off will take many years, and although European companies and governments will probably never be entirely without American software, and why should they, the American dominance will disappear, little by little. For better or worse, the American Century is coming to an end, also in IT.

esafak3• 5 months ago

What counts as data sovereignty in your book? Are the sovereign clouds of AWS, MS, Google acceptable? If not, who are your preferred providers?

gizzlon3• 5 months ago

"Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier.

I hope you're right! I'm a backend dev and engineer, and I would love to specialize in helping companies off US cloud. Haven't found a lot of interest here in Norway so far..

mfru• 5 months ago

Second that, even though it seems that there is nothing happening yet, many companies and government agencies in all of Europe are aware of their hard Microsoft dependency and are looking / coordinating to leave.

Same with Atlassian Confluence / Jira.

(Source: Working in a state owend company in a EU member country)

lenkite• 5 months ago

I really hope the EU is serious about this and doesn't change its mind with the next American administration who offers hugs and kisses.

hbn2• 5 months ago

You make it sound like a noble act of sacrifice but the employees are all still getting paid. The real people who will be hurt are the citizens relying on their government to function, and telling a bunch of government employees of varying competence levels to "suck it up and adapt to your workflow being broken" will throw a real wrench in that.

KronisLV3• 5 months ago

telling a bunch of government employees of varying competence levels to "suck it up and adapt to your workflow being broken" will throw a real wrench in that.

I will weep on the day when the great Europe is defeated by people being unable to use a slightly different spreadsheet program, word processor, or a file sharing solution.

But yeah, the argument about "adapt or die" is also way off base. Ideally it'd be a gradual migration, all low hanging fruit first, seeing what works and what doesn't.

gizzlon3• 5 months ago

The real people who will be hurt are the citizens relying on their government to function

You make it sound like the current Microsoft stack is so insanely great it will be impossible to replace.

Yes, change is hard, but there are also massive upsides in switching to something better.

csmpltn• 5 months ago

Have you ever even used OpenOffice? It's 50 years behind.

thfuran• 5 months ago

Or at least a decade behind, which should be surprising given that it hasn’t been actively developed in about a decade.

rconti2• 5 months ago

Honestly, I hadn't used Microsoft Office in 15 years, and it somehow went 20 years backwards in that time.

timbit422• 5 months ago

OpenOffice is 15 or so years behind but LibreOffice isn't. LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice in 2011 and the vast majority of volunteers working on it left the OpenOffice project and kept working on LibreOffice.

Anyone still using OpenOffice probably doesn't realize they would likely be much better off using LibreOffice instead.

OpenOffice doesn't support docx or xlsx but LibreOffice supports them much better.

octocop2• 5 months ago

A lot of hospitals run Microsoft. So it would be literal death you are talking about.

yardie2• 5 months ago

A lot of hospitals and healthcare systems in Europe use the open source EMR platform. No ones charts are in .docx format, it is not life or death, lets be serious.

lewisjoe• 5 months ago

It honestly doesn't make any sense. Interestingly, India was bold enough to move its government infra to Zoho's office suite cutting all reliance on Microsoft. It's only sane that other countries do the same.

integralid• 5 months ago

top level of government just needs to make the declaration: as of X, all Microsoft licenses will be terminated. No exceptions. Adapt or die

This is unrealistic populism. The type that gets upvoted on HN, apparently. It's not possible to just ditch all Microsoft licenses in a year, or in 5 years, or in 10 years. There are hundreds of critical systems that can't just be migrated to Linux overnight (or ever). And "just dying" is... not an option for a government branch. What is this even supposed to mean.

But we can limit American bigtech by 90%, and we should. Especially everything in the cloud.

DrScientist• 5 months ago

Indeed. I also fail to see how the existence of the CLOUD act, and thus use of any US company, is compatible with GDPR.

See https://www.exoscale.com/blog/cloudact-vs-gdpr/

( Though note exoscale, as a European provider has skin in the game here ).

otikik• 5 months ago

Adapt or die.

Yeah, no. That's not how government works - thankfully. I don't want my water to stop flowing just because someone decided to be drastic about software changes.

I agree with you in that all governments should be using open source software, for the record.

But governments are big machines and you can't steer them like a sports car. In some cases, the massive inertia they have can even be a good thing - a crazy guy can't just be elected one day, start issuing presidential mandates, and then expect them to happen immediately, for example.

maratc• 5 months ago

That must be unacceptable to any sovereign government.

Is it OK for a French sovereign government if a German government can demand access to its data?

tjwebbnorfolk2• 5 months ago

Also, they haven't actually done it yet. Announcements are easy. Implementation is hard, and most of them fail.

Wake me up when they actually do it.

tick_tock_tick7• 5 months ago

According to the CLOUD act, the US government can demand access to data from US companies, regardless of where that data is stored. That must be unacceptable to any sovereign government. I genuinely do not understand why other countries put up with this.

"put up with this" implies they have a choice.

vanschelven• 5 months ago

Every journey starts with the first step... And those steps are finally being taken now. Don't see why this kind of naysaying would be the top comment here

AtlasBarfed• 5 months ago

Well governments need to wake up and realize that if they aren't the US and even if they are the US, open source provides most of the basic building blocks of what you're going to build independent non-corporate controlled and non-external-state controlled software

So fund it!

Governments burn billions of dollars on defense which really is just an economic waste outside of the deterrent effect it does from getting invaded.

Investing in open source to enable you to be software independent and protected, not only is it providing some measure of electronic and economic defense, it improves software for you and your allies.

You get return on your investment.

throw10920• 5 months ago

If we (Europeans) really mean it - and we should - the top level of government just needs to make the declaration: as of X, all Microsoft licenses will be terminated. No exceptions. Adapt or die.

This is insane. This is sacrificing the well-being of your constituents to send a (minor) political message. The amount of service degradation (including actual physical health) that you'd put your citizens through would be unbelievable.

Only those who are extraordinarily stupid or outright malicious decide to deprecate important services before first assessing the needs of every dependent on that service, and then ensuring that a full replacement is in place.

teekert5• 5 months ago

I do like this news, but I wonder why they choose LibreOffice. It's the most widely known MS alternative, but things like OnlyOffice [0] and Nextcloud Office [1] (which is based on Collabora Online [2], which in turn is based on LibreOffice) offer much more compelling collaborative features, imho. Just plain office (like it's 1997) is quite a step back, no?

Especially OnlyOffice looks extremely similar to MS Office, I have it on all our Linux laptops at home so the kids don't feel much difference between home and school envs. I think document interoperability (as in: Looks similar) is also better.

[0] https://www.onlyoffice.com/

[1] https://nextcloud.com/office/

[2] https://www.collaboraonline.com/

eXpl0it3r2• 5 months ago

OnlyOffice, Nextcloud OPffice, Collabora might all have free offerings to a degree, but you'll end up at the mercy of the companies behind those tools and OnlyOffice comes with Enterprise offering that does also cost money.

Costing money isn't necessarily bad, but it's also hard to beat free & libre.

teekert5• 5 months ago

True.

But I have to say that I got quite used to collaborative editing, not something I'd like to give up.

People can get used to buttons moving to other places (imo), but collecting and integrating edits from multiple people via email is not something I look back at fondly.

StrauXX2• 5 months ago

OnlyOffice had some controversy around being owned and operated by a Russian company through shell companies. They might even fall under EU sanctions. There is an open German information request to the government that was never answered.

Wether those connections are true or not I can't say, but I do know people that dropped OnlyOffice in their evaluations for this reason.

maxloh• 5 months ago

They might even fall under EU sanctions.

They FALL under EU sanctions.

https://www.tu.berlin/en/campusmanagement/news-details/umste...

Hard_Space• 5 months ago

I checked it, but at $149 per year for the home server (and don't forget to click in the 'information' button on the 'Lifetime' License Duration option), there seems to be a bit of a premium on that MS styling, considering the functionality in competing F/OSS suites.

mixmastamyk• 5 months ago

Especially OnlyOffice looks extremely similar to MS Office, I have it on all our Linux laptops at home so the kids don't feel much difference between home and school envs.

This is how you make them dependent on a single MS-like interface. Kids are the most flexible, and shouldn't need. Would go as far as to say they are mildly harmed by not being exposed to different workflows.

Sure glad no one paved Windows over our Macs and Amigas so we wouldn't have to learn anything else.

jl62• 5 months ago

The European sovereign tech trend isn’t exclusively a benefit to OSS. SAP must be anticipating a significant windfall of Oracle refugees.

lejalv• 5 months ago

Can proprietary software (SAP) be truly sovereign, though?

On the one hand, nothing stops SAP from behaving like Oracle for the sake of shareholder value. On the other hand, even SAP could be bought by Blackrock or Peter Thiel, and back to US dependence.

Am I missing something about SAP that precludes these scenarios?

jl62• 5 months ago

Nothing absolutely precludes malfeasance, but SAP is a European legal entity, answerable ultimately to European law. Microsoft and Oracle also trade in Europe through European legal entities, which are theoretically also bound by European law, but should that law conflict with any US law that binds the parent companies, we would expect the US law to be the stronger influence (likely covertly).

AtomicOrbital• 5 months ago

take your abandon laptop which still runs and install Ubuntu on it ... you will see how easy linux is today ... there is no justification for microsoft windows in 2026

Eddy_Viscosity2• 5 months ago

What are the hurdles from any of the EU governments from: 1. Choosing the best open source options for the various MS replacements 2. Fund an office who's job would be to provide software support, continue development, and make customizations for various departments. They continue to host this as open source. 3. Expanding adoption of the new tools to more gov departments over time. Continue to expand software office accordingly. 4. Eventually, they will have a solution entirely within their control. The costs will initially be higher likely, but way less over time.

If this progresses, then other governments can also adopt those same tools and also provide funding to the software office so that the software is continuously updated for things like security, big fixes, etc. all remains gov sponsored open source.

Am I crazy?

voxleone• 5 months ago

I think an important point in this discussion is that adopting FOSS requires a level of institutional openness that is not typical of governments in general. It’s not just a question of switching vendors; it’s about embracing transparency, auditability, and shared ownership of public infrastructure. The question is: are governments fully aware of what FOSS adoption actually implies?

Brazil is an interesting case. On paper, we have a strong legal mandate. Under Art. 16 of Lei 14.063/2020[0], information and communication systems developed exclusively by public bodies must be governed by an open-source license, allowing use, copying, modification, and distribution without restriction by other public entities.

However, implementation tells a different story. Take PIX, the instant payment system developed by the Brazilian Central Bank. As of today, only the API is open. The core system code remains unpublished[1]. If the system was developed exclusively by the public administration, this seems difficult to reconcile with the letter - and certainly the spirit - of the law.

So the issue is not only whether governments should reduce vendor lock-in. It’s whether they are prepared to follow through on what real openness demands once they commit to it.

[0] https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_Ato2019-2022/2020/Lei... [1] https://d1gesto.blogspot.com/2025/06/brazils-pix-system-face...

ddtaylor• 5 months ago

I mean they should be using open source software for this type of stuff, but every time I see these announcements they are either worded strangely or the governments just don't do it, because the end result is always the same.

Can we do a Polymarket bet? I'm taking the Microsoft side. Yeah they suck. Yup, nothing new there, but they'll find a way to keep all these dolts paying.

troad3• 5 months ago

I'm very happy for all the Europeans getting to use software they like and prefer, but honestly I'm a little tired of reading about it. There's been an awful lot of recent blogging and news about de-Americanising one's stack.

It seems very important to the Europeans that they let everyone else know they're leaving? It's got the air of a thirty-five year old threatening to move out of his parents' basement any day now. Go already! Stop telling us about it. We all wish you the best. Good luck!

(Don't expect to get much say over how foreign tech platforms operate going forward, if you get the balkanised Internet you seem to yearn for?)

teekert5• 5 months ago

It's an incredibility hot topic here (in the EU) right now. It also provides a lot of (business) opportunities here. I get that this (HN) is not an EU platform, but a lot of us are on here.

Collectively we feel like we are going through an EU/US divorce that is rough and will take years to complete. All our tech is entangled with the US, everything would grind to a halt if Trump would pull some plugs at the moment. It's like everybody just woke up. We lost an ally that we really leaned on.

We even have news like "Dutch Defense dept considers jailbreaking F35s" [0]. Completely nuts of course! But gives a taste of the climate here.

I don't see what you mean with your remark about the balkanized internet, the problems is we've been building our systems in US walled gardens, and now we want our freedom back.

[0] https://tweakers.net/nieuws/244764/defensie-ziet-jailbreak-v...

troad3• 5 months ago

I don't see what you mean with your remark about the balkanized internet, the problems is we've been building our systems in US walled gardens, and now we want our freedom back.

The short version is that Europe's influence on tech is going to be significantly reduced by Europe trying to silo itself off from the rest of the world. If Europe becomes even more marginal of a market than it is now, then the established players have ever less reason to attempt to comply with European regulations. (You may say they already push back, but that's quite different from not bothering at all.)

Of course the rest of the world isn't going anywhere, and Europeans will remain exposed to new technologies coming out of Asia and America. It does Europe very little good to make a Euro-Twitter that abides by Euro regs, if the original Twitter remains widely accessible from Europe, but decides to no longer do business in Europe, and is no longer responsive to European regulation / courts / etc.

TLDR: A necessary outcome of increasing Euro digital autonomy is a reorientation of foreign players back towards home markets, and the rise of an American digital autonomy that no longer humours Europe at all.

pjerem• 5 months ago

HN is not an american only audience. I, as an european, am interested by this news.

And hey, about hearing the same things again and again, we also are tired hearing about Trump & Epstein & whatever is the today american shit. But it's still important to stay up to date.

tick_tock_tick7• 5 months ago

I mean they can't leave for years so talking about it is the only way to feel like they are doing something.

FpUser• 5 months ago

Ability to make certain kind of software is totally strategic for countries to be independent. Completely relying on some other 3rd party is truly stupid.

retired• 5 months ago

Is there a European alternative to Microsoft 365?

Most platforms like Nextcloud focus on file storage, email, documents and video conference but don't do anything similar to the identity management, provisioning, policies and SSO that Office 365 provides.

A national government is large enough to run their own Keycloak instance but a regional branch of government would be better off with having a SaaS for that.

It would be great if the EU would subsidize a full alternative to Microsoft 365 and give every government worker in every EU country an account to that. Just grab a random laptop from the shelf, install EUnionOS, log-in to EUnionCloud and have all the required apps for their work install themselves, set all the rights correctly, mail works automatically, automatic access to the correct files. Full disk encryption, theft protection etcetera.

wongarsu• 5 months ago

Many governments have their own MSPs (managed service provider) who could host any open source software, just as they are likely in charge right now of many Microsoft admin tasks. And if the government doesn't have one but a branch office wants a regional branch wants a keycloak instance they can always get an MSP for that

I do like your vision of a unified full replacement version. But even just gathering everyone's requirements for that seems like a near impossible task that would take years. And the end result would almost certainly end in a mess that's too restrictive for some, unusuably unsecure for others, and have a set of apps that will always be slightly wrong and difficult to change. These huge top-down solutions rarely work well

wolvoleo9• 5 months ago

You can always pick other components for those things. Many enterprises do this also because the included parts in M365 are usually pretty mediocre compared to AAA solutions that specialise in that part. For example dedicated MDMs are better than Intune. Dedicated IDPs are better than Entra AD. Dropbox is better than OneDrive, slack is way better than teams (to be fair, anything is better than teams :) )

The big benefit of the MS package is that you get it all for one price. And that it's integrated so you have less configuration. But they're not deal-breakers. That's why parties like Okta and MobileIron still exist. Airwatch was also really good but VMware screwed them up like they screw everything up.

But M365 is not the only game out there. Unless you're limiting yourself to wanting exactly what M365 is. Then it's only that yes.

rambojohnson• 5 months ago

Europe’s reading the room and building exits. They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term bet. Wero, the digital euro, local infrastructure, all of it points to the same thing: financial sovereignty matters when America looks more like a geopolitical liability.

my read is that 2026 to 2027 is basically Europe saying, "we should probably stop wiring the house through a burning building." Payments, cloud, office software, data infrastructure, all of it.

so Denmark moving to cut Microsoft dependence in the name of digital independence is basically the same story. When the US starts looking less like stable infrastructure and more like a chaotic landlord, everyone starts building their own exits.

tchalla3• 5 months ago

They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term be

Digital euro push is beyond the current US administration if that’s what you are hinting at. The trigger was Big Tech payments (Facebook Libra) and the rise of BTC.

ilikerashers2• 5 months ago

Europe has just been catastrophically slow in developing anything related to it's own tech infrastructure. Its doesn't back itself.

Given how poor it's responding to things like the Draghi report, I wouldn't anticipate success. Just more flailing around and working groups.

pydry• 5 months ago

There are plenty of european hosts (e.g. hetzner) and with payments systems the technology is rarely the problem it's the politics. I imagine EPI will have no problem succeeding.

The major problem Europe has (mentioned in the draghi report) is with industrial competitiveness and strategy and access to cheap energy.

With the former it's not like the US is doing any better though. I dont think anybody in the west even has an industrial strategy.

pjmlp4• 5 months ago

Europe isn't a country, and as such each nation has its own agenda, and political relations.

For bad or worse, not all European national governments see the world through the same glasses.

trinsic211• 5 months ago

We will see. My guess is 5 to 10 years these anti-competitive regimes will collapse as more and more people move away from bad actors like our current administration.

tick_tock_tick7• 5 months ago

my read is that 2026 to 2027 is basically Europe saying, "we should probably stop wiring the house through a burning building." Payments, cloud, office software, data infrastructure, all of it.

I think you transposed some numbers in those dates it's more like 2062-2072. All of those things need to be built first and frankly all the initiatives started long before the current USA situation. The EU has been aware that it is wholly dependent on the USA for a myriad of reasons for a very long time now but barely seemed to care.

We'll see if anything actually happens it's a very thankless thing to push for politicians.

JaggerJo• 5 months ago

Most solutions already exist as open source software.

partiallypro3• 5 months ago

I don't know how to break this to you, but Europe itself has been the burning building for 20 years. I don't see that changing any time soon. The anti-US stuff is largely flailing, the US is better positioned than Europe for the next 20 years also. They struggle with investment, have almost no large companies left of any merit in tech, have political problems that are similar to the US's, and regulate themselves to death. It would take a political revolution in Europe to fix that, and frankly they don't have it in them.

aucisson_masque4• 5 months ago

That's extremely condescending and naive. I'd say Europe citizen are in much better situation than the usa citizens, don't care about tech sector or shareholder revenue.

Usa still don't even have universal social security and medications are overpriced 10 time more. Just to name a few.

Then there is the American debt. Good luck with that when countries are switching from dollar to yen and euro. No really, I think that there are enough challenge to overcome in the states that you don't need to be condescending.

trinsic211• 5 months ago

Wow there is some serious rep management going on here. Trump Adminstration getting scared their empire collapsing?

prepend• 5 months ago

So it’s like Europe is ungoogling itself from the US?

themafia2• 5 months ago

to a declining, unstable empire

It's funny that we've wrapped the clock all the way around and people don't see Europe as the declining and unstable empires anymore.

less like stable infrastructure

It's perfectly stable. The news makes a lot of money generating interesting in overstating this problem. The supreme court is designed for national stability. It is doing it's job. It just doesn't act _instantly_, and if you're aiming for actual stability, you don't want it to.

trinsic211• 5 months ago

The supreme court is designed for national stability.

lol my ass. We have a corrupt Adminstration with a corrupt Supreme Court. The only thing it's doing is making people less safe to enrich the people at the top. This kind of response is embarrassing.

bean469• 5 months ago

The supreme court is designed for national stability.

On the contrary, I think that many of the rulings during this administration caused a lot of uncertainty among lawmakers

TacticalCoder• 5 months ago

They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term bet.

People need to get real here and I've got numbers: Europe is the declining, unstable empire.

The US is the US and in three years there's going to be another president. But the EU's problems are much deeper.

Inflation-adjusted, since the 2008 crisis, the Eurozone's GDP barely grew while both China and the US' GDPs grew like crazy.

2008 to 2025 Eurozone's GDP: $14 trillion USD to $17 trillion USD (+18%, inflation adjusted it's basically zero)

US same period: about $15 trillion to $30 trillion [1]

China same period: $4 trillion to $19 trillion, going from not a quarter of the Eurozone's size in 2008 to surpassing the Eurozone in 2025 FFS! In 17 years. This is jaw dropping.

That's when reality should kick in for people who believe the EU is not declining.

At this rate it's not even declining: it's falling from a cliff.

Now, sure, the Eurozone ain't the entire EU and countries outside the Eurozone like Poland are, thankfully, doing better. But things still look terribly bad.

Moreover The EU managed to shoot itself in the foot by destroying the biggest export of its biggest economy: german cars. They handed over the market to chinese EVs.

The EU also managed, when the US advised it not to, to become dependant on Russia for energy. And of course four years ago we now all know how well that played for Germany: Russia wasn't our friend anymore and energy price --and the industries in Germany do need lots of energy-- skyrocketted.

The EU is destroying itself both economically and culturally. Things are looking terribly bad over here.

I don't know how anyone can look at the US and at China's GDP growth compared to the Eurozone and believe that somehow Europe is doing fine.

Europe is not doing fine: Europe is definitely a declining, unstable (lots of far-right vs far-left parties opposing themselves in elections in many EU countries now) empire.

That said I very much welcome ditching MS software.

[1] round numbers but it is what it is: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP

jbm2• 5 months ago

The EU is destroying itself both economically and *culturally*

I understand the former. Can you clarify the details around the later? I hear this often, but the people I hear it from are not the most trustworthy or the most knowledgable.

conz• 5 months ago

Re: "Europe is not doing fine: Europe is definitely a declining, unstable (lots of far-right vs far-left parties opposing themselves in elections in many EU countries now) empire."

If this is reality in Europe, which is perhaps likely, then by comparison, the US has devolved into failed-state status. Better a slow decline than a catastrophic fall into the constitutional/regulatory/legal/technological/scientific abyss.

Even if Europe has insurmountable problems, its best move forward is to decouple strategically from the US, and these days, all things strategic are underpinned by information technology. The fact that Europe (soon to be followed by Canada, Australia and New Zealand) is heading down this path is why the US has hit the panic button[0].

Re: "The US is the US and in three years there's going to be another president. But the EU's problems are much deeper."

The US may have another president or even another style of president, but that wont stop this migration away from American technological/strategic hegemony; because at this level and at this scale, complete trust by former allies, once lost, will never be regained. The US century is now over.

Thankfully open source software is there as an alternative to that US software. I guess it's no co-incidence that LibreOffice and Linux both have their roots in Europe.

[0]https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

deterministic• 5 months ago

It's about time that Europe take independence seriously.

trinsic211• 5 months ago

I'm really glad Europe is making these changes. We have an authoritarian government that needs to go down in flames. The more pressure this puts on everyone to stop using centralized anti-competitive products the better off we all are.

jajuuka• 5 months ago

I'm not sure conflating US corporations and the US government is really logical. Microsoft isn't a startup from the US, it's a worldwide corporation. Same with Visa/Mastercard and others. Whatever buffoonery happens in the White House doesn't really get reflected out across US based organizations. It's like being worried about Siemens stability during a German economic downturn or political upset.

I think this has much more to do with rising nationalism. (I know the EU isn't a country. It's just the best word I can think of to fit. ) It's not like Denmark is saying they plan to use technology from the global south, Asia or are open to options. It's an attitude of "we want to support European companies". That's not inherently bad, but I fear this is just another expression of this isolationism that is becoming more popular in Europe. That's not to say it's exclusive or unique to Europe, but just recognizing the ways it shows up.

tibu• 5 months ago

The US government can require a US company lots of things. After POTUS declared that he wants Greenland I can totally understand Danmark wants to get rid of everything US.

fyredge• 5 months ago

There's something about governments moving to open source software that doesn't sit well with me. The only advantage I can see is reduction in expenditure with free software.

I believe we should go a step further and institute open standards. Move away from .docx and to .odt in document submission on government websites. This gives users the flexibility of choice as long as they adhere to a specific standards. This would also hopefully alleviate some of the mess of inconsistent rendering of the same document on different software.

timbit422• 5 months ago

What are you talking about? ODT is an open standard.

2025080421472• 5 months ago

I know someone that works in the central government of an EU country and have persuaded her to talk to the IT department in the ministry where she works to try to move away from Microsoft products. The short answer: "It's not possible for us to move away from Microsoft". And it's not that they don't want to, but they have extremely low IT resources + the employees are very reluctant to make any change. Sometimes they introduce a new program, or update an older one and there's massive whining in the entire ministry. These public employees should really try to adapt more and understand that digital environments have become crucial for independence, privacy and self-reliance.

mark_l_watson• 5 months ago

Some degree of national pride and independence simply makes a lot of sense: slightly modified Linux distros set up for local information resources and banking, tuned open LLMs, local web site indexing and search, and parallel backup financial infrastructure.

I get that some of these things are difficult to do, but small steps lead to larger steps.

JSR_FDED• 5 months ago

Of all the Microsoft products, Excel is going to be the hardest to replace. Firstly, it's critical in many organisations. We all know you shouldn't run your business on a spreadsheet, but everyone does. Just a tiny difference in how data is handled, an unsupported macro, a missing formula...the whole deck of cards collapses. Secondly, while people only use 20% of its features, everyone uses a different 20%.

acidburnNSA• 5 months ago

That is a common and reasonable sentiment. I can't help wonder if Claude Code will move this needle. Maybe people will stop relying as much on excel?

tsoukase• 5 months ago

An open source replacement of proprietary SW is very easy in the beginning but becomes hard quickly. You grab a Linux distribution and the App that match the functionality at best and call it a day. But the next day a bunch of problems arise: some features are not implemented, the UI is not ergonomic, the stability is not there and when updates come, the situation goes overboard. The billions of dollars don't start software, they end it polished and consumer ready.

encom2• 5 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=FUD

cs702• 5 months ago

In the past, a small number of European cities or municipalities have tried to move away from proprietary software, but those have been isolated cases, lacking broader support.

This time, things look different. Anecdotally, more people in Europe now suddenly actually care about this. They no longer want their governments to rely on software controlled by US companies, because they no longer trust it. Many are shocked and upset about recent US actions that they view as "detestable," including "irrational efforts against NATO," "nonsensical tariffs against allies," "ICE raids that trample over human rights," and "missiles targeting boat survivors." I'm paraphrasing what others have mentioned to me here. Whether you agree or disagree with these concerns, they are valid for many Europeans. They don't particularly care for the open-source movement on its own, but they now view open-source software as a more desirable alternative.

In an ironic twist of fate, the US government's actions could end up causing long-term damage to US tech companies.

This is all based on anecdotal evidence, so I could be wrong, but I have to call it like I see it.

rbbydotdev• 5 months ago

An EU Linux distro could be interesting

ChrisArchitect• 5 months ago

(2025)

Story from June OP?

Lots of discussion then:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234552

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44255352

m00dy• 5 months ago

I lived in Denmark for quite a while, don’t ever believe that, because it’s never going to happen.

Beijinger• 5 months ago

Well, not really surprising, considering that Trump wants to snap Greenland and Microsoft's founder likes to fuck Russian prostitutes on Epsteins island. Both is not really inspiring confidence to run a government infrastructure on such software.

arbirk• 5 months ago

Can we just use markdown already?

bookofjoe• 5 months ago

One of the driving themes of "Industry" Season 4 is precisely this: what happens to your data once big players ahold of it.

miroslavr• 5 months ago

I am wondering what EU was doing 20+ years in the digital world? Why doesn't it have own video streaming, cloud, email, social net... pretty much all that we use now Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft for. It is very difficult for fragmented Europe to have the central service in pretty much any domain. And its citizen and ruling classes were sleeping 20 years living cozy.

notepad0x90• 5 months ago

Great for them. But are they just going too mooch off of open source software then? Nothing wrong with that, so long as they fund developers and projects.

tjwebbnorfolk2• 5 months ago

I look forward to reading these exact same articles 10 years from now:

"EU contemplating debate over a draft proposal to definitely invest in a consulting contract to study the migration of a part of one agency to a homegrown office suite away from Microsoft"

neuroelectron• 5 months ago

Previous post on this subject--

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46636445

dagaci• 5 months ago

Its understated, but this kind move is now systemic in the EU due to the sanctioning of ICC & EU officials and random people who hurt the presidents feelings requiring Microsoft to remotely kill access to resources tied to Microsoft Accounts.

Without rules of law its literally irresponsible for EU to have this kind of heavy dependency on US corporations.

sublimefire• 5 months ago

However you like it or not banning just one company is not a recipe for success. IMO the issue is in the procurement and how these tenders are worded. For instance, if the requirement is data residency backed by private keys and conf compute then put it in writing. The idea that some other vendor will come in and solve this problem without such a requirement upfront will not hold for long.

By and large MS problem is that our world gets fragmented and you need to have products that adapt, eg great firewall in China, strict data residency in Europe. It is difficult to achieve that without segmenting your products as well.

thomasjudge• 5 months ago

There are a number of US states that have moved off Microsoft (mostly to G-Suite) and a number more that are considering it. And yes it won't be EVERYone (you can pry excel out of accountants cold dead hands) or everyTHING (obviously mainly Windows) but it's at least a blow against the pricing and quality issues from MSFT

eitally• 5 months ago

The problem isn't plain MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). The more nefarious set of issues is around domain-specific software that is only compatible with Microsoft platforms and software.

For example, Veeva Vault is the industry standard content (and content workflow) platform for life sciences. It's a heavy, somewhat unpleasant platform similar to a Workday or ServiceNow, but it's ingrained and it compliant with all life sci regulatory bodies' regulations. It requires customers use SharePoint and Office under the hood.

Things like that can't just be ripped out and replaced because there are no FOSS options.

Flatterer3544• 5 months ago

Denmark was literally the US lapdog for such a long time, open to provide access and info. Denmark was the first to follow US into Iraq, while the rest of Scandinavia was much more skeptical.

Guess just bad luck with Greenland turning them the complete opposite direction, since I was certain that Denmark would be the one of the last to go against US in any way.

jeroenhd• 5 months ago

As a Dutch citizen, I take issue with that. Our politicians worked hard to be considered the USA's most reliable lapdog!

People also ridiculed the French for maintaining independence of American influence for decades, even within the EU/EEG/etc., but that should prove that the America-sceptic voices have always been around, even if they weren't the most influential. It's also not the first time the Americans have eyed Greenland, that's why they have negotiated the right to set up military bases there.

After European countries aligned with America's overreactions in the Middle East as a gesture of goodwill (but also to buy political capital, despite the Americans starting an intense smear campaign against the French for not falling for their propaganda), European governments expected to be handled as an ally at the very least.

The past decade, the people of the USA and their representatives have dropped all pretences and the slow and steady criticism in the background has now made it to the foreground. The political capital countries tried to buy by doing what Washington asked has turned out to be worthless.

With recent threats of invasion and the diplomatic problems American representatives have caused, it's getting harder and harder to see a future where European governments end up treating the USA any different from other (upcoming, but not necessarily politically-aligned) world powers such as China, Russia, India, or Pakistan.

capevace• 5 months ago

I really wish there was a EU alternative to Cloudflare. Their featureset and DX is the best in the industry IMO but their data sovereignty features are sadly not really good enough for most EU enterprises we talk to.

The fact they’re an American company is unfortunately the dealbraker. We could store data outside of CF network but that defeats the point of the one stop shop.

kakoni2• 5 months ago

Does somebody have the latest on how the Epic EHR is doing in Copenhagen/Zealand regions?

encom2• 5 months ago

reduce dependence on U.S. tech firms

Let's have a look:

    $ host -t A digmin.dk
    digmin.dk has address 172.232.147.252
    digmin.dk has address 172.233.57.17
    
    $ whois 172.233.57.17 | grep -i orgname
    OrgName:        Akamai Technologies, Inc.
    OrgName:        Linode

Pathetic.

This kind of press release happens every so often. It's an election year, so that probably explains it. Nothing ever comes of it. As someone employed in the danish public sector, I'd love nothing more than to never have to use Outlook again, but it's unlikely to happen.

aucisson_masque4• 5 months ago

If everything goes as expected, all employees will be on an open-source solution during the autumn

For once, it's very fast.

aucisson_masque4• 5 months ago

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

Emen15• 5 months ago

The interesting question is not "can LibreOffice replace Word" but whether Denmark is restructuring identity, device management, and procurement to avoid recreating lock in elsewhere. Office is visible, but AD or Entra, MDM, compliance tooling, and vendor tied workflows are the real gravity wells. The success metric is not feature parity. It is whether dependency risk is measurably reduced over a 5 to 10 year horizon without fragmenting operational continuity.

huntoa• 5 months ago

A token gesture. Europe is extremely dependent on foreign tech. I don't see the political will to really change that. I think the main causes are corruption, incompetence, extortion (negotiations on trade, etc.), and short-term thinking of politicians and managers. People did warn them, but they were ignored. They fucked the citizens long-term. Treason.

Critical infrastructure, such as energy, healthcare, or train service, runs on US software and services and thus only works as long as the US allows it. In Germany, the German Railway moved all of their software services into US clouds and shut down their own data center. That didn't protect them from a recent DDoS, taking down their main customer-facing site for hours.

Meanwhile, the local job market abounds with job ads from government agencies and private businesses, requiring administrating MS software (AD, 365, Exchange), cloud and doing "Power"-stuff.

The study "European Software and Cyber Dependencies" [1] (Dec 2025) from of the European Parliament explains the dire state. It's full of money quotes:

"Non-EU actors, primarily US companies, control nearly all critical layers of Europe’s digital stack. These dependencies are reinforced by vendor lock-in, long-term contracts, proprietary formats, & network effects that limit switching and suppress market entry for EU innovators"

"80% of European corporate spending on software and cloud flows to US vendors."

"Public administrations rely heavily on Microsoft and Google productivity suites, with only isolated instances of migrations to open-source alternatives"

"A case study of the EU’s energy infrastructure provides a further illustration of how its digitalisation creates critical cyber dependencies. Industrial control, grid management, and market-trading software increasingly rely on non-EU vendors and cloud platforms."

"Such heavy reliance on US tech and vendors results in [...] tangible sovereignty risks. The CLOUD Act, FISA Act and US sanctions regimes give US authorities legal reach over data of European citizens and institutions hosted by American providers."

"Dependence extends across the supply chain — from chips and hardware (90% of advanced semiconductors imported) to developer tools and standards (GitHub, Docker, and major programming frameworks are US-governed);"

"The EU’s digital trade deficit exceeds EUR 100 billion annually"

"These outflows finance US R&D and jobs: according to one study, retaining just 15% of this spending could create around 500,000 jobs in Europe by 2035;"

"Lock-in inflates long-term costs and undermines innovation, while dependence on external platforms diminishes Europe’s leverage in trade and security negotiations;"

"Europe’s software and cyber dependencies are becoming a structural strategic liability. [...] without decisive action, Europe risks becoming a “digital colony”- dependent on others’ platforms, standards, and priorities for decades to come."

"[EU]’s deep reliance on non-EU tech is a strategic vulnerability. It exposes the EU to geopolitical coercion (a de-facto “virtual kill switch”), with potential cascading disruption across finance, health, energy and transport if access to […] cloud or key software is curtailed.

"In the current geopolitical scene, technology interdependence is being weaponised. External pressure can push the EU to dilute rules or face retaliatory trade measures, while dependence reduces Europe’s geopolitical leverage."

"the EU already faces pressure to dilute its own digital regulations to appease allies or avoid retaliation – recently, trade negotiators even been softening EU digital rules (like the new Digital Markets Act) in exchange for avoiding US tariffs"

"if a major US platform suffered a prolonged outage, or if transatlantic relations deteriorated, leading to data access blocks, a large swath of European business and government services could grind to a halt."

"semiconductors account for about 80% of the strategic value of a data centre; building AI campuses without European hardware will therefore send most of the value abroad"

[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2025/7785...

bigyabai• 5 months ago

If it can stop Hague prosecutors from having their emails deleted, then it's not exactly a "token" so much as it is a defensive mitigation.

dgan• 5 months ago

I always wondered : govt needs support for their IT infra; students need experience. Every damn uni / eng school have a ton of "associations". Just delegate software support/development into universities/eng school? I see it as a win-win

Vicentj• 5 months ago

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Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

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