I'm assuming AWS wouldn't fully divest from this European business unit and split it off as a completely separate entity?
So, unless it’s a separate legal entity, and also shares no authentication, software deployment, or related infrastructure with the US part of Amazon, it’s either not providing sovereignty or is being offered in violation of US law.
It’s unclear to me if they’d have to comply with requests to (for example) backdoor their IAM service backend and push the binaries to Europe, or not. (I’m not a lawyer.)
I think this is already done in some cases altough the political reliability has not yet been tested.
The EUSC will be more restricted, similar to GovCloud. Only EU citizens can access/operate it.
Specific example: an alarm fires for your service. If it’s in China, anyone on the team can go look at the logs. If it’s in GovCloud, only teammates who are American can look at the logs. In the EUSC, only Europeans can.
The sovereign cloud spec designed by the folks at France's ANSSI agency is tight.
Is this part of the spec? If not, it's as loose as a tent. And by "part of the spec" I mean "all your assets will be forcefully nationalized the second you or a parent company of yours becomes less than X% European owned", where X is well above 50.
[1] https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/11/dutch-looking-into-conseque...
To start with... states can and will absolutely block the sale of strategic national companies to foreign actors. But I'm sure you knew that.
Universities need cloud storage with online collaboration and a fully functioning office suite.
LibreOffice doesn't work because it's desktop-only and has no collaboration. However, there's an online-collaboration fork called Collabora Online, and you can use something like Nextcloud to provide your own privately hosted cloud backend. But obviously this is a gigantic effort for the university's IT department to provide and maintain with reliable redundancies and backups.
Also, LibreOffice/Collabora is pretty good if you stick to its native formats, but its interoperability with MS Office files has a lot of bugs.
In the end, it's just cheaper and more reliable to use MS or Google like everyone else. Students, professors and administrators wind up having basically the same needs around office software as businesses do.
Twenty universities come together to move to make Collabora+NextCloud work for them. That's 40 million EUR/year. How much do they need to actually spend on developers + infrastructure to make it happen?
The problem is coordination issues: actually getting people and orgs to look at it that way and spend the money that way, rather than just waiting for someone else to fix the problem.
What happened was that the big tech came in and made everything for them free. It is really hard to compete with free. They get windows for free, they get gmail for free at some point even unlimited google drive for free.
Now the situation is changing as the corps are tightening. I've seen 40k student university switch from gmail to office360 in two months because google suddenly wanted money and microsoft didn't. Now Microsoft also wants money. And it's not small money. So the school is doing cost assesment - you can give it to european third party provider that will be way cheaper tham microsoft. Or you go back to your own infra.
Turns out that what to be really expensive when google was giving people 30gb of free space to everyone in 2012 now is actually not that bad and you own your future. My guess is they will pay Microsoft for a year while they transition their email to their infra. The other parts gonna come later. But the students are required to use libre office (or latex) for writing their thesis so i don't think they see google docs as big blocker.
If it were that easy and cost-effective to do, large corporations would be doing it too. But there's a reason they're not.
1. They already self host many apps in production. Including their own complex homegrown app that manages the school. All of the students have 30 gigs of “network drive” for their virtual computer. That means lot of the infra is already there - including unified oauth/ldap.
2. There are already experts there teaching programming/devops. So these people can both administer and teach. I wouldn't underestimate inhouse capabilities.
3. It is quite easy to get grants for infrastructure modernization. These funds wouldn't be possible to use on paying third party services.
Overall I think its simply matter of costs and once googles/microsoft is not free they might not be the cheapest option anymore.
Word and excel are not the difficult part. Mail, calendars, management, storage, security measures, etc are hard.
And the thing is 99.99% of the time everything works just fine. I think these governments often struggle with moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want.
Until you have companies trying to intervene.
If Universities are publicly funded by the government, and those companies do stuff like spying on, or silencing public officials, then why should the government finance those companies?
I think its nuts that the EU has seen spying, access from services taken away, yet continues to fund those foreign companies. Are the Open Source alternatives worse? Would change suck even if the alternatives were better? It doesn't matter really. It makes no sense to pay to keep your bad deal running.
WTO says US gave illegal aid to Boeing
https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/wto-says-us-ga...
One of the most remarkable things in British politics in the last 25 years went almost unremarked upon, in part because it happened in a reactionary way.
Blair/Brown's New Labour got so deeply into bed with Microsoft that it caused the coalition government that replaced them to develop a point of agreement and move government functions off Microsoft to open standard formats, and that change stuck. Hence this weird little country that has so many problems has accidentally good IT for anything that they rolled out, there's a lot of open data etc. etc.
That would never have happened if their decision was being guided only by lobbyists; it happened that it was so strengthened by the major tech giants working with the other side.
EU governments can absolutely do this; I find it difficult to believe universities cannot.
Moving to a different mail server and office suite keeps the ICC working, but does not really protect people at the ICC from US sanctions. Their lives can be made very difficult: https://www.heise.de/en/news/How-a-French-judge-was-digitall...
I think this bit of the article is a critical problem:
>By outsourcing the management of IT systems, these educational institutions are losing technical knowledge and control. As a result, they are becoming increasingly dependent on big tech, putting academic freedom and independence at risk.
All of this is fixable but its expensive to fix. No one is motivated enough to spend the money.
But then a week later everyone has adjusted and the motivation to fix it is forgotten.
Moreover, the people working for the teams that should make the migration usually don't want a migration, so you have to perpetually convince them of the future gains.
For the last 10-15 years, very few revolution have been made in gov ICT. Most of the job is usually rewriting existing app in a recent language or creating apps for not critical features.
Servicing the jobs-to-be-done of the core applications is pretty straightforward I think.
I'm not sure what keeps people locked in besides identity. Article doesn't really specify.
Familiarity: "I've used MS Word/Excel/Teams before so I can use it here"
Convenience: "We have MS Entra, might as well go all-in"
Habit: "We never really investigated alternatives, this is just what 'everyone' uses."
step 2. cost savings by firing them all
step 3. we get locked in
step 4. oh no how did this happen
More importantly, using Microsoft at scale can leave your organization fundamentally insecure. The obscure, insecure defaults are, at best, dangerous missteps and, at worst, borderline negligent. I’m convinced that only a small fraction of enterprises using Microsoft have the expertise and budget required to secure it properly.
My personal view is that if your organization depends heavily on Microsoft, it’s not serious about security, whether they’re aware of it or not.
I saw a great Blackhat talk this year about Entra misconfiguration that got Microsoft's own sensitive internal services owned by a researcher, one of them owned by their security team. After the report they reconfigure their services, didn't pay a bounty and considered the problems solved. What about their customers making the same config errors as the Microsoft team... no changes planned.
There's much much more...
Essentially you need to pay double license for admin users so they can have two logins; and it's a pain to quickly elevate privilege to do day to day admin tasks.
So if your friendly domain admin clicks the wrong link, your entire network is owned.
Why does windows 11 show stock values in the task bar by default? Why does it show ads, games and yellow press headlines when you click on it? On the enterprise edition! Xbox services are installed and running by default. Why?
I feel like the current ignorance of the average computer user was a deliberate outcome they've been working towards for more than 20 years. As someone who has been using computers since the late 80's, I find their current offerings harder to use than ever.
Kerberos is not a great protocol, though.
Understatement of the week
and you really need to read the kerberos book before picking up sssd.
When it works. And when it doesn't work (which is most of the time if you're outside of corporate LAN) you simply can't debug what's happening.
> MIT Kerberos on Linux is not really compatible with Windows Kerberos
It actually is! Long, long time ago I managed to join Windows into a pure Kerberos domain. Everything worked, including things like GSSAPI authentication in Putty or MySQL. It involved some `ksetup.exe` incantations, I think this guide might be still relevant: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19316-01/820-3746/gisqf/index.ht...
Of course, there was no group synchronization (because no AD).
That was about 20 years ago. Back then, I was working on helping companies migrate to Linux, and I toyed with an idea of having a background service to periodically sync groups from the Linux SMB server with the local users.
Add public key infrastructure support, make ldap the default store and you got AD. Even better, you can throw all the OAuth crap down the drain.
now, starting services with a password becomes an issue of booting the machine.
Depending on the use-case, Kerberos (/this imagined x509 Kerberos) or Oauth2 still seems suitable for single-authenticator/multiple-services paradigm.
i may be naive a bit, i'll accept that, but I really like how AD works (which is essentially kerberos + ldap)
Ultimately I gave up and used samba instead, but it does seem like there's a big gap in linux offerings for "home/small business network file sharing" with shared auth
I also want to share the home printer/scanner, which I believe samba can do, but obviously sshfs won't. Side note - I would love to see a standard protocol and server for a 3d printer. We have a Bambu and the software is... alright... but doesn't play nice sharing an account between computers.
Ultimately I set up samba on the server, with mapped users, and a line in fstab on the desktop. Plain old NFS might have worked for the desktop but the users don't have the same UIDs between the desktop and the server and... reconciling that seemed painful.
I did try to make kerberos work with NFS for a few days but the experience was akin to staring into the sun.
As far as I can tell, the databases on Azure are all either slow, expensive, or both.
And of course it means we hand over all of our highly sensitive data to a company that has said that US law will overrule EU law. How can anyone trust a company that says they will not obey the law?
And regarding Microsoft, it's easy: paying for the whole package is much easier in terms of contract overhead and with MS the discounts are quite advantageous as soon as you increase the width of the package.
Short term and if you only look at the bill, it makes sense.
Long term, forcing your teams to work with shitty services is a terrible idea.
It really feels like ADO was just quickly patched together to they can offer it as part of a complete package.
Type the same id number into a bug related links twice. It'll have no match, and then a match.
For a small business without a dedicated IT team, simply hire a IT contractor to harden the tenant (MFA etc…), have them review every six months and be done with it and focus your resources on running your business.
Im also a logistics consultant… try to parse a multi-million line orderlines extract in Google Sheets compared to excel.
I’m also on Mac but to be honest it’s a challenge - there are still enough industry specific tools that are windows only so I have to run a parallels VM to get by.
And the biggest problem I have is managing revisions with multiple editors. If I were talking to Microsoft about strategy, this would be the thing I’d suggest. I know it’s common to use Sharepoint for collaboration, but it’s such a Frankenstein’d system that it’s going to be a problem for everyone sooner or later.
Don’t know what to tell you.
Honestly, I’m less interested in how things work on day one. When systems are fresh or new, it’s easier to keep working. The mess always ends up happening after things have had time to accumulate cruft. Working on a collaborative manuscript in the current Microsoft shared system is normally a nightmare.
Trying to manage/accept/reject edits and revisions between different people is still difficult. That is unless you can use a source code repository like GitHub. But good luck trying to convince people to do that. Sadly, this means that emailing files around is still the easiest way to keep things straight.
Clients will send you their PowerPoint template and want you to use it. They will send you their complex spreadsheets riddled with VBA macros and you will need to fix them. They will invite you to a Teams site because that's where their project updates go. I just don't see how you can avoid it as a consulting company!
For things like Excel - We can say it's 'bad' but I've not seen anything do the job it does better. And besides, even if it was bad, it doesn't matter - as a consultant you need to use it because your clients probably want your workings as part of the deliverables, and if it's on Google Sheets they often won't want that.
How do you know that they wouldnt be more productive if they were using Windows and Office bundle all the time?
I used to run a Microsoft productivity ops team. Email/SharePoint/etc. Our headcount was about 20-24. O365 dropped that to ~8. Now? I’m told it’s about 60, much of it relating to security.
For other degrees you need software which only runs on Windows.
It might also help that Microsoft was totally irrelevant in the professional world in the 80s.
unfortunately the university has gone full MS since then
Like yeah if you have a lot of pre-existing infrastructure migration can be a pain but MS is not in anyway necessary.
There is a lot more happening in the administrative and infrastructural side of things in most universities that one barely observes as student. So every change needs to take also that into account, the management and maintenance of services and infrastructures that must reliably support thousands of users, with relatively strict privacy and security standards, and their migration.
It just didn't seem right. Why would you need that?
What if you just wanted a plain IBM computer? Why isn't that the mainstream without need for any third party software? Or is it software? How do people do without it? What if you just want to compute? Not use the PC as an office machine or do any gaming?
Is this Microsoft content really essential?
Isn't the hardware any good without a Microsoft?
How would you go about doing that?
I guess Linus eventually asked himself the same kind of things and drove it home :)
Its' an awful sight. What's worse is that there's no argument for this extra cost (apart from maybe vendor lock-in), and now no one knows who to blame for the big bill that comes in every month.
There was no stopping it, I'd tried and they looked at me like I'm crazy. "Everybody else is doing it" is a very strong argument.
At the same time, a very popular open source security package that I wanted to use was deemed a security risk because the maintainer has placed Ukrainian and Palestinian flags in the readme.
As long as they have an obvious way of opening a web browser, an office suite, and maybe an email and calendering client, the average office worker will barely notice the OS.
Can they get rid of Typescript, npm, Github, VS, VSCode, .NET, C#, F#, C++ / DirectX, Next.js, vcpkg, Microsoft contributions to Java, Rust, and Linux kernel, on their students teaching materials?
If they can switch to UNIX FOSS technologies with zero trace of Microsoft's money sponsorship, and hinder the students careers in specific job markets, then surely.
People usually never look beyond getting rid of Office and Windows.
They're GPL licenced. They're open source. They're freely available.
They're sanction proof.
But I'm glad to see you concede the point.
To achieve Microsoft freedom, you have to have 100% Microsoft free technology, from computer, operating systems, programming languages, hosting services, communication platform, social media, job platforms, the whole deal.
If Microsoft wants to stop contributing that's perfectly fine. Others will maintain it.
That's what's great about big open source projects like Linux. It's another great project originating in Europe.
> "The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court suddenly couldn't access his email. According to Microsoft, that's because of US sanctions against the court's employees."
Nothing you've listed relates to that.
If American services and platforms have become unreliable and untrustworthy because the American government is erratic, then it's only natural that European organisations will look for alternatives.
DirectX is a funny one to list because 90% of Windows games run on Linux. WINE and Proton solve that problem for you:
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/nearly-90-percen...
Without Windows developers, game studios using Windows, Visual Studio and DirectX, SteamOS would have no games.
Proton represents Valve's failure to make a business out of Steam OS native games.
Funny will be when Microsoft decides Proton is a relevant target to aim for, and shot down by all means necessary.
No, it represents a market opportunity. WINE (a European led project) effectively makes Win32 and DirectX into Linux APIs. It works well for games. You can bring those games to Linux with less effort. And Valve can offer SteamOS (based on Arch Linux, also a European led project) for less cost.
You don't need Visual Studio. JetBrains has nice, cross-platform IDEs and they're a European company to boot:
As for Proton, don't build castles on foreign kingdoms => OS/2 "runs Windows better", Netbooks.
Lets see how long Valve manages to keep their castle up.
Microsoft is a foreign kingdom to Europe. That's part of the problem.
Without wagons carrying Windows game boxes, there is nothing at the SteamOS theater to play, and then the actors have to actually come up with their own original plays.
You can do development with Wine without a copy of Windows:
https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Winelib-User's-G...
"It seems to me like all the things you're doing can and should be automated at a larger scale."
Ten years ago when I recalled this I felt sort of good about the prediction. What I predicted pretty much happened.
That sysadmin guy has become some sort of CIO and seems to be doing well.
I did not anticipate the loss of data sovereignty.
.... and now I'm doing like 50% SRE/devops. Who's the sysadmin now, but without physical control of our data?
The path taken by Blender(propreiety initially to open source) to reach industry lead would to me seem the most viable to make a dent.
In that i think best cost effective options like WPSOffice or Corel Suite , would be a good option.They have the professional usability in the interface and functionality.
Corel is basically leaving the market wide , by mostly collecting rent from lawfirms as they are well taken care of there.Considering they used to have viable Linux options , seems a lack of vision theer to pick up marketshare.
Most of those UI/usability changes are market specific, like in my post Corel has speciaized to cater to lawyers so their workflow reflets that. LibrOffice and the others are highlygeneric , even MO as bloated as it is has specific workflows that hook their respective nicehe business verticals.
Of course, every university and every person is different, but it's not an impossibility unlike businesses.
I feel if the TUs were required to dogfood this, especially if generously funded such that startups could come along and provide the same service and support, that it could be a great positive externality
https://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/lab-infrastructure/install...
The application I mentioned: https://www.certsign.ro/en/products/eidas-trust-services/pap...
Also back on Windows the website I needed to access didn't work with Firefox so I had to resort to Chrome sadly but maybe I'll have better luck now.
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
Vivaldi is a nice chromium-based browser that I use on Linux for sites that don't work on Firefox. The certutil commands for it are apparently these: https://labs.gwendragon.de/blog/Web/Browser/Vivaldi/linux-ad...
I've failed to find even a single option on linux that does real PDF redaction like adobe acrobat. Most don't do redaction at all or worse they say they redact but it's actually just black highlighter on black text or some other kind of overlay that leaves the underlying text data intact.
They’re just hedging that American politics will stop licking the car battery.
I would claim that today is a much better moment to switch than it was 20 years ago - much more open source options, so less overall costs.
Many factories were building crap or wrong stuff just because somebody high up in the Party found it convenient for some reason.
Maybe the EU as a whole could pull off being 'fully independent' but it would require way more collaboration between countries than what we currently have.
EU could become fully independent by simply taxing imports. Designated collaboration between countries would just lead to inefficient central planning style stuff. Which is how many trans-Europe projects died
Today people are much more reliant on real-time collaboration, polished cloud and mobile experiences. Fractionalized open source software has a harder time competing with this than file based boxed software workflows of the past.
I constantly need a VPN as some services from my old country are geo-blocked. And when I forget to disable the VPN to my old country I can't visit certain sites from my current country. I need two phone numbers as some services require a phone number from the country they operate out of. I'm talking banking, classifieds, insurance, municipal. I can't use certain apps from my current country because I have to switch my account country but that disables apps from my old country.
And the best part, I can't vote for the national elections in my current country. Only for those in my old country. And it will be like that for the rest of my life. An example: I had to enable VPN to see the election results of my old country, the one I am eligible to vote in.
Please unify the EU so I don't have to deal with all of this.
If you live in the country you can vote. If you don’t live in the country you can’t vote. Simple.
No taxation without representation.
But the real joke has to be to vote for laws for others (not you) to be subjected to.
Representation without obligation (e.g. to be drafted) is even wilder.
Goes to show that voting based on a passport is silly.
Participating in local elections is often allowed.
If someone has been living and working in a country for a long time that should be enough to let them vote in national elections, regardless of what citizenship they have.
Not willing to change your citizenship is a sign of not integrating fully, in not being completely loyal to the country and to its citizens.
Imagine that both countries start a war between each other - who are you going to support? Whoever you choose does not matter, the fact remains that you would have to choose, legally speaking. Why should your current living country give the strongest possible leverage to an untegrated potential agent/supporter of the foreign country?
Highest privileges should be given to people who decided to be fully in, in both good and bad. You can't be allowed to only cherrypick the good stuff: "I want to vote, but I don't want to be drafted to be killed in a war".
And I personally hope it won't. Seeing how things are going, I have no interest for my country to become a small province of the EU to be managed by some bureaucrats in Brussels who have never set foot in it.
Sharing intel and and resources why not? Becoming a vassal state of an EU federation no thanks.
That has always been the case. I don't see how that would justify giving up our independence to become a province of a super state.
Secondly, using Russia a bogeyman to justify giving up our national rights is not a really convincing argument.
Russia hasn't been able to conquer a third of Ukraine in the last 3 years and it's economy is in shambles, yet we are supposed to believe that only a European super state can save us from it? That makes no sense.
But each to their own, those who want to give up their national rights, identities and shared cultural heritage should go ahead and integrate this super state and those who do not should be able to stay out of it.
I guess fundamentally we have a different view of what Europe should be.
*: https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...
As I said, still licking the car battery.
> And their leadership is so docile and complacent
That is the real issue.
Only if invaded by Russia and possibly China. And even then only the little peripheral ones. UK, Germany, and France could handle Russia - up to and including nukes.
For any conceivable military or paramilitary invasion from the rest of world, Europe will do just fine.
And sadly (an a bit off topic) , Europe — well Denmark at least — is most likely to face an military invasion from the USA.
And they didn't exactly struggle with the invasion parts of Afghanistan and Iraq, nor in the getting of high status targets in those theaters.
Arguably, the ICJ in the Hague is actually a result of one of those successful deployments of US forces on the continent.
Still not sure what can be done about the car battery ingestion challenges, though.
That was post 9/11. The mentality and motivation was different back then. Im not saying the US Military is anything less than a top tier orderly organization, its just that morale is generally low now among not only ranks but the entire country that supports them. You can't just throw out events occurring 23 years ago under a completely different context and assume things are the same.
I'd argue an initial moves against Europe, Canada, etc. would be a bigger mess initially than Afghanistan/Iraq were.
No one is sending in the troops to rescue Bibi from the Hague for a variety of reasons. Chief among them is that he is not currently under arrest, and the chances of him being arrested are effectively nil. Also, Mossad.
Let's suppose Netanyahu is somehow arrested and held in a highly secure government prison in The Netherlands awaiting his chance to clear his name at the ICC.
What exactly do you suppose Mossad is going to do?
- break him out? how?
- openly assassinate politicians/judges until someone gives in?
- blow up civilians?
What?
Bibi has not been arrested, he won't be arrested anytime soon, and the US is not at the point where they are willing to invade Europe to save him.
What do I think Mossad would do in the made up, improbable, alternate universe where we are debating the US invading their European allies?
I think that Mossad/Israeli security would never be caught flatfooted enough to allow Israeli leaders to visit a country that was planning to arrest them. I thoroughly believe that it would be nigh impossible to maneuver an Israeli head of state into a position where they were arrested. If things change and he is no longer protected by Israeli security, that is different.
So in answer to your question, no Mossad is not going to be breaking him out of a maximum security prison. They are going to use their intelligence network to say "Hey Benji, stay out Canada. They are going to arrest you, and have you tried if you set foot on their soil". Or "Hey Bibs, this state visit is mildly risky, we have an extraction plan in place if shit goes sideways."
Only by using the UK as a staging post - and then invading a country that wanted to be liberated with an active partisan network.
So, if China can't take Taiwan over a 150km stretch of littoral waters, a naval in invasion from over the Atlantic is impossible.
There is also no way such a fleet would get past Gibraltar or the Suez canal, so the US would they'd have to stage in Morocco or possibly take Scandinavia then cross into Denmark.
Back to licking batteries.
Normandy wasn't even the first invasion of mainland Europe by Americans of that war, let alone the first cross Atlantic invasion that the US has undertaken. The US had full armies on the ground in Europe almost a full year before Normandy, without staging in the Kingdom, and in a fascist, hostile country.
Aside from the above point, the US actually has a long, long tradition of successful invasions across oceans, including across the Atlantic. Hell, the first time the US raised their flag on foreign soil was a cross-Atlantic war in 1801. They're astoundingly good at it. They sent floating ice cream factories for troop morale in WWII in the Pacific, three of them actually. Can you imagine fighting total war and your enemy from 10k KM away shows up towing an ice cream factory for the boys?
> So, if China can't take Taiwan over a 150km stretch of littoral waters, a naval in invasion from over the Atlantic is impossible.
China hasn't tried. You have NO clue if this is accurate, and neither does anyone else. Aside from that, China is just getting into the force projection at sea game. Comparing them to the US expeditionary capabilities is daft.
> There is also no way such a fleet would get past Gibraltar or the Suez canal, so the US would they'd have to stage in Morocco or possibly take Scandinavia then cross into Denmark.
Yes, there is no way that is happening because the route from Virginia, where they keep all the Atlantic invasion stuff, to Denmark does not go anywhere near the Suez or Gib. You can just steam from Virginia to Denmark.
> Back to licking batteries.
Dibs on the lithium!
Reddit level argument ignoring the fact that the US's goal there wasn't to win anything since there's nothing of value there, it was to funnel taxpayer money to the military industrial complex for 15 years.
Pretty sure the US could have glassed Afghanistan off the map if they really wanted but probably wouldn't have been very popular decision.
War is only a tool, dominating a country or region militarily is not the same as winning a war if you have not achieved its political goals. In Afghanistan, those goals were not achieved, which means the war was lost.
if the situation is such that a US -> Netherlands land invasion (with somehow independent armed forces?) is imaginable, you're past the point of the US-ICC legal relations mattering (i'd go so far as to say there's no sovereignty to speak of here :p)
Yes, it does. Sentiment in politics and the population seems to have shifted significantly. And Trump being Trump seems to be helping Europe realize the necessity of this. I'll count that as one useful thing he has accomplished.
There’s no actual threat of Western Europe invasion from Russia.
Russia is a gas station operated by racketeers, they’ll bite off as much as they can and threaten with guns and nukes, they don’t have capability to meaningfully invade Western Europe.
Of course Russia can't attack western Europe right away, but he can weaken it by taking a bit at a time from eastern Europe. And Ukraine is part of that. Europe should really be stepping up there, but they keep telling themselves that Russia can't invade western Europe, so it's not that urgent.
In the coming decade, that will change.
Hopefully for the better.
They get government funding for both (British resident) students and research so the government has leverage but would have to use that to incentivise them. I imagine at least some other European countries are much the same.
An even trickier question if you are interested in digital sovereignty is how to get the private sector to do the same. Running everything on AWS and requiring a mobile app to do anything seems to be almost instinctive for many organisations.
Now I do m365 consulting and some Azure and I feel terrible. First of all those are terrible products, they lock you in heavily, they are overly complex. I would love if we started selling sovereign cloud solutions, open desk etc and I think our customers would be interested too. But we don't.
I'm actually thinking about starting my own business.
European countries (except maybe Russia!), in the EU and outside, are very complacent.
Whereas China not only has a much bigger budget than individual EU countries, but also central planning on a large scale, so they can just "force" things be done, no matter whether people like it or not. China giving 0.01% for such projects is way more money than a small EU country giving the same %. And it's not like they'll vote the party out for a failed project (which happens in EU countries quite often).
Also, curious: did you not like it there and left, or was that a fixed-duration contract or something?
Apparently the answer is "No." =3
I hate that people are incapable of using Libreoffice and mailing documents around, but modern users are addicted to "the cloud", and it's my understanding there's no EU centric competitor to those two giants.
By injecting CoPilot into it without customer validation is going to be very costly.
I was one of the people fighting for keeping Unix when the UU went to Exchange. It was a drama: instable af, the MS consultants could not keep it running even for 24 hours at a time while unix had 0 issues and kept chugging along (I don't remember what Unix: I think it was SunOS/Solaris). It was forced through at great cost and effort but of course sponsored by MS. It sucked for years to come.
I was at the UvA too when they moved to, equally instable MS stuff too: I worked behind some of the last Sun machines and got to take a palet of sparcstations, ultras and an e450 home when they got phased out (I still have them and they are still working, of course). Could have all been Linux now but MS was so aggressive and no one listened to profs or students, even in all tech deps who were all vehemently against the move.
It is very distressing how many organizations have become dependant on Microsoft and the US cloud for core services. I hope that an unintended consequence of the current US administration's approach is that this becomes less so.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/the-international-criminal-cou...
The link you provided does not appear to contradict the assertion in any way. "We have not cut off services to the ICC" != "We have not cut off services to one specific sanctioned individual who just so happened to coincidentally be on the ICC". The linked article even mentions Microsoft were pressed on the specific subject of the individual rather than the ICC as a whole, but declined to comment, so it looks like a regular case of weasel wording to distort the truth.
Actual independence would require a great deal of competence, expenditure, hard work, long-range planning, and time living unhappily far from any optimum.
While the Dutch obviously know how to do that - nobody in America is keeping the North Sea at bay for them - I would not bet that they'll actually do it here.
If the rot starts at the core of your education curriculum there is no saving your dependence on Microsoft.
I always found this choice puzzling to teach people proprietary technologies in a public institution. This was before DotNet core and VSCode was a thing and Microsoft hadnt whitewashed themselves to look like an open source friendly brand yet.
It's the job of a university to teach cutting edge research
The other issue is access. Again, from an art/graphics/design perspective, costs associated with proprietary software can limit some students from even participating in art/graphics/design programs. Adobe Creative Suite is US$69.99/mo or US$840/yr.
It was always pretty obvious what Microsoft wanted and was trying to do. Now trying to escape, will be painful, but that's the price they will have to endure if they want freedom and data sovereignty.
It did slowly sneak in over time I guess. In my last year of my master's eventually the faculty was forced to stop hosting its own intranet and mailing lists and migrate everything to the "cloud" (Microsoft 365 and Blackboard).
I have a copy at home of all the old wiki content and the old cs.uu.nl website. The university themselves didn't even think they should archive it so I archived it myself.
I hope there's other people with copies too. My archive isn't complete
Probably not intended, but had to laugh a bit at that.
Windows indeed is real world.
It is even worse know that vscode and all the clones are packed with llm agents that such devs can't live without.
For one thing for example, the latency of the editor is crazy for someone that worked with native editors.
But tbf VS Code is decent at being editor tho
In my experience, getting the periphery stuff is harder than the contents of the course a good chunk of the time for beginners.
TBF, the curriculum being MS based can mean very little if the concepts taught in are valuable enough. I've briefly looked at the project linked in your user description, and they don't look nice and absolutely not tinted by MS influence.
It is indeed dancing with the devil, but if MS forks the money to renew the whole university's computer park, clear all the licensing issues and train part of the staff, it can be a boon for the university.
My uni had a deal with Sun (RIP), many basic courses were in Java, all our system programming course we're Solaris targeted, all servers were Solaris anyway so our code had to run there. It's a pretty basic arrangement IMHO.
FOSS to the rescue:
* LibreOffice, instead of MS Office.
* Thunderbird, instead of Outlook (even though I don't like the direction Thunderbird has been going).
* NextCloud, instead of one drive (and there are other alternatives, more FOSS-friendly or less so)
* Matrix/IRC client plus Jitsi, instead of Teams.
and they will do just fine - on Windows or on Linux.
Same one they were using before I would think. Nobody said they were using MS Exchange server.
> and compliance... oh my compliance
Is that a magic word? :-) ... Compliance with what?
I was kind of hoping that the GDPR would be that kick, as it's clear to anyone that Microsoft, or really any other major US corporation, can't actually satisfy that completely as long as they have their tendrils in its European subsidiaries and that the US can compel them give up the information they care about. But this is a rather large elephant the EU has elected to ignore since that's the path of least resistance.
The EU actually realising the using Microsoft as your foundation does break the GDPR and fining the relevant institutions (and fixing itself on that same front!), or relevant institutions being embargoed to the point of not being able to use Microsoft products, as is apparently now the case with the ICC, will probably kick Europe into gear, but it needs to be a solid kick, and not just an institution here and there.
While I applaud the use of alternatives to windows and it's apps, universities teach it because it is what their graduates will use in the real world. Governments use it because while it has it's flaws, it mostly works and is a universal standard. It's the toyota of operating systems. The parts and manpower to repair it and use it are available everywhere, and it's cheap and reliable.
So why each time i announce myself as working with computers, there is always someone that approaches me saying "great, i have a problem with my computer, can you ..."? I just make them stop and ask "Are you talking about Windows?", and when the answer is affirmative i just say "Sorry, I only work on Linux." and they go "What is that?", lol, i would like you to see their faces when i say "It's a professional system!" and leave. :)
In case you don't: The products that people report problems with are the products that people actually use frequently. When "Linux as daily driver" market share is the same order of magnitude as Windows, then such observations will tell us something about the two systems' relative usability.
The majority of computers in the world run Linux. Windows only has majority share in the desktop space .
Like fast food, it makes satiates a short term desire for a long term problem.
At least, facebook, instagram and an argument can be made for gmail.
I think goods are a different thing altogether though, nobody tells you what to do with your washing machine after you buy it, but social media engines use your data against you and change the rules/system on a whim.
Today, a desktop is the primary epistemological tool; only a FLOSS one is suitable for study, as it reveals what it does and is, or at least can be, shaped according to need. Most are simply IT illiterate, like professors from the 1950s unable to read and write fluently, except they still haven't realised it...
(If the EU never figures out how to allow nimble startups companies to exist, then forget about it)
Microsoft's partnership/JV with 21Vianet in China shows that it can be done (with limitations on features) and this is probably the right direction to go.
Workaccount2•2mo ago
petcat•2mo ago
js8•2mo ago
p2detar•2mo ago
js8•2mo ago
I think the big issue is that all European elites have investments in the USA, and they don't have reason to pick EU over USA for investing. So there is nothing compelling them to voluntary worsen the relations.
seanieb•2mo ago
The EU is quietly investing massively in diversifying away from the US market. there are trade negotiations or agreements in process (or being advanced) with countries/regions including India, the countries of the Mercosur bloc, Mexico, and Middle-East countries.
nxm•2mo ago
bigfudge•2mo ago
seanieb•2mo ago
It's a priority for economic and political reasons. The Trump Tariffs and the US's policies towards Ukraine, and questionable commitment to NATO highlighted the dependencies and exposed the EU is to Trumps corrosive tactics.
bojan•2mo ago
saubeidl•2mo ago
It really needs to be, though, that's kind of the crux of it.
Federate or die off, it's time to get rid of old tribal thinking. We're all Europeans.
martijnvds•2mo ago
AllegedAlec•2mo ago
ramon156•2mo ago
bojan•2mo ago
Further, it'd probably be two Chambers, and we have proportional representation, which should make a slide to fascism a bit more difficult.
concinds•2mo ago
input_sh•2mo ago
There's no such position or a branch in the EU. None of the three can make any sort of change of their own.
hulitu•2mo ago
cough vdL cough
disgruntledphd2•2mo ago
input_sh•2mo ago
At most I would concede that she's way more of a household name than her predecessors, but that doesn't automatically mean she holds more power.
pessimizer•2mo ago
I guess the only thing saving the EU from the same fate is its powerlessness and indecisiveness. The people who run it are certainly insane in the same way as the leaders of the UK and the US. You're both crippled from your lack of federalization and protected by it.
edit: In the US, our real problem is that our executive (including the intelligence agencies) can do whatever it wants without an executive order or a coherent legal rationale, they will simply never be prosecuted. The next executive will proclaim that the illegal acts under the last one will never be tolerated again, pardon everybody who did it, and make those acts legal from now on.
input_sh•2mo ago
That was kind of my point, I just didn't want to write an essay about it. Congress does nothing therefore the only tangible change happens from one guy signing whatever he wants to sign into the law, effectively reducing three branches of government down to one. That said, I sure can point to for example Trump essentially taking over the power to impose tarrifs away from the congress and congress doing absolutely nothing to assert what was previously widely understood to be 100% within their authority. Or dozens of people that were deported despite various courts literally ordering the administration not to do that, Kilmar Abrego Garcia being just the first of them.
> I guess the only thing saving the EU from the same fate is its powerlessness and indecisiveness. The people who run it are certainly insane in the same way as the leaders of the UK and the US.
Now here we vehimently disagree. Nobody "runs" the EU. You need something like 500 people to agree on something for it become a law. Each of those represents their nation, their party, and their EU-level coalition. The biggest countries don't get to impose a change on smaller countries, the smallest countries don't get to do so either.
It is by far the most complex political system we have in the world for a very good reason. It came from decades of negotiating and re-negotiating between countries. It set some base standards that apply equally to otherwise incomparable nations. It is not meant to move fast and break things, it is meant to be slow and ineffective because every decision it makes impacts people that have absolutely nothing in common except the fact that they all volutarily joined the EU. From Finland to Portugal, from Cyprus to Ireland. Seriously, name me one other thing that those four countries have in common. Two of them are not in NATO, one of them is not even in Europe geographically-speaking, but I guess they all kinda like football? The fact that the EU does anything at all is a miracle of human cooperation.
And we're comparing it to one guy with questionable mental capacity (to say the least) signing things into law. Give me a break. The biggest "problem" with the EU is that at least 95% of the population that like to shit on it as an institution haven't invested more than 10 minutes into trying to understand how it works, yourself very much included.
gverrilla•2mo ago
they have a lot in common.
saubeidl•2mo ago
Imagine if every state governor in the US had veto power over federal legislation. Imagine trying to get anything done that would require buy-in from both California and Alabama. That's the situation we find ourselves in.
tomrod•2mo ago
The US has been fighting corporatism vs. oligarchy since the cold war ended, with regulatory capture as a primary tool in both tool chests.
There are some simple policy changes, politically unsavvy in the US, that a federated EU could implement to induce better outcomes.
sharpy•2mo ago
vunderba•2mo ago
https://reclaimthenet.org/eu-council-approves-new-chat-contr...
ahartmetz•2mo ago
saubeidl•2mo ago
freehorse•2mo ago
canyp•2mo ago
machomaster•2mo ago
nxor•2mo ago
machomaster•2mo ago
nxor•2mo ago
nxor•2mo ago
bregma•2mo ago
LtWorf•2mo ago
p2detar•2mo ago
kakacik•2mo ago
For poor countries in the east, EU is salvation, it dumps billions every year on them that are promptly stolen by cleptocratic governments (I know this darn too well as coming from one such place and literally everybody there knows this, you guys are fools for allowing this for decades). Yeah, all you westerners, you don't even bother to check whats happening with your truckloads of money as long as politicians don't stick out like Orban or Fico. And even if they do, all that happens is some PR statements and things go on as usually.
For Swiss for example, it would be a massive downgrade in many aspects - sovereignty, general freedom, performance, agility in ever-changing world, freedom of self-determination, and obviously economical power and wealth. They themselves voted in public vote to not join, same for NATO.
EU should be more like Switzerland, that I honestly believe is the only general recipe how long term old continent can compete and be peer to behemoths like US or China. Its not about this topic or that program, but general working and mindset of society. But good luck that western EU egos would ever accept that somebody found a more effective and way more sustainable way of functioning within European dominion. So its a path to stagnation, I see it as inevitable.
Harder working, more clever countries not laying comfortably deep in their unsustainable social systems, bureaucracy and corruption will catch up and move far beyond EU in upcoming decades, and those further like US will keep pushing beyond whats possible for EU. Maybe bigger war with russia would actually change that mindset not sustainable in 2025, but it could also mean collapse and utter catastrophe. EU is weak and slow and lost, in times when its really bad idea.
trinix912•2mo ago
Have you forgotten what a hassle it was to do international trade before your East European country was a part of the EU?
EU is far from perfect but it's still better than pretending member countries can do it all on their own.
anonzzzies•2mo ago
With easily accessible and massive funding by the EU for issues like this would get a lot of uniting done without more federating. I easily can point out 1000s of people who would spend their time working on EU sovereign/open source office 365, ai, aws etc etc the rest of their working lives and beyond, but it needs to make money and there is no money. Both investor money and EU money are incredibly hard to secure here for these type of efforts. Not impossible but very hard.
spragl•2mo ago
OK, let us play this game...
China, Japan, Taiwan and the Koreas "really needs to be" a single entity. Theyre all East Asian.
USA, Canada and Mexico "really needs to be" a single entity. Theyre all North Americans.
Nigeria, Algeria, Somalia, and so on "really needs to be" one entity. Theyre all Africans.
It is obvious where this is going, and it is not some place most people want to be. You never explained the rationale behind the need you think there is. You just stated your opinion. But your rationale would be much more interesting to hear.
saubeidl•2mo ago
Together, they are of about the same scale as a united Europe. If we want to play in the same league as them and not be subjugated by them, uniting is our only way forward.
United we stand, divided we fall.
nxor•2mo ago
skirge•2mo ago
bojan•2mo ago
manuel_w•2mo ago
I as an European get the feeling people usually hate on the EU just because it dares to interfere with local legislation. But that's its job. And usually the EU interferes for a good reason. Usually because member countries falling back to only thinking about themselves and forgetting that we Europeans are in this shit together.
> you can't do that
It's good that you can't call sparkling wine that's not from the Champagne "Champagne". It's good that you can't screw over flight passengers the way they do in the US. It's good that you can't annoy customers with phone power sockets that change with every model.
When I hear about actual examples of excess bureaucracy, it's usually on the country-level.
TulliusCicero•2mo ago
trinix912•2mo ago
TulliusCicero•2mo ago
If you expect generalizations to be perfect all the time, you'll be persistently disappointed, and probably a hypocrite to boot.
skirge•2mo ago
TulliusCicero•2mo ago
The issue I've seen is that there isn't really the political will to fix it. Europeans broadly seem uncomfortable giving up national sovereignty when it comes to digital issues (including those that impact scaling businesses), so they implicitly choose the status quo that makes it hard for software/internet businesses to succeed.
Literally in this thread you can see Europeans who are against greater federalization. And their objections are entirely understandable, but at the same time, can't exactly have your cake and eat it too. If you insist on 27 different sets of regulations to protect certain interests, however valid, you can't exactly be surprised when that makes scaling businesses rather challenging.
vladms•2mo ago
adrianN•2mo ago
mistrial9•2mo ago
nxor•2mo ago
bdangubic•2mo ago
dmitrygr•2mo ago
vanviegen•2mo ago
Funding opportunities are nearly absent though. And it seems that buying 'local' software has never been a consideration (until now). On the contrary: I've seen many cases where EU/national products were pushed out of the market by US products that came later and were (subjectively) worse. They were way better funded though. And, because of that or because of being American, they were considered to be more serious/trustworthy companies. Also, they could afford to flood the market with dump prices, until local competition was basically gone.
*: Okay, with one exception: hiring employees involves a lot of work and risk, and doesn't allow for fiscally attractive stock plans.
dmitrygr•2mo ago
vanviegen•2mo ago
baby•2mo ago
SunshineTheCat•2mo ago
Being a barnacle on the side of a boat might be a nice free ride for a while until it goes somewhere you don't want to.
amarant•2mo ago
There is plenty of European tech success stories, but plenty of them will be mistaken for American ones after Microsoft bought them(and more often than not ruined the product, see Skype for example)
disgruntledphd2•2mo ago
SunshineTheCat•2mo ago
https://www.voronoiapp.com/markets/Comparing-the-Largest-Com...
amarant•2mo ago
Financially, yes. American companies are obviously larger. How else would they be acquiring all the European companies?
In terms of technical capability, European powerhouses like ASML doesn't even have competitors from America as far as I can tell.
It's entirely possible to argue they don't have competitors at all. For certain categories of products (EUV), they literally don't!
qoez•2mo ago
vanviegen•2mo ago
jimbohn•2mo ago
The US is also still cultivating divisiveness, at the EU level, they groom a politically aligned minority that conveniently opposes any long-term improvement (Looking at Meloni's Italy, Hungary, etc.), at the country level, where possible, they again groom divisiveness by propping up yet another sovranist party.
Of course, that's what a "normal" competitor does, and of course China russia are also taking part in it. But the ambiguous situation of the USA-EU friendship needs to be solved.
I don't see how the EU can get out of this without recognizing that the US is not a friend anymore, and enduring a few decades of protectionism at the services level to try to pull a china on key sectors.
Workaccount2•2mo ago
Europe is in the intractable situation of needing to double defense spending, slash taxes, gain energy independence and bankroll it with an aging population skilled in mostly legacy industries. And doing all this with a working population that has only ever known generous work/life conditions.
jimbohn•2mo ago
Agree with your second paragraph, just disagreeing with the generous work/life conditions part, that's something that was enjoyed by boomers (through country-level debt, even!), but new generations work harder for a salary that in US terms looks like scraps.
greatgib•2mo ago
For example, here "sick leaves" days are not considered normal holidays that have to be taken in the year to not be lost.
Workaccount2•2mo ago
37.5 days more, That's huge. And France isn't even the lowest in the EU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
hulitu•2mo ago