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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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

failed due to corrupt government official and M$ bribes

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

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...

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."

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

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?

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

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

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

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

Well 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

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.

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.

>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.

I agree. Whilst I think MS products are on a downward trajectory, I'm getting "Agriculture Department of Maastricht switches to OpenOffice" vibes

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.

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.