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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Look, I support Europe's push for computational sovereignty. It's frankly long overdue. But Europeans still consistently underestimate the scope and difficulty of that task, and it must be undertaken simultaneously with building military and energy sovereignty while China's eating their economic lunch.
There isn't the money, the attention bandwidth, the industry, the IP, the skilled labor with know-how, the tools, or the raw materials to do all of those.
> Chinese alternatives are starting to appear
Maybe, but they are seriously handicapped and not competitive. And certainly when it comes to inference: They also don't have the hardware capacity to supply their own market and the European market.
> will be very competitive in the next few years
Maybe. More likely they'll only be competitive in 10+ years.
> Europe also has some key strategic cards to play when it comes to hardware, such as access to TSMC.
Then why haven't they played them? Both Japan and America got commitments for significant domestic advanced node fab and packaging facilities from TSMC. Europe only got 40k WSPMs of already-outdated 12nm+ lines.
Further: Which European company is designing or will soon design competitive CPUs/GPUs/switching to hand off to TSMC? Will a European company cut in line for cutting-edge tools, conjure up IP and know-how from nothing, and start selling HBM and DRAM, too? And will all these fantasy companies be decoupling from US EDA tools, as well?
Finally: If you're saying that Europe will be able to outplay the US in a zero-sum game for access to TSMC wafer spins, you might want to consider also the strategic cards that the US can play to prevent that.
> Europe will be a consumer/bystander in the AI race, not a protagonist
That's not just likely, that's absolutely guaranteed. Sorry, Mr. Draghi.
> For that, you don't need a lot of hardware
How do you serve inference at scale without a lot of hardware? If both US and China are supply-constrained for GPUs that they're turning into high-value-added products/services, why would they give Europe any hardware at all?
If I can turn a $100k GPU into $1M of value, there aren't enough GPUs in the world, your companies don't have the fiscal firepower to be price-setters, and your products/services compete with mine on global markets--why the fuck would I sell you any GPUs? Charity?
And if the plan is for European computing to remain totally dependent on US and CN... what are we even talking about here?
> But it can lose that post in the future
Sure, nothing lasts forever. But I thought this was about European computational sovereignty, not dependence on the US specifically. I guess not: Depending on the US is a crisis, but depending on Qatar and China is A-OK. What could go wrong?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47169815 (iPhone and iPad approved to handle classified NATO information)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If an inter-operable protocols were enforced by some regulation it would alleviate the situation a bit.
https://www-sueddeutsche-de.translate.goog/muenchen/muenchne...
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?
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
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.
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.
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...)
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.
In other words, Sam Altman et al. should be hardcore Atlanticists at this point.
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.
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.
There isn't the money, the attention bandwidth, the industry, the IP, the skilled labor with know-how, the tools, or the raw materials to do all of those.
> Chinese alternatives are starting to appear
Maybe, but they are seriously handicapped and not competitive. And certainly when it comes to inference: They also don't have the hardware capacity to supply their own market and the European market.
> will be very competitive in the next few years
Maybe. More likely they'll only be competitive in 10+ years.
> Europe also has some key strategic cards to play when it comes to hardware, such as access to TSMC.
Then why haven't they played them? Both Japan and America got commitments for significant domestic advanced node fab and packaging facilities from TSMC. Europe only got 40k WSPMs of already-outdated 12nm+ lines.
Further: Which European company is designing or will soon design competitive CPUs/GPUs/switching to hand off to TSMC? Will a European company cut in line for cutting-edge tools, conjure up IP and know-how from nothing, and start selling HBM and DRAM, too? And will all these fantasy companies be decoupling from US EDA tools, as well?
Finally: If you're saying that Europe will be able to outplay the US in a zero-sum game for access to TSMC wafer spins, you might want to consider also the strategic cards that the US can play to prevent that.
> Europe will be a consumer/bystander in the AI race, not a protagonist
That's not just likely, that's absolutely guaranteed. Sorry, Mr. Draghi.
> For that, you don't need a lot of hardware
How do you serve inference at scale without a lot of hardware? If both US and China are supply-constrained for GPUs that they're turning into high-value-added products/services, why would they give Europe any hardware at all?
If I can turn a $100k GPU into $1M of value, there aren't enough GPUs in the world, your companies don't have the fiscal firepower to be price-setters, and your products/services compete with mine on global markets--why the fuck would I sell you any GPUs? Charity?
And if the plan is for European computing to remain totally dependent on US and CN... what are we even talking about here?
> But it can lose that post in the future
Sure, nothing lasts forever. But I thought this was about European computational sovereignty, not dependence on the US specifically. I guess not: Depending on the US is a crisis, but depending on Qatar and China is A-OK. What could go wrong?
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.
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.
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.
I want to see (sincerely) a whole government ditch MS
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
See https://www.exoscale.com/blog/cloudact-vs-gdpr/
( Though note exoscale, as a European provider has skin in the game here ).
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.
Is it OK for a French sovereign government if a German government can demand access to its data?
Wake me up when they actually do it.
"put up with this" implies they have a choice.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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?