At a time of growing concern over the power of the world’s mighty tech companies, one German state is turning its back on US giant Microsoft.
In less than three months’ time, almost no civil servant, police officer or judge in Schleswig-Holstein will be using any of Microsoft’s ubiquitous programs at work.
The whole article is a good read but this is the important bit:
Instead, the northern state will turn to open-source software to “take back control” over data storage and ensure “digital sovereignty”, its digitalisation minister, Dirk Schroedter, told AFP.
They also blame Trump which is pretty hilarious but probably not terribly relevant to the community.
Trump’s executive order forced Microsoft to disable access for ICC’s Chief Prosecutor. So, in a sense, Trump is indeed a threat to digital sovereignty.
Oh, he is a threat to all types of sovereignty, in every sense.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor has lost access to his email, and his bank accounts have been frozen.
Working with information today could be hundreds of times better if there were serious open standards. Switching away from outdated proprietary junk, to an open source version of that junk is great, but late. And, let’s hope, its the start of real change. To catch up to where we should have been decades ago if we hadn’t been held back by lazy MS et al. Digital information should zip between people and have real meaning. Not have to go through a thick layer of IT, and files and formats, and redundant copies, and silos and having to know tech to get things done. Peoples expectations are so low, they are satisfied with the crap we have today.
hadn’t been held back by lazy MS et al.
MS is not lazy but working hard to maintain their lead.
edit: Just noticed that my phrasing is bad and could be seen as praise. OP is right, MS is holding everybody back.
I meant to say that they abuse their market domination to maintain their lead.
Look at MS Teams. It was free until Slack was done as a competitor.
MS did things but that’s inevitable. The crucial part are the things that they prevented.
It’s increadible that OP is even downvoted.
You’re way off here. Microsoft are the industry leaders in this space because they’re so far ahead of everyone else because they focus on this stuff. They’re far from lazy, they’re the opposite in fact. As someone who manages the whole MS suite from entra to dev ops all the way to managed instance dbs and defender and everything in between daily, their integration across everything and their pace of updates is insane.
What products specifically are you calling “outdated junk” and why?
I can also explain Microsoft’s straglehold on enterprise/government/institutional IT in two words: Group Policy. Nothing - absolutely nothing - from any other OS maker comes close to the granular level of configurability, customisation and flexibility that comes with Group Policy, not even ChromeOS or iOS.
I get it! It’s a fucking terrible program. At the moment I’ve got two instances of it running, one old and one new. Why the fuck? Why doesn’t all the old things transfer to the new one?
It’s also a joke to maneuver. The different subjects have “hidden” subcategories that aren’t supposed to be hidden but are! So you have two extra clicks to find the folder… it’s a giant fucking joke that a company the size of MS can’t make this tolerable.
Channels get hidden when they’re inactive for a decent amount of time. To see them you just view all the channels in a team. Not really hard. Can also just then tick to always show it. This is a PICNIC situation.
I’m guessing your 2 instances are the personal one that is included with windows, and then the work one. You can’t have 2 instances of the same one installed.
Do you like work for Microsoft or something, you’re all over this post
It’s like I opened it and read the comments and replied to the ones that I was thought warranted a response. Crazy I know.
Is what I said wrong?
YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP!
Yes, but only in Europe, and no Americans are allowed. 😕
Try and stop me. I don’t even have windows installed anymore.
Nice
Teams is just an incomprehensible version of Discord. What’s the open source version of that? Matrix?
Can anything be more incomprehensible that Discord?
Incomprehensible? How? It’s got team/channel chats, private chats, and meetings. What makes it stand out is, like everything else MS does, the integration across all their services.
It definitely needs some improvement, but “incomprehensible” it isn’t.
I would say “even busier” and “over-integrated” rather than “incomprehensible”.
Not to start a fight or anything, but it almost reminds me of emacs, because it’s like someone started with an idea for one kind of program, but they just kept adding and adding and adding to it. But emacs at least is free, flexible, long established, free, and quirky.
You love to see it.
At my work all but me love microsoft. But … They started to complain about teams too. I only use the chat because it’s impossible to avoid.
Literally no one I work with likes Teams but we keep using it because that’s just what we do. Other options basically don’t exist simply by virtue of being either not Microsoft or not overwhelmingly the market leader.
So you’re saying that other options do exist but some companies don’t want to use them because Microsoft is very popular, which is kind of a circular thing, and I understand, but it’s a sign of laziness, not quality.
I’m not sure why you’re taking a oppositional tone. To be clear I’m complaining, not trying to justify it.
At mine the person in charge of IT procurement is an ex Microsoft salesman.
My work hate Microsoft but don’t see a viable alternative. Microsoft is safer because of their stranglehold.
do France next
Why would we uninstall France?
Why would we uninstall France?
🤔
German state hits uninstall on France
😅
Aren’t French authorities quite ahed on FOSS adoption in their platform? I.e. https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en
even the most sensitive information are collected through Microsoft and government sites use adobe too 🤷 Windows is the OS in almost all government computers.
not to forget all the WhatsApp use for official communication
facebook and xitter accounts of most government offices are still active
It’s a cooperation between France, Germany, and more recently The Netherlands.
What was the alternative they chose ?
It doesn’t say, but seems to be an ad-hoc solution.
This process started in 2021 already.
They will use GNU/Linux, LibreOffice, Nextcloud, Open Xchange (OX), Thunderbird and Univention AD-Connector.
https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/themen/digitalisierung/linux-plus1/Projekt
I didn’t see what exactly they’re using for a Teams replacement?
Many are switching to Nextcloud Talk.
Open desk, is the office suite they use, I suppose. Matrix chat, perhaps?
It has an inbuilt messenger based on element, apparently.
Jup, Matrix indeed. Thx
It was barely tolerable, then they gated proper noise cancellation behind some AI privacy destroying BS. Excellent choice, fu Microsoft
I want to say various cities/regions in Germany make statements like this every few years? And they usually end up rolling back when it becomes clear the cost to retrain both existing staff and new staff isn’t worth it.
That said: This gets the national security bump so maybe it will stick. Also nobody on the planet likes to use Teams.
Yes, but: this endeavour comes after/along with the development of a unified “open desk”, a replacement solution for the office and collaboration tools from microsoft etc, backed by the federal government. This ensures a base layer of interoperability between offices and makes training probably easier.
And if it sticks, good. But it still has the fundamental problem of needing to re-train all your existing employees AND train new staff who haven’t been brought up in that system.
Its on a completely different scale, but plenty of tech youtubers have done the “Let’s get rid of all the Adobe in my life”. Some succeed. Most tend to come down on some variation of “I can do about 99% of what I used to do in these two or three tools. And these ten things are actually genuinely easier and more performant. But we can’t take a month off making videos to get all of our editors up to speed. And this also removes our ability to contract out an edit to someone with the industry standard workflow”. And from my professional experience in different fields, that is true. Hiring someone and then spending a week or a month so they can use YOUR tools becomes a huge burden in not too long of a time.
I really hope Germany pulls it off this time and more governments follow. But I also remember all the other times I have read this story.
It’s quite easy to use. France is working together with them.
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en
The Netherlands have joined last year.
Meanwhile Belgium has bought extra copilot licences and digs itself deeper into the M$ pit.
I wouldn’t count on the federation they’ve been doing nothing all these years. Schleswig-Holstein law has favoured FLOSS solutions since 2009 (“where technically possible and economical”), and bits and pieces were introduced as early as 2012. ZenDiS exists since 2022, opendesk is based on dPhoenixSuite, work done by Dataport precisely for Schleswig-Holstein, and they’re still doing most of the development work. More importantly though I’m not seeing any political commitment on the federal level, the Bundeswehr switching over because they care about stuff doesn’t mean that the, what, finance ministry cares. The BND probably also cares but tough luck getting them to confirm or deny anything.
I’ve used them all pretty much and it’s a really shitty product
I took a look and its quite complicated to install requiring a very complex kubernates clustwr. Unclear why it is so disparate when something like nextcloud can be single containerised. I feel like this could be simplified for deployment.
