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.

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.

"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.

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

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

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

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

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

> 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.

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

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

>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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

>That must be unacceptable to any sovereign government

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

"all Microsoft licenses will be terminated"

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

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

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?

> 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.

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

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

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

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

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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...

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

failed due to corrupt government official and M$ bribes

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

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

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?

> 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.

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 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.

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.

Many European governments are reassessing their tech dependencies, especially after incidents like that. It raises significant concerns about privacy and autonomy when companies respond to geopolitical pressures.

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.

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

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.

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?

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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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