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.
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 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.
Nice
I never understood how a huge government can’t be bothered to host their own nextcloud or whatever for a couple dozen mil per year instead of spending hundreds of millions per year on onedrive and other commercial crap.
Legal liability for when the service, inevitably, gets breached. If the government hosts it, they’re liable. If the vendor hosts it, the vendor is liable. Simple as money matters.
Spread responsibility thinly across as many organizations and departments within those organizations and across as many legal thresholds as you can to minimize blowback when something inevitably has to be held to account.
So they could just use a service offered by (checks notes) T-Systems, Siemens, Lufthansa Systems, SAP, TeamViewer AG,… what’s that? In all these years these companies were relying on US service providers as well, instead of innovating? Well that sucks.
Bribes, I’d venture.
Governments are usually inhabited by older folks, that aren’t too tech savvy.
I’m definitely in the minority, but i really never had or have any issues with Windows or Teams like everyone seems to complain so much about. With that said, I absolutely love that they are making this move. As someone who works in the area and sees the pricing and how much our company spends on Microsoft I find it appalling and absurd that anyone is willing to spend that much on licensing… I wish I could work on a project like this just to see what the savings could be overall.
Used Teams for a bit. Seemed fine, just used it like any other IRC clone. Didn’t use it for video. Windows has a lot of annoyances; death by a thousand cuts. The Windows ecosystem also sucks: to the point where graphic card and mouse driver installers try to install spyware.
The worst part for teams is if you do contract work and need to be a part of multiple teams instances… It’s a MASSIVE fucking pain. Microsoft’s login processes are absolute infuriating and even more so if you have to log in to multiple different accounts that all somehow have the same email address but different tenants without letting you know which account version is for which tenant.
We had to use slack for our internal stuff so we could always be in contact with each other because you could only be signed into one teams instance at a time without jumping through crazy hoops.
I initially wanted us to move to teams but that hurdle stopped us. I’m kinda glad in hindsight.
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.
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.
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.
That includes Windows, right?
…
Right?
…
Yes, they’ll use Linux.
Es ist wirklich das Jahr des Linux-Desktops
Linux is great for government work.
They dont need compatibility as much. They have their systems only they use, therefore they can easily make them on Linux or emulate.
Otherwise they need a office suite like Libre.
And there’s money to save. Benefits the whole country.
They have their systems only they use, therefore they can easily make them on Linux or emulate.
Also, a lot of systems are web-based (and therefore automatically multi-platform) these days.
Don’t forget, most computers are faster on Linux than on the newest windows version, so you can hold off on upgrades for longer if the hardware is physically fine, which just further decreases costs.
I have a Dell laptop from 2013 I’m running Mint on 🫡
Granted, I’m only using it for web browsing and note taking, but still.
So basically an office simulator
and therefore automatically multi-platform
But not necessarily multibrowser.
Damn those people developing only for Chrome.
So with all this AI usage, surely developing for all browsers should be a breeze now, right? Right??
And gamers are looking to SteamOS to replace windows.
SteamOS is not a good desktop distribution, which isn’t surprising as it’s not supposed to be one. It’s specialised for handhelds.
Go install Ubuntu or something, really anything, ideally don’t have an Nvidia GPU, install steam, done. SteamOS has no special sauce regarding running games.
Not Ubuntu.
Source: I use Ubuntu.
That’s not a very good idea. It’s not a general use distribution.
It says they will be replaced soon, so im assuming it’s phase 2.
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.
I’m stuck with Teams in my job.
I fucking hate it.
It crashes, it loses things, it has a lousy search function, to automate messaging you need to learn one of the arcane and convoluted MS services because they deprecated the much easier webhooks…
When something fails (and it always does) we just say “Well… it’s Teams”, and that sums it up.
Same. I’ve come to terms using it in browser mode on Edge, same for Outlook. The desktop applications are so horrific, I uninstalled both. Half the time they wouldn’t work or force log me out.
Now I literally have a standalone screen that’s showing nothing but Edge with those two tabs on, and all my productive environment is on a nice large screen where I don’t have to see the crap.
Any suggestions on alternatives?
Slack is ok but proprietary.
Element is a new and eg fractal doesn’t have threading.
Sorry to say, but no idea.
We used separate applications for seven years (Jabber for IM and Asana for ticket management), and for me, that’s what I’m stuck with using Teams for, at least until Microsoft drops AI into and it eats itself.
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.
It was barely tolerable, then they gated proper noise cancellation behind some AI privacy destroying BS. Excellent choice, fu Microsoft
I didn’t see what exactly they’re using for a Teams replacement?
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
Many are switching to Nextcloud Talk.
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?
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.
