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.
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.
“We’re done with Teams!” he said, referring to Microsoft’s messaging and collaboration tool and speaking on a video call — via an open-source German program, of course.
The radical switch-over affects half of Schleswig-Holstein’s 60,000 public servants, with 30,000 or so teachers due to follow suit in coming years.
The state’s shift towards open-source software began last year.
The current first phase involves ending the use of Word and Excel software, which are being replaced by LibreOffice, while Open-Xchange is taking the place of Outlook for emails and calendars.
Over the next few years, there will also be a switch to the Linux operating system in order to complete the move away from Windows.
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“The geopolitical developments of the past few months have strengthened interest in the path that we’ve taken,” said Schroedter, adding that he had received requests for advice from across the world.
“The war in Ukraine revealed our energy dependencies, and now we see there are also digital dependencies,” he said.
The government in Schleswig-Holstein is also planning to shift the storage of its data to a cloud system not under the control of Microsoft, said Schroedter.
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Source: ‘We’re done with Teams’: German state hits uninstall on Microsoft
In an interview with Danish broadsheet newspaper Politiken [Danish], Caroline Olsen, the country’s Minister for Digital Affairs, said she is planning to lead by example and start removing Microsoft software and tools from the ministry. The minister told Jutland’s Nordyske [🇩🇰 Danish, but not paywalled] the plan is that half the staff’s computers – including her own – would have LibreOffice in place of Microsoft Office 365 in the first month, with the goal of total replacement by the end of the year.
English-language site The Local is also carrying the story. The move follows similar ones by the city governments of Copenhagen and Aarhus.
Given that earlier this year, US President Donald Trump was making noises about taking over Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, it seems entirely understandable for the country to take a markedly increased interest in digital sovereignty – as Danish Ruby guru David Heinemeier Hansson explained just a week ago.
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The more pressing problem tends to be groupware – specifically, the dynamic duo of Outlook and Exchange, as Bert Hubert told The Register earlier this year. Several older versions go end-of-life soon, along with Windows 10. Modernizing is expensive, which makes migrating look more appealing.
A primary alternative to Redmond, of course, is Mountain View. Google’s offerings can do the job. In December 2021, the Nordic Choice hotel group was hit by Conti ransomware, but rather than pay to regain access to its machines, it switched to ChromeOS.
The thing is, this is jumping from one US-based option to another. That’s why France rejected both a few years ago, and we reported on renewed EU interest early the following year. Such things may be why French SaaS groupware offering La Suite numérique is looking quite complete and polished these days.
EU organizations can host their own cloud office suite thanks to Collabora’s CODE, which runs LibreOffice on an organization’s own webservers – easing deployment and OS migration.
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Source: Danish department determined to dump Microsoft
Not content to wait for open letters to influence the European Commission, Dutch parliamentarians have taken matters into their own hands by passing eight motions urging the government to ditch US-made tech for homegrown alternatives.
With each IT service our government moves to American tech giants, we become dumber and weaker…
The motions were submitted and all passed yesterday during a discussion in the Netherlands’ House of Representatives on concerns about government data being shipped overseas. While varied, they all center on the theme of calling on the government to replace software and hardware made by US tech companies, acquire new contracts with Dutch companies who offer similar services, and generally safeguard the country’s digital sovereignty.
“With each IT service our government moves to American tech giants, we become dumber and weaker,” Dutch MP Barbara Kathmann, author of four of the motions, told The Register. “If we continue outsourcing all of our digital infrastructure to billionaires that would rather escape Earth by building space rockets, there will be no Dutch expertise left.”
Kathmann’s measures specifically call on the government to stop the migration of Dutch information and communications technology to American cloud services, the creation of a Dutch national cloud, the repatriation of the .nl top-level domain to systems operating within the Netherlands, and for the preparation of risk analyses and exit strategies for all government systems hosted by US tech giants. The other measures make similar calls for eliminating the presence of US tech companies in government systems and the preference of local alternatives.
“We have identified the causes of our full dependency on US services,” Kathmann told us. “We have to start somewhere – by pausing all thoughtless migrations to American hyperscalers, new opportunities open up for Dutch and European providers.”
The motions passed by the Dutch parliament come as the Trump administration ratchets up tensions with a number of US allies – the EU among them. Nearly 100 EU-based tech companies and lobbyists sent an open letter to the European Commission this week asking it to find a way to divest the bloc from systems managed by US companies due to “the stark geopolitical reality Europe is now facing.”
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Source: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options, says Dutch parliament
The only question is, how did the retards in charge of procurement allow themselves to buy 100% US and closed source vendor lock-in in the first place, gutting the EU software development market?
Robin Edgar
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