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.
That includes Windows, right?
…
Right?
…
Yes, they’ll use Linux.
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.
It says they will be replaced soon, so im assuming it’s phase 2.
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.
I’m stuck with Teams in my job.
I fucking hate it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Teams is just an incomprehensible version of Discord. What’s the open source version of that? Matrix?
It was barely tolerable, then they gated proper noise cancellation behind some AI privacy destroying BS. Excellent choice, fu Microsoft
Nice
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’ve used them all pretty much and it’s a really shitty product
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.
At mine the person in charge of IT procurement is an ex Microsoft salesman.
