I'm working for the XWiki and CryptPad projects, which are integrated in openDesk. Here are a couple links / infos that can be interesting to understand the context of openDesk.
The openDesk project comes initially from an initiative of the Ministry of Interior of Germany in 2021, to build the alternative to Office 365. The project was progressively transferred in 2025 to a state-owned organization, the ZenDis (https://zendis.de), which oversees the global development of openDesk.
The source code is mainly available on https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk, where you will find mirrors of every project which is bundled into openDesk (Nextcloud, Collabora, Element, Univention, XWiki, Jitsi, OpenXchange, CryptPad, OpenProject, …)
There was also a couple public presentations about openDesk at FOSDEM during the past years :
I find it fascinating to see how much power Germany's "digital sovereignty" initiative has gained. In the beginning, it looked like yet another government thingy that nobody will use. But by now, they must be well above 100k government employees using it daily.
Also, in case you missed that: StackIt is the AWS / G Cloud competitor by LIDL: https://www.stackit.de/en/ It's the basebone for their app strategy with 100 mio+ client installs and about 500k employees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collabora_Online ("Collabora Online (often abbreviated as COOL) is an open-source online office suite developed by Collabora, based on LibreOffice Online, the web-based edition of the LibreOffice office suite.")
Rightly so. They should have never used it in the first place. What with the US not recognizing the court it always made very little sense to me that they would rely on the infrastructure components to be supplied by the USA. The latest sanctions are just another step in something that was already in motion from day #1.
The world order at the highest level relies on the nations themselves to behave, especially the largest ones because nobody has the practical power to enforce the decisions of the court in case defendants are in places where the court is not recognized. To USA not recognizing the court has always shown that they don't care about the crimes they commit.
Agreed. And I think European countries really need to start eating our own dog food and stop being 100% reliant on US software and hardware. It's not (only) about opposing certain political behaviours, but (also) about supporting our financial independence and wellbeing.
> To USA not recognizing the court has always shown that they don't care about the crimes they commit.
I'd nitpick the "don't care" part. To me, it's that they do care precisely because they know they are guilty. I think Trump is guilty for the boats being shot. Obama guilty for the drone strikes. W guilty for well, the whole shit show. Didn't really pay attention to Biden, but I'd assume drone strikes continued there too. From Clinton on back, I admit I just wasn't paying attention to those kinds of issues.
So, reading the documentation in the [repo](https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/deployment/opendesk/...) it’s immediately made clear that you should use the Enterprise Edition for production use. (Since the German state is behind this, why not focus on totally free software for production use?)
But what really surprised me are statements like this in the README:
” Nextcloud Enterprise: openDesk uses the Nextcloud Enterprise to the build Nextcloud container image for oD EE. The Nextcloud EE codebase might contain EE exclusive (longterm support) security patches, plus the Guard app, that is not publicly available, while it is AGPL-3.0 licensed.
And
COOL Controller container image and Helm chart: Source code and chart are using Mozilla Public License Version 2.0, but the source code is not public. It is provided to customers upon request.
”
This, according with other paragraphs describing percentages of free and non-free code in certain components really makes me wonder…
It's a misconception that (A)GPL source code should be publicly available.
GPL family mandates source code access to people who can access to the software itself. So as long as ICC gets the source code of the NextCloud EE and the Guard app, the GPL is fulfilled.
This is how RedHat operates, and is not a violation of GPL.
Also, this is how you can build a business around GPL. You only have to provide source code to people who buys your software, or you can sell support to it.
Lawyers historically are notoriously linked to Microsoft and its formats as a somewhat unintentional industry side standard.
Moves like this hearten me as for certain lawyers the formats and standards they now will be expected to follow has just shifted, towards open source no less.
I remember when lawyers historically used WordPerfect for the same reasons. Now, I don’t know the details of how that industry shifted (MS dominance and WP shitting the bed with their GUI versions would be my guess), but it shows that it is possible.
OpenDesk is basically a huge helm file that configures the individual apps.
Given enough RAM it should be rather simple to deploy.
You can start right away, there is a community edition:
https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/deployment/opendesk
All else aside, Microsoft 365 as an office suite screams for disruption. If you don't believe me try actually using their copilot and observe the poor integrations with core products such as Excel/Word/Powerpoint. Sorry for the offtopic but it really hurts for those of us who are forced by their CIO to use this thing.
Yes, the product is terrible and easily beat out by a competitor. However, most people who are forced to use it is by dictate their own company CIO, hence MS has captive audiences.
The lack of anything at all on the roadmap page [1] and lack of a link to their code repository on a blog post touting their open-source cred [2] does not build confidence. I found their code repo link in the comments here, after not finding it easily on their site.
EDIT: to be clear, I'm all for open source software, and for more options to tools from big tech firms.
I work for one of the several European companies building open source software that has been chosen as components of openDesk.
openDesk is solid, legit and serious.
Open source is a requirement. As such, money doesn't go to a startup building proprietary software that get bought a few years later by a big tech company and then all the investment is lost. They audit and check that licenses are open source and that the dependencies have compatible licenses.
It's publicly funded, by Germany* (for their needs, but it will grow larger than them). Their strategy is to give money to established European open source software companies so they improve their software in areas that matter to them, including integration features (user management, for instance, or file / event sharing with other software, many things) as well as accessibility. They take all these pieces of software and build a coherent (with a common theme / look & feel), turn-key, feature-rich suite. This strategic decision that has its drawbacks allows to get something fast with what exists today.
I'm not sure communication and the business strategy is all figured out / polished yet, but with the high profile institutions adopting it, it will come. Each involved companies wants this to succeed too.
I think this is huge. I'm quite enthusiastic. Software might not be perfect but with the potential momentum this thing has, it could improve fast, and each piece of open source software that is part of this as well along the way.
They have some real users too. I know of some out of my head. According to ChatGPT:
- Robert Koch Institute (RKI) – entered a contract on 11 June 2025 to use openDesk as the technical basis for the “Agora” platform for public‑health authorities.
- BWI GmbH – the IT infrastructure provider for the German armed forces (Bundeswehr); signed a framework contract for openDesk.
- Bundesamt für Seeschifffahrt und Hydrographie – also mentioned as an early adopter of openDesk.
- Föderale IT‑Kooperation (FITKO) – listed as a user in the EU OSS Catalogue entry for openDesk.
I think I read that some German states use the software too.
You never know what will happen in the long run but the solution will probably be maintained for some time given it's backing by the federal government of Germany.
Microsoft has to follow US sanctions, even if they are misplaced. This isn't a choice on Microsoft's part here.
The ICC was applauded in the US in the when it went after Russia but when it goes after Israel it is sanctioned. It unfortunately hard to be impartial, like the ICC is, when it comes to international war crimes. The big players want you to play towards their favourites and only hold their enemies accountable.
Depressing. I wonder what convinced them of that decision considering national security and the price-tag of several billions. Also, Palantir. Do you think it's conservative attraction to the current U. S. administration?
Especially since USA, home country of Microsoft corporation, is exhibiting military junta techniques.
USA is killing citizens of foreign countries, weekly via the "U.S. military conducting missile strikes against boats in the Caribbean and Pacific claiming they are shipping drugs".
These non-military victims, citizens, being killed intentionally are a violation of human rights.
These people are members of international drug trafficking cartels that are highly armed and organized and kill thousands of people directly (and tens of thousands indirectly) every year. They are military combatants actively waging war against the US, and this is self-defense.
The US has been waiting for the host countries of these cartels to stop them for decades now, at the cost of millions of lives. To defend their behavior and claim that the US shouldn't defend its own citizens from foreign military powers is absolutely disgusting.
I find it hard to compare o365 to OpenDesk. O365 is just a bag of programs using vaguely the same UX concept and openDesk is a full integrated environment. I myself changed to Nextcloud with integrated collab office and will never go back to MS
Maybe it's time for UN to start rolling out their own global linux distro / mobile OS, Cue UN getting sanctioned in 3...2... But jokes aside seems like a useful global good.
It seems likely the ICC will issue an arrest warrant for Trump in the coming years. I see all their recent moves as a signal they want to distance themselves from the US so they can actually issue that warrant.
There are quite a few reasons that should happen, but I won't hold my breath. And I that issuance really won't do anything worthwhile, except be a footnote in a history book.
Trump's life-span is likely to not be a very large number of years from today given his age, and systemic health problems.
SO I expect ICC would find other people, e.g. Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, who are helping to commit these areguably war-crimes in the Pacific and Caribbean seas, the missile strikes against civilian non-US vessels.
I wonder if this will be like Germany's rush to run Linux across their entire fed. govt and it will only last a few years. Germany gave up eventually. I wonder if the ICC will too, or if it will actually stick this time around.
I think the bigger question is why they were using microsoft products in the first place.
USA has been very hostile to the ICC under trump, but its not exactly a huge shift, bush was also incredibly hostile. It seems borderline incompetent to use a microsoft cloud offering given the political situation.
Not to mention given the type of work they do, seems like hosting stuff off site at all is a bad plan.
How much do you think they should spend on IT to be independent from Microsoft (serious question) ? Wikipedia mentions they employ 800 persons working in several buildings and a detention center for a budget of 141 million USD.
Microsoft O365 Business Premium per person is 22 USD per month so total per year is ~200k USD (online price, I imagine they can negotiate a bit for that amount of people).
The same reason most organizations use it -- inertia and because it's been the standard for so long, it's the best at what it does.
The startup I used to work at was exclusively on OSX + GoogleDocs, when we were small, but as we grew (and especially when the Finance team grew) more and more employees found a need for the MS Office Suite as well as apps that only run on Windows, so they started rolling out Windows VM's and then full Windows machines.
Lobbying - and likely a fair amount of network pressure from legal systems in various nations that lean towards using office for internal documents as a default.
>I think the bigger question is why they were using microsoft products in the first place.
Public institutions in Europe, in my experience, often have a confusing insistence on using Microsoft cloud products. Universities heavily push Office 365 and Teams, often trying to demand that faculty use them, while faculty continue to use alternatives as much as possible in order to actually work effectively. During the pandemic, the only online conferences I attended that insisted on running via Teams, against all reason, were run by a UK public institution, and they had as many embarrassing technical problems as might be expected.
This is despite Microsoft's cloud services being generally designed for businesses and often poorly suited for public institutions, especially universities. The services are fundamentally built with the assumption that work will primarily take place within a single organization, with clearly defined employees. European research collaborations constantly seem to be hobbled by needing to use hacks around this assumption, but the inexplicable importance of using Microsoft seems to outweigh these problems. In the most ridiculous case, a conference online during the pandemic asked everyone during registration to please not register using their university email address, but to use a personal one not associated with any Office 365 account, because they had no way of allowing access to Teams if the email address was managed by Microsoft at a different university. Yet still the importance of using Teams was paramount to the organizers.
I have had no clear explanation of why using Microsoft services is so important, despite them being so poorly suited to the institutions, so opposed (and often just not used) by many of the actual users, and arguably being used in ways that they are not really intended to be used. I've had some people claim it is necessary for GDPR compliance, despite the GDPR compliance of any US company being on shaky ground. Microsoft itself has described what seem like rather extensive contingency plans around US-enforced GDPR violations or requirements for service cutoffs (there is a blog post somewhere), but these must also imply a fear that such things could actually happen (and, of course, actually did happen with the ICC). It all seems rather strange.
> I think the bigger question is why they were using microsoft products in the first place.
There used to be this quaint idea of rule of law and things like that. We can always argue that governments were happy to get dirty and occasionally illegal, and they certainly were. But a) it was universally seen as a bad thing, and b) no country would have done it so blatantly and openly. Perversely, this narrative was important to advance the US’ interests because it opened opportunities for American companies to go deep into foreign administrations. Which they did.
So yeah, the clock ticked and now we’re in a new and exciting era for geopolitics and who knows what system will prevail in the end. What is certain is that the US abdicated their leadership.
> USA has been very hostile to the ICC under trump, but its not exactly a huge shift, bush was also incredibly hostile. It seems borderline incompetent to use a microsoft cloud offering given the political situation.
There is a difference between hostility as in "we won’t take part and won’t cooperate in any way" and "we’re also going to pressure private companies to steal your stuff". The ICC is also full of NATO countries and allies so any form of hostility has to be calibrated to keep them on your side. If you care about alliances, that is.
> Not to mention given the type of work they do, seems like hosting stuff off site at all is a bad plan.
Indeed. To be fair, it seems like a bad plan for most large companies with anything that looks like industrial secrets, let alone a government or such a supra-national organisation.
USA has been very hostile to the ICC since way before Trump.
The ICC was created in 1998 when Bill Clinton was president of the USA. He never ratified the Rome treaty. And then GW, Obama, Trump and Biden didn't either.
Very few americans batted an eye as far as I could tell. Your are after all by definition exceptional. (/s)
ditches is a strong word here, we change software providers for different tooling all the time
dependency on american corps is a bit weird, when they wont move away from windows just for one presendential term surely? trump will be out in X years. whats the point?
some of these organisations are now more politically aligned than ever questioning their neutrality
It's actually not called Microsoft 365, but "the Microsoft 365 Copilot app" (not to be confused with Microsoft Copilot (a slop generator with the same logo))
caubin|3 months ago
I'm working for the XWiki and CryptPad projects, which are integrated in openDesk. Here are a couple links / infos that can be interesting to understand the context of openDesk.
The openDesk project comes initially from an initiative of the Ministry of Interior of Germany in 2021, to build the alternative to Office 365. The project was progressively transferred in 2025 to a state-owned organization, the ZenDis (https://zendis.de), which oversees the global development of openDesk.
The source code is mainly available on https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk, where you will find mirrors of every project which is bundled into openDesk (Nextcloud, Collabora, Element, Univention, XWiki, Jitsi, OpenXchange, CryptPad, OpenProject, …)
There was also a couple public presentations about openDesk at FOSDEM during the past years :
* In 2024 : https://archive.fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3...
* In 2025 : https://archive.fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5...
evanjrowley|3 months ago
>CryptPad was selected to join the German "Sovereign Workplace" project, now called openDesk.
https://blog.cryptpad.org/2025/01/28/CryptPad-Funding-Status...
Many more details in this blog post from XWiki: https://xwiki.com/en/Blog/XWiki-CryptPad-knowledge-managemen...
fxtentacle|3 months ago
Also, in case you missed that: StackIt is the AWS / G Cloud competitor by LIDL: https://www.stackit.de/en/ It's the basebone for their app strategy with 100 mio+ client installs and about 500k employees.
bonyt|3 months ago
https://www.opendesk.eu/en/product#document-management ("Collabora Online powers openDesk with a robust office suite designed for efficient teamwork and secure document editing.")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collabora_Online ("Collabora Online (often abbreviated as COOL) is an open-source online office suite developed by Collabora, based on LibreOffice Online, the web-based edition of the LibreOffice office suite.")
trelane|3 months ago
jacquesm|3 months ago
The world order at the highest level relies on the nations themselves to behave, especially the largest ones because nobody has the practical power to enforce the decisions of the court in case defendants are in places where the court is not recognized. To USA not recognizing the court has always shown that they don't care about the crimes they commit.
ultim8k|3 months ago
dylan604|3 months ago
I'd nitpick the "don't care" part. To me, it's that they do care precisely because they know they are guilty. I think Trump is guilty for the boats being shot. Obama guilty for the drone strikes. W guilty for well, the whole shit show. Didn't really pay attention to Biden, but I'd assume drone strikes continued there too. From Clinton on back, I admit I just wasn't paying attention to those kinds of issues.
uvesten|3 months ago
But what really surprised me are statements like this in the README:
” Nextcloud Enterprise: openDesk uses the Nextcloud Enterprise to the build Nextcloud container image for oD EE. The Nextcloud EE codebase might contain EE exclusive (longterm support) security patches, plus the Guard app, that is not publicly available, while it is AGPL-3.0 licensed.
And
COOL Controller container image and Helm chart: Source code and chart are using Mozilla Public License Version 2.0, but the source code is not public. It is provided to customers upon request. ”
This, according with other paragraphs describing percentages of free and non-free code in certain components really makes me wonder…
bayindirh|3 months ago
GPL family mandates source code access to people who can access to the software itself. So as long as ICC gets the source code of the NextCloud EE and the Guard app, the GPL is fulfilled.
This is how RedHat operates, and is not a violation of GPL.
Also, this is how you can build a business around GPL. You only have to provide source code to people who buys your software, or you can sell support to it.
Another example: Rock Solid curl [0].
[0]: https://rock-solid.curl.dev/
evolve2k|3 months ago
Moves like this hearten me as for certain lawyers the formats and standards they now will be expected to follow has just shifted, towards open source no less.
mikestew|3 months ago
velcrovan|3 months ago
Does anyone have any experience using it?
clickety_clack|3 months ago
schnatterer|3 months ago
eeasss|3 months ago
onemoresoop|3 months ago
slwvx|3 months ago
EDIT: to be clear, I'm all for open source software, and for more options to tools from big tech firms.
[1] https://www.opendesk.eu/en/roadmap
[2] https://www.opendesk.eu/en/blog/open-source-software-trust
jraph|3 months ago
openDesk is solid, legit and serious.
Open source is a requirement. As such, money doesn't go to a startup building proprietary software that get bought a few years later by a big tech company and then all the investment is lost. They audit and check that licenses are open source and that the dependencies have compatible licenses.
It's publicly funded, by Germany* (for their needs, but it will grow larger than them). Their strategy is to give money to established European open source software companies so they improve their software in areas that matter to them, including integration features (user management, for instance, or file / event sharing with other software, many things) as well as accessibility. They take all these pieces of software and build a coherent (with a common theme / look & feel), turn-key, feature-rich suite. This strategic decision that has its drawbacks allows to get something fast with what exists today.
I'm not sure communication and the business strategy is all figured out / polished yet, but with the high profile institutions adopting it, it will come. Each involved companies wants this to succeed too.
I think this is huge. I'm quite enthusiastic. Software might not be perfect but with the potential momentum this thing has, it could improve fast, and each piece of open source software that is part of this as well along the way.
* see also caubin's comment
Lapel2742|3 months ago
https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk
They have some real users too. I know of some out of my head. According to ChatGPT:
- Robert Koch Institute (RKI) – entered a contract on 11 June 2025 to use openDesk as the technical basis for the “Agora” platform for public‑health authorities.
- BWI GmbH – the IT infrastructure provider for the German armed forces (Bundeswehr); signed a framework contract for openDesk.
- Bundesamt für Seeschifffahrt und Hydrographie – also mentioned as an early adopter of openDesk.
- Föderale IT‑Kooperation (FITKO) – listed as a user in the EU OSS Catalogue entry for openDesk.
I think I read that some German states use the software too.
You never know what will happen in the long run but the solution will probably be maintained for some time given it's backing by the federal government of Germany.
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
vincvinc|3 months ago
"IMPOSING SANCTIONS ON THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT" (white house, feb 2025) https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/impo...
Microsoft admits in French court it can't keep EU data safe from US authorities (jul 2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45822902
yupyupyups|3 months ago
Snowden leaked that fact before Microsoft made the admission. But it's good that it's coming from them officially nonetheless.
whatever1|3 months ago
Could MS create a new EU based company in which it just owns shares ?
Or is the US cloud act so wide that they can demand data from all the companies a us based company has equity in?
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
pjmlp|3 months ago
bhouston|3 months ago
The ICC was applauded in the US in the when it went after Russia but when it goes after Israel it is sanctioned. It unfortunately hard to be impartial, like the ICC is, when it comes to international war crimes. The big players want you to play towards their favourites and only hold their enemies accountable.
The US is also sanctioning Palestinian human rights groups, and kicking them off of US platforms like YouTube, because they make Israel look bad: https://theintercept.com/2025/11/04/youtube-google-israel-pa...
marcosdumay|3 months ago
Or rather, stealing control from their customers computers is already leaving politics mess up with the customers.
baumschubser|3 months ago
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Bavaria-wants-to-move-to-Micros...
frm88|3 months ago
tptacek|3 months ago
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
perihelions|3 months ago
Elfener|3 months ago
(was submitted to HN 3 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45797515)
firefax|3 months ago
ebbi|3 months ago
ncr100|3 months ago
Especially since USA, home country of Microsoft corporation, is exhibiting military junta techniques.
USA is killing citizens of foreign countries, weekly via the "U.S. military conducting missile strikes against boats in the Caribbean and Pacific claiming they are shipping drugs".
These non-military victims, citizens, being killed intentionally are a violation of human rights.
throw10920|3 months ago
These people are members of international drug trafficking cartels that are highly armed and organized and kill thousands of people directly (and tens of thousands indirectly) every year. They are military combatants actively waging war against the US, and this is self-defense.
The US has been waiting for the host countries of these cartels to stop them for decades now, at the cost of millions of lives. To defend their behavior and claim that the US shouldn't defend its own citizens from foreign military powers is absolutely disgusting.
Surac|3 months ago
dang|3 months ago
OpenDesk – a flexible all-in-one office suite for the public sector - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45838239 - Nov 2025 (19 comments)
maxglute|3 months ago
blackoil|3 months ago
spwa4|3 months ago
sixothree|3 months ago
lordofgibbons|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
testing22321|3 months ago
PenguinCoder|3 months ago
ncr100|3 months ago
SO I expect ICC would find other people, e.g. Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, who are helping to commit these areguably war-crimes in the Pacific and Caribbean seas, the missile strikes against civilian non-US vessels.
petepete|3 months ago
https://www.opendesk.eu
hwartig|3 months ago
https://opencode.de/en/software/open-desk-1317
magicalhippo|3 months ago
https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/deployment/opendesk
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
mkromkamp|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
namegulf|3 months ago
aitchnyu|3 months ago
zie|3 months ago
I hope it sticks, but I'm not holding my breath.
bawolff|3 months ago
USA has been very hostile to the ICC under trump, but its not exactly a huge shift, bush was also incredibly hostile. It seems borderline incompetent to use a microsoft cloud offering given the political situation.
Not to mention given the type of work they do, seems like hosting stuff off site at all is a bad plan.
vladms|3 months ago
Microsoft O365 Business Premium per person is 22 USD per month so total per year is ~200k USD (online price, I imagine they can negotiate a bit for that amount of people).
Johnny555|3 months ago
The startup I used to work at was exclusively on OSX + GoogleDocs, when we were small, but as we grew (and especially when the Finance team grew) more and more employees found a need for the MS Office Suite as well as apps that only run on Windows, so they started rolling out Windows VM's and then full Windows machines.
nitwit005|3 months ago
munk-a|3 months ago
iso1631|3 months ago
cge|3 months ago
Public institutions in Europe, in my experience, often have a confusing insistence on using Microsoft cloud products. Universities heavily push Office 365 and Teams, often trying to demand that faculty use them, while faculty continue to use alternatives as much as possible in order to actually work effectively. During the pandemic, the only online conferences I attended that insisted on running via Teams, against all reason, were run by a UK public institution, and they had as many embarrassing technical problems as might be expected.
This is despite Microsoft's cloud services being generally designed for businesses and often poorly suited for public institutions, especially universities. The services are fundamentally built with the assumption that work will primarily take place within a single organization, with clearly defined employees. European research collaborations constantly seem to be hobbled by needing to use hacks around this assumption, but the inexplicable importance of using Microsoft seems to outweigh these problems. In the most ridiculous case, a conference online during the pandemic asked everyone during registration to please not register using their university email address, but to use a personal one not associated with any Office 365 account, because they had no way of allowing access to Teams if the email address was managed by Microsoft at a different university. Yet still the importance of using Teams was paramount to the organizers.
I have had no clear explanation of why using Microsoft services is so important, despite them being so poorly suited to the institutions, so opposed (and often just not used) by many of the actual users, and arguably being used in ways that they are not really intended to be used. I've had some people claim it is necessary for GDPR compliance, despite the GDPR compliance of any US company being on shaky ground. Microsoft itself has described what seem like rather extensive contingency plans around US-enforced GDPR violations or requirements for service cutoffs (there is a blog post somewhere), but these must also imply a fear that such things could actually happen (and, of course, actually did happen with the ICC). It all seems rather strange.
kergonath|3 months ago
There used to be this quaint idea of rule of law and things like that. We can always argue that governments were happy to get dirty and occasionally illegal, and they certainly were. But a) it was universally seen as a bad thing, and b) no country would have done it so blatantly and openly. Perversely, this narrative was important to advance the US’ interests because it opened opportunities for American companies to go deep into foreign administrations. Which they did.
So yeah, the clock ticked and now we’re in a new and exciting era for geopolitics and who knows what system will prevail in the end. What is certain is that the US abdicated their leadership.
> USA has been very hostile to the ICC under trump, but its not exactly a huge shift, bush was also incredibly hostile. It seems borderline incompetent to use a microsoft cloud offering given the political situation.
There is a difference between hostility as in "we won’t take part and won’t cooperate in any way" and "we’re also going to pressure private companies to steal your stuff". The ICC is also full of NATO countries and allies so any form of hostility has to be calibrated to keep them on your side. If you care about alliances, that is.
> Not to mention given the type of work they do, seems like hosting stuff off site at all is a bad plan.
Indeed. To be fair, it seems like a bad plan for most large companies with anything that looks like industrial secrets, let alone a government or such a supra-national organisation.
tiahura|3 months ago
lysace|3 months ago
The ICC was created in 1998 when Bill Clinton was president of the USA. He never ratified the Rome treaty. And then GW, Obama, Trump and Biden didn't either.
Very few americans batted an eye as far as I could tell. Your are after all by definition exceptional. (/s)
amriksohata|3 months ago
dependency on american corps is a bit weird, when they wont move away from windows just for one presendential term surely? trump will be out in X years. whats the point?
some of these organisations are now more politically aligned than ever questioning their neutrality
anikom15|3 months ago
[deleted]
greatgib|3 months ago
[deleted]
Elfener|3 months ago
iammjm|3 months ago
pfortuny|3 months ago
bix6|3 months ago
dybber|3 months ago
> Create, edit and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations with full support for all major file formats
opencl|3 months ago
erk__|3 months ago