[bradley13]

That's great, but it's always just one agency, or one very local bit of government. If we (Europeans) really mean it - and we should - 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.

According to the CLOUD act, the US government can demand access to data from US companies, regardless of where that data is stored. That must be unacceptable to any sovereign government. I genuinely do not understand why other countries put up with this.

[flexie]

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.

[gizzlon]

> "Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier.

I hope you're right! I'm a backend dev and engineer, and I would love to specialize in helping companies off US cloud. Haven't found a lot of interest here in Norway so far..

[lenkite]

I really hope the EU is serious about this and doesn't change its mind with the next American administration who offers hugs and kisses.

[mfru]

Second that, even though it seems that there is nothing happening yet, many companies and government agencies in all of Europe are aware of their hard Microsoft dependency and are looking / coordinating to leave.

Same with Atlassian Confluence / Jira.

(Source: Working in a state owend company in a EU member country)

[esafak]

What counts as data sovereignty in your book? Are the sovereign clouds of AWS, MS, Google acceptable? If not, who are your preferred providers?

[Izmaki]

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.

[quietbritishjim]

> The “that’s nice but Denmark is small” comment is getting tiresome.

The parent comment didn't complain that Denmark or its overall government is small. They complained that this agency represents a small fraction of their government.

[kakacik]

But those investments will only get bigger over time and vendor lock-in will get more complex. I get that there is no unlimited budget to this but proper will to migrate for good would look very differently.

For example detailed plan for next 5-10 years how gradually everything moves. Now it feels like 1 step ahead 3 steps back, nice pat on the back for doing something, while overall transition will take 2 centuries unless magic happens. Not enough, not at this point when all cards are on the table.

[nxm]

Investment and long term maintenance costs are usually not worth it. All is good until there’s a self induced outage and your boss has to take the blame (and not Microsoft)

[lukan]

"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.

[wolvoleo]

Well, if your goal is to be 100% the same as what Microsoft offer, then sure no there's not. But that's letting them set the goalposts.

If you look at the features you actually need and are willing to explore different ways of doing things that are not exactly like M365 there's more options. France and Germany are also working on freeing themselves from M365.

This kinda thing sounds a lot like those RFPs that were specifically written so they could only be fulfilled by Microsoft because it was just a list of their feature tickboxes.

[rconti]

The best time to do this was ~2010 before all of the cloud lock-in stuff.

The second best time is now.

[Gigachad]

Google has drop in replacements for most of it. But that doesn’t solve the problem of using US tech.

[throwyawayyyy]

What I find interesting, and reflects my ignorance of how these things are used, is that if you look at, say, FAANG companies, Office isn't used. I've worked for two FAANGs over the past couple of years, and everything is done via Google docs. Replacing a giant suite like Office looks hard, replacing something simpler like Google docs looks very much simpler, and surely should suffice?

[hermanzegerman]

For many services there are drop-in Replacements available. I don't see what's so special about Mail or Calendar from Microsoft vs other vendors.

The Quality is also Shit. I get some stupid Errors when trying to Access OWA every other day. Then I have to reset cookies/cache and can login again

[lpcvoid]

There's Nextcloud/OCIS/Owncloud for Sharepoint (god I fucking hate Sharepoint) and Onedrive, there's Libreoffice/Collabora (and Onlyoffice, but that's russian...), there's Thunderbird for Email. Windows is absolutely replaceable also, of course, maybe even easier than the Office365 subscription mentioned above.

The lock in only exists in brains of (old) people that can't adapt. MS products can all be replaced, and should be in the EU. You simply cannot trust an American company anymore after Trump.

[usrbinbash]

> 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.

[tchalla]

It won’t but it creates a sense of urgency.

[jbreckmckye]

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

[wolvoleo]

See la suite in France.

They have an extensive history in this too. The gendarmerie even has their own Linux distro for their workstations.

[skrebbel]

> 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.

[hermanzegerman]

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

[lnsru]

You’re absolutely right. The benefit of being US independent has no value in the eyes of the large part of European population. The politician fighting for it is fighting uphill battle against mega corporation with endless lobbying budget and simultaneously digging a grave for the political career.

[Ylpertnodi]

> It's a thankless and tough battle for politicians, because they face lobbying and media pressure against them.

Awwww, poor babies.

[erk__]

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...

[llm_nerd]

>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.

[bytehowl]

>Taiwan recently re-engaged in diplomatic unification talks with China

That's news to me, got any good articles on the topic?

[tick_tock_tick]

Why shouldn't the USA sanction a clear overstep of authority? Neither the USA or Israel are part of the ICC.

[wiseowise]

> 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.

You forgot Trumps best butt-buddy: Putin.

[justin66]

> 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.

[throw10920]

> If we (Europeans) really mean it - and we should - 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.

This is insane. This is sacrificing the well-being of your constituents to send a (minor) political message. The amount of service degradation (including actual physical health) that you'd put your citizens through would be unbelievable.

Only those who are extraordinarily stupid or outright malicious decide to deprecate important services before first assessing the needs of every dependent on that service, and then ensuring that a full replacement is in place.

[AtlasBarfed]

Well governments need to wake up and realize that if they aren't the US and even if they are the US, open source provides most of the basic building blocks of what you're going to build independent non-corporate controlled and non-external-state controlled software

So fund it!

Governments burn billions of dollars on defense which really is just an economic waste outside of the deterrent effect it does from getting invaded.

Investing in open source to enable you to be software independent and protected, not only is it providing some measure of electronic and economic defense, it improves software for you and your allies.

You get return on your investment.

[vanschelven]

Every journey starts with the first step... And those steps are finally being taken now. Don't see why this kind of naysaying would be the top comment here

[tick_tock_tick]

> According to the CLOUD act, the US government can demand access to data from US companies, regardless of where that data is stored. That must be unacceptable to any sovereign government. I genuinely do not understand why other countries put up with this.

"put up with this" implies they have a choice.

[integralid]

>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.

[otikik]

> Adapt or die.

Yeah, no. That's not how government works - thankfully. I don't want my water to stop flowing just because someone decided to be drastic about software changes.

I agree with you in that all governments should be using open source software, for the record.

But governments are big machines and you can't steer them like a sports car. In some cases, the massive inertia they have can even be a good thing - a crazy guy can't just be elected one day, start issuing presidential mandates, and then expect them to happen immediately, for example.

[octocop]

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

[yardie]

A lot of hospitals and healthcare systems in Europe use the open source EMR platform. No ones charts are in .docx format, it is not life or death, lets be serious.

[Tarq0n]

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.

[heikkilevanto]

> Not everything is a state secret.

No, but almost everything is a potential DDOS. And slight modifications to emails, documents, and calendars can cause a lot of havoc that may be hard to detect.

[hermanzegerman]

It's not about state secrets, it's about being able to provide services when the US is turning Hostile.

Hospitals or Police aren't guarding state secrets too, but if they would loose access to their IT Infrastructure because Donald had some strange brainfart this morning like the Judge of the International Court of Justice it would impact the State critically

[marcosdumay]

There's no point in having a parallel software "infrastructure". In fact, it's a choice well known for never working.

Either your main architecture handles something or it doesn't get handled.

[piokoch]

"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?

[xylifyx]

99% of users, could just as well use another form of spreadsheet. Only complex macros or custom integration does. Perhaps very large spreadsheets, I don't know.

[hermanzegerman]

In my part of Germany we used BigBlueButton after a short time when Zoom was used. E-Mail and a LDAP account was also always available for students. It's not exactly Rocket Science.

There are also ready made solutions available for purchase

https://www.univention.com/industries/educational-sector/

[mastermage]

Also the IT Administrators that may be skilled in Windows Server and similar but less so in Linux. Thats something that beeds to be taken into account. Can be changed they can learn new things, but that takes time.

[maratc]

> That must be unacceptable to any sovereign government.

Is it OK for a French sovereign government if a German government can demand access to its data?

[lewisjoe]

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.

[DrScientist]

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 ).

[tjwebbnorfolk]

Also, they haven't actually done it yet. Announcements are easy. Implementation is hard, and most of them fail.

Wake me up when they actually do it.

[philipallstar]

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.

[macintux]

> The UK was evil for wanting more sovereignty vs the EU

I don't think many thought the UK was evil.

I think many thought the UK had been sold a bag of lies, and that exiting based on a very slim majority of voters on a referendum was a bad idea.

[csmpltn]

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

[timbit42]

OpenOffice is 15 or so years behind but LibreOffice isn't. LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice in 2011 and the vast majority of volunteers working on it left the OpenOffice project and kept working on LibreOffice.

Anyone still using OpenOffice probably doesn't realize they would likely be much better off using LibreOffice instead.

OpenOffice doesn't support docx or xlsx but LibreOffice supports them much better.

[thfuran]

Or at least a decade behind, which should be surprising given that it hasn’t been actively developed in about a decade.

[rconti]

Honestly, I hadn't used Microsoft Office in 15 years, and it somehow went 20 years backwards in that time.

[hbn]

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.

[KronisLV]

> 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.

I will weep on the day when the great Europe is defeated by people being unable to use a slightly different spreadsheet program, word processor, or a file sharing solution.

But yeah, the argument about "adapt or die" is also way off base. Ideally it'd be a gradual migration, all low hanging fruit first, seeing what works and what doesn't.

[gizzlon]

> The real people who will be hurt are the citizens relying on their government to function

You make it sound like the current Microsoft stack is so insanely great it will be impossible to replace.

Yes, change is hard, but there are also massive upsides in switching to something better.