Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
dub.uu.nl
dub.uu.nl
If the rot starts at the core of your education curriculum there is no saving your dependence on Microsoft.
I always found this choice puzzling to teach people proprietary technologies in a public institution. This was before DotNet core and VSCode was a thing and Microsoft hadnt whitewashed themselves to look like an open source friendly brand yet.
The other issue is access. Again, from an art/graphics/design perspective, costs associated with proprietary software can limit some students from even participating in art/graphics/design programs. Adobe Creative Suite is US$69.99/mo or US$840/yr.
It's the job of a university to teach cutting edge research
It was always pretty obvious what Microsoft wanted and was trying to do. Now trying to escape, will be painful, but that's the price they will have to endure if they want freedom and data sovereignty.
It is even worse know that vscode and all the clones are packed with llm agents that such devs can't live without.
For one thing for example, the latency of the editor is crazy for someone that worked with native editors.
But tbf VS Code is decent at being editor tho
Probably not intended, but had to laugh a bit at that.
Windows indeed is real world.
It did slowly sneak in over time I guess. In my last year of my master's eventually the faculty was forced to stop hosting its own intranet and mailing lists and migrate everything to the "cloud" (Microsoft 365 and Blackboard).
I have a copy at home of all the old wiki content and the old cs.uu.nl website. The university themselves didn't even think they should archive it so I archived it myself.
I hope there's other people with copies too. My archive isn't complete
In my experience, getting the periphery stuff is harder than the contents of the course a good chunk of the time for beginners.
TBF, the curriculum being MS based can mean very little if the concepts taught in are valuable enough. I've briefly looked at the project linked in your user description, and they don't look nice and absolutely not tinted by MS influence.
It is indeed dancing with the devil, but if MS forks the money to renew the whole university's computer park, clear all the licensing issues and train part of the staff, it can be a boon for the university.
My uni had a deal with Sun (RIP), many basic courses were in Java, all our system programming course we're Solaris targeted, all servers were Solaris anyway so our code had to run there. It's a pretty basic arrangement IMHO.
More importantly, using Microsoft at scale can leave your organization fundamentally insecure. The obscure, insecure defaults are, at best, dangerous missteps and, at worst, borderline negligent. I’m convinced that only a small fraction of enterprises using Microsoft have the expertise and budget required to secure it properly.
My personal view is that if your organization depends heavily on Microsoft, it’s not serious about security, whether they’re aware of it or not.
As far as I can tell, the databases on Azure are all either slow, expensive, or both.
And of course it means we hand over all of our highly sensitive data to a company that has said that US law will overrule EU law. How can anyone trust a company that says they will not obey the law?
Type the same id number into a bug related links twice. It'll have no match, and then a match.
It really feels like ADO was just quickly patched together to they can offer it as part of a complete package.
And regarding Microsoft, it's easy: paying for the whole package is much easier in terms of contract overhead and with MS the discounts are quite advantageous as soon as you increase the width of the package.
Short term and if you only look at the bill, it makes sense.
Long term, forcing your teams to work with shitty services is a terrible idea.
Add public key infrastructure support, make ldap the default store and you got AD. Even better, you can throw all the OAuth crap down the drain.
now, starting services with a password becomes an issue of booting the machine.
Kerberos is not a great protocol, though.
When it works. And when it doesn't work (which is most of the time if you're outside of corporate LAN) you simply can't debug what's happening.
> MIT Kerberos on Linux is not really compatible with Windows Kerberos
It actually is! Long, long time ago I managed to join Windows into a pure Kerberos domain. Everything worked, including things like GSSAPI authentication in Putty or MySQL. It involved some `ksetup.exe` incantations, I think this guide might be still relevant: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19316-01/820-3746/gisqf/index.ht...
Of course, there was no group synchronization (because no AD).
That was about 20 years ago. Back then, I was working on helping companies migrate to Linux, and I toyed with an idea of having a background service to periodically sync groups from the Linux SMB server with the local users.
Understatement of the week
and you really need to read the kerberos book before picking up sssd.
i may be naive a bit, i'll accept that, but I really like how AD works (which is essentially kerberos + ldap)
Ultimately I gave up and used samba instead, but it does seem like there's a big gap in linux offerings for "home/small business network file sharing" with shared auth
I used to run a Microsoft productivity ops team. Email/SharePoint/etc. Our headcount was about 20-24. O365 dropped that to ~8. Now? I’m told it’s about 60, much of it relating to security.
Why does windows 11 show stock values in the task bar by default? Why does it show ads, games and yellow press headlines when you click on it? On the enterprise edition! Xbox services are installed and running by default. Why?
I saw a great Blackhat talk this year about Entra misconfiguration that got Microsoft's own sensitive internal services owned by a researcher, one of them owned by their security team. After the report they reconfigure their services, didn't pay a bounty and considered the problems solved. What about their customers making the same config errors as the Microsoft team... no changes planned.
There's much much more...
Essentially you need to pay double license for admin users so they can have two logins; and it's a pain to quickly elevate privilege to do day to day admin tasks.
So if your friendly domain admin clicks the wrong link, your entire network is owned.
I feel like the current ignorance of the average computer user was a deliberate outcome they've been working towards for more than 20 years. As someone who has been using computers since the late 80's, I find their current offerings harder to use than ever.
For a small business without a dedicated IT team, simply hire a IT contractor to harden the tenant (MFA etc…), have them review every six months and be done with it and focus your resources on running your business.
How do you know that they wouldnt be more productive if they were using Windows and Office bundle all the time?
Im also a logistics consultant… try to parse a multi-million line orderlines extract in Google Sheets compared to excel.
I’m also on Mac but to be honest it’s a challenge - there are still enough industry specific tools that are windows only so I have to run a parallels VM to get by.
They’re just hedging that American politics will stop licking the car battery.
*: https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...
As I said, still licking the car battery.
Reddit level argument ignoring the fact that the US's goal there wasn't to win anything since there's nothing of value there, it was to funnel taxpayer money to the military industrial complex for 15 years.
Pretty sure the US could have glassed Afghanistan off the map if they really wanted but probably wouldn't have been very popular decision.
And they didn't exactly struggle with the invasion parts of Afghanistan and Iraq, nor in the getting of high status targets in those theaters.
Arguably, the ICJ in the Hague is actually a result of one of those successful deployments of US forces on the continent.
Still not sure what can be done about the car battery ingestion challenges, though.
if the situation is such that a US -> Netherlands land invasion (with somehow independent armed forces?) is imaginable, you're past the point of the US-ICC legal relations mattering (i'd go so far as to say there's no sovereignty to speak of here :p)
There’s no actual threat of Western Europe invasion from Russia.
Russia is a gas station operated by racketeers, they’ll bite off as much as they can and threaten with guns and nukes, they don’t have capability to meaningfully invade Western Europe.
Yes, it does. Sentiment in politics and the population seems to have shifted significantly. And Trump being Trump seems to be helping Europe realize the necessity of this. I'll count that as one useful thing he has accomplished.
In the coming decade, that will change.
Hopefully for the better.
European countries (except maybe Russia!), in the EU and outside, are very complacent.
Whereas China not only has a much bigger budget than individual EU countries, but also central planning on a large scale, so they can just "force" things be done, no matter whether people like it or not. China giving 0.01% for such projects is way more money than a small EU country giving the same %. And it's not like they'll vote the party out for a failed project (which happens in EU countries quite often).
I constantly need a VPN as some services from my old country are geo-blocked. And when I forget to disable the VPN to my old country I can't visit certain sites from my current country. I need two phone numbers as some services require a phone number from the country they operate out of. I'm talking banking, classifieds, insurance, municipal. I can't use certain apps from my current country because I have to switch my account country but that disables apps from my old country.
And the best part, I can't vote for the national elections in my current country. Only for those in my old country. And it will be like that for the rest of my life. An example: I had to enable VPN to see the election results of my old country, the one I am eligible to vote in.
Please unify the EU so I don't have to deal with all of this.
And I personally hope it won't. Seeing how things are going, I have no interest for my country to become a small province of the EU to be managed by some bureaucrats in Brussels who have never set foot in it.
Sharing intel and and resources why not? Becoming a vassal state of an EU federation no thanks.
I would claim that today is a much better moment to switch than it was 20 years ago - much more open source options, so less overall costs.
Today people are much more reliant on real-time collaboration, polished cloud and mobile experiences. Fractionalized open source software has a harder time competing with this than file based boxed software workflows of the past.
Many factories were building crap or wrong stuff just because somebody high up in the Party found it convenient for some reason.
Maybe the EU as a whole could pull off being 'fully independent' but it would require way more collaboration between countries than what we currently have.
The issue I've seen is that there isn't really the political will to fix it. Europeans broadly seem uncomfortable giving up national sovereignty when it comes to digital issues (including those that impact scaling businesses), so they implicitly choose the status quo that makes it hard for software/internet businesses to succeed.
Literally in this thread you can see Europeans who are against greater federalization. And their objections are entirely understandable, but at the same time, can't exactly have your cake and eat it too. If you insist on 27 different sets of regulations to protect certain interests, however valid, you can't exactly be surprised when that makes scaling businesses rather challenging.
It really needs to be, though, that's kind of the crux of it.
Federate or die off, it's time to get rid of old tribal thinking. We're all Europeans.
https://reclaimthenet.org/eu-council-approves-new-chat-contr...
OK, let us play this game...
China, Japan, Taiwan and the Koreas "really needs to be" a single entity. Theyre all East Asian.
USA, Canada and Mexico "really needs to be" a single entity. Theyre all North Americans.
Nigeria, Algeria, Somalia, and so on "really needs to be" one entity. Theyre all Africans.
It is obvious where this is going, and it is not some place most people want to be. You never explained the rationale behind the need you think there is. You just stated your opinion. But your rationale would be much more interesting to hear.
With easily accessible and massive funding by the EU for issues like this would get a lot of uniting done without more federating. I easily can point out 1000s of people who would spend their time working on EU sovereign/open source office 365, ai, aws etc etc the rest of their working lives and beyond, but it needs to make money and there is no money. Both investor money and EU money are incredibly hard to secure here for these type of efforts. Not impossible but very hard.
For poor countries in the east, EU is salvation, it dumps billions every year on them that are promptly stolen by cleptocratic governments (I know this darn too well as coming from one such place and literally everybody there knows this, you guys are fools for allowing this for decades). Yeah, all you westerners, you don't even bother to check whats happening with your truckloads of money as long as politicians don't stick out like Orban or Fico. And even if they do, all that happens is some PR statements and things go on as usually.
For Swiss for example, it would be a massive downgrade in many aspects - sovereignty, general freedom, performance, agility in ever-changing world, freedom of self-determination, and obviously economical power and wealth. They themselves voted in public vote to not join, same for NATO.
EU should be more like Switzerland, that I honestly believe is the only general recipe how long term old continent can compete and be peer to behemoths like US or China. Its not about this topic or that program, but general working and mindset of society. But good luck that western EU egos would ever accept that somebody found a more effective and way more sustainable way of functioning within European dominion. So its a path to stagnation, I see it as inevitable.
Harder working, more clever countries not laying comfortably deep in their unsustainable social systems, bureaucracy and corruption will catch up and move far beyond EU in upcoming decades, and those further like US will keep pushing beyond whats possible for EU. Maybe bigger war with russia would actually change that mindset not sustainable in 2025, but it could also mean collapse and utter catastrophe. EU is weak and slow and lost, in times when its really bad idea.
Funding opportunities are nearly absent though. And it seems that buying 'local' software has never been a consideration (until now). On the contrary: I've seen many cases where EU/national products were pushed out of the market by US products that came later and were (subjectively) worse. They were way better funded though. And, because of that or because of being American, they were considered to be more serious/trustworthy companies. Also, they could afford to flood the market with dump prices, until local competition was basically gone.
*: Okay, with one exception: hiring employees involves a lot of work and risk, and doesn't allow for fiscally attractive stock plans.
I as an European get the feeling people usually hate on the EU just because it dares to interfere with local legislation. But that's its job. And usually the EU interferes for a good reason. Usually because member countries falling back to only thinking about themselves and forgetting that we Europeans are in this shit together.
> you can't do that
It's good that you can't call sparkling wine that's not from the Champagne "Champagne". It's good that you can't screw over flight passengers the way they do in the US. It's good that you can't annoy customers with phone power sockets that change with every model.
When I hear about actual examples of excess bureaucracy, it's usually on the country-level.
The EU is quietly investing massively in diversifying away from the US market. there are trade negotiations or agreements in process (or being advanced) with countries/regions including India, the countries of the Mercosur bloc, Mexico, and Middle-East countries.
It's a priority for economic and political reasons. The Trump Tariffs and the US's policies towards Ukraine, and questionable commitment to NATO highlighted the dependencies and exposed the EU is to Trumps corrosive tactics.
I think the big issue is that all European elites have investments in the USA, and they don't have reason to pick EU over USA for investing. So there is nothing compelling them to voluntary worsen the relations.
The US is also still cultivating divisiveness, at the EU level, they groom a politically aligned minority that conveniently opposes any long-term improvement (Looking at Meloni's Italy, Hungary, etc.), at the country level, where possible, they again groom divisiveness by propping up yet another sovranist party.
Of course, that's what a "normal" competitor does, and of course China russia are also taking part in it. But the ambiguous situation of the USA-EU friendship needs to be solved.
I don't see how the EU can get out of this without recognizing that the US is not a friend anymore, and enduring a few decades of protectionism at the services level to try to pull a china on key sectors.
Europe is in the intractable situation of needing to double defense spending, slash taxes, gain energy independence and bankroll it with an aging population skilled in mostly legacy industries. And doing all this with a working population that has only ever known generous work/life conditions.
For example, here "sick leaves" days are not considered normal holidays that have to be taken in the year to not be lost.
37.5 days more, That's huge. And France isn't even the lowest in the EU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
Agree with your second paragraph, just disagreeing with the generous work/life conditions part, that's something that was enjoyed by boomers (through country-level debt, even!), but new generations work harder for a salary that in US terms looks like scraps.
Being a barnacle on the side of a boat might be a nice free ride for a while until it goes somewhere you don't want to.
There is plenty of European tech success stories, but plenty of them will be mistaken for American ones after Microsoft bought them(and more often than not ruined the product, see Skype for example)
https://www.voronoiapp.com/markets/Comparing-the-Largest-Com...
Financially, yes. American companies are obviously larger. How else would they be acquiring all the European companies?
In terms of technical capability, European powerhouses like ASML doesn't even have competitors from America as far as I can tell.
It's entirely possible to argue they don't have competitors at all. For certain categories of products (EUV), they literally don't!
While I applaud the use of alternatives to windows and it's apps, universities teach it because it is what their graduates will use in the real world. Governments use it because while it has it's flaws, it mostly works and is a universal standard. It's the toyota of operating systems. The parts and manpower to repair it and use it are available everywhere, and it's cheap and reliable.
The majority of computers in the world run Linux. Windows only has majority share in the desktop space .
So why each time i announce myself as working with computers, there is always someone that approaches me saying "great, i have a problem with my computer, can you ..."? I just make them stop and ask "Are you talking about Windows?", and when the answer is affirmative i just say "Sorry, I only work on Linux." and they go "What is that?", lol, i would like you to see their faces when i say "It's a professional system!" and leave. :)
In case you don't: The products that people report problems with are the products that people actually use frequently. When "Linux as daily driver" market share is the same order of magnitude as Windows, then such observations will tell us something about the two systems' relative usability.
For other degrees you need software which only runs on Windows.
It might also help that Microsoft was totally irrelevant in the professional world in the 80s.
Like yeah if you have a lot of pre-existing infrastructure migration can be a pain but MS is not in anyway necessary.
There is a lot more happening in the administrative and infrastructural side of things in most universities that one barely observes as student. So every change needs to take also that into account, the management and maintenance of services and infrastructures that must reliably support thousands of users, with relatively strict privacy and security standards, and their migration.
It just didn't seem right. Why would you need that?
What if you just wanted a plain IBM computer? Why isn't that the mainstream without need for any third party software? Or is it software? How do people do without it? What if you just want to compute? Not use the PC as an office machine or do any gaming?
Is this Microsoft content really essential?
Isn't the hardware any good without a Microsoft?
How would you go about doing that?
I guess Linus eventually asked himself the same kind of things and drove it home :)
unfortunately the university has gone full MS since then
And the thing is 99.99% of the time everything works just fine. I think these governments often struggle with moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want.
One of the most remarkable things in British politics in the last 25 years went almost unremarked upon, in part because it happened in a reactionary way.
Blair/Brown's New Labour got so deeply into bed with Microsoft that it caused the coalition government that replaced them to develop a point of agreement and move government functions off Microsoft to open standard formats, and that change stuck. Hence this weird little country that has so many problems has accidentally good IT for anything that they rolled out, there's a lot of open data etc. etc.
That would never have happened if their decision was being guided only by lobbyists; it happened that it was so strengthened by the major tech giants working with the other side.
EU governments can absolutely do this; I find it difficult to believe universities cannot.
Moving to a different mail server and office suite keeps the ICC working, but does not really protect people at the ICC from US sanctions. Their lives can be made very difficult: https://www.heise.de/en/news/How-a-French-judge-was-digitall...
I think this bit of the article is a critical problem:
>By outsourcing the management of IT systems, these educational institutions are losing technical knowledge and control. As a result, they are becoming increasingly dependent on big tech, putting academic freedom and independence at risk.
All of this is fixable but its expensive to fix. No one is motivated enough to spend the money.
Until you have companies trying to intervene.
If Universities are publicly funded by the government, and those companies do stuff like spying on, or silencing public officials, then why should the government finance those companies?
I think its nuts that the EU has seen spying, access from services taken away, yet continues to fund those foreign companies. Are the Open Source alternatives worse? Would change suck even if the alternatives were better? It doesn't matter really. It makes no sense to pay to keep your bad deal running.
WTO says US gave illegal aid to Boeing
https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/wto-says-us-ga...
Moreover, the people working for the teams that should make the migration usually don't want a migration, so you have to perpetually convince them of the future gains.
For the last 10-15 years, very few revolution have been made in gov ICT. Most of the job is usually rewriting existing app in a recent language or creating apps for not critical features.
But then a week later everyone has adjusted and the motivation to fix it is forgotten.
The path taken by Blender(propreiety initially to open source) to reach industry lead would to me seem the most viable to make a dent.
In that i think best cost effective options like WPSOffice or Corel Suite , would be a good option.They have the professional usability in the interface and functionality.
Corel is basically leaving the market wide , by mostly collecting rent from lawfirms as they are well taken care of there.Considering they used to have viable Linux options , seems a lack of vision theer to pick up marketshare.
Most of those UI/usability changes are market specific, like in my post Corel has speciaized to cater to lawyers so their workflow reflets that. LibrOffice and the others are highlygeneric , even MO as bloated as it is has specific workflows that hook their respective nicehe business verticals.
Of course, every university and every person is different, but it's not an impossibility unlike businesses.
I feel if the TUs were required to dogfood this, especially if generously funded such that startups could come along and provide the same service and support, that it could be a great positive externality
I've failed to find even a single option on linux that does real PDF redaction like adobe acrobat. Most don't do redaction at all or worse they say they redact but it's actually just black highlighter on black text or some other kind of overlay that leaves the underlying text data intact.
https://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/lab-infrastructure/install...
The application I mentioned: https://www.certsign.ro/en/products/eidas-trust-services/pap...
Also back on Windows the website I needed to access didn't work with Firefox so I had to resort to Chrome sadly but maybe I'll have better luck now.
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
Vivaldi is a nice chromium-based browser that I use on Linux for sites that don't work on Firefox. The certutil commands for it are apparently these: https://labs.gwendragon.de/blog/Web/Browser/Vivaldi/linux-ad...
It is very distressing how many organizations have become dependant on Microsoft and the US cloud for core services. I hope that an unintended consequence of the current US administration's approach is that this becomes less so.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/the-international-criminal-cou...
The link you provided does not appear to contradict the assertion in any way. "We have not cut off services to the ICC" != "We have not cut off services to one specific sanctioned individual who just so happened to coincidentally be on the ICC". The linked article even mentions Microsoft were pressed on the specific subject of the individual rather than the ICC as a whole, but declined to comment, so it looks like a regular case of weasel wording to distort the truth.
I was one of the people fighting for keeping Unix when the UU went to Exchange. It was a drama: instable af, the MS consultants could not keep it running even for 24 hours at a time while unix had 0 issues and kept chugging along (I don't remember what Unix: I think it was SunOS/Solaris). It was forced through at great cost and effort but of course sponsored by MS. It sucked for years to come.
I was at the UvA too when they moved to, equally instable MS stuff too: I worked behind some of the last Sun machines and got to take a palet of sparcstations, ultras and an e450 home when they got phased out (I still have them and they are still working, of course). Could have all been Linux now but MS was so aggressive and no one listened to profs or students, even in all tech deps who were all vehemently against the move.
Universities need cloud storage with online collaboration and a fully functioning office suite.
LibreOffice doesn't work because it's desktop-only and has no collaboration. However, there's an online-collaboration fork called Collabora Online, and you can use something like Nextcloud to provide your own privately hosted cloud backend. But obviously this is a gigantic effort for the university's IT department to provide and maintain with reliable redundancies and backups.
Also, LibreOffice/Collabora is pretty good if you stick to its native formats, but its interoperability with MS Office files has a lot of bugs.
In the end, it's just cheaper and more reliable to use MS or Google like everyone else. Students, professors and administrators wind up having basically the same needs around office software as businesses do.
What happened was that the big tech came in and made everything for them free. It is really hard to compete with free. They get windows for free, they get gmail for free at some point even unlimited google drive for free.
Now the situation is changing as the corps are tightening. I've seen 40k student university switch from gmail to office360 in two months because google suddenly wanted money and microsoft didn't. Now Microsoft also wants money. And it's not small money. So the school is doing cost assesment - you can give it to european third party provider that will be way cheaper tham microsoft. Or you go back to your own infra.
Turns out that what to be really expensive when google was giving people 30gb of free space to everyone in 2012 now is actually not that bad and you own your future. My guess is they will pay Microsoft for a year while they transition their email to their infra. The other parts gonna come later. But the students are required to use libre office (or latex) for writing their thesis so i don't think they see google docs as big blocker.
If it were that easy and cost-effective to do, large corporations would be doing it too. But there's a reason they're not.
Twenty universities come together to move to make Collabora+NextCloud work for them. That's 40 million EUR/year. How much do they need to actually spend on developers + infrastructure to make it happen?
The problem is coordination issues: actually getting people and orgs to look at it that way and spend the money that way, rather than just waiting for someone else to fix the problem.
Word and excel are not the difficult part. Mail, calendars, management, storage, security measures, etc are hard.
Its' an awful sight. What's worse is that there's no argument for this extra cost (apart from maybe vendor lock-in), and now no one knows who to blame for the big bill that comes in every month.
There was no stopping it, I'd tried and they looked at me like I'm crazy. "Everybody else is doing it" is a very strong argument.
At the same time, a very popular open source security package that I wanted to use was deemed a security risk because the maintainer has placed Ukrainian and Palestinian flags in the readme.
By injecting CoPilot into it without customer validation is going to be very costly.
step 2. cost savings by firing them all
step 3. we get locked in
step 4. oh no how did this happen
Actual independence would require a great deal of competence, expenditure, hard work, long-range planning, and time living unhappily far from any optimum.
While the Dutch obviously know how to do that - nobody in America is keeping the North Sea at bay for them - I would not bet that they'll actually do it here.
As long as they have an obvious way of opening a web browser, an office suite, and maybe an email and calendering client, the average office worker will barely notice the OS.
(If the EU never figures out how to allow nimble startups companies to exist, then forget about it)
I'm assuming AWS wouldn't fully divest from this European business unit and split it off as a completely separate entity?
So, unless it’s a separate legal entity, and also shares no authentication, software deployment, or related infrastructure with the US part of Amazon, it’s either not providing sovereignty or is being offered in violation of US law.
It’s unclear to me if they’d have to comply with requests to (for example) backdoor their IAM service backend and push the binaries to Europe, or not. (I’m not a lawyer.)
I think this is already done in some cases altough the political reliability has not yet been tested.
The EUSC will be more restricted, similar to GovCloud. Only EU citizens can access/operate it.
Specific example: an alarm fires for your service. If it’s in China, anyone on the team can go look at the logs. If it’s in GovCloud, only teammates who are American can look at the logs. In the EUSC, only Europeans can.
The sovereign cloud spec designed by the folks at France's ANSSI agency is tight.
Is this part of the spec? If not, it's as loose as a tent. And by "part of the spec" I mean "all your assets will be forcefully nationalized the second you or a parent company of yours becomes less than X% European owned", where X is well above 50.
[1] https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/11/dutch-looking-into-conseque...
To start with... states can and will absolutely block the sale of strategic national companies to foreign actors. But I'm sure you knew that.
Today, a desktop is the primary epistemological tool; only a FLOSS one is suitable for study, as it reveals what it does and is, or at least can be, shaped according to need. Most are simply IT illiterate, like professors from the 1950s unable to read and write fluently, except they still haven't realised it...
Microsoft's partnership/JV with 21Vianet in China shows that it can be done (with limitations on features) and this is probably the right direction to go.
FOSS to the rescue:
* LibreOffice, instead of MS Office.
* Thunderbird, instead of Outlook (even though I don't like the direction Thunderbird has been going).
* NextCloud, instead of one drive (and there are other alternatives, more FOSS-friendly or less so)
* Matrix/IRC client plus Jitsi, instead of Teams.
and they will do just fine - on Windows or on Linux.
Same one they were using before I would think. Nobody said they were using MS Exchange server.
> and compliance... oh my compliance
Is that a magic word? :-) ... Compliance with what?
Like fast food, it makes satiates a short term desire for a long term problem.
At least, facebook, instagram and an argument can be made for gmail.
I think goods are a different thing altogether though, nobody tells you what to do with your washing machine after you buy it, but social media engines use your data against you and change the rules/system on a whim.
"It seems to me like all the things you're doing can and should be automated at a larger scale."
Ten years ago when I recalled this I felt sort of good about the prediction. What I predicted pretty much happened.
That sysadmin guy has become some sort of CIO and seems to be doing well.
I did not anticipate the loss of data sovereignty.
.... and now I'm doing like 50% SRE/devops. Who's the sysadmin now, but without physical control of our data?
I was kind of hoping that the GDPR would be that kick, as it's clear to anyone that Microsoft, or really any other major US corporation, can't actually satisfy that completely as long as they have their tendrils in its European subsidiaries and that the US can compel them give up the information they care about. But this is a rather large elephant the EU has elected to ignore since that's the path of least resistance.
The EU actually realising the using Microsoft as your foundation does break the GDPR and fining the relevant institutions (and fixing itself on that same front!), or relevant institutions being embargoed to the point of not being able to use Microsoft products, as is apparently now the case with the ICC, will probably kick Europe into gear, but it needs to be a solid kick, and not just an institution here and there.
I hate that people are incapable of using Libreoffice and mailing documents around, but modern users are addicted to "the cloud", and it's my understanding there's no EU centric competitor to those two giants.
Apparently the answer is "No." =3
Servicing the jobs-to-be-done of the core applications is pretty straightforward I think.
I'm not sure what keeps people locked in besides identity. Article doesn't really specify.
Familiarity: "I've used MS Word/Excel/Teams before so I can use it here"
Convenience: "We have MS Entra, might as well go all-in"
Habit: "We never really investigated alternatives, this is just what 'everyone' uses."
Can they get rid of Typescript, npm, Github, VS, VSCode, .NET, C#, F#, C++ / DirectX, Next.js, vcpkg, Microsoft contributions to Java, Rust, and Linux kernel, on their students teaching materials?
If they can switch to UNIX FOSS technologies with zero trace of Microsoft's money sponsorship, and hinder the students careers in specific job markets, then surely.
People usually never look beyond getting rid of Office and Windows.
> "The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court suddenly couldn't access his email. According to Microsoft, that's because of US sanctions against the court's employees."
Nothing you've listed relates to that.
If American services and platforms have become unreliable and untrustworthy because the American government is erratic, then it's only natural that European organisations will look for alternatives.
DirectX is a funny one to list because 90% of Windows games run on Linux. WINE and Proton solve that problem for you:
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/nearly-90-percen...
Without Windows developers, game studios using Windows, Visual Studio and DirectX, SteamOS would have no games.
Proton represents Valve's failure to make a business out of Steam OS native games.
Funny will be when Microsoft decides Proton is a relevant target to aim for, and shot down by all means necessary.
No, it represents a market opportunity. WINE (a European led project) effectively makes Win32 and DirectX into Linux APIs. It works well for games. You can bring those games to Linux with less effort. And Valve can offer SteamOS (based on Arch Linux, also a European led project) for less cost.
You don't need Visual Studio. JetBrains has nice, cross-platform IDEs and they're a European company to boot:
As for Proton, don't build castles on foreign kingdoms => OS/2 "runs Windows better", Netbooks.
Lets see how long Valve manages to keep their castle up.
Microsoft is a foreign kingdom to Europe. That's part of the problem.
They're GPL licenced. They're open source. They're freely available.
They're sanction proof.
But I'm glad to see you concede the point.