For første gang bliver suverænitet en prioritet i regeringens, kommunernes og regionernes fælles strategi for digitalisering.
Digitaliseringsminister Caroline Stage (M) vil fra næste måned begynde at udfase Microsoft i sit eget ministerium. Planen er, at omkring halvdelen af medarbejderne om en måneds tid og hen over sommeren skal arbejde
20 Comments
Y_Y
I'm pleased at the overall tide here. I think governments especially ought to use and contribute back to FOSS.
When I see announcements like this it does make me worry that MS (or whatever vendor) will try to make an example of them; by submarining stories about how the switchover is hard, non-techie civil servants want to keep what they're "used to", LibreOffice is technically inferior (no comment on that one, I think all office suites I've seen are junk).
I have my fingers crossed, but my chickens uncounted.
GardenLetter27
Perhaps they can start by adding Linux support for MitID – https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/help/help-universe/platform-suppo…
Crazy how many critical services are tied to American companies.
digitalWestie
It's a few times over the years I've read about govs switching to linux like this. Anyone know how they got on?
decide1000
I hope this sets an example for the rest of Europe! Great news.
lordofgibbons
I wish there was a fund we could pool money into to make LibreOffice less ugly to look at. I'll happily donate to the cause.
Andrew_nenakhov
I used to love LibreOffice when it was OpenOffice.org. When it got unshackled from Oracle, it somehow became kinda uglier, and unfortunately it wasn't able to keep up with the times technology-wise, as all efforts to make it online are a failure of usability and speed.
What we, the humanity, need, is a free-as-in-freedom open source set of web applications that work like Google Docs / Spreadsheets / Slides, but can be self-hosted and would natively use OpenDocument file format.
lordnacho
Talking to my Danish friends, and I have a fair few in tech, the country is owned by Microsoft. A lot of code jobs are c# on Azure, and all the office people use Excel.
This is a welcome change. I've thought for a long time, why would your average office worker even need to pay MS for their desktop OS when so many things could just be done on the web? And why develop a bunch of stuff on a proprietary platform when you can just code it on a Linux platform?
yxhuvud
Good, especially if there are also budgets somewhere to fix issues they have with it.
user____name
I recently tried a bunch of Office packages and was surprised by just how bad they've gotten over the years. It just feels like a downgrade from what we had in prior decades. Especially LibreOffice just had the most abysmal performance imaginable. The older versions were much better in my experience.
KingOfCoders
My problem, I tried to switch from PowerPoint to Impress several times, but it's just not working for me (it also crashed).
Hope for the best, with more users perhaps I can switch too in the future.
jamesblonde
David Heinemeir Hansson (ruby-on-rails) writes extensively about the risk to Danish sovereignty if they don't have digital sovereignty.
In particular, Microsoft have already shown they will acquiesce to Trump's wishes. Turn off Microsoft in Denmark in the morning, you get Greenland by the afternoon.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/denmark-gets-more-serious-about-di…
P.s. this thread will be gone within 1-2 hrs when the mods on PT time wake back up. Anything about European Digital Sovereignty is killed quietly and quickly here.
mikl
Will be interesting to see if they can make it stick. Everyone is used to Windows + Office, so there’ll be a lot of resistance to trying something else, and if their IT department is not ready for it, it can quickly become a shit-show.
Arch-TK
You know, I really do think governments should not be paying into Microsoft's bank accounts. But thinking about this from another perspective, if I was hired as a programmer at a company and told I could use vim on i3 on some Linux distro and then suddenly the company decided that everyone would be switched over to windows machines and forced to use VSCode then I would be rightfully pissed. Just like someone hired to do CAD in solidworks would be rightfully pissed if you told them they had to switch to another equally powerful but different CAD tool.
Not sure what the solution is there aside from offering incentives to retrain, offering the option to keep using the proprietary product, and hiring staff specifically advertising that you want people who are happy using libreoffice.
piker
Somebody tell the Danish legal team that Tritium (https://tritium.legal) runs on Linux :).
Politics aside, Microsoft has such a strangle hold on so many industries it's insane. That reach is just extending with copilot + OpenAI and Azure. The next few years could be bleak if it plays the way MSFT is trying to push it. Good for Denmark.
mpascale00
Ofc I love this, as a LibreOffice exclusive user Document signing in Libreoffice on Linux has caused me nothing but trouble, and other critical features a government might want to have – any thoughts on this?
leke
Maybe they could pay some Danish software dev to improve the product with all the license money they will save.
forinti
There is currently a very strong reason to migrate to Open Source: the big tech corps are pushing people into their clouds and this leads to new constraints on your planning because now you are subject to the software company's product lifecycle.
So, if before you could run your old version of Oracle or whatever for as long as you wanted (if you could live without the support), now you have no choice. When the support for a product is dropped on the cloud, you have to upgrade whether you are ready for it or not.
pu_pe
Denmark is at particular risk because if the US does something concrete against Greenland, they might want to retaliate with sanctions at the very least. Impossible to do that if you have a strong dependency on American tech companies.
mmooss
The issues in this situation are always,
1. How much is compatibility with outside users and past documents necessary? No office application can successfully, reliably convert anything but relatively simple documents (have LLMs done better somehow?). Each conversion reduces fidelity and often integrity; send a few revisions back and forth and it can become a problem. Simply adding a small headache every time an outsider emails your users' a document – or vice verssa – becomes a big issue. Regarding past documents, some users create complex applications in Excel, for example. How much of a problem is that for these users? How will those problems be solved?
2. What is the system management story? Essential to IT beyond even 30 users is a way to deploy, administer (including configuring settings), and upgrade/patch applications en masse. Microsoft provides those tools and Office, of course, integrates well with them. There are third party tools, but they need to do much better than exist; they need to function efficiently and reliably – imagine the deployment bug implemented en masse. Are there such tools for Linux and LibreOffice?
0xTJ
Great! We should all be worried when our governments lock themselves into situations with just a single vendor.