[HN Gopher] Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
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Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
Author : robtherobber
Score : 226 points
Date : 2025-11-28 15:53 UTC (7 hours ago)
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| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Europe's failure to facilitate a competitive tech scene in the
| early 2000's (and even still ongoing today) will haunt them for
| decades. Such an enormous fumble that people still celebrate as a
| win.
| petcat wrote:
| EU is in a really tough situation. They're getting squeezed on
| all sides economically by USA and China while also facing a
| belligerent Russia on their eastern borders. And their internal
| politics and governance makes it very difficult to align in a
| direction that could enable them to start digging out of so
| much globalized dependence.
| js8 wrote:
| Yes. Unfortunately, the EU institutions have been designed
| during heyday of globalization and neoliberalism. So they are
| unable to adapt to (or even recognize) the end of it.
| p2detar wrote:
| Oh, it's very well recognized. You can check the Mario
| Draghi report or even recent comments by ECB's Christine
| Legarde. I think it's mostly reluctance to make big
| structural changes that seems to be the issue right now.
| js8 wrote:
| But when Draghi wrote his report, he was leaving the
| power structures. It will probably slowly change, but the
| neoliberal hegemony is still there.
|
| 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.
| seanieb wrote:
| A recent analysis of the Trump Tarrifs on the EU concluded
| that while "some regions and industries could suffer", for
| Europe overall the hit may be "limited but not negligible.
|
| 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.
| nxm wrote:
| If that was so easy to do then they would have done it
| already years ago
| bigfudge wrote:
| European defence spending is going to be much less
| transatlantic than it would have been were it not for
| Trump. Some of this is about mindshift. We could have
| avoided us defence contractor tie in before, but we don't
| see the need. Now we do.
| seanieb wrote:
| The economics have changed, and now it's worth their
| time.
|
| 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.
| bojan wrote:
| "Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity. Yes, we have
| European Union which helps a lot, but it is not complete (and
| certainly wasn't in the time when Microsofts and Googles of
| this world started), making that all-important initial scaling
| way more difficult than it is in the US.
| saubeidl wrote:
| > "Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity
|
| 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.
| martijnvds wrote:
| Tell that to the right-wing nutjobs who all want their
| "<country code>XIT"
| AllegedAlec wrote:
| Please god no.
| ramon156 wrote:
| I can't fathom why you would give one parlement all the
| power. This is the root issue of America right now,
| individual states have less and less power every year.
| bojan wrote:
| Otherwise you get an economy stifling patchwork of
| regulations, which is what we have within the EU now.
|
| Further, it'd probably be two Chambers, and we have
| proportional representation, which should make a slide to
| fascism a bit more difficult.
| concinds wrote:
| America is already a country. The EU isn't. You could
| give the EU a metric ton more power and they'd still be
| more decentralized than the halcyon days of the US that
| you reference.
| input_sh wrote:
| I would argue that the root issue in America right now is
| that you have one guy that can pass 200+ executive orders
| in less than a year completely bypassing the other two
| supposed branches of government.
|
| There's no such position or a branch in the EU. None of
| the three can make any sort of change of their own.
| hulitu wrote:
| > There's no such position or a branch in the EU.
|
| _cough_ vdL _cough_
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| She's basically a civil servant for the Council and
| Parliament.
| input_sh wrote:
| She's the head of one of the three branches, she doesn't
| get to sign a piece of paper and for that to instantly
| become a law. Neither does her branch as a whole.
|
| At most I would concede that she's way more of a
| household name than her predecessors, but that doesn't
| automatically mean she holds more power.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The executive can't bypass the courts with an executive
| order, unless you've seen something I haven't. The reason
| Congress doesn't do anything is because it ceased to be a
| functioning body sometime around the AUMF. Congresspeople
| realized that doing anything other than what the donors
| paid for is fraught with risk. Better to watch things
| being done and complain about it. The UK went the same
| way, concentrating all power in the current government
| with even backbenchers being absolutely powerless.
|
| I guess the only thing saving the EU from the same fate
| is its powerlessness and indecisiveness. The people who
| run it are certainly insane in the same way as the
| leaders of the UK and the US. You're both crippled from
| your lack of federalization and protected by it.
|
| edit: In the US, our real problem is that our executive
| (including the intelligence agencies) can do whatever it
| wants _without_ an executive order or a coherent legal
| rationale, they will simply never be prosecuted. The next
| executive will proclaim that the illegal acts under the
| last one will never be tolerated again, pardon everybody
| who did it, and make those acts legal from now on.
| saubeidl wrote:
| It might not be ideal and wildly swing the pendulum every
| couple of years, but looking at American centralization
| from our end, it still seems more functional somehow. At
| least you guys can _get something done_.
|
| Imagine if every state governor in the US had veto power
| over federal legislation. Imagine trying to get anything
| done that would require buy-in from both California and
| Alabama. That's the situation we find ourselves in.
| tomrod wrote:
| The root issue in the US is regulatory capture. Easier to
| do with one parliament, but not impossible with dozens.
|
| The US has been fighting corporatism vs. oligarchy since
| the cold war ended, with regulatory capture as a primary
| tool in both tool chests.
|
| There are some simple policy changes, politically unsavvy
| in the US, that a federated EU could implement to induce
| better outcomes.
| sharpy wrote:
| Intellectually, I think people agree with that. But I think
| the weight of history works against it. When you have a
| history filled with war, and intense competition...
| vunderba wrote:
| What could go wrong with more centralization of power...
|
| https://reclaimthenet.org/eu-council-approves-new-chat-
| contr...
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Sarcasm aside, what could go wrong is what is going
| wrong: the democracy is a little too indirect so that it
| feels like the EU leadership is governing itself.
| saubeidl wrote:
| This article is about the Council, which is comprised of
| the heads of the various nation states, i.e. the
| positions more centralization of power would get rid of.
| freehorse wrote:
| Europe is too heterogeneous. What you see as europe is not
| what others may see as europe.
| canyp wrote:
| It always struck me funny how Americans refer to it as
| "Europe". Like, "I traveled to Europe this summer"; what
| does that even mean, lol. It's like their country's land
| mass is so large that they intuitively assume that other
| entities must have a large mass too, and see homogeneity
| where there is none.
| machomaster wrote:
| It would be like Russians traveling to America, but
| making no distinction between Canada and Mexico. Except
| that Russians don't do that. This is an entirely and
| purely American problem.
| bregma wrote:
| It's been tried a number of times. It has never worked out
| well.
| p2detar wrote:
| I think this is the logical next step, but I feel like it
| won't be based on the EU but assembled entirely parallel by
| some of EU's members, and this seems consequential to me.
| kakacik wrote:
| As Swiss resident coming originally from EU country, how to
| put it politely... _fuck that_. EU does some good but its
| top politicians are absurd obscure career bullshitters
| (Leyen, who the heck likes her and whom she represents?
| Certainly not eastern EU, she represents everything wrong
| with EU though. She is so lost and yet untouchable, ie
| still pushes for destruction of whole European automotive
| industry while playing her political games. EU parliament
| is a behemoth of corrupt ultra bureaucracy and so on.
| Certainly not a leader for whole continent).
|
| 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.
| trinix912 wrote:
| So what's your proposed alternative? For every country to
| stick to their own stuff and wish for the best?
|
| Have you forgotten what a hassle it was to do
| international trade before your East European country was
| a part of the EU?
|
| EU is far from perfect but it's still better than
| pretending member countries can do it all on their own.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I agree with you but until we speak the same language, this
| is going to take a while. I am Dutch, speak Dutch, French,
| German, Spanish and Portuguese (and Mandarin) rather well,
| but I speak mostly English to prove a point as I believe we
| should pick a language (does not have to be English but
| seems the most obvious). I won't see this in my lifetime,
| nor my childrens or grandchildren.
|
| 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.
| skirge wrote:
| if we talk beaurocracy EU is very well consolidated: "you
| can't do that", everyone says consistently.
| bojan wrote:
| This is a popular meme, but compared to the combined
| regulation of 27 member states, the EU as a whole is doing
| great.
| manuel_w wrote:
| What exactly is overly bureaucratic in the EU?
|
| 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.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| When people talk about the EU, they don't necessarily
| mean the EU proper, just like many "US" problems are more
| at the state or local level. People often mean "within
| the EU", including national regulations that may be
| widespread.
| trinix912 wrote:
| Then they should say that, not bash on the EU as a whole.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| This is true, but it's also a fixable problem.
|
| 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.
| vladms wrote:
| Digital can probably be fixed easier. Energy independence
| on the other hand was a more stupid thing not to target
| (like Germany closing nuclear reactors, then buying gas
| from people that thought they could do whatever they
| want...).
| adrianN wrote:
| The technology for energy independence has only been
| developed in the last few years. Before electric cars
| everyone was dependent on oil. We're very close to the
| tipping point where renewables outcompete everything else
| and all sectors get electrified. Then energy independence
| becomes achievable.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| on the other hand, the USA got mass surveillance
| normalized, and an entire generation with serious emotional
| disturbances due to social media.. Many indicators of
| required cell phone IDs and airport biometrics still on the
| way. Is that a "win" in the long term?
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Excuse denied. All they had to do was nothing. Instead they
| over-regulated way too early, before the industries could
| grow enough to support operating in such an environment. Now
| they are behind and will likely never catch up. The future of
| European tech is government handouts/scraps, collected by
| force from American companies.
| vanviegen wrote:
| That doesn't feel true. I've founded several companies and
| talk to many other founders in the Netherlands. I've never
| experienced or heard of government regulation (though often
| somewhat annoying of course) being an inhibiting factor.*
|
| 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.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| ...and that's why all the major big tech is dutch.
| Amazon, google, meta, apple, Netflix, nvidia. All Dutch
| vanviegen wrote:
| Sorry, I really don't understand how your response
| relates to my earlier comment.
| baby wrote:
| Right but as an entity it can also do quite the damage.
| Cookie popups come to mind.
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| It feels like an emphasis has been placed more on legislating
| or policing what other people make rather than making anything
| of value themselves (as far as tech goes).
|
| 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.
| amarant wrote:
| I feel like this sentiment comes at least partially from
| American companies(especially Microsoft) habit of buying
| successful European tech companies, making people believe
| they're American and not European.
|
| 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)
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Deepmind is another good example, as is ARM.
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| That might be your feeling, but it isn't reality. It comes
| instead from EU companies not even being in the same galaxy
| as US ones when it comes to revenue, size, and market
| impact. There is literally no comparison. It's not like the
| major leagues compared to the minors, it's like the major
| leagues compared to tee-ball.
|
| https://www.voronoiapp.com/markets/Comparing-the-Largest-
| Com...
| amarant wrote:
| I think we're comparing different things. While you
| appear to be talking about financial size, I meant in
| terms of technical capability.
|
| 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!
| qoez wrote:
| AI is gonna be even worse. At least there's some competition
| from scandinavia and germany and france's tech scenes. For AI
| there's basically none.
| jimbohn wrote:
| Along with Europe's incompetence and divisiveness, you must
| also consider that the US has kept it so tight under its
| umbrella that it has squeezed it. The US wants a rich market to
| sell into, a suitable ally for oil campaigns, but not a
| competitor.
|
| 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| As long as the European psyche is at "40 days PTO, 4 day work
| weeks, and generous worker protections" the US doesn't have
| to worry about Europe getting out from under it.
|
| 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.
| hulitu wrote:
| They tried. They were either spied on (Earth - then developed
| by Google) or aquired (Star Office by Sun).
| t0mas88 wrote:
| AWS had announced a sovereign European cloud, probably to avoid a
| loss of business in the long term due to these initiatives. But
| it's questionable whether this would survive strong political
| pressure from the US government.
| saubeidl wrote:
| As long as there's any American ownership in the chain, this is
| not to be trusted.
|
| I'm assuming AWS wouldn't fully divest from this European
| business unit and split it off as a completely separate entity?
| hedora wrote:
| The US CLOUD Act says that if Amazon has the technical
| ability to access those machines, they must do so if the US
| government asks them to.
|
| 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.)
| kenjackson wrote:
| And it certainly would not survive strong political pressure
| from the EU and US governments. Local governments still can be
| adversely impacted.
| ttkari wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand how an American company would be able
| to provide any service that could be "sovereign European".
| Vespasian wrote:
| In theory Amazon could license the stack to a European
| Operator while having no operative access themselves.
|
| I think this is already done in some cases altough the
| political reliability has not yet been tested.
| WJW wrote:
| I guess the question then becomes: what happens if some
| future US government pressures Amazon to revoke the
| license. Unless and until there's a good answer to that,
| it'd still be better to develop something locally.
| nemomarx wrote:
| They must have something like this for China, right?
| cmckn wrote:
| Sort of. AWS operates the China regions more or less like
| any other region, with oversight by the Chinese holding
| companies.
|
| 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.
| Muromec wrote:
| If I run your software, you can have no operational
| control, but you can sneak a root kit or some kind of stuff
| I dont want to have there
| Balinares wrote:
| By providing the software to be installed in clusters owned
| and operated by European companies.
|
| The sovereign cloud spec designed by the folks at France's
| ANSSI agency is _tight_.
| vander_elst wrote:
| How I can imagine it works: Amazon only provides the packaged
| software, the infra and the ops are officially driven by a
| 100% European company. AWS probably provides support, but
| they don't have the encryption keys not any access to the
| installation.
| p2detar wrote:
| Is this new? Microsoft already offer that and I think already
| for quite a while.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Is it really that hard to switch to
| [google|libre|apache|free|etc.|etc.]? It seems like at the
| university level the ideas are the important part, and the need
| to write/spreadsheet at the bleeding edge of functionality much
| less so?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Short answer: to Google it's not so bad but it's not like the
| legal risks are any different from Microsoft. And to the rest
| -- yes it is very hard.
|
| 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.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| How much is the typical dutch university paying MS/Google?
| Maybe 10k students x 200EUR/year = 2 million EUR/year.
|
| 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?
| gglanzani wrote:
| They probably paying a tenth of that as big edu users. What
| you quote are the commercial starting price for a basic-ish
| license.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| If you look at the numbers that way, open source usually
| looks like a slam dunk.
|
| 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.
| omnimus wrote:
| At 4 european universities i studied/taught this has never
| been the case. Most universities are used to run their infra,
| they ran their email servers way before google existed and
| they run big fleets of servers for thin clients. Afaik they
| still kept their own internal messaging as backup but it was
| still email servers hidden behind web gui.
|
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| There's a huge difference between running an email server
| and some additional servers for thin clients -- all
| traditional stuff -- versus running an entire private cloud
| that redundantly stores the many many petabytes for your
| 40,000-person university, and all the web servers for the
| office software. Keeping it secure, keeping it updated, and
| having a live failover site if there's a fire or flood in
| your main data center that takes it out for weeks or
| months.
|
| 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.
| Jaxan wrote:
| Yes. Because sometimes even the fundamental sign-in is through
| Microsoft.
|
| Word and excel are not the difficult part. Mail, calendars,
| management, storage, security measures, etc are hard.
| tgv wrote:
| IIRC, Dutch unis have another account managing system, run by
| SURFnet. OAuth2, I think.
| kenjackson wrote:
| At this point all tech is big business. Microsoft or Apple. Azure
| or AWS. Google Apps or Office. Even dealing with Red Hat feels
| like you're dealing with big tech.
|
| 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.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| > moving off of them because they find that making the common
| case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want.
|
| 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.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Unfortunately part of it is that it likely goes both ways.
| For example illegal subsidies to Airbus. And US companies
| still buy Airbus. I think all of these go into the calculus
| of the decisions to purchase though. It's likely you value
| open source much higher than they do based on your own
| principles.
| edwinjm wrote:
| What's the alternative?
|
| WTO says US gave illegal aid to Boeing
|
| https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/wto-says-us-
| ga...
| LtWorf wrote:
| USA does corruption and also does threatening if you try to
| not use their companies. I've read an interview to a mexican
| minister who basically got direct threats from the USA
| ambassador when the government decided to stop using windows.
| vikingtoby wrote:
| Red Hat is IBM, the OG big tech really
| hx8 wrote:
| I'd say Bell is the OG, which was founded about 40 years
| before IBM.
| exasperaited wrote:
| Governments also don't move to open standards because open
| standards doesn't have a hospitality suite to invite them to at
| football matches or Cheltenham.
|
| 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.
| graemep wrote:
| That is a tiny part of it though. Lots of government
| functioning depends on big tech clouds. The NHS depends on
| AWS. A lot of the private sector does too. Everyone depends
| on Apple or Android phones. Card payments (and the government
| is pushing a move to cashless) rely on Mastercard and Visa.
| Windows increasingly requires logging in with an MS account.
| In the meantime govt and big business are pushing people to
| use mobile apps more, increasing this dependence.
|
| 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| It's like the proposals to get rid of daylight savings time.
| People get ruffled when the time jump happens, so conversation
| of getting rid of it bubbles up.
|
| But then a week later everyone has adjusted and the motivation
| to fix it is forgotten.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| Gov don't move because it's not worth the risk for people with
| decision power. If you succeed, there's no big win to tag on
| your resume, if you fail (the most likely to happen) you're
| out.
|
| 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.
| oxguy3 wrote:
| Obviously terrible seeing the US government harm its own
| international standing for no real gain, but if it results in
| Europe developing viable alternatives to American big tech
| services, that'd be fantastic.
| sabas123 wrote:
| The problem is that we already can provide an alternative, but
| we don't switch to them. Which might be even worse.
| jwithington wrote:
| The lock-in is around identity services, right?
|
| 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.
| martijnvds wrote:
| Familiarity, convenience and habit.
|
| 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."
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| step 1. have syadmins run your stuff, recruit ITSM kids to help
| run it! We all learn and maintain our own hardware, software and
| get to poke at the fun internals of email, storage, etc.
|
| step 2. cost savings by firing them all
|
| step 3. we get locked in
|
| step 4. oh no how did this happen
| seanieb wrote:
| I spent the past year working for a company that relies heavily
| on Microsoft for email, productivity tools, and identity
| management. After that experience, I can say with confidence:
| never again. The support is astonishingly poor, and user
| experience feels like an afterthought.
|
| 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.
| LPisGood wrote:
| What kind of obscure insecure defaults are there?
| seanieb wrote:
| Direct Send was my favorite. Direct Send allows devices to
| send unauthenticated email to internal recipients using your
| organization's domain, which can expose you to internal
| emails for phishing etc. It bypasses user authentication,
| making sender identity difficult to verify or audit. For all
| orgs made before mid 2025 it was enabled by default.
|
| 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...
| e12e wrote:
| One not-so-obscure problem is how hard it is to only elevate
| yourself to admin when you need it (and run as a regular user
| the other time).
|
| 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.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Everything on by default in general has plagued them, because
| they don't want users to complain it doesn't work.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Check out the Microsoft baseline security guidelines for
| Windows 11. It's about 400 entries. 400 settings that
| Microsoft themselves recommend changing from the defaults to
| achieve a baseline 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?
| lokar wrote:
| Changing the default would cost sales and increase support
| costs.
| machomaster wrote:
| Obscure from a typical user's POV: the fact that file
| extensions are not being shown by default. This makes it
| possible for the user to click on a file that has the
| extension and the icon of a picture (imbedded inside), but
| turns out to be an executable file.
| project2501a wrote:
| Where do I find money to fund my rewrite of Kerberos 5 in Rust,
| removing the dumb options and Kerberos 4 compatibility and
| eventually create Kerberos 6 + AD that will solve a metric
| buttload of issues in Linux and knock a major peg of MS off?
| NuclearPM wrote:
| Did you respond to the wrong comment?
| cyberax wrote:
| Ask IBM/RedHat. They did a lot of foundational work with SSSD
| (aka "too many 'S' D").
|
| Kerberos is not a great protocol, though.
| kakacik wrote:
| > Kerberos is not a great protocol
|
| Understatement of the week
| project2501a wrote:
| sssd is a dogpile of dogcrap. I have 15 tickets on github
| about fixing their manpages.
|
| and you _really_ need to read the kerberos book before
| picking up sssd.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Memory safety or type safety are the least of Kerberos'
| issues. The protocol itself is fundamentally flawed.
| lokar wrote:
| Kerberos solves the problem that doing public key
| authentication is slow on a i386
| project2501a wrote:
| kerberos solves the problem that you can have short one
| time tokens using your password.
|
| 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.
| lokar wrote:
| No one would build KRB4/5 today, it makes no sense. It's
| only advantage over an X.509 cert based system is speed
| on really really slow CPUs.
| nightfly wrote:
| What issues on Linux would this actually solve?
| project2501a wrote:
| simplify gssapi, for one. single authentication and
| authorization: submit on slurm? ask kerberos + ldap. can i
| upload to this service? as kerberos + ldap. Policies
| applied on this computer? ask kerberos + ldap
|
| i may be naive a bit, i'll accept that, but I really like
| how AD works (which is essentially kerberos + ldap)
| solid_fuel wrote:
| I tried to set up network file sharing with NFS the other
| day and it was like pulling teeth. You need Kerberos if you
| want to map user names instead of user ids and still have
| some security.
|
| 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
| mr_mitm wrote:
| sshfs doesn't work for you?
| mcv wrote:
| I work for a company that now uses everything from Microsoft.
| They used to have Jira, AWS and tons of other different
| products, but now everything is Microsoft, and it's terrible.
| Azure DevOps is particularly horrific. It's like Jira+Jenkins
| except you can never find anything. Nothing about it makes
| sense to me.
|
| 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?
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| This is blatant nonsense. The best security choice for any
| small business that doesn't have a dedicated full time security
| staff is Microsoft 365.
| seanieb wrote:
| Have you admined a Google Apps account and an MS365 account?
| I'm curious why you think Microsoft is more secure? For me
| they are completely different, Google is secure by default,
| Microsoft is not. Do you have "Direct Send" enabled on your
| account for example?
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| Because outside of a handful of nerdy tech companies, all
| small businesses need to use Microsoft Office. From there,
| it's a no brainer to stay in the MS ecosystem and use
| Sharepoint etc...
|
| 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.
| tfourb wrote:
| My father's decidedly non-nerdy logistics consulting
| business with roughly 20 employees ran (and runs) on Mac
| OS since the founding of the company in the mid 1990s
| with my mom being the ,,IT team". There are some
| situations where companies rely on certain
| compatibilities requiring windows. But most could do
| completely fine without, especially nowadays.
| isk517 wrote:
| I'm always amazed at how needlessly complicated and useless
| administration of Microsoft products and services are. So much
| of 365 feels like it is 75-90% completed then abandoned. Every
| time I find something that sounds like it should be really
| useful, it turns out to lack at least one function or feature
| needed to do what I would need it to.
| arethuza wrote:
| When I did a 4 year CS degree at a UK university in the 1980s I
| don't think I touched anything from Microsoft for the entire time
| I was there!
| aeyes wrote:
| Because for a CS degree students are expected to work with
| other systems and the software needed to complete the course
| work is usually low level. Even when I did my CS degree 20
| years ago our labs were Linux and Solaris.
|
| 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.
| cuttothechase wrote:
| I am pretty sure you wouldn't have touched anything from google
| and meta as well.
| blibble wrote:
| same for me in the 2000s
|
| unfortunately the university has gone full MS since then
| pjmlp wrote:
| It was much easier in 1980's, unless you would be using CP/M or
| MS-DOS.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| Students go to university to get an education and obtain
| employment. All larger employers use Microsoft. Universities
| would be failing students by not giving them an education on
| their technologies. Microsoft gives the Universities and their
| students steep discounts or free software to propagate this.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Companies can pay to train their employees on the software
| that they use. This is neither the responsibility of the
| secondary education system nor the Dutch taxpayers.
| Avshalom wrote:
| I did a 4 year degree in earth science minor in CS graduating
| in 2019 and had to touch microsoft for arcgis in one class, and
| an excel spreadsheet in another.
|
| Like yeah if you have a lot of pre-existing infrastructure
| migration can be a pain but MS is not in anyway necessary.
| mseri wrote:
| As much as I agree with the need for digital independence and
| the fact that universities (and governments) in Europe are
| over reliant on US tech, it is not as simple as you describe.
|
| 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.
|
| See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46080495
| hbn wrote:
| And surely nothing has changed about the world in the last 40
| years
| WalterBright wrote:
| When I did a 4 year stint in college, nobody had ever heard of
| Microsoft.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| My first experience with an original IBM PC, I wondered what
| this thing called Microsoft was.
|
| 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 :)
| canpan wrote:
| Same here in 2000s, studying CS was completely MS free. The
| professors mostly used linux or Mac anyhow. The university
| system for students was web based. Papers were written in LaTeX
| with official template. The email system was hosted by the
| university and not based on outlook. Math related professors
| did not even use a PC at all during class but a
| blackboard/OHP/paper. So I don't see a problem for the
| netherlands..
| yupyupyups wrote:
| Oh it's not only Dutch universities.
| ramon156 wrote:
| I can guarantee some dutch banks are also locked into MS. Maybe
| not the big ones that actually need to care about tech, but the
| ones that don't care about tech went head-first into Microsoft
| Suite these last few years.
|
| 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.
| Muromec wrote:
| The big green one absolutely is ms heavy place.
| bojan wrote:
| We switched completely to Microsoft/Azure a couple of years
| ago. My previous employer as well.
|
| 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.
| lbreakjai wrote:
| I worked on the migration to Azure for the big orange one. They
| absolutely went all-in on it.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| at work I don't need MS at all. It's just used because the IT
| department prefers it to manage things. I wish we could just use
| Fedora or Ubuntu.
| nxm wrote:
| IT has to cover much less technical users than someone who
| would prefer to use Linux
| graemep wrote:
| Most people barely know what OS they are using. its just a
| way to start apps.
|
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Depends.
|
| 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.
| fph wrote:
| Why should they get rid of the Linux kernel?
| breve wrote:
| The problem is described in the first two sentences of the
| article:
|
| > _" 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...
| lysace wrote:
| In the 90s I used to sort of tease/banter our sysadmin guy at a
| small, developer-centric company in Europe (SunOS/Linux/etc-
| focused) in a friendly way with something like:
|
| "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?
| rzerowan wrote:
| For one reasono another im not seeing any of the currently OSS
| solutions like LibreOffice/OpenOffice.orgwould not gain much
| traction and will remain niche even as the MS/Goog options remain
| entrenched.
|
| 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.
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| If UI is your concern, check out Collabora and OnlyOffice, both
| have a modern ribbon-like interface and looks similar to MO.
| timvisee wrote:
| In my 5 years I was basically only allowed to use Microsoft
| tools. It's one of the most stupid things I've ever seen.
| amoshebb wrote:
| I have found daily-driving Ubuntu at Delft shocking pleasant.
| Chrome, zotero, obsidian, zoom, and so on all work great.
| Outlook, teams, and the office suite, and signing pdfs are all
| the sharpest edges by far.
|
| 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
| letmetweakit wrote:
| Why would you need Outlook? Can't you use it in a browser?
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Yes, and the same can be done with Teams. That's what I do on
| my Linux laptop.
| elbear wrote:
| My university uses Teams and the browser version is missing
| some features. For example, I can't see the files uploaded
| by the professor. That tab won't load.
| amoshebb wrote:
| Yes, chrome gives me a little "PWA" so I can even have an
| icon in my dock, but it's not as nice
| aquariusDue wrote:
| PDF signing is the bane of my existence, luckily I can get by
| with a cloud solution but it's nowhere near how easy I wish it
| would be. Sadly I'm still forced to use a Windows VM or dual-
| boot because the tax authority in my country requires a
| root/digital certificate for login to their web system, at
| least for incorporated entities.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Would this procedure work with the certificates you need to
| use?
|
| https://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/lab-
| infrastructure/install...
| ta20240528 wrote:
| If China can survive -- and even start to thrive without ASML and
| TMSC, then have no doubt that should push come to shove Europe
| will be able to run a mail server and some office tools.
|
| They're just hedging that American politics will stop licking the
| car battery.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Push has come to shove and has been shoving for nearly a
| decade. Europeans continue to be incapable. As a Canadian I
| wish they were not, but they are.
| vladms wrote:
| It's more a risk management issue. A country that wants to do
| everything by itself (from food, to shovels, to cars, to
| computers) will not be the most efficient and will loose a
| lot. Before '90s communist countries were "proud" that
| everything was produced locally - except many things were
| breaking or bad quality or unavailable (not all, but many).
|
| 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.
| mantas wrote:
| Coming from ex-USSR, I can assure you that shortages and
| shitty quality was not because of closed garden. But
| because of politics (and corruption) first. And lack of
| meritocratic natural selection.
|
| Many factories were building crap or wrong stuff just
| because somebody high up in the Party found it convenient
| for some reason.
| trinix912 wrote:
| Yugoslavia didn't have centralized planning for products,
| one could even argue it had a meritocratic natural
| selection (sort of) and there still were shortages.
|
| 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.
| mantas wrote:
| And, compared to USSR, Yugos production was much higher
| quality and shortages were much smaller.
|
| EU could become fully independent by simply taxing
| imports. Designated collaboration between countries would
| just lead to inefficient central planning style stuff.
| Which is how many trans-Europe projects died
| osener wrote:
| I knew plenty of office workers managing just fine using
| OpenOffice 10-15 years ago.
|
| 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.
| boznz wrote:
| Agree, Personally I consider these newer systems a curse
| as far as productivity goes, using a simple email/open-
| office combination never caused any issues with clients
| or suppliers in the last 20 years.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| The problem is , there are very few Europeans or EUans. There
| are French and Germans and Spanish etc; they all want their
| country first and sure open markets but their country first.
| That is how they vote (certainly these days). Most people do
| not feel EU unfortunately. Language is one thing: it is
| getting better but having language not unified (English,
| Spanish, Mandarin; pick one) is a massive and real issue
| keeping people's minds and efforts local instead of, at least
| EU wide. It is slowly getting better but the EU should made
| easier accessible and far higher funds for pan EU projects.
| Currently it is a serious pain to get access to EU funds and
| many just get eaten by the few massive consultancy corps who
| have dedicated teams going for any funding and tender in any
| locality and language.
| lpcvoid wrote:
| Well written. I hope one day the united states of europe is
| a real political entity, burying the stupidity that is
| fragmented national interests.
| systemtest wrote:
| As a EU citizen that moved to a different EU country: Yes
| please!
|
| 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.
| econ wrote:
| Having people vote who don't live in the country has
| always struck me as weird. If you are some place else for
| say a year or even 10 years it seems a reasonable topic
| for debate but longer?? Never pay taxes either???
| machomaster wrote:
| Often the rule is that one gets the vote in local
| elections after living for some time, but only citizens
| can vote in national elections (Parlament, President).
| This makes sense. If you want to fully participate in a
| society, you should integrate and become a citizen.
| machomaster wrote:
| Why should countries allow foreign influence - the voting
| in the most important elections in the country, by
| foreign citizens who didn't integrate enough to even get
| their citizenship?
|
| Participating in local elections is often allowed.
| YC398739847 wrote:
| EU politicians are just too dependent on keeping the status quo
| of the last decade. The status quo is how they got to their
| position so they have no incentive to change anything (Starmer,
| Merz, Marcon, Von der Lyen. Yuck). By the time they finally get
| the shove they need to rapidly decouple, e.g. when America
| invades The Hague* to rescue Netanyahu from war crimes charges,
| it will be when they're already on the edge of the proverbial
| cliff.
|
| *: https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-
| be...
| ta20240528 wrote:
| The usa couldnt handle Aghanistan. Now they are invading
| continental Europe?
|
| As I said, still licking the car battery.
| YC9834689 wrote:
| Most European countries barely have a standing military to
| defend themselves, they're completely dependent on the USA
| for defense through NATO. And their leadership is so docile
| and complacent that I can't see them being able to muster
| up a strong resistance to any incursion, most likely if
| there was an actual invasion of The Hague they would let
| America do what they need to and try to return back to
| business as usual as quickly as possible. Again, they're
| not the types to think beyond the status quo.
| mcv wrote:
| The EU put together has the second largest military in
| the world.
|
| > And their leadership is so docile and complacent
|
| That is the real issue.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| In fairness, the US has a pretty good record when it comes
| to invading continental Europe. They already have troops
| and nukes on the ground in the Netherlands...
|
| 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.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| >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.
|
| That was post 9/11. The mentality and motivation was
| different back then. Im not saying the US Military is
| anything less than a top tier orderly organization, its
| just that morale is generally low now among not only
| ranks but the entire country that supports them. You
| can't just throw out events occurring 23 years ago under
| a completely different context and assume things are the
| same.
|
| I'd argue an initial moves against Europe, Canada, etc.
| would be a bigger mess initially than Afghanistan/Iraq
| were.
| jack_tripper wrote:
| _> The usa couldnt handle Aghanistan_
|
| 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.
| lossolo wrote:
| > US's goal there wasn't to win anything since there's
| nothing of value there
|
| War is only a tool, dominating a country or region
| militarily is not the same as winning a war if you have
| not achieved its political goals. In Afghanistan, those
| goals were not achieved, which means the war was lost.
| Loughla wrote:
| What were the goals for Afghanistan?
| lukan wrote:
| Destroying Al Quaida and their host, the Taliban. Al
| Quaida might be gone, but I believe Taliban are in power
| today and the US left in a not so glorious way after
| giving up fighting them.
| freehorse wrote:
| Not just "giving up fighting them": when the US decided
| to leave, the taliban were in a stronger position than
| they were before the US invaded (eg they controlled a
| bigger part of the country and had much less opposition
| inside afghanistan). The war was already lost long before
| the US decided to leave.
| throawayonthe wrote:
| i think it's one of those things where how/if they will do
| it doesn't matter, it's a "we make the rules" thing
|
| 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)
| wiseowise wrote:
| Only invasion, or a real threat of invasion, from Russia, US
| or China can shook Europe into real change.
| mcv wrote:
| Threat of invasion from Russia doesn't seem to be doing it.
| China is too far away. The US? Half of Europe might
| actually side with them.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| The EU has - just like the US - a generation of boomer
| senators and presidents in (voting) power for more than 2
| decades at this point.
|
| In the coming decade, that will change.
|
| Hopefully for the better.
| graemep wrote:
| Europe is not a political entity or an organisation. Who
| exactly will do it? The EU, some EU country, Russia, the UK,
| Switzerland, some cooperative agreement...?
| trinix912 wrote:
| We're talking about running a few mail server, network
| shares, and an office suite (LibreOffice if you want). Any
| university's in-house IT department should be able to pull
| that off, and it's exactly what many did for a very long
| time.
| rorylawless wrote:
| If Universities are anything like other large
| public/public-adjacent organizations, the bulk of the in-
| house IT department was long since replaced by Microsoft
| resellers posing as IT. It's insidious.
| freehorse wrote:
| Not all universities in Europe are like this, but some
| are 100% like this. But if there was a larger political
| directive towards a more autonomous solution, it would
| eventually work, I think.
| ClikeX wrote:
| The trap of Microsoft is long contracts and setting up
| dependency. In many cases it was a big undertaking to get
| the current setup, now try convincing anyone to tear it
| out.
| graemep wrote:
| China is bigger, and a lot more ambitious, and is willing to
| put resources into it.
|
| European countries (except maybe Russia!), in the EU and
| outside, are very complacent.
| trinix912 wrote:
| It's not as much about complacency as it is about the lack of
| funding and resources. We're talking about countries with
| government budgets as low as 20 billion USD. Looking at
| common election promises, people here would rather see that
| money spent on non-profit housing, healthcare,
| infrastructure, than some ambitious AI or tech project that
| they likely wouldn't directly benefit from - at least
| compared to the things mentioned before - so there's little
| money left for "developing our own MS Office / LLM / Google".
|
| 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).
| canyp wrote:
| Does China actually "force" things to be done? As far as I
| can tell, in the realm of technology at least, the
| government mostly just sets direction and then lets private
| capital do its thing, albeit without letting power
| concentrate in a way that subverts government.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| When they want something to be done, it just gets done. I
| guess that is the point; I was working in China when one
| year there were 0 electric scooters; the next year, only.
| Gas scooters were forbidden overnight basically and that
| was that. Try doing that over here...
| canyp wrote:
| Hilarious. Such efficiency, not even the free markets can
| catch up!
|
| Also, curious: did you not like it there and left, or was
| that a fixed-duration contract or something?
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I loved it (still go on holiday), but the sentiment
| changed (during/after HK + Covid) and clients started to
| demand non-china produced electronics so we had to leave.
| code123456789 wrote:
| Yes, see Great Chinese Firewall. Providing a VPN access
| to civilians is a criminal offense in PRC. This is not
| the same as forcing companies to use domestic software,
| but to illustrate the ability of Chinese government to
| implement draconian limitations in general.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
|
| Apparently the answer is "No." =3
| firefax wrote:
| But what's the alternative? Most people use either O365 or Google
| Docs.
|
| 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.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Microsoft is destroying their monopoly from within. Office 365
| was a staple of the global business landscape.
|
| By injecting CoPilot into it without customer validation is going
| to be very costly.
| Insanity wrote:
| An exception to Betteridge's Law! I would love to see more
| universities move away from proprietary software and opting for
| open source equivalents.
| herbst wrote:
| I have time so I tried to study one or two things. The harsh
| reality is that every university that supports remote studies I
| have looked at explicitly or implicitly required apple or even
| worse windows hardware.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| > for example, by using its own mail server.
|
| 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.
| vid wrote:
| I completely support not being dependant on a foreign company (or
| any company at all, standards FTW) and I don't think there should
| even be a shadow of possibility that an organization like the ICC
| could be cut off from services due to a foreign directive, but
| while I have seen it repeated many times, I think the article's
| opening assertion is not true;
| https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...
|
| 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.
| vanschelven wrote:
| It's not strictly true, but the distinction between the truth
| and the assertion is small enough that the ICC itself draws the
| conclusion that Microsoft didn't yet:
|
| https://www.techradar.com/pro/the-international-criminal-cou...
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| > I think the article's opening assertion is not true
|
| 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.
| sega_sai wrote:
| I am sure UK universities cannot go without Microsoft. I believe
| the absolute majority rely on it. And I can see how they rely
| more and more on it, by stopping using non-Microsoft/local
| solutions and switching to Microsoft's ones.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| I mean, what did they do _before_ Microsoft? The Netherlands is a
| bit older than Microsoft, and so, presumably, is its
| universities.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >to be honest, Microsoft is making it increasingly attractive to
| switch. Now that the company is putting AI in everything,
| everything is becoming more annoying to use."
| djij wrote:
| Can Dutch universities do _with_ Microsoft? Genuinely how far
| gone are we that this is a question?
| bell-cot wrote:
| Dependence on Redmond and Washington (for high-complexity
| software, national security, and any other "really hard" stuff)
| is a very easy, comfy local optimum.
|
| 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.
| arianvanp wrote:
| I studied at Utrecht University and all the programming classes
| in the Bachelor were C#, Visual Studio, XNA, DirectX. Windows.
| Database class i had to learn in Proprietary Microsoft tools too.
| All Microsoft stuff. Sure nobody would complain if you did stuff
| on Linux but all the support by TAs and teachers was on Microsoft
| platforms only.. The Master was much better but the Bachelor
| basically was grooming people to become Microsoft consultants.
|
| 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.
| philipp-gayret wrote:
| I had a similar experience at a different university in NL,
| practically the entire curriculum was Oracle & Cisco.
| pbreit wrote:
| I've gone without Microsoft products for many years now. It's
| SOOOOO much better.
| vanschelven wrote:
| Surely not _all_ the courses... Utrecht was and is big on
| Haskell as you know... Given that you TA'd a course on it :)
| dmos62 wrote:
| And same goes for less technical disciplines too. Adobe,
| Autodesk, Archicad, etc. It's pretty bad software: expensive,
| very buggy, poor extensibility, poorly maintained, closed-
| source, rapid tech debt accumulation requires upgrading your pc
| every few years. If only a minor percentage of organizations
| licensing it would instead spend that budget financing an open
| source project, that would have a very positive effect for
| everyone. I can somewhat understand private businesses not
| thinking long-term, but public institutions paying licensing
| fees instead of financing open-source seems like plain
| incompetence. Then again, maybe there's a lack of open-source
| initiatives willing to spearhead this.
| edolstra wrote:
| It wasn't always that way. When I began studying CS at Utrecht
| University, there was no Windows at all. It was Solaris, IRIX
| and a bit of HP-UX.
| tamimio wrote:
| Not just in education, but even at work, companies or even
| governments would rather have MS, for example, paying them hefty
| contracts, while hiring borderline minimum wage workers to run
| such systems. I remember I had similar arguments with an
| executive before, and I recommended hiring competent people and
| using alternative tools. The answer was simple: "We don't want to
| have XYZ department relying on this person/group, but rather on
| this big popular company." They thought they were mitigating the
| risk, only to put all their eggs in one basket!
| permo-w wrote:
| tangentially, US (and other) universities are massively dependent
| on/hamstrung by a Dutch company, Elsevier
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