Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
dub.uu.nl253 points by robtherobber 10 hours ago
253 points by robtherobber 10 hours ago
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.
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.
Surely not _all_ the courses... Utrecht was and is big on Haskell as you know... Given that you TA'd a course on it :)
Well I guess at the time large part of GHC development technically was Microsoft Research ;) . But yeh the Functional Programming and Compilers course were nice exceptions to the Microsoft trend. That's also why I ended up following that path in my master's programme :')
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.
And it should've been NixOS after!
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
> if the rot starts at the core of your education curriculum there is no saving your dependence on Microsoft.
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.
The things that's puzzling is that I overall find it much harder getting my toolchains and stuff working on windows.
In my experience, getting the periphery stuff is harder than the contents of the course a good chunk of the time for beginners.
I've gone without Microsoft products for many years now. It's SOOOOO much better.
Visual Studio is world class IDE, C# is one of the better designed languages and ecosystems, Windows is everywhere - from home, to enterprise.
I had a similar experience at a different university in NL, practically the entire curriculum was Oracle & Cisco.
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.
Even if you do, you’re still going to get breached. They drop features all of the time that open potential vulnerabilities.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Kerberos solves the problem that doing public key authentication is slow on a i386
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.
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.
That doesn't seem right to me, assuming you still want the paradigm of one-time principal-to-domain authentication with just-in-time principal-to-resource authentication. While I think you could probably use x509 certs to streamline and modernize the ticket-granting-and-session-key dance, you'd still be doing a lot of the same high-level things.
Depending on the use-case, Kerberos (/this imagined x509 Kerberos) or Oauth2 still seems suitable for single-authenticator/multiple-services paradigm.
Memory safety or type safety are the least of Kerberos' issues. The protocol itself is fundamentally flawed.
What issues on Linux would this actually solve?
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
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)
Ask IBM/RedHat. They did a lot of foundational work with SSSD (aka "too many 'S' D").
Kerberos is not a great protocol, though.
Ultimately Kerberos is used to authenticated basically everything in a Windows on-prem environment and in a way that is largely transparent to the user. Silent SSO is a very nice feature. Even if you're doing OIDC or SAML, those protocols do not define what is actually performing authentication at the IdP which, again, ultimately ends up being Kerberos if you're people are on-prem. So whatever your feelings are about Kerberos as a protocol, it doesn't matter if that's what Windows uses. And again, it cannot be obsoleted by other protocols. Even if you're using a newer fido thing like passkeys or client certs or whatever, ultimately the device has to be authenticated to get that passkey or cert or whatever it is installed into the authenticator app of the device. So Kerberos is king on prem. MIT Kerberos on Linux is not really compatible with Windows Kerberos in ways that cause problems that are not solved by re-writing Kerberos in another language. More important issues have to do with sharing credentials and getting trust info and other such things.
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.
What kind of obscure insecure defaults are there?
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?
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...
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.
Everything on by default in general has plagued them, because they don't want users to complain it doesn't work.
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.
They've apparently had a corporate philosophy of obfuscating the underlying system from the end user and deliberately inhibiting their ability to learn how it fits together since at least the early 2000's.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
You can run a logistics consulting business without windows, but you will struggle without Excel and PowerPoint, and 365 with SharePoint is basically needed for collaboration in any consulting business.
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.
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.
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...
The usa couldnt handle Aghanistan. Now they are invading continental Europe?
As I said, still licking the car battery.
>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.
> 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.
What were the goals for Afghanistan?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
My comment was in fun. I hoped that the reference to licking car batteries would signal that.
No one is sending in the troops to rescue Bibi from the Hague for a variety of reasons. Chief among them is that he is not currently under arrest, and the chances of him being arrested are effectively nil. Also, Mossad.
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.
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.
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)
Only invasion, or a real threat of invasion, from Russia, US or China can shook Europe into real change.
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.
> Threat of invasion from Russia doesn't seem to be doing it.
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.
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.
Well, at least in the Netherlands, that's not true. Our elected representatives have been rather.. volatile over the past decade. I liked the boomers better.
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...?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Already heard about the plans of the European Union to spend 200 billion on AI Factories?
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.
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).
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well written. I hope one day the united states of europe is a real political entity, burying the stupidity that is fragmented national interests.
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.
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.
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???
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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.
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...).
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.
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?
> "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.
What could go wrong with more centralization of power…
https://reclaimthenet.org/eu-council-approves-new-chat-contr...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> The reason Congress doesn't do anything is because it ceased to be a functioning body sometime around the AUMF.
That was kind of my point, I just didn't want to write an essay about it. Congress does nothing therefore the only tangible change happens from one guy signing whatever he wants to sign into the law, effectively reducing three branches of government down to one. That said, I sure can point to for example Trump essentially taking over the power to impose tarrifs away from the congress and congress doing absolutely nothing to assert what was previously widely understood to be 100% within their authority. Or dozens of people that were deported despite various courts literally ordering the administration not to do that, Kilmar Abrego Garcia being just the first of them.
> 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.
Now here we vehimently disagree. Nobody "runs" the EU. You need something like 500 people to agree on something for it become a law. Each of those represents their nation, their party, and their EU-level coalition. The biggest countries don't get to impose a change on smaller countries, the smallest countries don't get to do so either.
It is by far the most complex political system we have in the world for a very good reason. It came from decades of negotiating and re-negotiating between countries. It set some base standards that apply equally to otherwise incomparable nations. It is not meant to move fast and break things, it is meant to be slow and ineffective because every decision it makes impacts people that have absolutely nothing in common except the fact that they all volutarily joined the EU. From Finland to Portugal, from Cyprus to Ireland. Seriously, name me one other thing that those four countries have in common. Two of them are not in NATO, one of them is not even in Europe geographically-speaking, but I guess they all kinda like football? The fact that the EU does anything at all is a miracle of human cooperation.
And we're comparing it to one guy with questionable mental capacity (to say the least) signing things into law. Give me a break. The biggest "problem" with the EU is that at least 95% of the population that like to shit on it as an institution haven't invested more than 10 minutes into trying to understand how it works, yourself very much included.
> There's no such position or a branch in the EU.
cough vdL cough
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Europe is too heterogeneous. What you see as europe is not what others may see as europe.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
if we talk beaurocracy EU is very well consolidated: "you can't do that", everyone says consistently.
This is a popular meme, but compared to the combined regulation of 27 member states, the EU as a whole is doing great.
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.
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.
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.
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.
…and that’s why all the major big tech is dutch. Amazon, google, meta, apple, Netflix, nvidia. All Dutch
Sorry, I really don't understand how your response relates to my earlier comment.
Right but as an entity it can also do quite the damage. Cookie popups come to mind.
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.
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.
If that was so easy to do then they would have done it already years ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They tried. They were either spied on (Earth - then developed by Google) or aquired (Star Office by Sun).
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.
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)
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...
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
What’s the alternative?
WTO says US gave illegal aid to Boeing
https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/wto-says-us-ga...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I am pretty sure you wouldn't have touched anything from google and meta as well.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I did a 4 year stint in college, nobody had ever heard of Microsoft.
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 :)
same for me in the 2000s
unfortunately the university has gone full MS since then
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
If UI is your concern, check out Collabora and OnlyOffice, both have a modern ribbon-like interface and looks similar to MO.
Not just the UI ,as you can see with Blender it goes toe-to-toe with the paying big suites like Maya and Autodesk, a legacy of its dvelopment being proprietary.Comparad to GIMP et al difference is stark.
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.
You're talking about business workflows, and that makes sense. But this article is about universities, they have far less Microsoft-specific document editing workflows, compared to established enterprises. At least, that was my experience when I was a part-time teacher at a university - LibreOffice did the job just fine for me. And although other professors used MS Office, none of them did anything fancy (they didn't have any custom VBAs/macros, no disgusting database-like Excel spreadsheets etc) - I can see these people easily switching to the oss options we have today.
Of course, every university and every person is different, but it's not an impossibility unlike businesses.
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
Why would you need Outlook? Can't you use it in a browser?
Yes, chrome gives me a little “PWA” so I can even have an icon in my dock, but it’s not as nice
Yes, and the same can be done with Teams. That's what I do on my Linux laptop.
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.
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.
Would this procedure work with the certificates you need to use?
https://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/lab-infrastructure/install...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I worked on the migration to Azure for the big orange one. They absolutely went all-in on it.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
They probably paying a tenth of that as big edu users. What you quote are the commercial starting price for a basic-ish license.
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.
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.
IIRC, Dutch unis have another account managing system, run by SURFnet. OAuth2, I think.
Europe can do without Microsoft, however it will require a kick in the rear to get there.
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.
Anyone knowledgeable of history knows the Dutch universities existed for four centuries before Microsoft even existed. With that knowledge the question becomes farcical.
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.
IT has to cover much less technical users than someone who would prefer to use Linux
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.
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.
Oh it's not only Dutch universities.
Can Dutch universities do with Microsoft? Genuinely how far gone are we that this is a question?
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.
I'm not sure I understand how an American company would be able to provide any service that could be "sovereign European".
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.
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.
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.
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
They must have something like this for China, right?
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.
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.
And it certainly would not survive strong political pressure from the EU and US governments. Local governments still can be adversely impacted.
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?
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.)
Is this new? Microsoft already offer that and I think already for quite a while.
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.
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.
The problem is that we already can provide an alternative, but we don't switch to them. Which might be even worse.
Functionally, they can easily do without Microsoft... I'm more worried about the implications in terms of PsyOps and repercussions... Like they pulled with that ICC judge.
tangentially, US (and other) universities are massively dependent on/hamstrung by a Dutch company, Elsevier
> Can they do without Microsoft, however? Can they work without Office, Outlook, Teams and OneDrive?
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
>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."
An exception to Betteridge's Law! I would love to see more universities move away from proprietary software and opting for open source equivalents.
I mean, what did they do before Microsoft? The Netherlands is a bit older than Microsoft, and so, presumably, is its universities.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
Apparently the answer is "No." =3
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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.
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."
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.
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...