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Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

• Workaccount2 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
      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 11mo ago
        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 11mo ago
          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 11mo ago
      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 11mo ago
        If that was so easy to do then they would have done it already years ago
        • bigfudge 11mo 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.
        • seanieb 11mo ago
          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 11mo ago
    "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 11mo ago
      > "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 11mo ago
        Tell that to the right-wing nutjobs who all want their "<country code>XIT"
      • AllegedAlec 11mo ago
        Please god no.
      • ramon156 11mo ago
        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 11mo ago
          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 11mo ago
          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.
  • SunshineTheCat 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
      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 11mo ago
        Deepmind is another good example, as is ARM.
      • SunshineTheCat 11mo ago
        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-Companies-in-the-US-Europe-and-China-4100 https://www.voronoiapp.com/markets/Comparing-the-Largest-Com...
        • amarant 11mo ago
          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 11mo ago
    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.
    • vanviegen 11mo ago
      Yeah, but unless there's AGI right around the corner, it's starting to look more and more like there's no real moat in the trillions being invested. As switching between AI providers is easy (especially when compare the stranglehold say Microsoft has on organizations), catching up may be relatively easy and cheap for latecomers.
  • jimbohn 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
      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.
      • greatgib 11mo ago
        Surprisingly, from France, Hen I work for US companies, the American employees were on holidays more often than the french ones. For example, here "sick leaves" days are not considered normal holidays that have to be taken in the year to not be lost.
        • Workaccount2 11mo ago
          Thankfully we don't have to rely on anecdotes, and can just check data. The average American works 300 (!) more hours a year than the average Frenchman. 37.5 days more, That's huge. And France isn't even the lowest in the EU. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_annual_labor_hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
  • hulitu 11mo ago
    They tried. They were either spied on (Earth - then developed by Google) or aquired (Star Office by Sun).
• t0mas88 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
      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 11mo ago
    And it certainly would not survive strong political pressure from the EU and US governments. Local governments still can be adversely impacted.
  • ttkari 11mo ago
    I'm not sure I understand how an American company would be able to provide any service that could be "sovereign European".
    • arlcode 11mo ago
      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.
• gcanyon 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
      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 11mo ago
        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 11mo ago
        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.
• kenjackson 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    > 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 11mo ago
      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 11mo ago
        What’s the alternative? WTO says US gave illegal aid to Boeing https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/wto-says-us-gave-illegal-aid-boeing https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/wto-says-us-ga...
    • LtWorf 11mo ago
      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.
• hayleox 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    The problem is that we already can provide an alternative, but we don't switch to them. Which might be even worse.
• jwithington 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    What kind of obscure insecure defaults are there?
    • seanieb 11mo ago
      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 11mo ago
      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.
• arethuza 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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.
    • deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
  • cuttothechase 11mo ago
    I am pretty sure you wouldn't have touched anything from google and meta as well.
  • blibble 11mo ago
    same for me in the 2000s unfortunately the university has gone full MS since then
  • pjmlp 11mo ago
    It was much easier in 1980's, unless you would be using CP/M or MS-DOS.
  • godzillabrennus 11mo ago
    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.
    • 11mo ago
• yupyupyups 11mo ago
  Oh it's not only Dutch universities.
• ramon156 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    The big green one absolutely is ms heavy place.
  • bojan 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
    I worked on the migration to Azure for the big orange one. They absolutely went all-in on it.
• denimnerd42 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    IT has to cover much less technical users than someone who would prefer to use Linux
    • graemep 11mo ago
      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.
    • denimnerd42 11mo ago
      Nah it's a skill issue. They don't know how and don't want to learn.
• pjmlp 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    Why should they get rid of the Linux kernel?
    • pjmlp 11mo ago
      Because Microsoft contributions, including being one of the Rust on the kernel sponsors.
      • breve 11mo ago
        How will Microsoft or the US government stop anyone from using those Linux contributions now that they've been contributed? They're GPL licenced. They're open source. They're freely available. They're sanction proof.
        • pjmlp 11mo ago
          The point is using Microsoft stuff, instead of alternatives, not what Microsoft can do.
          • breve 11mo ago
            No, the point is precisely what Microsoft can do. This is all about sovereignty of the computers you use, the software you use, and control of your data. But I'm glad to see you concede the point.
            • 11mo ago
• lysace 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    If UI is your concern, check out Collabora and OnlyOffice, both have a modern ribbon-like interface and looks similar to MO.
    • rzerowan 11mo ago
      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.
      • d3Xt3r 11mo ago
        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.
• HarshaaVardhan 11mo ago
  [flagged]
• timvisee 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    Why would you need Outlook? Can't you use it in a browser?
    • anonymouskimmer 11mo ago
      Yes, and the same can be done with Teams. That's what I do on my Linux laptop.
      • elbear 11mo ago
        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 11mo ago
      Yes, chrome gives me a little “PWA” so I can even have an icon in my dock, but it’s not as nice
  • aquariusDue 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
• ta20240528 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
      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 11mo ago
        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 11mo ago
          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.
• Joel_Mckay 11mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines Apparently the answer is "No." =3
• firefax 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  > 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 11mo ago
  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-services-international-criminal-court-president-american-sanctions-trump-tech-icc-amazon-google/ 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 11mo ago
    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-court-is-ditching-microsoft-software-for-an-open-source-alternative https://www.techradar.com/pro/the-international-criminal-cou...
  • anonymous908213 11mo ago
    > 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.
    • vid 11mo ago
      Difficult to say exactly, and that's part of the problem, which is why my comment is about not being dependant on closed foreign companies.
• sega_sai 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  I mean, what did they do before Microsoft? The Netherlands is a bit older than Microsoft, and so, presumably, is its universities.
• fuzzfactor 11mo ago
  >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 11mo ago
  Can Dutch universities do with Microsoft? Genuinely how far gone are we that this is a question?
• bell-cot 11mo ago
  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 11mo 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.
  • philipp-gayret 11mo ago
    I had a similar experience at a different university in NL, practically the entire curriculum was Oracle & Cisco.
  • pbreit 11mo ago
    I've gone without Microsoft products for many years now. It's SOOOOO much better.
    • Razengan 11mo ago
      I went for a decade without using any Microsoft products until they bought GitHub
      • pbreit 11mo ago
        Ah, GitHub, you're right. And I guess I do use LinkedIn and VSCode as well. Was thinking Office/Windows.
    • xcf_seetan 11mo ago
      I ditch Windows in 1996 and went Linux. Really SOOOOO much better. :D
• tamimio 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  tangentially, US (and other) universities are massively dependent on/hamstrung by a Dutch company, Elsevier
• einpoklum 11mo ago
  > 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.
  • jetbalsa 11mo ago
    What email server are they going to use? what about anti-spam / anti-malware in there. and compliance... oh my compliance
    • einpoklum 11mo ago
      > What email server are they going to use? Same one they were using before I would think. Nobody said they were using MS Exchange server. > and compliance... oh my compliance Is that a magic word? :-) ... Compliance with what?
• SapporoChris 11mo ago
  Anyone knowledgeable of history knows the Dutch universities existed for four centuries before Microsoft even existed. With that knowledge the question becomes farcical.
• jongjong 11mo ago
  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.
• Telaneo 11mo ago
  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.
• octaane 11mo ago
  So, I'm going to chip in with a different perspective from that of some other commentators on here. The overwhelming majority of computers in the entire world, used by our entire species, have windows as their OS. While I applaud the use of alternatives to windows and it's apps, universities teach it because it is what their graduates will use in the real world. Governments use it because while it has it's flaws, it mostly works and is a universal standard. It's the toyota of operating systems. The parts and manpower to repair it and use it are available everywhere, and it's cheap and reliable.
  • quamserena 11mo ago
    I am in university currently and I run Linux, and the only thing that I have needed Windows for has been SolidWorks. Everything else has worked just fine. We’re actually provided Linux VMs because so much software development happens in Linux (or MacOS); you need to know *nix to be job-ready in CS. I’m not sure what world you live in.
  • xcf_seetan 11mo ago
    > and manpower to repair it and use it are available everywhere So why each time i announce myself as working with computers, there is always someone that approaches me saying "great, i have a problem with my computer, can you ..."? I just make them stop and ask "Are you talking about Windows?", and when the answer is affirmative i just say "Sorry, I only work on Linux." and they go "What is that?", lol, i would like you to see their faces when i say "It's a professional system!" and leave. :)
    • akoboldfrying 11mo ago
      I think you do know the answer, and are just being coy. In case you don't: The products that people report problems with are the products that people actually use frequently. When "Linux as daily driver" market share is the same order of magnitude as Windows, then such observations will tell us something about the two systems' relative usability.
  • mips_avatar 11mo ago
• black_13 11mo ago
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• alvineh 11mo ago
  Hello, this is my second comment I will answer any question
• tdrz 11mo ago
  I read quite a lot of bashing of various national and transnational European institutions for relying so much on US tech. But what about YOU, european? gmail, facebook, instagram, twitter, whatsapp, macbook, iphone, uber, steam etc etc are all working fine for you?
  • cobbaut 11mo ago
    European from Antwerp here. I only use two of those, and see more and more of my friends migrate away from some, albeit slowly.
    • tdrz 11mo ago
      I (also European), for one, find it virtually impossible to convince people to give up on most of those.
  • dijit 11mo ago
    yep, but for most of those its not very good for us. Like fast food, it makes satiates a short term desire for a long term problem. At least, facebook, instagram and an argument can be made for gmail. I think goods are a different thing altogether though, nobody tells you what to do with your washing machine after you buy it, but social media engines use your data against you and change the rules/system on a whim.
• thenthenthen 11mo ago
  In my experience it went something like this: Before covid it seemed to be run mainly locally, during covid there was a massive lobby by MS to push teams and most Unis caved and thats how most unis ended up in the MS eco system.
  • vanviegen 11mo ago
    Yes, this is what happened. 'The only way' to scale up Teams video conferencing such that everybody could use it, was to move everything to the cloud. Never waste a good crisis!
• kkfx 11mo ago
  Yes, of course, when their teachers learn to use a FLOSS desktop for all tasks, starting with writing theses and papers in LaTeX... In other words, when they run courses for students to recover what they didn't learn in high schools. Today, a desktop is the primary epistemological tool; only a FLOSS one is suitable for study, as it reveals what it does and is, or at least can be, shaped according to need. Most are simply IT illiterate, like professors from the 1950s unable to read and write fluently, except they still haven't realised it...
• gtech1 11mo ago
  Germany's ZenDIS with OpenDesk is actively working on the issue too
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• phendrenad2 11mo ago
  If a viable Office 365 alternative appears, it won't be a big top-down bureaucratic initiative from the government, or even the universities. It'll be a nimble EU-based startup company building a full office suite and making it available not just to government organizations via a "contact sales" link (you hear that, NextCloud and OpenDesk?), but via one-click deploy to AWS EU region, docker/k8s, and whatever EU-based cloud hosts exist, so you and your friends can test it out at home. (If the EU never figures out how to allow nimble startups companies to exist, then forget about it)
• okillbite 11mo ago
  I think a better question is if there is an operating framework that would remove Microsoft's ability to sanction individuals on the whim of the current US administration in lieu of the appropriate EU institutions. Microsoft's partnership/JV with 21Vianet in China shows that it can be done (with limitations on features) and this is probably the right direction to go.
• Ruthsigela 11mo ago
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• maxglute 11mo ago
  Not exactly a sales pitch but TFW north korea has more of a soveign software ecosystem than EU.