6 ms·

I have very little hope in Krause. He is just a populist and an opportunistic politician without much substance behind. Personally I couldn’t care less which o

by tirant 2mo ago

I have very little hope in Krause. He is just a populist and an opportunistic politician without much substance behind. Personally I couldn’t care less which operating system the city chooses to use as long as it helps to save costs and increase efficiency. Bureaucracy is extremely high and ideology driven, permissions take too long to be granted and populist projects are taking money away from families and their young children (Kindergarten contributions are through the roof).

dewey 2mo ago
> Personally I couldn’t care less which operating system the city chooses to use as long as it helps to save costs and increase efficiency. It's your personal opinion so that's fine, but that's exactly the thinking that got us into other hard to detangle dependencies before (gas from russia was cheap and efficient, until it got turned off) and that's the same for building up an even bigger dependency on Microsoft and other large US vendors when many other European countries like France are investiging heavily into building up European alternatives.
- pembrook 2mo ago
  Comparing one of the core strategic resources of any society (energy) and microsoft office suite in the same sentence is a bit silly no? Microsoft Word is absolutely not a core strategic asset to your countries economic success. You could easily migrate off of it tomorrow and everything would be fine, minus some banal feature gaps in LibreOffice/etc. Nobody will die in the winter and there will be no food shortages (EU is fertilizer dependent) if Microsoft shuts off your access to creating PowerPoints. The fact that there’s more effort being put into building EU alternatives for Microsoft Office than energy security, tells you how unserious and out of touch the political class truly is. And Microsoft office is just the very very top of the stack (the easiest to vibe code alternatives to). What about the operating systems, the hardware, for which there is no EU alternative for? And it’s not just the US you need to worry about, all of computing depends on physical manufacturing in China/Taiwan. China could cut off access tomorrow and there’d be no more computers/phones/comms infrastructure/etc. That’s an actual real threat. As someone living in the EU, the saber rattling for domestic political points between the US and the EU is one of the dumbest memes and is resulting is real tax money being spent on the silliest of projects. Migrating off microsoft while their entire business model is being made irrelevant by AI, being one of them. Meanwhile, the stuff that actually matters for sovereignty and isn't surface level BS is of course ignored (energy, resources, mining) in favor of handouts to companies for domestic manufacturing of weapons that aren't even relevant for modern war.
  - sajithdilshan 2mo ago
    Unfortunately you're singing to deaf ears. I totally agree with you regarding the current drama about EU sovereignty. Being sovereign is amazing, but at the moment EU is doing it for all the wrong reasons. It's more like cut dependency on US while moving towards China and I wonder what kind of a sovereignty that is. Also I saw the other day an announcement from NextCloud that they can now run the new Euro office or whatever its called on their cloud, and that would have been exciting if we were living in 2010. What's happening is that all those private companies are getting tax payers money from EU to come-up with some janky alternative to a US software and label it as sovereign and pocket the money. It's quite funny that Europeans are still discussing on what alternative they can use for MS Office in 2026 while the rest of the world is researching on frontier AI
    - dewey 2mo ago
      > It's quite funny that Europeans are still discussing on what alternative they can use for MS Office in 2026 while the rest of the world is researching on frontier AI You don't have to pick. The people working on office suites and negotiating government contracts are not the same people that work on frontier AI.
      - sajithdilshan 2mo ago
        I think you're missing the point. It's not about who is working on what, but the tax payers money is being wasted that could have been used for a better purpose. If they switch to a new office suite, that's millions of Euros wasted on migration, training people to use and building all the existing processes and flows around it.
        dewey 2mo ago
        That's very short term thinking. Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees as licensing fees is most likely the better use of tax payer money. What makes you think that licensing cost is much cheaper than migrating even over a short term horizon? Example from Germany (https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministerien-behoerden/I/Presse/PI/2025/cds/251204_cds_open-source https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministe...), that county moved to LibreOffice and previously spent 15 millionen euros on licenses, the migration was 9 million. Why do you think many countries like the US try to divest from China and even move some manufacturing back?

by tirant 2mo ago

dewey 2mo ago

> Personally I couldn’t care less which operating system the city chooses to use as long as it helps to save costs and increase efficiency. It's your personal opinion so that's fine, but that's exactly the thinking that got us into other hard to detangle dependencies before (gas from russia was cheap and efficient, until it got turned off) and that's the same for building up an even bigger dependency on Microsoft and other large US vendors when many other European countries like France are investiging heavily into building up European alternatives.

pembrook 2mo ago
Comparing one of the core strategic resources of any society (energy) and microsoft office suite in the same sentence is a bit silly no? Microsoft Word is absolutely not a core strategic asset to your countries economic success. You could easily migrate off of it tomorrow and everything would be fine, minus some banal feature gaps in LibreOffice/etc. Nobody will die in the winter and there will be no food shortages (EU is fertilizer dependent) if Microsoft shuts off your access to creating PowerPoints. The fact that there’s more effort being put into building EU alternatives for Microsoft Office than energy security, tells you how unserious and out of touch the political class truly is. And Microsoft office is just the very very top of the stack (the easiest to vibe code alternatives to). What about the operating systems, the hardware, for which there is no EU alternative for? And it’s not just the US you need to worry about, all of computing depends on physical manufacturing in China/Taiwan. China could cut off access tomorrow and there’d be no more computers/phones/comms infrastructure/etc. That’s an actual real threat. As someone living in the EU, the saber rattling for domestic political points between the US and the EU is one of the dumbest memes and is resulting is real tax money being spent on the silliest of projects. Migrating off microsoft while their entire business model is being made irrelevant by AI, being one of them. Meanwhile, the stuff that actually matters for sovereignty and isn't surface level BS is of course ignored (energy, resources, mining) in favor of handouts to companies for domestic manufacturing of weapons that aren't even relevant for modern war.
- sajithdilshan 2mo ago
  Unfortunately you're singing to deaf ears. I totally agree with you regarding the current drama about EU sovereignty. Being sovereign is amazing, but at the moment EU is doing it for all the wrong reasons. It's more like cut dependency on US while moving towards China and I wonder what kind of a sovereignty that is. Also I saw the other day an announcement from NextCloud that they can now run the new Euro office or whatever its called on their cloud, and that would have been exciting if we were living in 2010. What's happening is that all those private companies are getting tax payers money from EU to come-up with some janky alternative to a US software and label it as sovereign and pocket the money. It's quite funny that Europeans are still discussing on what alternative they can use for MS Office in 2026 while the rest of the world is researching on frontier AI
  - dewey 2mo ago
    > It's quite funny that Europeans are still discussing on what alternative they can use for MS Office in 2026 while the rest of the world is researching on frontier AI You don't have to pick. The people working on office suites and negotiating government contracts are not the same people that work on frontier AI.
    - sajithdilshan 2mo ago
      I think you're missing the point. It's not about who is working on what, but the tax payers money is being wasted that could have been used for a better purpose. If they switch to a new office suite, that's millions of Euros wasted on migration, training people to use and building all the existing processes and flows around it.
      - dewey 2mo ago
        That's very short term thinking. Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees as licensing fees is most likely the better use of tax payer money. What makes you think that licensing cost is much cheaper than migrating even over a short term horizon? Example from Germany (https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministerien-behoerden/I/Presse/PI/2025/cds/251204_cds_open-source https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministe...), that county moved to LibreOffice and previously spent 15 millionen euros on licenses, the migration was 9 million. Why do you think many countries like the US try to divest from China and even move some manufacturing back?