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.
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...?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
What kind of obscure insecure defaults are there?
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...).
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.
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.
> "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…
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.
> There's no such position or a branch in the EU.
cough vdL cough
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.
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 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.
Europe is too heterogeneous. What you see as europe is not what others may see as europe.
It's been tried a number of times. It has never worked out well.
Please god no.
Tell that to the right-wing nutjobs who all want their "<country code>XIT"
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.
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.
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.
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)
They tried. They were either spied on (Earth - then developed by Google) or aquired (Star Office by Sun).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Red Hat is IBM, the OG big tech really
I'd say Bell is the OG, which was founded about 40 years before IBM.
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.
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!
I am pretty sure you wouldn't have touched anything from google and meta as well.
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.
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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.
When I did a 4 year stint in college, nobody had ever heard of Microsoft.
It was much easier in 1980's, unless you would be using CP/M or MS-DOS.
And surely nothing has changed about the world in the last 40 years
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.
same for me in the 2000s
unfortunately the university has gone full MS since then
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, 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The big green one absolutely is ms heavy place.
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
Oh it's not only Dutch universities.
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".
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.
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.
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.
And it certainly would not survive strong political pressure from the EU and US governments. Local governments still can be adversely impacted.
Is this new? Microsoft already offer that and I think already for quite a while.
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.)
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.
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.
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."
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
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?
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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.
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.
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...?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
What kind of obscure insecure defaults are there?
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...).
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.
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.
> "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...
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.
> There's no such position or a branch in the EU.
cough vdL cough
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.
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 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.
Europe is too heterogeneous. What you see as europe is not what others may see as europe.
It's been tried a number of times. It has never worked out well.
Please god no.
Tell that to the right-wing nutjobs who all want their "<country code>XIT"
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.
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.
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.
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)
They tried. They were either spied on (Earth - then developed by Google) or aquired (Star Office by Sun).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Red Hat is IBM, the OG big tech really
I'd say Bell is the OG, which was founded about 40 years before IBM.
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.
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!
I am pretty sure you wouldn't have touched anything from google and meta as well.
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 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.
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46080495
When I did a 4 year stint in college, nobody had ever heard of Microsoft.
It was much easier in 1980's, unless you would be using CP/M or MS-DOS.
And surely nothing has changed about the world in the last 40 years
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.
same for me in the 2000s
unfortunately the university has gone full MS since then
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, 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The big green one absolutely is ms heavy place.
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
Oh it's not only Dutch universities.
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".
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.
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.
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.
And it certainly would not survive strong political pressure from the EU and US governments. Local governments still can be adversely impacted.
Is this new? Microsoft already offer that and I think already for quite a while.
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.)
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.
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.
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."
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
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?
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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.