- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
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Great going denmark. /s This should not have been much of a challange. And you failed.
I rather disagree, this was always going to be hard. Microsoft will have put serious pressure on them not to switch, and its pain-in-the-ass proprietary lock-in tactics create a lot of friction in making a transfer. And let’s also acknowledge that the average office worker is so much a creature of habit that they can’t easily adapt to new software without costly trainings and months of service, and even then many people never fully adapt. I don’t love that Denmark is stepping back, but let’s not pretend that entrenched technologies and contracts are easy to switch.
They got the call.
Y’all being surprised is the funny part.
Denmark has abandoned plans to ditch technical problems
too quick to surrender
Ffs, ignorance and laziness aren’t excuses.
What a bunch of weak ass removed. I did it a few years ago. I’m on Nextcloud and collabora. I spend a lot of my life in spreadsheets. In their defense, collabora’s choices when it comes to key commands and defaults could not possibly be more stupid. For example, if you are pasting something into a spreadsheet, only a clown would think the default should be paste with formatting? At least give us a “ctl-shift-V” or something like that. So stupid. Just mimic google sheets and be done with it.
I don’t agree with their decision, but migrating any large organization to new software is typically a lot more difficult than migrating a single home user.
Agreed. But Fyi, I’m not a home user, I own a small business.We have to train employees on Collabpra and other open source tools. Its not that hard. We have tons of collaborative, shared documents that our clients interact with. Cybersecurity is a thing, but its not all that difficult to not be slave, or involuntary contributor to the dark side.live by your principles or capitulate. I know which choice I’ll make. I also know that 90+% of people wouldn’t even consider the extra burden of defining, much less living on principles. That’s so sad.
pilot phase with 38 ministry employees kicked off last year to trial Collabora’s suite with Office documents. However, this trial was terminated when elections took place earlier this year. A spokesperson confirmed that the experiment had concluded, and would not resume again. They also confirmed that no evaluation benchmarking Collabora’s performance against Microsoft Office had taken place either.
So it was a performance more or less, without any plan to actually switch.
When elections took place could mean someone that won was pro America or Microsoft
There was no real change of power, Denmark is still ruled by their xenophobic self-declared social democrats busy teaming up with Italian post-fascists to undermine international rule of law. While there is little meaningful difference between Mette Fredriksen and Georgia Meloni she’s pretty much as left as Danish politics goes, the only parties left of this mess (the Ø and Å lists, not kidding) are marginal and have never had real power.
Traditionally Denmark has had no political line for themselves, and have followed America completely. They are completely new to trying to think original thoughts in terms of foreign policy, and we should expect to see them stumble a bit. I guess it’s refreshing to see them pretend to try.
Kind of hard words like xenophobic, fascist for parties democratically voted for by the majority of voters.
I don’t know why you don’t already know this, but fascists and xenophobes are capable of voting as well.
So it stops being xenophobic or fascist when a majority elects them? The literal Nazis were elected by a plurality; would more votes have made them not fascist or not xenophobic?
It is kinda true though, we just call it something else. And fascism is on the rise here, along with xenophobia. We were always among the first to join the USA in wars while suppressing any questions from critics in the process.
I dont know any of denmarks politics, but both can be true. The NSDAP was more or less democratically elected, MAGA as well
Saying the NSDAP was democratically elected to power is a perpetuating a fascist lie. The NSDAP was always using undemocratic methods, such as political violence and voter intimidation, and finally, outright banning and persecuting political opponents and entire political parties. That is not being elected more or less democratically.
If you have been taught bad history, then enlighten yourself, rather than continuing to give fascists false legitimacy.
That has happened in the US for at least about a century and people still consider our presidents democratically elected.
It specifically says that performance wasn’t benchmarked.
The root cause is incompatibility with Microsoft’s proprietary document format causing fuckiness for LibreOffice based Collabora. E.g. formatting issues.
They could’ve tried the Russian alternative but I guess they’d prefer to gargle Microsoft’s fetid cock some more.
Doesnt Office export to .odt too? Was any IT savy person involved in this?
It does export to odt, but it still messes up document formatting. Of course this is a solvable issue from a technical perspective, but it’s still a lot of man hours to do so for every single document and template across an entire government.
Microsoft’s format is “open” but they don’t follow their own standard so it’s effectively proprietary. I’d be surprised if the odt export even works.
I think they meant that the whole thing was “a performance”… A theater. Not that the performance of the product had anything to do with it.
deleted by creator
Performance as in performative
sounds like they didn’t try very hard
It seems they tried to ditch Microsoft Office but to keep docx. What they need to do is to ditch docx first and start using open document format, then let the software follow.
I don’t think that’s very likely as nobody seem to understand what file formats are or why they matter. So the second best option is probably to wait for Euro-Office to hopefully take off, and then hopefully Euro-Office can change default to ODT at some point in the future and we can finally get rid of docx once and for all.
Back in 2025, the government of Denmark announced that it is ditching Windows and Microsoft Office in favor of open-source alternatives like Linux.
Denmark’s reasoning was that it wants to reduce reliance on a U.S. vendor like Microsoft and also not be at the mercy of a volatile Trump administration. Now, it appears that the country has failed in its ambitious endeavor.
Adoption of this European software would have been an important step in Denmark’s bid for technological independence from software made by a U.S. firm.
A pilot phase with 38 ministry employees kicked off last year to trial Collabora’s suite with Office documents. However, this trial was terminated when elections took place earlier this year. A spokesperson confirmed that the experiment had concluded, and would not resume again. They also confirmed that no evaluation benchmarking Collabora’s performance against Microsoft Office had taken place either.
Microsoft must have truly been shitting it. 38 whole people trying out other software.
I mean how hard would it have been for Microsoft to just pay a few of those 38 if any of them had been taking it seriously to begin with.
No benchmarking, and the attempt at switching ended with the elections.
Could it even have been called an attempt?
Microsoft must have truly been shitting it. 38 whole people trying out other software
That’s not the point, the problem for Microsoft is that when people begin to realize we don’t need Microsoft products because open source solutions work, it will spread like fire.
The attempt was however half assed, and Microsoft never really needed to worry.
They didn’t even try. It seems it was all a show.
Says Microsoft propaganda site.
I don’t have much experience with Collabora but what I have wasn’t great. I’m very much in favour of governments ditching MS for something like Libre Office. But I also know that the formatting errors can be a pain in the røv especially if you have 20 year old Excel sheets full of important information spiked with macros that civil servants who have long since retired made ages ago. It’s minefields within minefields.
So I think many things can be true at the same time. Denmark would like to rely less on American software and services. It was in the interest of the government to communicate that loudly at a time when the mad orange hand was reaching for Greenland (and may do so again because what’s in a treaty?). The Collabora trial could have been an earnest effort that failed for many reasons I don’t have trouble imagining. Or it was a show piece, a signal to the Danish voters as well as American companies. Your contacts may not be as certain any more. It may have led to some increased MS lobbying bts. And this doesn’t mean this is the end of the effort. Just this one, at this point in time.
The big problem is this: success stories of governments switching to something open source are rare. You don’t win elections when people are fed up with long processing times in government services. They’d have to be sufficiently pissed off with the mad orange to tolerate that out of spite. And with the urgency of the Greenland crisis having subsided, the level of pissedoffness will have also declined.
I would put some money on it either being.
1: Some senior bod didn’t like that they had to learn where one new button was, and threw their toys out of the pram. 2: The macros thing you mentioned. So many of these were done back in the day, VBA code that no-one knew about until they tried to open the sheet in another office package and it exploded.
my money is on #1. Classic danish public sector story.
That last paragraph is interesting because in my opinion; Europe has been supporting the US, so they have no room to talk. I got tired of the why don’t you protest bullshit. It’s because you paid for it, with every arms, apple, google, amd, nvidia, intel, microsolp, etc purchase that the US made. This isn’t a popular opinion but it should be recognized that you’re indirectly paying in as well.
Open software should be pursued.
There is this idea in international politics that the rest of the world should have a say in US elections. Because the outcome inevitably affects us all outside the US. Since we don’t have a say, we still rely on you to be the instrument of checks and balances on your government. And when it is as erratic and boneheaded as your current one, no amount of trade we do with the US should abrogate your responsibilities as the aforementioned instrument. Nor do I think we should stop encouraging protest against the dumb policy of tariffs, which is hurting your own economy as well. Or the end of Roe v Wade. Or the illegal kidnapping of a not much liked head of state. Or the illegal war in Iran. And while this is not exactly the example to follow, the French are rioting for much less these days. It started with bad conditions in schools.
Capitalism works very much with countries’ economies complementing each other. You have the IT sector, high tech military companies, and whisky. Europe has luxury brands, wine, and various niche industries. You buy our shit and we buy yours and then there is no need to produce your shit here as well and vice versa.
That’s a result of decades of a transatlantic relationship that worked in everybody’s favour. We invest in your economy and get security guarantees in return. It’s in a way an extended payoff of the Marshall plan. Your tech sector would be much worse if Europe had built up parallel infrastructures. Which nobody thought necessary because we were all friends. And especially arms deals are often decades in the making. So this “you buy our slop and guns so stop telling us to protest our idiotic government” doesn’t sound quite right to my ears. I think that’s too easy an out.
Rest assured though that Europe will be spending less of its money in the US. The loss of trust as a result of 45/47 is nearly instant. Rebuilding it will take more than a couple of saner administrations. Meanwhile, the US’s purchasing power is shrinking too. Europeans buy military equipment in South Korea and Canada looks to the EU for closer ties. And we haven’t even talked about the bubble yet.
It’s surprising really that you aren’t protesting more.
There are no checks and balances. And per example, what would happen if all tech industries pulled the plug on Europe?–that could happen, look at starlink.
US tech industry hurt itself in confusion
US Big Tech is loyal, first and foremost, to mammon. Pulling out of a single war torn country isn’t so bad. Pulling out of a rich and highly developed market, with over half a billion consumers, and many globally leading corporations, that will hurt in a different way.
