The alternatives don’t have to be perfect. Reducing the dominance of any single country is a good thing.
thrirha klha
mmkdnmmkni’m currently learning arabic. did i get your name right?
Yes, except for the last word, there’s no ‘d’
right, i misread it as ممكدن
Mentally ready. Actually not ready at all.
Given they broke their own procurement laws to choose US tech companies for their cloud infrastructure its definitely silly.
FYI, Proton CEO also caught flak for praising Trump picks, so they are playing both sides of the field FYI
in that article (which i had to use the Bypass Paywalls Clean extension to comfortably read) Proton states “we do not comply with US subpoenas from either party.” which of course is because they comply fully with Swiss subpoenas LOL
what’s a subpoena?
When it’s the government asking.
I just wish that the narrative would focus more on the anti-competitive behavior of these firms to make sure we don’t fall into the same monopolistic trap in Europe. We need variety, we need competition. Focus on standards, low switching costs, and allow reverse engineering.
France is. The EU is working on trying to get EU-made solutions in use. Switzerland is not in the EU and neither is the UK.
Now that we established this, we can have a productive conversation.
don’t talk about it… do it!
It will never happen as long as slugs like van der Leyen or Merz are running the show. These people are completely incompetent.
Oh yes. Because Merz builds data centers, and Der Leyen is known for making IT decisions at EU companies. They also happen to be the queens of private investors.
No.
Merz and von der Leyen are extremely competent, they just don’t pursue the goals they say they do. They may even belief that they are pursuing other goals than they really do.
They believe in trickle down economics despite all evidence pointing to it making everything worse. In their pursuit of economic growth, they do the exact thing that in their model should boost, but in reality stifles growth. They increase the wealth redistribution from the poor and middle class to the rich.
And they are so damn good at it. That’s the reason money has put them in their current positions.
They are extremely competent in doing the wrong thing.
They believe in trickle down economics despite all evidence pointing to it making everything worse.
It is high time we switch to Pinata economics.
I like you
I think its great that Europe is looking to rely less on US tech but nothing about whats going on with Europe (especially within the EU) makes me think privacy is a focus.
Companies that have had their whole data on Google/MS servers for 20 years certainly don’t care for privacy the way you and I do. But they are certainly realizing that US providers are not the way to go. Baby steps I guess.
That reminds me of a quote I heard once. Probably from Cory Doctorow but I cannot remember now.
“Everyone wants you to have privacy… just not from them.”
Yeah? Because Chat Control is still a thing. And age verification as well, but the EU won’t outsource that to 3rd parties (we have EIDAS and the EU wallet for that).
Not even the GDPR?
GDPR is nice and all, but people have been fighting chat control and all its hydra heads for years now, so no.
But I’m an American so what do I know?
But I’m an American so what do I know?
You know much more about the world around you than the orange turd that claims to be the leader of the free world. Don’t sell yourself short, mate! It’ll take people like you to rebuild once this is over.
I am too!
Doubt it, honestly. The NSA has a Consolidated Intelligence Center in Wiesbaden as well as Darmstadt’s Dagger Complex just a stones throw away from Frankfurt the center of EU finance and logistical hub. Any alternative will be compromised with these bases remain.
Wasn’t Europe going full open source?
You know how there’s theory and practice?
Not Bavaria 🙄
The “C” in “CSU” is for “corruption”.
oh god… we have built everything on microsoft stuff and the higher ups insist that anything that legally can be hosted on the cloud be migrated to azure. This will cause us (the actual workers) untold levels of pain if it were mandated by the eu.
I still wish it does become mandatory though
Meanwhile, my employer decided to switch from a self made Linux platform (with it’s pitfalls due to the usual “it’s free, why should we put so much money into maintenance” reasoning) to Microslop. I and multiple other people warned them, again and again.
Well, get to it then! Ain’t got all year.
I think many companies are basically stuck with Microsoft (Excel, Word, Teams, Sharepoint, Onedrive etc). Switching to something else is going to be a pretty serious project. It’s going to be expensive and time consuming.
Totally worth doing IMO, but convincing the CEO is another matter. I guess we need a cautionary tale before the executives decide to reserve a few million euros for rebuilding a significant part of the IT infrastructure.
I think many companies are basically stuck with Microsoft (Excel, Word, Teams, Sharepoint, Onedrive etc).
Tbh, office and collaboration tools are the least of our worries; there are plenty of good alternatives which, with some financial support, can be adapted to suit companies’ needs in very little time. What should worry us more are the tons of critical applications tailored to a very specific area of administration and business. The software that runs the power plants and hospitals. The software that manages logistics and industrialised production. The software that runs our accounting and HR. That’s the Windows lock-in that we’re not going to shake off over night.
Oh, that and the hardware vendors + hyperscalers…
Same with industrial automation, power grid, production management, etc. Most people don’t even realise how much critical software is Windows-only.
Just have companies get tax reductions if they use EU only software. Voila, it’s done within months - to the shock of every it- admin out there.
Yep. Money steers the decision making process. Politics determines how money works, and companies just go with the flow.
If they put all the effort they use to change things in favor of ai to migrate to software alternatives, it would be a perfectly viable project
Convincing CEOs is not our job. In general they have neither the obligation nor the habbit to take anything else other than their KPIs into consideration. Convincing elected polititians to legistlate is our job.
Some know already, some will bow to reason, many will do whatever keeps them elected. People will need to re-learn to play the long game.
I totally agree with you. Politics is the correct arena for this.
Those who work at the IT department of a company have some authority in this matter too, and they can convince the executives to channel the resources for the migration. If you’re in any other part of the organization tree, your words have less weight.
If laws are written first, and companies react after that, it’s not going to be a very smooth landing, but I still think this is the most likely outcome. Ideally, smart IT people in various companies would bring this up as a potential risk to daily operations. This way, companies would have more time to react before the laws are enforced.
My guess is, most executives won’t give any money to a migration project of this magnitude unless the future of the company depends on it. There needs to be some sort of impending doom in the horizon, before they start reacting. Maybe massive fines or a total collapse of the IT infrastructure would do it.
Sadly, besides the bottom line, the only universally relaible motivator for an organization is legislation.
If there’s a way around the legislation, they’ll definitely take it. If you know of an exploit in the system or if you’re best buddies with the local king, laws suddenly cease to matter.
It’ll help when governments stop accepting or just blocking links to onedrive and sharepoint, and file formats that are not open. Then companies are forced into using alternatives instead of just blindly using microsoft, or don’t work for any government project again.
Now there’s a business opportunity. When companies are that screwed, they’ll start the project immediately. That’s when system migration consults get rich.
Excel is the biggest hurdle to overcome. No other spreadsheet software comes close to providing the same amount of features and functionality.
So I keep hearing… Yet, I’m having a hard time believing that most people are even aware of those fancy features, let alone use any of them.
I accept that there are important models implemented as excel sheets. Reimplementing or even attempting to migrate away is viewed as risk. But this is a different argument.
Can confirm! Calc is fine as long as you’re not trying to do anything too advanced. Then again, when you bump into those limits, you might want to consider switching to R or Python anyway. Excel just allows you to delay that inevitability a little bit longer.
I mean, you can run python (or their own language “LibreOffice Basic”) from within a Libreoffice Calc sheet.
Calc’s scripting is actually more powerful than the aging VBA thing Excel uses for macros, imho.
Very interesting… I guess my calculations can be supercharged while still technically remaining in the realm of a spreadsheet.
Hopefully Python still runs with its usual consistency. VBA is a total nightmare in this regard. The code can randomly throw some useless error for no obvious reason. You can run the same code a few hours later and everything works perfectly even though you didn’t change anything. Can’t really use anything that unstable for anything serious.
This is the real thing of it. By the time you reach that you shouldn’t be using a damn spreadsheet program.
At least for greenfield set it up right now. There’s plenty of actual programs that do things theyre supposed to.
And a lot of people don’t need all those features.
This is the main problem, changing the infrastructure in companies which use Windows, Certainly Microsoft EU is way more privacy focused (forced by law) than Microsoft US which use even keyloggers and sharing data with Towerdata and a lot of others. But this, even so, companies and administrations use more and more alternatives to Windows apps and services The EU has tons of good and even better alternatives to those from US corps, it’s not a tecnical problem, but an political and burocratic one for companies and administrations to change, not so for the normal user, who can easily change his setup to his like from a huge catalogue of EU soft and services.
Likewise, climate change isn’t really a technological problem. Governments don’t motivate companies stop destroying the planet, so they don’t. Obviously, there are some technological issues too, but for the most part, it’s a political issue.
Please do, hurt these tech Oligarchs where it hurts!
