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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Excel is the biggest hurdle to overcome. No other spreadsheet software comes close to providing the same amount of features and functionality.

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?

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."

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.

Given they broke their own procurement laws to choose US tech companies for their cloud infrastructure its definitely silly.

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.

thrirha klha mmkdn mmkn

i'm currently learning arabic. did i get your name right?

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.

Not Bavaria 🙄

You know how there's theory and practice?

I think you misread it. "Private", as in "privacy".

Proton is leaving Switzerland afaik, to operate in the EU. You’re not wrong about the shit the EU is trying to pull with mass surveillance and de-anonymization. Yeae fornyear it geta struck down by courts, but the fuckers try and try.

i'm sorry you have a typo, "the west" is not written "the globe"

Sure it is. It's the US that's not ready for what it will cost...

France is switching from Microsoft Office to Libre Office right now for government employees, and it's saving them money in licensing fees.

Once the transition is finished, they're projected to save millions each year from just that switch

Europe is not ready for what that will cost.

True. But it will be okay. They can find somewhere else to spend all the money they save.

I'd say the priority should be to have hardware that allows changing the os, just like pcs. We already have a lot of functional mobile OSes, but with locked hardware, we're still stuck with google and apple

Start by introducing a viable smartphone OS

Damn funny me thinking about Symbian and the fallen empires of Nokia and Ericsson, now that the ball is in EU's court as enshittification consumes America and the Chinese government likes to have its presence in nearly every device ever made from the Middle Kingdom.

Graphene and e/OS exist.

Problem with Graphene is the limitation of hardware to Pixel due to manufacturers.

e/OS is good, but the missing killer app for me is contactless payment. Which brings Europe back to the Visa/MC problem. Digital Euro could fix this.

You would have the same trouble Microsoft did though. No one wanted to use the Windows mobile because there were no apps for it, and there were no apps for it because no developers wanted to develop for a platform with no users. Chicken and the egg.

It would be nice to have a smartphone that was just web-based and didn't really have apps, but I think that ship has sailed, people are just used to the concept and I think they would think of it as a step backwards if they had a phone that didn't use apps.

Not even sure there is that much will on politicians side. I hope there is, but they are mostly ignorant (judging from politicians in my country) and wouldn't distinguish between Word and Windows. They might be interested if there are elections and public pushes for it. But once elected then it's another song based on US stick and carrot. Mostly sticks from this administration. But I really do hope we start to move and now is the best time possible. Also recently there was data that German Federal Administration is paying Microsoft something like:

2023: 274.091.361,75 Euro
2024: 347.665.579,71 Euro
2025: 481.369.660,77 Euro

The trend is not encouraging, isn't it, and those are insane numbers - imagine what could we have for that amount with OSS. There is another neglected area - computer education in elementary school is practically non-existent and tiny-existent in middle school in my country while MS is subsidizing software for government and specially education sector. And so the circle of is closed.

Billionaires or no billionaires, I dont want my data in the US

i stopped reading when i saw that

It's not ready, it's got a long way to go.