They should consider LibreOffice if they don’t need cloud features.

Thing is, cloud features are very good for being productivity. And also for minimising mistakes, because you dont have multiple copies.

Long before clouds was a thing we had servers and local networks and shared drives. We still have servers and private vpns to connect to them to access shard drives.

But we used to have them too.

Sure, and maybe even some kind of suvversion system could lock one user out while the other is doing work, to avoid the kinds of conflicts that we’re talking about here.

All of that is a hard sell versus the experience of dropping into a document and seeing three cursors all entering data collaboratively, a la Google Sheets.

And I’m writing this to someone that’s trying to make myself at home using Grid raft, the vibecoded AI Slop Excel. If I had to share documents mid-production with anyone else at all, I would need something cloud-based.

I agree. “The cloud” is just the same shit but someone else is running it and it has a web based UI. There’s also ways to make libreoffice collaborative too hiw m365 office is. We don’t need it.

I called this over a decade ago. Embrace, extend, extinguish, now all the prices hike what seems like quarterly or biannually. Such a joke.

My org has been trying to shut off “the zed drive” (network mount) for like a decade and staff still hate Onedrive. If it was actually better, why would staff resist using it so much?

I 100% agree. But it didnt work like it does today.

You could not collab, because the software wasnt build to take advantage of shared drives, which will bring back all the following issues as before.

Best case is open source software with the same funtionality as Docs or Word, but you can hook it up to any servers at setup.

Build a Wireguard VPN inside the programs for making it just as easy for the masses to use them.

I dont want the “cloud”. I just want the same productivity.

There use to schemes to provide flexible locking to allow multiple people to edit documents located on the same local network. Never liked it nuch but others did. I expect that it is possible to develop and achieve shared documents and concurrent editing etc without Google. Maybe dust off old concepts etc.

The copies of same excel with a bit of change by different users on my sharepoint site disagrees.

Just use OVH cloud or some other EU one, what do you think?

Have you ever had a job where everyone relies on local spreadsheets?

Yes. It sucked. The last person always left a filter on.

Every organization seems to over-use spreadsheets. Fortunately, most people really do utilize a small feature set.

They can consider LibreOffice if they need cloud features, with collabora and nextcloud.

It’s way more complicated to deploy rather than just paying $60/user/month for Microsoft 365 E5, but nextcloud and collabora sell commerciale support, others sell managed instances, Germany is selling opendesk as a saas, and al on

Europe is making their own online suite Euro Office based on Only Office

FUSE mounts are a thing…

Now if they also directed the license cost savings back toward funding their newly chosen oss projects, we’d be golden.

Imagine. Companies that instead pay X amount pay X*.25 or something. Small cost for the business compared to Microsoft and huge boost in revenue to improve OSS.

Even just a one-time monthly payment equivalent would be massive. I’ve seen companies that spend well over 60k a month on microsoft licenses.

B-but a study funded by CCIA Europe (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta…) says EU cloud sovereignty rules would cost Europe up to €233 billion. (Conveniently, it doesn’t count the benefits of not depending on them.)

So considerate of them, worrying about our wallets out of pure altruism.

The general message I hear among enterprise architects is that there’s a price for IT sovereignty.
But that it’s a price worth paying.

I question if the price is really higher, once the transition costs are paid. Those cloud services by US big tech ain’t cheap and are highky profitable.

The price could be in costs, but it could also be in reduced functionality.
A standard response that a lot of Microsoft trained IT ops people give is that the other products are inferior, harder to use, require more administration, etc. And it used to be that this would shut down a lot of discussions about moving away from MS.

But the message I hear nowadays is that this will be a price worth paying, and that disarms a lot of the usual naysayers.

Given the degrading quality of Microsoft products, I would not blindly believe statements that alternative options are rrally worse.

I’m not disagreeing with you on that :)
Personally I’ve been arguing for less Microsoft dependence within my organization for years, and have quietly been doing what I can without without making it too obvious.

In any case, my point is that counter-arguments like reduction in functionality, increase in expenditure, and so forth, no longer hold the same weight like they used to.
Here in the Netherlands, there’s been a much stronger mandate given from top-down to look for more sovereignty. Because the risks that come with the alternative are becoming more clear with every passing month.

That is certainly the case. The big hurdle and investment is the transition. Once everything is up and runnung and mostly walked in, I would not be surprised if costs were lower while the software implementaion being actually better tailored to the specific needs. But it is not easy to get there and there are risks of course.

A price for switching.

Then it’s simpler and cheaper.

It’s even cheaper hardware wise in many cases.

I imagine most of those costs are probably redirected to implementation at first.

The Cyber Resiliance Act might actually do that. Because paying for support contracts covering every little piece of free software will be cheaper than the fines.

More of this please!!!

The switchover’s been ongoing for years as some European governments have moved to Linux, and are going for FOSS for their operations.

I wonder if the tech companies will realize their bending to Trump is going to shoot them in the ass

Satya sure won’t. See his latest post on the super intelligence era.

No, it is not. They still get billions of American taxpayer money

De-dollarization is already happening. President Shits-his-pants is accelerating that.

They’re going to lose the rest of the world, but to Trump and many of his supporters, the rest of the world doesn’t matter and barely exists. Except for Russia which Trump seems to love somehow.

They don’t care about that, they only care about keeping their wealth tax free.

I agree. Digital sovereignty is important for the EU. The less we are in the pocket of the US the better.

Digital anarchy is important for the regular people. The more you take technology in your own hands, the less you are at the whims of centralised services.

Digital anarchy is important for the regular people

https://www.coryd.dev/posts/2026/become-worthless-to-tech-companies

Reading down those actions and it turns out I’m already doing most of those things.

Right on! Just thought I would pass it on in the spirit of your statement. There are so many things we can do.

First time I have seen “digital anarchy” and I love it. Except it sounds like a punk-techno band. Lol.

Microslop is a security risk. An OS with a backdoor isn’t useful for anything but gaming.

Why would you want a backdoor on the OS of your gaming machine?

I don’t and it sounds like I might not have to soon. Mslop had us by the balls for long enough.

Oh what did I miss there?

fartknife/ easyanticheat will have support for signed linux kernels with tpm, secure boot and iommu

Some anticheat systems require a backdoor. If those are games you want to play, you have to submit to it. Personally I see it as a reason to avoid those games, but if you really want to play them, you may not have a choice. Apart from pressuring the publisher to support saner anticheat and Linux.

It’s not the OS, only microsoft 365

Only because changing the OS compared to stopping a transition to an insecure Microsift cloud service is a much greater task, one that is in progress as well.

You don’t need no windows for no gaming, this isn’t 2015 jesus

I know, but I still do classes and they require you use garbage software. Eventually I’ll get it sorted out.

I feel your pain. Hang in there!

Thanks!

It might be worth checking if there’s really no alternative. I intend to do that for my son; his school requires Windows, but he’s starting to get increasingly annoyed by Windows (his laptop has Win11) so I want to check with the school why exactly Windows is so essential. Presumably, most is Web, so will work just fine on Linux. Specific software may have a Linux version, run fine on Wine, or have an open source alternative.

I know and for the most part that’s how it is. Some of the classes still want to use Respond-ass. Which I just end up going to the school library for. If I have to use Win11, I will just run a VM. That OS has been a nightmare.

Strange question perhaps – but is open source/linux supported tax filing software available where you are?

I haven’t found any that run reliably outside of Microsoft so far in Canada – tend to use a windows vm specifically for it, but it’s an example of software outside of gaming that’s pretty handy, and not typically easy to get / trust on linux yet as far as I’m aware.

I would assume your tax system works differently. I wanted to move to Canada since I have skills to contribute. But I live the greatest country on the earth, the U Ass of A (/s borat joke.)

Anyway, there is a simple free option for those that make under a certain amount; most people have w2 forms so those are pretty much automated; as in your employer already submitted them. But then comes in tax exemptions.

So then it gets more complicated because you don’t want to be paying the same tax in multiple ways. For instance, you pay a local tax and then pay a federal tax on your income. I don’t have an issue with taxes going to the right place, which is often not the case here.

I always pay the taxes whenever I’m in other countries even though I could get an exemption but I don’t think that’s right. I get the privilege of going somewhere then I should pay what everyone else pays and besides you don’t have to tip -_-

So taxes are complicated here if you’re outside of the norm. The amount of different forms I had to file before I quit my latest job was a job in itself, add in a death in the family and it’s even more complicated. Like it took months, with a delay, to sort out all off this. And it sucks, if you don’t do it right you end up with everything taken away.

Like you, I’m interested in some open source software.

I’m thinking that this step in life(quitting what I was doing) is a good choice because I’m tired. Yeah I can charge 100+ an hour but doing the math for the year, I really should work at a grocery store.

USA just switched off starlink in Ukraine. They blocked Microsoft accounts and visa cards from ICC members. You can’t rely on USA tech. It’s got a killswitch and a madman ready to push the button.

yeah we dutchies got our own killswitches and madmen ready to push the button

That’s the idea, you figured it out, bravo!! 👏🏼👏🏼

And you americans, go out there and vote Democrat, you can do politics in third parties later if you have a country left after the election.

And you americans, go out there and vote Democrat*, you can do politics in third parties later if you have a country left after the election.

*Vote as far left as possible in the Democrat primaries too or it’s all for nothing.

4 months too late my man

Democrats there are of the same capital class though.

So tired of this tankie shit

It’s true, but try this:

• defeat the bigger evil first
• then defeat the smaller evil
• ???
• communism (or whatever it is you want)

You have to start shifting the Overton Window from somewhere.

Diversification helps here. Being able to switch service providers easy and quickly is best for users.

At the moment it’s good for Europeans to focus on domestic services, but in the long run our laws and governments may also turn more oppressive, so having many different reliable alternatives is the recipe for a free and empowered society.

Iris2 can’t go online early enough. There is Govsatcom now at least, as a crutch, to bridge the time until the basic Iris2 service can begin in 2030.

Just imagine Europe would have listened to the strong SpaceX fan crowd that called Ariane 6 a waste of money, because it costs some millions more per launch.

And can you remember the storm against Galileo when the crowd called it an epic waste of money (the domestic Putin front does to this day for mysterious reasons), when already have the US military run GPS?

GVD JA!!!

Laat ze maaris iets zien noorderburen! Hup holland hup!

Oh my God! How are they going to work without MS Teams?

I love using MS Teams, because I hate getting work done.

who needs that shit anyone? work is about the community and MS Teams is all about the community!

Exactly, just think about all the networking you can do with teams so we all can grow together as one big family.

Oh my god, how were they supposed to work WITH MS teams?

It’s always nice to see Microsoft get kicked in the balls.

Especially after they lobbied/bribed the ISO committee into approving the broken and closed-source OOXML as if it was an open standard

What do you mean, the Office Open Extensible Markup Language isn’t open source? That’s nonsense! Next, you’ll tell me OpenAI is some sort of opaque stock market scam.

Ther’s only two things I hate in this world, people who are intolerant of other people’s cultures, and the… no, wait! I love the Dutch!

The detail that stands out to me is that this was the tax authority specifically — the institution with the most sensitive possible data trove deciding the sovereignty question matters more than the migration roadmap. That’s a different calculus than a regular ministry would make.

The DPA precedent probably weighed in too. The Dutch data protection authority has been aggressive on exactly this (the Schrems II follow-throughs, the earlier government guidance against US cloud for personal data). Once your regulator has signaled the position, staying the course turns a technical decision into a legal exposure.

One of those changes that requires and entire generation of workers to retire… <cough> boomers <cough>

Until that happens, they stand in the way of change. After they are put out to pasture, change occurs at a normal pace, according to logic and reason, as it always should. Even in normal times.

I expect to see a lot of shifts in things as the boomers finally begin to die off. Medical advances are extending their lives to freakish extremes, but so far not one of them has proven to be immortal. .

I worked at a health company as a manager and was told not to electronize records keeping because they couldn’t afford to hire computer literate people for the grunt work. I was told to use whiteboards and laminated printouts.

Get me out of this fucking shithole USA…

scary thought

Kudos to the Netherlands, the Oranje made the correct decision.

At first I thought you meant that “the Orange” (i.e. Donald) made the correct decision into ruining the US so much that the Dutch autorithies decided to ditch Office. lol

As someone whose job just switched to D365… It’s been a nightmare.