The State of Schleswig-Holstein Is Consistently Relying on Open Source

The sabotage scenario is perhaps less likely than the alternative scenario of industrial and political espionage.

There are also practical advantages: the ability to fix a bug in-house instead of waiting for a technology giant from another continent.

I agree, but it also feels like it would be so difficult. It requires a ton of training, the UIs are not flashy so people are going to feel repulsed (I unironically found looks to be a big blocker when adopting open source tech) and finally Microsoft is going to lobby incredibly hard against it. I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to actively sabotage any adoption.

Today when a government pushes for a backdoor we often see companies push back. The FBI publicly complained about iMessage encryption a lot, and currently Apple is also telling the government of India they aren’t going to install their “security” software… those are just a couple examples.

What happens when major OSS projects are controlled by the governments themselves? Will David still beat Goliath?

> I'm sure Microsoft, under orders from the U.S. government, could disable all computers in any country or organization, at the flick of a switch.

Where does this kind of conspiracy thinking come from?

Simple business incentives will tell you this is extremely, incredibly unlikely.

Microsoft is a for-profit corporation. If it ever used such a switch, customers would never trust it again, and its global sales would plummet. It would be corporate suicide.

In fact, such a "switch" is the kind of thing a corporation would make sure they didn't have, precisely so some future US administration could never pressure them into using it. Microsoft is a global corporation that doesn't want the US interfering with its money-making.

Indeed, the entire point of the big cloud companies offering "sovereign" clouds in Europe is precisely to guarantee to customers that the US government can't order them to do anything about them, because of the way the legal control structures are set up.

"the needs of most government bureaucracies would be well served by currently available OSS word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and graphics software."

wait until they found out that there is no "customer service" in OSS, sometimes the project is fine but people need "someone" to be held accountable in some ways

that's why a lot of OSS project never take flight

I doubt that Microsoft has a kill switch. Though through automatic updates they still have pretty strong sabotage capabilities.

But the OS is not where Microsofts power lies. Its in exchange (almost everywhere cloud managed, including for many governments) and SharePoint, with a small amount of teams, where Microsoft is truly a scary prospect for sovereignty.

Prudent to assume that the same is possible with Linux.

I feel like there should be an open project to manage and support this.

I think governance (both public and private) would benefit from open tools to manage communities at scale via technology.

Flicking that switch would be pretty much a one time deal. Not likely.

What would happen instead, and has happened in the past, is Microsoft (or juniper, etc) leaving a remote vulnerability unpatched while certain groups use that exploit. It's much more deniable. So deniable, that it's impossible to say for certain that it was intentional.

It's more practical to audit FOSS systems for bugs than a Microsoft solution, and the tools for doing so are open source and getting even better every day. Like you said, sharing the burden helps with cost: It also helps with the trust issue. Going one step further, formally verified software solutions are possible (and exist!). Good luck getting that from Microsoft, they ship a calculator that needs updates and internet access to run.

> Imagine how Open Source Software could improve if a consortium of nations put their money and resources into commissioning bug fixes and enhancements, which would be of collective benefit.

This is the business model of Quansight Labs, whose employees help maintain much of the scientific python stack. Mostly tech companies, not governments, sponsoring the work

Governments have more to gain from being able to work with a few big companies on things like surveillance than they do from sovereignty - which many of them regard as an out of date idea anyway.

Despite all the talk about sovereign cloud the actual governments are actually going the other way.

1. The Online Safety Act in the UK pushes people to use big tech more rather than run stuff independently - the forums that moved to social media. 2. EU regulatory requirements that help the incumbents:https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/27/cispe_eu_sovereignty_... 3. ID apps in multiple countries that require installs from Google or Apple stores, and only run on their platforms. 4. The push to cashless which means increased reliance on Visa, Mastercard, Apple and Google.

To be clear I do not not think that any of these things are in the public interest. However the government is not the public, and the public (and probably a lot of the government) has deeply ingrained learned helplessness about technology.

Similar opinion and source of income.

Linux for starters, however even that has too many US contributions.

In general, we need to go back to the cold war days, multiple OSes and programming languages governed by international standards, with local vendors.

If sovereignty is desired, it can't stop at Office packages.

I have a possibly strange take.

Isn't the code of law the original open source, for very good reason?

As law becomes more and more enforced by software, should it not all be required to be open source?

I find Onlyoffice to be the closest alternative. It presents itself as a hosted office platform but you can actually install it locally and it feels just like an office program.

It's not the most efficient, being effectively a webview. But its UI and compatibility is imho much better than LibreOffice.

https://www.onlyoffice.com/

The catch depends a lot on the context that you're considering. Trying to replace Microsoft Office as a whole by a drop-in replacement like LibreOffie may work better or worse depending on who uses it.

I've never used anything but OpenOffice / LibreOffice for writing academic texts in the humanities and never missed anything. The "catch" whenever I tried Microsoft Word was the menu that had the most important functions (for me) hidden away much deeper than in OO and LO.

I've never been a big user of Spreadsheets but I've heard only good of Excel and trust the widespread opinion that it is unchallenged in its domain. In sociology you wouldn't use it because you've got specialized statistics software such as R and SPSS (PSPP being an attempt at an Open Source Alternative to SPSS).

Looking at administration, Excel ist probably quite important but when you get rid of it, not one but various solutions might take its place, depending on who uses it. If you want something like a browseable database in a colorful table for office clerks, LO Calc might be enough. But the things Excel gets praised for a lot (I never know what exactly people mean) would probably have to be tackled another way.

Governments going down that need to invest into finding those solutions by providing staff that is qualified to find them or even develop them. The state of Schleswig-Holstein considered in its Open Source initiative strategy that it may be challenged by a future legislation and put a focus on the reasons for acceptance of Open Source solutions. I wonder if that is put into action well to find solutions with the least "catch" that may even excel over Microsoft products depending on their context :)

what are your use cases and what's your scripting knowledge?

there is some information in the following article:

https://euro-stack.com/blog/2025/3/schleswig-holstein-open-s...

Are we gonna accept being forever locked in to Microsoft because of custom Excel workbook formulas? Forever paying Microsoft a license fee, because we don't want to covert said formulas or invest in open source software to make it reach parity with Excel.

Will you get upset if Microsoft will charge 500000000 USD (because more copilot value added every month) per year? That is way more upsetting imho. And if all fails there is still some SAP solution to everything in life :P

I must agree, unfortunately, and do so due to a reason that's way more mundane than "custom formulas": UI.

Language, form, muscle memory (call it what you will) is difficult to separate from thinking and working. I'm very picky when it comes to desktop UI: I use Linux exclusively, and I can't tolerate most Linux distros' default desktop environments. Someone who's been productive for a decade or more with Windows applications -- well, to the extent we're willing to ascribe "UI stability" to those applications' own updates -- will probably hate Linux with a passion.

I don't think such a transition can be made seamless. They should have thought about becoming Microsoft's hostage two decades ago (I guess).

In that case, keep your MS license where there is a migration problem, simple as that. There is no need for the entire gov sector to pay so you and your team can use custom formulas.

Formulas exist in other software too. LibreOffice has better compatibility with older Excel files than MS Excel itself.

When you migrate anyway you could choose that to use a proper database and SQL if that makes sense instead.

Arriving first (ye ye Lotus 1-2-3 existed we know) and early extreme lobbyism sure stands strong.

> We've been seeing variations of the same article every week.

Time has come. Over the last few years there is more and more interest from goverments and private organizations to have relieable software that does not depend of foreign entities. Software sovereignty is becoming a necesity rather than a nice to have for both nations and enterprises.

> Excel, in particular, hasn't been unseated despite billions in investments from competitors over the years.

Excel, like many other technologies in the past can be disrupted. Like mane other commenters say, it won't come cheap. Saving costs shouldn't be the the goal here.

> Parity will happen someday, but it's at least a decade away.

Challenge accepted!

Munich seems to have become the preferred destination for US companies opening their German office (most recent: OpenAI, Notion, Anthropic).

So if Microsoft would have paved that way, it would have been totally worth it for the city.

- Sir, can we bribe you?

- Of course, of course.

Back then Microsoft was lobbying as hard as they could to turn that decision to move to linux over.

They knew: If Linux makes it in Munich, it will likely spread over and they loose tons of contracts with other German states.

There is probably some (or even much) truth to it but it needs to pointed out that this statement comes from the political opposition and is therefore somewhat biased against this project.

It's not ideology. The US has started sanctioning European judges who serve on international courts, causing Microsoft to cut off access to its services.

Given that the US has shown it's willing to wield sanctions as a blunt instrument against anyone and everyone, it's only prudent for European countries to reduce their exposure to US tech.

"Somebody needs to put a lot of $$$$ into the project"

and that's the problem, people wouldn't invest that much into project no one use

I've been using LibreOffice Calc and Writer for years. I've used Microsoft Office Excel and Word, too.

I can't say I've ever suffered from my choices or that I missed any features. As for "polish" - that's subjective, isn't it? I can access all the features I want quickly and efficiently. It's a tool, after all.

There are some minor bugs with Calc that I'd rate 2/10 in importance - annoyances mostly. I haven't used Excel in a while, but it had annoyances, too.

But even if Microsoft Office is more polished and feature-rich, I still think that the trade-off is worth it - we get data and software sovereignty, privacy and cost savings. The workers need to relearn how to access feature X in the menu or how to live without feature Y.

I don't necessarily disagree with "Libreoffice is junk" but that's not actually a problem, or all the problem. As the article has stated, 80% of the licenses were dropped, while 20% of the use cases continue to be supported by Microsoft Office. To me that is already a big win compared to 100% Microsoft Office.

You see, most Office users are not heavy/expert users and they only occasionally need the basic features that exist everywhere and do good enough of a job. I personally have only used Word maybe 3 times over the past few years, because almost all work documents live elsewhere, while Google Docs is good enough for my personal word processing needs (which could probably be done with Libreoffice as well).

Imagine every company starts to evaluate how many employees actually need Microsoft Office, and then drop licenses for those who would be ok with Libreoffice or nothing at all. Microsoft would be shitting their pants.

It's 2025, maybe instead we can finally stop trying to emulate letters from the 1980s? If your business process today involves Word, you need to be retired so someone can come in that understands what computers are.

I really don’t get why there’s always this group of people who feel the need to constantly manage everything for others—like sysadmins, for example. Sure, there are valid scenarios where management makes sense, like printing or shared drives, but most of the stuff is just over the top. As a developer, I’m sick of all the constant restrictions—broken VPNs, stealth monitoring, and antivirus software that slows everything down. These "security measures" are supposed to help, but they just kill performance and cause frustration. At the end of the day, I just want my system to work smoothly without constant interference.

This is my concern with all those "success" stories about Linux as an enterprise desktop OS. Run it for 10 years and show me the actual cost savings/improved productivity.

Microsoft is trash and is getting worse day by day, but at the very least it's the same trash everyone has to deal with, so people mostly got used to the smell, and you can get economies of scale in tools used to deal with said smell. MS is trash because of incompetence.

Linux is dozens of different flavors of trash, so you don't even get economies of scale dealing with it. It's trash because of ideology - the people involved would often reject the functionality you mentioned for ideological reasons, and even for those who do accept them, won't agree on the implementation meaning you now have a dozen of different flavors, and will take up arms if someone tries to unify things (just look at the reaction to systemd).

Linux works well for careers where shoveling trash is already part of your work, in which case all the effort doubles as training for the job and experience makes this a non-issue. But for non-IT careers where the computer is just a tool that is expected to work properly, it's nowhere near there, and will never get there because everyone's instead arguing on the definition of "there" and which mode of transportation to use getting there.

I think this comes primarily from trying to add a separate management tool on top, instead of leveraging the OS structure themself. There is a reason, why most directories are specified to be readonly. Also writable XOR persistent is mostly true. The only things required to be writable are /tmp, /var and /home. /tmp is wiped at least on every boot or is even just a ramdisk. /var can be cached or reset to the predefined settings on boot. /home needs to be managed, that is true. But you wouldn't want every users directory on every host anyway, instead you want to populate them on login. That is typically done by libpam.

/usr is expected to be shared among hosts, host-specific stuff goes into /usr/local for a reason, and as a sysadmin you can decide to simply not have host specific software.

EDR/AV is basically unnecessary, when you only mount things either writable or executable. And you don't want the users to start random software or mount random USB-sticks anyway.

> Back then it was like nobody who had ever actually been a sysadmin had ever taken an honest crack at Linux and all the hype was coming from home users who had no idea what herding boxen was actually like.

Unix has over 50 years of history of being primarily managed by sysadmins instead of home users. While Linux is not Unix, it has inherited a lot. The whole system is basically designed to run a bunch of admin configured software and is actually less suitable for home users. I would say the primary problem was accessing it with a Windows mindset.

AFAIK they use Open-Xchange, Univention Corporate Server and other specialized (maybe customized?) an open solutions for telephony, interoperability and other tasks.

https://euro-stack.com/blog/2025/3/schleswig-holstein-open-s...

I would disagree with you both about the past and the present and what's "janky", but - that's actually beside the point:

LibreOffice works just fine on _Windows_ - and that's what the majority of its users are running.

So, Schleswig-Holstein can switch to Linux, or not switch, or let specific agencies or individuals choose.

The political climate is completely different. The US is no longer an ally but a fascist regime actively supporting far right and nazi movements in Germany. What made sense 8 years ago probably doesn’t make sense today.

The idea is sound but the feeling of hate is perhaps strong. It’s understandable there’s no incentive to pay for open source software, and doing so would be seen as an unnecessary allocation of resources that could better be allocated elsewhere.

Given this understanding, the best away to achieve the desired outcome is to get creative about aligning incentives at the top of org structures where resources are allocated.

That's a really good point actually. If you're self hosting, you're already eating some cost by having people, probably in-house, doing the work but the price difference must be quite large and they should use it to support the project.

I hope those are not mutually exclusive actions. Switching and contributing may be on the Schleswig-Holstein Administration's agenda.