Denmark's digital affairs ministry says it plans to switch to the open source LibreOffice software and away from Microsoft products as part of an effort to make the government more digitally…
Denmark’s tech modernization agency plans to replace Microsoft products with open-source software to reduce dependence on U.S. tech firms.
In an interview with the local newspaper Politiken, Danish Minister for Digitalisation Caroline Stage Olsen confirmed that over half of the ministry’s staff will switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice next month, with a full transition to open-source software by the end of the year.
“If everything goes as expected, all employees will be on an open-source solution during the autumn,” Politiken reported, quoting Stage. The move would also help the ministry avoid the expense of managing outdated Windows 10 systems, which will lose official support in October.
LibreOffice, developed by the Berlin-based non-profit organization The Document Foundation, is available for Windows, macOS, and is the default office suite on many Linux systems. The suite includes tools for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, vector graphics, databases, and formula editing. Stage said that the ministry could revert to Microsoft products if the transition proves too complex.
Microsoft had not responded to Recorded Future News' request for comment as of Friday morning, Eastern U.S. time.
The ministry’s decision follows similar moves by Denmark’s two largest municipalities, Copenhagen and Aarhus, which previously announced plans to abandon Microsoft software, citing financial concerns, market dominance and political tensions with Washington. Proponents refer to the process as moving toward “digital sovereignty.”
Henrik Appel Espersen, chair of Copenhagen’s audit committee, told Politiken the move was driven by cost concerns and Microsoft’s strong grip on the market. He also cited tensions between the U.S. and Denmark during Donald Trump’s presidency, which sparked debate about data protection and reducing reliance on foreign technology.
The shift comes amid a wider European trend toward digital independence. This week, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein said that local government agencies will abandon Microsoft Office tools such as Word and Excel in favor of LibreOffice, while Open-Xchange will replace Microsoft Outlook for email and calendar functions. The state plans to complete the shift by migrating to the Linux operating system in the coming years.
Schleswig-Holstein first announced its decision to abandon Microsoft last April, saying it would be “the first state to introduce a digitally sovereign IT workplace.” “Independent, sustainable, secure: Schleswig-Holstein will be a digital pioneer region,” the state’s Minister-President said at the time.
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I work in software development for Danish hospitals, and some regions already used OpenOffice, now libre office, for .. well over 15 years. At least in parts.
We integrate with an API into libreoffice, and it more or less did not change in well over a decade. But sometimes libreoffice crashes and you can't figure out why. There are just no logs. It feels like a black box at times.
But I don't think they will be switching away from Teams as quickly. Will be interesting for sure.
Slightly off topic, but does anyone know why libreoffice stopped publishing artefacts to mvn repo? https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.libreoffice/libreoffi...
LibreOffice release builds should offer to send a crash report. Ideally, you should then create a bug report referencing the crash report. Besides that, you can do your own build with debug symbols and get backtraces or debug the program.
At The Document Foundation we are always interested in helping deployments. It is also nice to do writeups for our blog. Let me know, if your organisation needs help: ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org
I recommend to consider our certification program: https://www.documentfoundation.org/certification-program/
I asked about the Maven artifacts and our release engineer will update them later this week.
> you should then create a bug report referencing the crash report
Reducing friction would be nice here - I don't remember encountering the crash log screen, but if you could file a bug report right from that screen, that'd be perfect. A lot of information can be pre-collected at that stage - precise version, build, OS, architecture, processor type, etc. All that'd be left is the "What I was trying to do", my e-mail, and a checkbox if I agree with the privacy policies and if I want to receive e-mail updates about this bug report.
> you can do your own build with debug symbols
It'd be great if the Document Foundation helped distros to offer libreoffice-*-debug packages for this case - if it's crashing for you, install the debug version and your crash logs will be a lot easier to read.
> if you could file a bug report right from that screen, that'd be perfect
You can file a bug report from a crash report - it prefills all the relevant data. See an example crash report: https://crashreport.libreoffice.org/stats/crash_details/bac2...
"Bug reports for libc.so.6:
File a bug for: Calc Writer Impress Chart Base"
Here is what the dialog says about bug reports: https://git.libreoffice.org/core/+/master/svx/uiconfig/ui/cr...
> It'd be great if the Document Foundation helped distros to offer libreoffice-*-debug packages for this case
I believe most distros have this covered now, some by making use of debuginfod, which downloads symbols on demand: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Debuginfod
By rbanffy 2026-02-2614:52 Thank you. This is all awesome work. BTW, I didn't know debuginfod existed :-)
Why does libreoffice have such an annoying document recovery mechanism that I can't turn off or modify? It takes like three clicks to cancel that process every time I open a new doc
Have you deactivated Tools - Options - Load/Save - General: Save AutoRecovery information...?
Yes. It still operates after that if I open a document that I didn't shutdown correctly. Many times I just open documents to take temp notes. and some times I shutdown the application with out saving and that document recovery process starts no matter what.
By buovjaga 2026-02-2710:18 There is this command line option that you could add to your shortcut for launching LibreOffice: --norestore
It will skip the recovery dialog. I use it often when doing QA.
I think if we're to move to away from these US products to open source ones, then governments should also provide resources or funding to develop them using the licensing fees they save. Is the Danish government contributing back to libreoffice?
By hermanzegerman 2026-02-2512:581 reply The German State of Schleswig Holstein does
https://euro-stack.com/blog/2025/3/schleswig-holstein-open-s...
By wolvoleo 2026-02-2513:37 There's a lot more than just one municipality. The French government uses a lot of open source and is actively working on la suite.. The gendarmerie has been on Linux for years. Nato is using matrix (noteworthy especially because America is of course part of that)
https://element.io/en/case-studies/nato https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
By toomuchtodo 2026-02-2519:44 Indeed, take what you're paying US Big Tech and direct it to domestic EU enterprises, corporate or non profit.
By trinsic2 2026-02-2612:07 Agreed. There should be some structure setup for open source projects to request contribution fees. Having stuff like this in plain sight might help orgs play nice.
By staticlibs 2026-02-2513:01 > sometimes libreoffice crashes and you can't figure out why > why libreoffice stopped publishing artefacts to mvn repo
I think both questions would be a perfect fit for the paid support bugtracker of LibreOffice maintainers. Hopefully paid by some hospital funds that are not spent on MS Office licenses.
Switching from Word/Excel to LibreOffice is comparably easy. A lot of other Microsoft Products are much harder to get rid of.
I've never seen a European corporation that doesn't do user management with ActiveDirectory. Some still have it on their own Windows servers, but most browser based applications still go through Entra (Azure Cloud based AD). Just shut off their Entra/AAD and most of their software is blocked because nobody can log in.
This is the elephant in the room that most comments on this page miss. Office may be hard to replace, Teams maybe even harder, but the real pain comes when you touch identity and access management. The usual initial optimism that "yeah but [insert solution name here] does this, problem solved" dissolves very fast as you start going through the inventory of requirements for managing users, devices, authentication, etc.
It's not just the technical hurdle which maybe you'll whip your admins into finding workarounds (-keep praying that your admins don't leave because it will be painful to find replacements who understand and can maintain the spaghetti pasta monster your infra ended up being-). In overall non-technical organizations the user experience always ends up hobbled even just by asking people to keep track of multiple identities.
MS is still entrenched because they give a turnkey solution with Eeeeeverything™ and your CTO doesn't need to struggle with any uncertainty. SaaS made it so easy to just "outsource" everything to MS, they'll be responsible and accountable for operations, infra, security, processes, etc. Even less headache for your C-level people. See no evil, hear no evil, you pay MS to take the shit and your job is safe. If you throw a stone out the window you'll hit someone with general "MS administration" skills. And users are usually familiar with MS tools, Windows, Office, so they aren't bothered (you hear a lot of complaints about Teams on HN but not so much from normal users). So this covers the tech, the skills, and the UX.
By ExoticPearTree 2026-02-2610:412 reply > Office may be hard to replace, Teams maybe even harder.
It actually depends how you use it. If you use the shared online collaboration features (concurrent editing for example) it might be pretty hard since I do not know any other solution besides Google Workspace that can do that.
And Excel standalone I think is the hardest to replace if you have lots of macros with business logic inside them.
For Teams, as long as you use it for conferencing and chat (no file sharing or editing), you can replace it with Slack or whatever other solution might exist that has some feature parity.
IAM can stay MS, as it is a pretty battle tested solution on-prem and in the cloud. Or you move to something like Okta with a LDAP like backend where you manage users and groups.
> IAM can stay MS
That's leaving the most critical component still with a US company. Doesn't fly if the goal is what the Danish agency is trying to achieve.
> It actually depends how you use it.
Obviously but the larger the company, the more ways to use it, and one of those ways will be a nightmare to tackle. You want one solution, not a patchwork. So the one that does everything gets picked. MS throws everything and the kitchen sink in their ecosystem to fit every need even if sometimes at mediocre or crappy quality.
> For Teams, as long as you use it for conferencing and chat (no file sharing or editing), you can replace it with Slack
Taken in isolation you're right. But in a world of network effects every company, supplier, service provider you work with might use Teams and you can federate. Switch to Slack alone and you make your life harder.
I mentioned this in another comment, if protocols and formats were mandated to be open or interoperable (in practice) to allow usage in the public sector, replacing MS would be a notch or 2 simpler.
By ExoticPearTree 2026-02-2612:311 reply > That's leaving the most critical component still with a US company. Doesn't fly if the goal is what the Danish agency is trying to achieve.
Yes, because it is very hard to replace. I said that you could move to Okta or something similar (in this or in another comment), but this requires you have pretty modern apps that can integrate with SAML/OAuth/OIDC.
And, even staying with MS for a few more years while you migrate IAM to something else is not as bad as having the full Office stack. You can't just yank out everything overnight - I mean you could, but you have to spend a ton of money to have a 1:1 solution from the get-go.
By close04 2026-02-2613:04 > You can't just yank out everything overnight
Yeah, it's that transition period - "it's going to get worse before it gets any better" - that hurts the most and that everyone tries to avoid.
> IAM can stay MS
The idea is to move critical parts away from US companies.
The US shows hostility towards Europe, even threatened a military attack. So the goal is now to remove as much dependence as possible.
To claim Microsoft is a company and doesn't have to follow US government order is naive. US government is now routinely breaking the law, if they threaten Europe with military action, they can also threaten Microsoft with military/police action.
By andix 2026-02-2610:45 Exactly. And if identity and access management is turned off, then nothing works anymore.
In the past there was a lot of Software directly installed to user's PCs and might have been authenticated without SSO. Also log in to a PC often works without identity management (cached credentials). But nowadays nearly everything is somehow in the browser and requires SSO.
By dijit 2026-02-2520:40 Agreed, and even things like Keycloak/FreeIPA are only partial solutions.
FreeIPA in particular is a beast to maintain, it puts kubernetes-cowboys to shame.
By flopsamjetsam 2026-02-2521:423 reply > But I don't think they will be switching away from Teams as quickly.
I'm interested to know why Teams is so sticky for the team. Are there not good replacements available? I've used it a little, but am by no means a power user.
By close04 2026-02-2610:49 On top of what sibling comment says, Teams benefits from other network effects. If all your partners use Teams and the federation is a enabled, next time you consider a replacement that can do all of this, the bar will be that much higher to find a suitable alternative.
If an inter-operable protocols were enforced by some regulation it would alleviate the situation a bit.
By trinsic2 2026-02-2612:22 It's buggy as hell. That's one thing. But they rolled teams out with office anti-competitively to lock orgs in and on that premise it should be abandoned. Market saturation by a company that is contributing to an authoritarian government by way of anti-competition needs to be black listed everywhere.
By wiredpancake 2026-02-2522:57 Because 'Teams' isn't just a simple meeting application. It's very feature rich. If you ever have to deal with the admin.teams.microsoft portal you'll know how many options and toggles it has.
Alongside this many businesses deploy 'Teams Supported' or 'Teams Enabled' devices into meeting and conference rooms. Yealink is a popular brand, they don't have baked in support for LibreMeet or whatever meeting products exist.
By trinsic2 2026-02-2612:04 Did you try running Libra office from command line to see the console output?
By PeterStuer 2026-02-2622:18 Could you expand on the Teams remark? What exactly is the lock=in?
By rambojohnson 2026-02-2513:3411 reply Europe’s reading the room and building exits. They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term bet. Wero, the digital euro, local infrastructure, all of it points to the same thing: financial sovereignty matters when America looks more like a geopolitical liability.
my read is that 2026 to 2027 is basically Europe saying, "we should probably stop wiring the house through a burning building." Payments, cloud, office software, data infrastructure, all of it.
so Denmark moving to cut Microsoft dependence in the name of digital independence is basically the same story. When the US starts looking less like stable infrastructure and more like a chaotic landlord, everyone starts building their own exits.
By trinsic2 2026-02-2612:27 I'm really glad Europe is making these changes. We have an authoritarian government that needs to go down in flames. The more pressure this puts on everyone to stop using centralized anti-competitive products the better off we all are.
> to a declining, unstable empire
It's funny that we've wrapped the clock all the way around and people don't see Europe as the declining and unstable empires anymore.
> less like stable infrastructure
It's perfectly stable. The news makes a lot of money generating interesting in overstating this problem. The supreme court is designed for national stability. It is doing it's job. It just doesn't act _instantly_, and if you're aiming for actual stability, you don't want it to.
By trinsic2 2026-02-2612:37 > The supreme court is designed for national stability.
lol my ass. We have a corrupt Adminstration with a corrupt Supreme Court. The only thing it's doing is making people less safe to enrich the people at the top. This kind of response is embarrassing.
By bean469 2026-02-279:22 > The supreme court is designed for national stability.
On the contrary, I think that many of the rulings during this administration caused a lot of uncertainty among lawmakers
I'm not sure conflating US corporations and the US government is really logical. Microsoft isn't a startup from the US, it's a worldwide corporation. Same with Visa/Mastercard and others. Whatever buffoonery happens in the White House doesn't really get reflected out across US based organizations. It's like being worried about Siemens stability during a German economic downturn or political upset.
I think this has much more to do with rising nationalism. (I know the EU isn't a country. It's just the best word I can think of to fit. ) It's not like Denmark is saying they plan to use technology from the global south, Asia or are open to options. It's an attitude of "we want to support European companies". That's not inherently bad, but I fear this is just another expression of this isolationism that is becoming more popular in Europe. That's not to say it's exclusive or unique to Europe, but just recognizing the ways it shows up.
By tibu 2026-02-2620:36 The US government can require a US company lots of things. After POTUS declared that he wants Greenland I can totally understand Danmark wants to get rid of everything US.
By tchalla 2026-02-2513:39 > They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term be
Digital euro push is beyond the current US administration if that’s what you are hinting at. The trigger was Big Tech payments (Facebook Libra) and the rise of BTC.
By ilikerashers 2026-02-2513:493 reply Europe has just been catastrophically slow in developing anything related to it's own tech infrastructure. Its doesn't back itself.
Given how poor it's responding to things like the Draghi report, I wouldn't anticipate success. Just more flailing around and working groups.
There are plenty of european hosts (e.g. hetzner) and with payments systems the technology is rarely the problem it's the politics. I imagine EPI will have no problem succeeding.
The major problem Europe has (mentioned in the draghi report) is with industrial competitiveness and strategy and access to cheap energy.
With the former it's not like the US is doing any better though. I dont think anybody in the west even has an industrial strategy.
Yes, it's glaringly obvious to me that they've been actively suppressing their own tech sector. Feels like a lot of EU politicians owned shares of US tech companies.
This effect of politicians making decisions based on what corporate shares they own is ubiquitous now.
In the other direction, I even wonder if US threats about Greenland were related to this trend of Denmark moving off US big tech. I feel like the real game is military coercion dressed up as economics.
I suspect if people knew the real reasons behind each political decision, they'd be shocked. I'm sure it's all 100% about money; about taking as much as possible whilst giving as little in exchange as possible; filling the gap with pure coercion.
It's a racket. The US have provided military protection in exchange for Europe tying itself to the mast of the US empire. Some of it is unspoken, some of it is contracted, especially concerning military hardware.
By tonyedgecombe 2026-02-2711:07 Yes, I always think it's quite rich for Americans to complain about European defence when the current state is exactly what America wanted for the last seventy years.
By ilikerashers 2026-02-267:41 Yeap. I worked in the UK public sector and I watched the UK gov briefly back their own cloud company (Skyscape) then ditch them when they had some minor issues.
Completely captured by US tech
Europe isn't a country, and as such each nation has its own agenda, and political relations.
For bad or worse, not all European national governments see the world through the same glasses.
By wolvesechoes 2026-02-268:281 reply 9/10 conversations on things happening across Europe can be thrown into trash bin, as they treat EU, or even Europe as a whole, as a single political entity. I could somehow accept that Americans can display such ignorance, but amazingly pretty often this mistake is being made by people declaring themselves as European. Like, are they blind to the political reality that surrounds them?
I can understand talking about us as a wide group, given how we share many cultural points of view, ways of working are still closer that across the pound, many being polyglot, having seen the same cartoons as kids and so on, regardless of the differences that remain, however we are still quite far away from turning into United States of Europe. The growing rights sentiment, is exactly because many nationals don't want going that far, among other issues.
Also not everything that gets regulated in Brussels, gets adopted by local goverments, and additionally there are plenty European countries that still aren't part of EU organisation.
Yeah, cannot understand this misunderstanding when coming from Europeans, as you mention.
By mytailorisrich 2026-02-2610:341 reply Cynically, my view is that this is actually on purpose and pushed by the EU itself. My is happening in with Russia, Ukraine, the US is used as a narrative tool to push for EU federalisation. This means pushing for more EU control, which we are seeing, and minimising references to individual countries. Even the "sovereignty" push is fully through the lens of more EU oversight (which is oxymoronic but a powerful political narrative).
By ExoticPearTree 2026-02-2611:02 I don't think that is going to happen anytime soon. First thing the EU is that it needs to be reformed from the ground up and have elections for the general commissioner and its cabinet. Commissioner positions should be handed over to every country just because. The whole of Europe should vote who they want for agriculture, who they want for foreign relations and so on. The way it works now is very very wrong and a big disservice to EU citizens.
By trinsic2 2026-02-2612:30 We will see. My guess is 5 to 10 years these anti-competitive regimes will collapse as more and more people move away from bad actors like our current administration.
By prepend 2026-02-2519:14 So it’s like Europe is ungoogling itself from the US?
By tick_tock_tick 2026-02-2518:231 reply > my read is that 2026 to 2027 is basically Europe saying, "we should probably stop wiring the house through a burning building." Payments, cloud, office software, data infrastructure, all of it.
I think you transposed some numbers in those dates it's more like 2062-2072. All of those things need to be built first and frankly all the initiatives started long before the current USA situation. The EU has been aware that it is wholly dependent on the USA for a myriad of reasons for a very long time now but barely seemed to care.
We'll see if anything actually happens it's a very thankless thing to push for politicians.
By JaggerJo 2026-02-2615:20 Most solutions already exist as open source software.
By TacticalCoder 2026-02-2523:322 reply > They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term bet.
People need to get real here and I've got numbers: Europe is the declining, unstable empire.
The US is the US and in three years there's going to be another president. But the EU's problems are much deeper.
Inflation-adjusted, since the 2008 crisis, the Eurozone's GDP barely grew while both China and the US' GDPs grew like crazy.
2008 to 2025 Eurozone's GDP: $14 trillion USD to $17 trillion USD (+18%, inflation adjusted it's basically zero)
US same period: about $15 trillion to $30 trillion [1]
China same period: $4 trillion to $19 trillion, going from not a quarter of the Eurozone's size in 2008 to surpassing the Eurozone in 2025 FFS! In 17 years. This is jaw dropping.
That's when reality should kick in for people who believe the EU is not declining.
At this rate it's not even declining: it's falling from a cliff.
Now, sure, the Eurozone ain't the entire EU and countries outside the Eurozone like Poland are, thankfully, doing better. But things still look terribly bad.
Moreover The EU managed to shoot itself in the foot by destroying the biggest export of its biggest economy: german cars. They handed over the market to chinese EVs.
The EU also managed, when the US advised it not to, to become dependant on Russia for energy. And of course four years ago we now all know how well that played for Germany: Russia wasn't our friend anymore and energy price --and the industries in Germany do need lots of energy-- skyrocketted.
The EU is destroying itself both economically and culturally. Things are looking terribly bad over here.
I don't know how anyone can look at the US and at China's GDP growth compared to the Eurozone and believe that somehow Europe is doing fine.
Europe is not doing fine: Europe is definitely a declining, unstable (lots of far-right vs far-left parties opposing themselves in elections in many EU countries now) empire.
That said I very much welcome ditching MS software.
[1] round numbers but it is what it is: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP
By conz 2026-02-264:35 Re: "Europe is not doing fine: Europe is definitely a declining, unstable (lots of far-right vs far-left parties opposing themselves in elections in many EU countries now) empire."
If this is reality in Europe, which is perhaps likely, then by comparison, the US has devolved into failed-state status. Better a slow decline than a catastrophic fall into the constitutional/regulatory/legal/technological/scientific abyss.
Even if Europe has insurmountable problems, its best move forward is to decouple strategically from the US, and these days, all things strategic are underpinned by information technology. The fact that Europe (soon to be followed by Canada, Australia and New Zealand) is heading down this path is why the US has hit the panic button[0].
Re: "The US is the US and in three years there's going to be another president. But the EU's problems are much deeper."
The US may have another president or even another style of president, but that wont stop this migration away from American technological/strategic hegemony; because at this level and at this scale, complete trust by former allies, once lost, will never be regained. The US century is now over.
Thankfully open source software is there as an alternative to that US software. I guess it's no co-incidence that LibreOffice and Linux both have their roots in Europe.
[0]https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
> The EU is destroying itself both economically and *culturally*
I understand the former. Can you clarify the details around the later? I hear this often, but the people I hear it from are not the most trustworthy or the most knowledgable.
By tonyedgecombe 2026-02-2711:081 reply I don't understand the former. Europe is not in decline.
I mean I understand the argument that Europe is in decline economically (the argument is that the price of energy goes up therefore industrial production goes down). I don't understand anyone claiming European "culture" is in decline, unless you are comparing it to some pre-world war 1 era of world-wide dominance.
By tonyedgecombe 2026-03-0814:25 >I mean I understand the argument that Europe is in decline economically
It isn't though. GDP is growing in most of Europe. Slowly but it is growing.
By AlexeyBelov 2026-02-278:54 According to his other comments it's about immigrants...
By deterministic 2026-02-260:10 It's about time that Europe take independence seriously.
By partiallypro 2026-02-2518:362 reply I don't know how to break this to you, but Europe itself has been the burning building for 20 years. I don't see that changing any time soon. The anti-US stuff is largely flailing, the US is better positioned than Europe for the next 20 years also. They struggle with investment, have almost no large companies left of any merit in tech, have political problems that are similar to the US's, and regulate themselves to death. It would take a political revolution in Europe to fix that, and frankly they don't have it in them.
By aucisson_masque 2026-02-2523:172 reply That's extremely condescending and naive. I'd say Europe citizen are in much better situation than the usa citizens, don't care about tech sector or shareholder revenue.
Usa still don't even have universal social security and medications are overpriced 10 time more. Just to name a few.
Then there is the American debt. Good luck with that when countries are switching from dollar to yen and euro. No really, I think that there are enough challenge to overcome in the states that you don't need to be condescending.
By partiallypro 2026-03-0222:47 I don't see how it's condescending or naive (at least anymore than the relative anti-US stuff you I was responding to,) name a large company or big innovation Europe has produced in the past 20 years? The whole continent is basically flat on growth for the past decade. It's literally in the numbers. Europe has been in denial, not the US. It has been very much left behind by China and the US. The US controls its own monetary system, European countries do not, that makes the debt issues a bit exaggerated. Not to mention China's has tremendous debt itself.
Also we do have universal social security, and while many medications are expensive at least they are available. Try getting a weeks worth of ibuprofen in Germany, it requires a doctor's appointment. I love Europe and have lived there, but talk to virtually any business person in Europe and they both envy the US and China, not themselves. If you can't see that painfully obvious reality, I don't know what to say, honestly.
By themafia 2026-02-2523:32 > Usa still don't even have universal social security
It does though. There are several programs, some administered by the federal government, and some by the states. We don't have "single payer" but we absolutely have "universal social security."
> and medications are overpriced 10 time more.
If you use the sticker price. Sure. It looks that way. If you use the actual pharmacy receipts the story is far different.
Wow there is some serious rep management going on here. Trump Adminstration getting scared their empire collapsing?
By cgfjtynzdrfht 2026-02-260:51 [dead]
I think a move to Open Source would be great in Europe, but only if the governments using the technologies are actively funding their development.
This doesn't just mean once-off grants, or a bit of cash donated here and there. I would like to see per-user per-year contributions to the organisations that develop these tools on-par with the current spend going towards Microsoft Cloud products.
It can be better than Microsoft, but you need to fund it to be better than Microsoft.
By Thanemate 2026-02-2515:26 I would replace "funding" with at minimum "contributing", because there are people who would think having a government actively dipping their toes in a product gives them right over actively piloting the direction of that product.
I've already seen online discussions of something similar happening when Valve announced that they're actively contributing to Arch Linux and KDE. But then, it's Valve.
I would like to see tech related educational institutions incorporate contributing to open source as part of their curriculum. A lot of these institutions are funded by the government anyway, so it would make sense to support the technology running your country which funds you.
By rbanffy 2026-02-2610:28 > I would like to see tech related educational institutions incorporate contributing to open source as part of their curriculum
As long as we avoid drowning maintainers with review requests, I'm in.
By embedding-shape 2026-02-2512:192 reply > It can be better than Microsoft, but you need to fund it to be better than Microsoft.
Lol no. Microsoft profits more than the value they provide, not exactly we should want to copy. We need to prevent hypercapitalism from reaching us in Europe, not make it worse, as we now seen exactly what it does to countries when you let it grow unfettered.
But I agree in general, governments and companies that use FOSS should donate back either engineering-time or money, but no need to do complicated "per-user per-year contributions", give them a sum per year, enough to fund the core developers at least and ideally to hire new ones, otherwise hire engineers and let them full-time contribute back.
Luckily, at least in Europe, this is exactly what we're seeing now. The governments who are looking into FOSS are all thinking about how to help fund it, no one seem to be thinking "How can we do this for free?" which is nice thing to see.
Governments funding FOSS is not Microsoft's business model and it's not capitalism.
By embedding-shape 2026-02-2514:11 > Governments funding FOSS is not Microsoft's business model
Yeah, long time ago we last saw the whole "Microsoft <3 Open Source" shtick, so seems more true than ever.
Europe as in EU can certainly use a bit more capitalism. Nothing brutal like US or China have where individuals are often crushed by system or situation with no help in sight, but Europe got lazy, complacent, used to over-generous unsustainable easy to abuse social system and generally living off debt to future generations. Self-serving massive bureaucracy and corruption. Companies like car makers are already being hit badly and its going to get a lot worse with global competition.
For the 1000th time here and elsewhere - look no further than Switzerland. Highly diverse, federated group of people that managed to preserve most direct democracy in the world for 800 years and counting. 'Most free and most armed nation in the world' still holds true without clusterfuck that US gun situation is. Each canton is very self-sufficient, governs local rules, laws and taxation so there is no animosity between various regions - really a mini version of EU.
This is how EU parliament should look like, if (mostly) french and german egos would step down from their pedestals and acknowledge that somebody may figured things out better. Its most capitalistic country in Europe by far while preserving most of what we call social and healthcare net, has top notch free education and so on. Also its not increasing its debt, a clear mark of sustainable economical success of such approach, in contrary with literally any EU country.
Sweeping generalizations like just don’t really contribute anything worthwhile. You mention Switzerland as supposedly a counter-example, but the characterization also does not apply to the Scandinavian countries, Netherlands, several Baltic states, and to a certain degree countries like Poland.
Is this actually just a criticism of French and German public governance, or Spanish, or Italian? If so, yes, I agree. They are slow and have a lot of overhead. But they don’t represent anything like a full picture.
By trinsic2 2026-02-2612:43 I think it's a rep management firm trying to slow the trump administrations collapse
By mainecoder 2026-02-2615:52 Are we just going to forget that the Switzerland is the place where capitalists many(in my opinion or some if you want) keep their money.
