There is currently a very strong reason to migrate to Open Source: the big tech corps are pushing people into their clouds and this leads to new constraints on your planning because now you are subject to the software company's product lifecycle.
So, if before you could run your old version of Oracle or whatever for as long as you wanted (if you could live without the support), now you have no choice. When the support for a product is dropped on the cloud, you have to upgrade whether you are ready for it or not.
I'm pleased at the overall tide here. I think governments especially ought to use and contribute back to FOSS.
When I see announcements like this it does make me worry that MS (or whatever vendor) will try to make an example of them; by submarining stories about how the switchover is hard, non-techie civil servants want to keep what they're "used to", LibreOffice is technically inferior (no comment on that one, I think all office suites I've seen are junk).
I have my fingers crossed, but my chickens uncounted.
I wish there was a fund we could pool money into to make LibreOffice less ugly to look at. I'll happily donate to the cause.
You know, I really do think governments should not be paying into Microsoft's bank accounts. But thinking about this from another perspective, if I was hired as a programmer at a company and told I could use vim on i3 on some Linux distro and then suddenly the company decided that everyone would be switched over to windows machines and forced to use VSCode then I would be rightfully pissed. Just like someone hired to do CAD in solidworks would be rightfully pissed if you told them they had to switch to another equally powerful but different CAD tool.
Not sure what the solution is there aside from offering incentives to retrain, offering the option to keep using the proprietary product, and hiring staff specifically advertising that you want people who are happy using libreoffice.
Perhaps they can start by adding Linux support for MitID - https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/help/help-universe/platform-suppo...
Crazy how many critical services are tied to American companies.
Denmark is at particular risk because if the US does something concrete against Greenland, they might want to retaliate with sanctions at the very least. Impossible to do that if you have a strong dependency on American tech companies.
Somebody tell the Danish legal team that Tritium (https://tritium.legal) runs on Linux :).
Politics aside, Microsoft has such a strangle hold on so many industries it's insane. That reach is just extending with copilot + OpenAI and Azure. The next few years could be bleak if it plays the way MSFT is trying to push it. Good for Denmark.
This is great for sovereignty.
It’s wonderful that they made the choice (likely exactly for sovereignty reasons).
But: IMO (as an infrequent user) LibreOffice is still far behind MS Office in usability. I hope the more big orgs depend on it, the more interest there will be to improve it. This will then hopefully make it easier for others to make the switch.
I used to love LibreOffice when it was OpenOffice.org. When it got unshackled from Oracle, it somehow became kinda uglier, and unfortunately it wasn't able to keep up with the times technology-wise, as all efforts to make it online are a failure of usability and speed.
What we, the humanity, need, is a free-as-in-freedom open source set of web applications that work like Google Docs / Spreadsheets / Slides, but can be self-hosted and would natively use OpenDocument file format.
I recently tried a bunch of Office packages and was surprised by just how bad they've gotten over the years. It just feels like a downgrade from what we had in prior decades. Especially LibreOffice just had the most abysmal performance imaginable. The older versions were much better in my experience.
I hope this sets an example for the rest of Europe! Great news.
Usually the biggest hurdles are Active Directory, deep Excel trenches and reliance on Outlook. The OS itself, browsers to get the job done and non-Excel office stuff are usually not an issue. There might also be deep reliance on Acrobat or some digital signature stuff etc.
Either way, great news. I hope it works well.
How are Danes submitting taxes? That's still Windows only software in many countries (though many have switched to web portals already).
The issues in this situation are always,
1. How much is compatibility with outside users and past documents necessary? No office application can successfully, reliably convert anything but relatively simple documents (have LLMs done better somehow?). Each conversion reduces fidelity and often integrity; send a few revisions back and forth and it can become a problem. Simply adding a small headache every time an outsider emails your users' a document - or vice verssa - becomes a big issue. Regarding past documents, some users create complex applications in Excel, for example. How much of a problem is that for these users? How will those problems be solved?
2. What is the system management story? Essential to IT beyond even 30 users is a way to deploy, administer (including configuring settings), and upgrade/patch applications en masse. Microsoft provides those tools and Office, of course, integrates well with them. There are third party tools, but they need to do much better than exist; they need to function efficiently and reliably - imagine the deployment bug implemented en masse. Are there such tools for Linux and LibreOffice?
It's a great way for Denmark to negotiate a better deal with Microsoft for the next round of licenses. No way they will stick with Linux.
It's just too fiddly, requiring way more "IT people" running around configuring Samba shares and printer drivers.
And LibreOffice is many many years behind MS Office, and it'll continue to be that way.
Sorry for the pessimism but this was true in 2005, in 2015, and in 2025.
Ofc I love this, as a LibreOffice exclusive user Document signing in Libreoffice on Linux has caused me nothing but trouble, and other critical features a government might want to have - any thoughts on this?
Following Trump's threats Danes would do better if they try to keep their vital infrastructure including IT as free as possible from the dependence.
Calc was not a great alternative to Desktop Excel but maybe it's better now, my opinion is 8 major version behind. But I remember that in v17 the array functions were a pale imitation of what's possible in Excel.
I also find that there is something wrong with the rendering that made the suite looks dated but again maybe it's better in v25...
I prefer the document model of writer to the word document model but it requires a more cartesian mindset. But then most people don't learn how to effectively use their word processor so maybe Words still have an edge with non technical user.
I asked a few questions to Bing and to my surprise it appears to know Calc as much as it know Excel.
Good luck to the Danish Ministry of Digitalization, we need used alternatives to the Office monopoly.
It's a few times over the years I've read about govs switching to linux like this. Anyone know how they got on?
Great! We should all be worried when our governments lock themselves into situations with just a single vendor.
Maybe they could pay some Danish software dev to improve the product with all the license money they will save.
David Heinemeir Hansson (ruby-on-rails) writes extensively about the risk to Danish sovereignty if they don't have digital sovereignty.
In particular, Microsoft have already shown they will acquiesce to Trump's wishes. Turn off Microsoft in Denmark in the morning, you get Greenland by the afternoon.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/denmark-gets-more-serious-about-di...
P.s. this thread will be gone within 1-2 hrs when the mods on PT time wake back up. Anything about European Digital Sovereignty is killed quietly and quickly here.
Will be interesting to see if they can make it stick. Everyone is used to Windows + Office, so there’ll be a lot of resistance to trying something else, and if their IT department is not ready for it, it can quickly become a shit-show.
Good, especially if there are also budgets somewhere to fix issues they have with it.
My problem, I tried to switch from PowerPoint to Impress several times, but it's just not working for me (it also crashed).
Hope for the best, with more users perhaps I can switch too in the future.
Please note that only ~79 employees will affected by this decision.
A number of circumstantial factors point at this being primarily political posturing.
Does the EU contribute in a significant way to these open source project development budgets?
phasing out Office and Windows is not hard. the only real difficulty is that corporate IT departs are populated with people who have built their entire careers on the Microsoft ecosystem and can't imagine a world beyond Microsoft.
Luckily this was never counted on the trade deficit. Phew!
Let's not forget about GitHub.
As far as I can tell, this is only about MS Office, not about operating systems. But I cant read the whole article due to paywall.
Talking to my Danish friends, and I have a fair few in tech, the country is owned by Microsoft. A lot of code jobs are c# on Azure, and all the office people use Excel.
This is a welcome change. I've thought for a long time, why would your average office worker even need to pay MS for their desktop OS when so many things could just be done on the web? And why develop a bunch of stuff on a proprietary platform when you can just code it on a Linux platform?