I am Danish, working with IT in the private sector, but with regular contact to the public sector.

I can assure you that there is plenty of other agencies, ministries, municipalities, private companies etc. in both Denmark and other European countries looking into switching to non-American software.

"Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier. Everybody asks about it it. Everybody plans around it.

Although the weaning off will take many years, and although European companies and governments will probably never be entirely without American software, and why should they, the American dominance will disappear, little by little. For better or worse, the American Century is coming to an end, also in IT.

The “that’s nice but Denmark is small” comment is getting tiresome. Whether the country had 6 million or 60 million the bureaucracy is the same. It’s not about the size or the economics, it’s about the message.

It won’t be long until the rest of the public sectors follow along. There has already been plenty of consideration and desire to follow through. What’s holding them back typically is not the desire to stay with Microsoft et. al., but the investment needed to make the switch away from a live system.

"I genuinely do not understand why other countries put up with this."

Maybe because there is no drop in replacement of microsoft and microsoft dependant tools?

So yes, one can (and should) build them. But the market right now is not offering this yet.

> That's great, but it's always just one agency, or one very local bit of government.

Transitioning every system wholesale at once, is not gonna happen.

I rather have our governents and agencies do it step by step than not at all.

I agree. Whilst I think MS products are on a downward trajectory, I'm getting "Maastricht Planning Department switches to Kali Linux" vibes

I want to see (sincerely) a whole government ditch MS

> That's great, but it's always just one agency, or one very local bit of government.

All change starts small. If these small agencies or very local bits of government successfully pull it off, larger ones may well follow.

It is actually at least two agencies that is working in that direction, The Danish Road Authorities is also working on it: https://www.fstyr.dk/nyheder/2025/dec/faerdselsstyrelsen-tag...

Well the State of Schleswig Holstein is ditching Microsoft completely. But it's a difficult political uphill battle, because some Users won't change their habits and cry about it.

The Minister shut this up with "Software is a decision by the employer, the employee has to accept it"

Which then got blown up by the tabloid media, which ran BS Headlines like "OMG Courts and Police not working (because they're childish and refuse to learn another E-Mail Client)

Also Microsoft is playing dirty and lobbying very hard behind the scenes to obstruct it, in Munich they changed their German HQs to Munich and started to pay Taxes there. So suddenly the city changed back to MS

TL;Dr: It's a thankless and tough battle for politicians, because they face lobbying and media pressure against them. Also they will be blamed for any roadblocks, and there is no real upside for them in it, as no one except for a few nerds cares about this

Every journey starts with the first step... And those steps are finally being taken now. Don't see why this kind of naysaying would be the top comment here

> the top level of government just needs to make the declaration: as of X, all Microsoft licenses will be terminated. No exceptions. Adapt or die.

Edgy! But it sounds like really terrible government. As if the failure of a government agency which cannot adapt to losing all its computer systems and therefore "dies" will not negatively effect those who are governed.

> According to the CLOUD act, the US government can demand access to data from US companies, regardless of where that data is stored. That must be unacceptable to any sovereign government. I genuinely do not understand why other countries put up with this.

"put up with this" implies they have a choice.

> Adapt or die.

Yeah, no. That's not how government works - thankfully. I don't want my water to stop flowing just because someone decided to be drastic about software changes.

I agree with you in that all governments should be using open source software, for the record.

But governments are big machines and you can't steer them like a sports car. In some cases, the massive inertia they have can even be a good thing - a crazy guy can't just be elected one day, start issuing presidential mandates, and then expect them to happen immediately, for example.

A lot of hospitals run Microsoft. So it would be literal death you are talking about.

> That must be unacceptable to any sovereign government.

Is it OK for a French sovereign government if a German government can demand access to its data?

Not everything is a state secret. There's no need to immediately migrate every trivial email and permit request, but having a parallel infrastructure for the stuff that needs it should be a no-brainer.

>top level of government just needs to make the declaration: as of X, all Microsoft licenses will be terminated. No exceptions. Adapt or die

This is unrealistic populism. The type that gets upvoted on HN, apparently. It's not possible to just ditch all Microsoft licenses in a year, or in 5 years, or in 10 years. There are hundreds of critical systems that can't just be migrated to Linux overnight (or ever). And "just dying" is... not an option for a government branch. What is this even supposed to mean.

But we can limit American bigtech by 90%, and we should. Especially everything in the cloud.

Well governments need to wake up and realize that if they aren't the US and even if they are the US, open source provides most of the basic building blocks of what you're going to build independent non-corporate controlled and non-external-state controlled software

So fund it!

Governments burn billions of dollars on defense which really is just an economic waste outside of the deterrent effect it does from getting invaded.

Investing in open source to enable you to be software independent and protected, not only is it providing some measure of electronic and economic defense, it improves software for you and your allies.

You get return on your investment.

It honestly doesn't make any sense. Interestingly, India was bold enough to move its government infra to Zoho's office suite cutting all reliance on Microsoft. It's only sane that other countries do the same.

Indeed. I also fail to see how the existence of the CLOUD act, and thus use of any US company, is compatible with GDPR.

See https://www.exoscale.com/blog/cloudact-vs-gdpr/

( Though note exoscale, as a European provider has skin in the game here ).

>That must be unacceptable to any sovereign government

The US recently doubled down on using US corporations as vehicles of coercion, sanctioning ICC judges for judging against Israel.

https://www.state.gov/icc-sanctions

This is beyond insane, and every American company causing grief for the staff of a criminal court in which every single civilized nation but the US and Israel (I guess I didn't have to add that but) belongs needs to see enormous fines, and to be marginalized and removed. Microsoft, Google, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal...either they can domesticate in another nation, or get relegated to provincial US operations.

It is absolutely untenable, and every single nation needs to purge all American operations as rapidly as possible.

And...it's happening. This criminal US administration filled with pedophiles and self-dealing garbage overextended. They overplayed their hand, and the result is not only the rapidly accelerated decline of the American empire, it invariably has redoubled China's influence.

I keep seeing prophesying about China invading Taiwan on here. Surely HN knows that won't be necessary, right? Taiwan recently re-engaged in diplomatic unification talks with China (not overtly, but the feelers are obvious to anyone with any sense of the moment), and they're going to make that choice themselves. Now that the US is relegated to worldwide joke/idiocracy, and it really is rapidly becoming a unipolar world, it's really the only rational choice.

But I guess the US has the pathetic joke of the Board of Peace, or their close allies El Salvador and new puppet state Venezuela. What a disgrace.

Also, they haven't actually done it yet. Announcements are easy. Implementation is hard, and most of them fail.

Wake me up when they actually do it.

"all Microsoft licenses will be terminated"

Ok, and what will be the alternative? I am not talking about the easy part, like documents creation, although I don't see walking away from Excel as LibreOffice alternative is a bit of disappointment. But what about the whole security/networking/permissions area? What is the viable alternative that can scale?

Remember Covid times? In Poland all schools got access to Office 365 (overnight ) and education kept going. 500 000 teachers and a few millions of pupils. Tell me who else except Microsoft or Google have ability to support that?

This is a clash of semi-overlapping, transitioning philosophies.

The global, liberal hegemony philosophy is that you can trust other countries, and countries are just economic zones with mildly different food and weather. Country dividing lines for any other purpose are bad. The UK was evil for wanting more sovereignty vs the EU; what's the difference? Open the borders. Let anyone vote. This has only recently been philosophically countered in the popular left-leaning consciousness by the war in Ukraine, where at least one border is seen to be worth defending, and in the mainstream as sovereignty and related conservative ideas are taking hold again, although with a few extra steps to make it palateable to non-conservatives.

The practical philosophy is: we already save a huge amount of money we can spend on benefits by depending on the US for defence; might as well do the same with tech. They probably know everything anyway, and what's to know? This isn't exactly countered yet philosophically, but Donald Trump is making people realise they should at least pay their own way in defense, which is helping to gradually override the prioritising of short-term vote-buying.

Have you ever even used OpenOffice? It's 50 years behind.

You make it sound like a noble act of sacrifice but the employees are all still getting paid. The real people who will be hurt are the citizens relying on their government to function, and telling a bunch of government employees of varying competence levels to "suck it up and adapt to your workflow being broken" will throw a real wrench in that.