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hnbad • today at 1:33 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

> alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS

That sentence seems to lack an important word. Microsoft is a company so I don't assume they built an alternative for it. Microsoft 365 is what used to be called Office 365 and governments love their Office suite so that would make sense and I could see the number accidentally getting dropped but NixOS is probably an OS so I guess this is about Microsoft Windows but then it just means they're replacing one OS with another and Windows-compatibility (nor Office suite compatibility for that matter) is hardly a novel idea.

The site doesn't seem to have much information about this headline at a glance. Does anyone have a link to the missing context?


Replies

Quothling • today at 3:32 PM

It looks like they're not quite set on that. There is a very empty part of the repo here: https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO/src/branch/main/compone...

The German Defense sector did something with Nextcloud, Collabora Online, Open-Xchange, Element/Matrix and Univention Nubus I believe. With things like Euro-Office and Nextcloud really stepping things up. Even Proton getting an office suite, I don't think the M365 platform is the big hurdle it once was. Especially because Microsoft lost the private market. 25 years ago you'd get employees who knew how to use Microsoft Office, today they all grew up with Macs, Chromebooks and similar.

What is the alternative though? If you piss off Trump you risk getting all your digital infrastructure shut down over night. It doesn't even have to be you who pisses him off. Obviously using Anthropic AI service has it's own issues within the EU trade zone, but it's been what... 3 months? Since they were ordered to shut off EU access to their most powerful models because they ran afoul of the US government.