Trump is driving European governments to Microsoft alternatives: What Germany, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria are planning.
With Ukraine's cold position, rapprochement with Russia, and its tariff policy, US President Donald Trump has startled the Europeans – and fueled the discussion about digital sovereignty. The risks of dependence on American tech companies have suddenly moved up on the political agenda, not only in Berlin, but also in other European capitals.
The discussion has many facets, because US companies such as Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Broadcom and OpenAI dominate in numerous areas of IT, from hardware to cloud services to operating systems and (AI) applications. In some segments, however, Chinese suppliers such as Lenovo and Huawei also have a strong position, just like the Europeans themselves, for example with ASML or SAP.
An IT world without dependencies on third parties would not be conducive to productivity and prosperity and anyway unrealistic, after all, there is hardly any know-how for the increasingly complex products in hardly any company. But the dependence on Microsoft's software and cloud services is particularly concerned about many European politicians. If the company is forced to shut down cloud services like 365 due to orders from the US government, the impact would be drastic: ministries and agencies with 365 subscriptions could not even chat or email from now on.
If Microsoft no longer provide security updates, sooner or later all users of Windows and the "On-Premise" (i.e. on customer hardware instead of the cloud) ongoing variants of Office and Exchange got into trouble. Microsoft's plan to offer Offices only in the cloud in the future puts additional pressure on Europeans. And the switch to other providers is complicated, among other things, by the fact that management applications such as e-file programs are interwoven with Microsoft Office.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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We should start making laws and frameworks that prevent us from making bad decisions in the future. Using Microsoft and their products was always a bad decision and fixing that now is way more expensive than whatever the arguments were against Linux and FOSS software in the last two decades. It was just easy and convenient at the time.
Being dependent on Russia for oil didn't turn out great either.
But I just see people talking about how to change things for the better, never how to prevent silly things in the future. I'd rather be in a situation were we don't have to fix things.
Any information generated or collected by government should only be stored in open file formats. That is the biggest issue right there.
Any software that citizens are required to use MUST be Open Source is the next biggest one.
Third is that any software created with public funds must be Open Source.
Finally, Open Source should be the preference in all government procurement. Exceptions where viable Open Source options do not exist should be allowed.
All government data needs to be stored in-country if possible and at least on continent if not. Suppliers bound in their home country by laws which could threaten the data sovereignty of their customers should be excluded from government contracts (so all US based companies).
Such a framework for a government to properly adopt FOS software would require provisions against a "bad government" controlling said software.
Just because the US is plummeting into a political nightmare doesn't mean the EU couldn't do the same I. 20-40 years.
Such a framework of governments moving from Microsoft/Google/Amazon/Cloudflare/Whoever to a FOSS equivalent should require the target Foss platform to be run by an independent non-profit that cannot be politically influenced.
But I have no idea how to actually future proof that from corruption. Because money talks, and billions can buy so much influence in so many unexpected places
Europe ignored its own procurement laws to choose Microsoft in the first place.
Heh, I agree with everything you said, but I’m afraid such a framework is impossible to create, let alone implement. It’s impossible to foresee the infinite possibilities for people to screw themselves through bad decisions, so all you’d create is a lot of bureaucracy to still end up in the same place.
That might be the case. But more often than not it's WAY too easy to see that a decision is bad to argue that we can't implement any measures against that.
In this case we "just" need laws that prohibit that any infrastructure can be dependent on few foreign entities and had to be completely independent if reasonably possible. Diversification or elimination of dependencies as a law.
You can't rely on foreign proprietary software like Teams for public facilities and infrastructure if there are reasonable alternatives.
You can't rely only on Russian oil if other countries are available for trade.
Exactly. I think you complicate it all. Governments need to just setup their own data centers or host it somewhere within their own country. And ideally use open source solutions if possible and most importantly they should not only use it, but also donate to these projects they use.