Yet another Hacker News

Dutch tax authorities cancel Microsoft 365 cloud rollout and turn to open source

107 points CrankyBear 4 days ago 18 comments

nxobject 3 days ago | parent

I suspect the fact that the Netherlands hosts the ICC might have made this a little more salient, too.

eigenspace 3 days ago | parent

It's especially funny that Microsoft has been swearing up and down that they can offer "sovereign" infrastructure in Europe, and yet the moment Trump comes calling they trip over themselves to implement his sanctions against the ICC.

atoav 3 days ago | parent

I'd love to hear from any US company that makes such a claim, how they will deal if forced by their government to comply due to the patriot act.

In the end the question is very simple, aside from the rare idealist company all companies seek to earn money. How big of a hit would they be willing to take to defend the rights of their foreign customers?

As a European by this point I find US companies about as trustworthy as Chinese ones, if not more so. With Chinese companies you have the Chinese government as a potential attacker. With US companies you have the US government as a potential attacker. Both is bad, but with US companies I feel that they also have a higher tendency to fuck you over as the customer or to change the deal after the fact. Sure usually they should respect EU law when doing business in theEU, but how well is that working out?

wolvoleo 3 days ago | parent

Yes at least the Chinese government is pretty consistent. They don't change direction in a day because someone wakes up on the wrong side of the bed.

In the long term this is probably more of a risk because the Chinese strategy actually has long-term planning behind it while the American one is random and a lot of their actions harm themselves more than anyone else. China is the best in the world at playing the long game.

But in the short term the Chinese are more dependable.

wolvoleo 3 days ago | parent

Encryption wise they do have a feature called customer key which allows zero knowledge processing on their side.

However turning this on reduces the feature set of m365 massively so almost nobody actually uses it.

eigenspace 3 days ago | parent

That's a privacy claim which is irrelevant to the question of sovereignty. Even with zero-knowledge processing, they can still just close your account and stop providing any service after a phone-call from the US president.

Vital government functions cannot be allowed to run on this type of infrastructure, it's ridiculous.

kazinator 3 days ago | parent

People are tired of 25 years of European stories about this and that government branch or municipality switching away from Microsoft lock in to some open source solutions, and then coming back again, etc.

Stick with it for five (5) years consistently, then report on it.

Neywiny 3 days ago | parent

I don't think I've ever seen an article here of that happening? I wouldn't be surprised if it goes but I think showing the effects now instead of in 5 years is helpful.

k12sosse 3 days ago | parent

But this time it's because America is an untrusted and untrustable untrustworthy vendor, keep em coming, submitters

jolmg 3 days ago | parent

It's possibly part of the effort to push it so it sticks, else you may have people asking themselves why the government is relying on freeware instead of professionally made software, thinking it's just cheapening out. Open source may not have the good rep it has here, outside of these circles.

bob1029 3 days ago | parent

> Stick with it for five (5) years consistently

There would be very little to talk about.

The harsh reality is that projects like ffmpeg and SQLite are wild exceptions to the rule. You need more than a handful of well engineered OSS components to run a complicated business like this.

ninalanyon 3 days ago | parent

Really? What is so difficult about computing taxes? Isn't it just a database and a set of arithmetic and logical functions?

__m 3 days ago | parent

Compared to Linux that seems trivial

leonidasrup 3 days ago | parent

In many cases when a government branch or municipality switches away from Microsoft, Microsoft throws money at the government branch or municipality.

For example, When Munich in 2013 migrated to Linux:

"In 2016, Microsoft relocated its German headquarters to Munich. "

"In 2018, journalistic group Investigate Europe released a video documentary via German public television network ARD that claimed that the majority of city workers were satisfied with the operating system, with council members insinuating that the reversal was a personally motivated decision by mayor Dieter Reiter. Reiter denied that he had initiated the reversal in gratitude for Microsoft moving its German headquarters from Unterschleißheim back to Munich."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

DrScientist 3 days ago | parent

I've seen this - I was part of a large company that threatened to move everything, not to open source, but to google docs, and MS sales team moved heaven and earth to reverse the decision.

It's not just that they don't want to lose a customer - they don't want lots of examples out there of how it can be done.

wolvoleo 3 days ago | parent

Like gendbuntu for example? A big success, going since 2008 and they've got 100k workstations running on it today, 97% of their workforce.

The success stories are there but the failures seem to get more press. Which isn't all that surprising IMO.

It's also worth noting that the Dutch tax office this article is about has until now been running on an in house office solution, they had only recently decided to move to Microsoft 365 but for geopolitical reasons this is no longer a good option. The rollout had only just started.

They do run windows but that is not planned to change anyway, this is about their office suite.

hn_submit 3 days ago | parent

I think it's serious this time. Microsoft is definitely worried. The noises they've been making that they've neglected Windows and are making changes to fix this are telling.

They're the ones that probably have access to the most accurate statistics on Linux market share, and they're not liking what they're seeing.

thomasjeff1 3 days ago | parent

Grew a pair