117 points lowkeyokay 2 hours ago 66 comments

jruohonen 2 hours ago | parent

"alternativ til Microsoft Office-pakke"

That says it all; that governments run with this "pakke".

my-huge-pony 1 hour ago | parent

Is there a version without a paywall?

ochrist 1 hour ago | parent

Full Danish text here:

I al stilhed har Digitaliseringsministeriet droppet sit ellers meget omtalte pilotprojekt med et open souce-baseret alternativ til Microsofts Office-pakke, som ministeriet ellers anvender i stor stil.

Projektet blev søsat i sommeren 2025, da knap 40 medarbejdere i ministeriet gik i gang med at teste open source-systemet Collabora som alternativ til Office. Systemet blev dengang leveret af danske cBrain.

Dengang sagde daværende digitaliseringsminister Caroline Stage (M), at pilotprojektet var et 'kærkomment skridt i den rigtige retning' frem mod at frigøre sig fra afhængigheden af Microsoft opg at hun ønskede at hendes ministerie skulle være spydspids for frigørelsen fra amerikansk teknologi. Det kan du læse mere om her: Her er den løsning, som skal erstatte Microsoft Office for alle medarbejdere i Digitaliseringsministeriet

Nu meddeler en pressemedarbejder til Version2, at projektet blev droppet, da der blev udskrevet valg i foråret.

Og der er ingen planer om at genoptage det, hedder det. Projektet er ikke blevet evalueret som det ellers var planen.

Og det ærger professor Mikkel Flyverbom fra CBS.

"Det er en fin ide at afprøve alternativer i et pilotprojekt. Jeg ville dog ønske, at ministeriet benyttede muligheden for at lære af pilotprojektet og dele de erfaringer med andre dele af den offentlige sektor," skriver han i en mail til mediet.

Digitaliseringsministeriets departement er i dag lagt sammen med andre ministerier, så ministeriet i dag hedder Forsknings-, Uddannelses-, og Digitaliseringsminister med Christina Egelund som minister.

Med afslutning ved valgudskrivelsen i slutningen af februar 2026 nåede open source-piloten kun at være i luften i godt et halvt års tid.

Pilotprojektet koblede Collabora ind i ministeriets centrale sagsbehandlingssystem, F2, der leveres af danske cBrain, og det var planen, at de 38 test-ansatte allerede fra første dag skulle udarbejde ministeriets dokumenter, præsentationer og tabeller uden Microsofts Word, PowerPoint og Excel.

Særligt funktioner som ’track changes’ og konvertering mellem Microsoft-formater og open source-formater bliver noget af det, ministeriet vil arbejde med i testperioden, hed det dengang.

Pilotprojektet skulle afklare, om britiske Collabora overhovedet kunne understøtte ministeriets arbejdsgange og behov på tilfredsstillende vis. Det står i dag uklart, om det har været tilfældet, da projektet ikke er blevet evalueret.

Der var dog flere historier fremme om, at Collabora-projektet havde ført til visse frustrationer blandt ministeriet ansatte.

Blandt andet har der været med formateringer af typografier, afsnitsformateringer, blanke sider og udfordringer med track changes.

pessimizer 1 hour ago | parent

European governments have been pretending to drop Microsoft for 20 years, I suppose the first one that did it got a big discount, and now they do it whenever they want to reduce costs. Europe will never slow, and in fact will continually increase, its dependency on the US forever.

We propagandize them against all alternatives, like Russian energy and Chinese everything, and employ all of their academics and politicians at our nonprofits and universities, sprinkling credentials all over them. Europeans love a credential; makes them feel superior. Money well spent.

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

It's all well and good to evangelize but the problem is that we are only evangelizing and not actually making alternatives. Programmers tend to accept an MVP as an alternative because we can deal with the rough edges, but real users don't see it that way.

card_zero 1 hour ago | parent

The other day I was watching a manager wrestle with Excel. He couldn't select information to send it to somebody who wanted it, because it was trying to do a collaborative spreadsheet thing and had got itself locked up somehow. He ended up taking a photo of the screen and texting it.

izacus 1 hour ago | parent

This. I've been around these kind of pushes in my part oif EU for a long time and the reality is: there's a lot of talk and demands and not many people signing up for tenders, development or maintenance work.

The opinion is that "the public workers don't need it" for every feature missing in Linux or LibreOffice. I can only imagine how a fight to upstream such features would look like even if someone took on a support contract.

With Microsoft at least the governments get shared fate with large corpos who also need enterprise features.

nikanj 53 minutes ago | parent

It's usually clear to all parties that the tendering process is theatre, and they've already picked the company that'll get the contract

dvdkon 3 minutes ago | parent

I'd sign up for tenders, but they all seem to require a company with "1 million EUR revenue in public sector <whatever> projects" and 5 people with various roles, degrees and X years of experience in <whatever>.

I'm just a freelancer with FLOSS experience and some commercial experience, and so are plenty other FLOSS contributors. Nobody's going to create a company and hire staff just to have a chance at getting selected in the one tender a year that allows outsiders in.

The idea might be that only companies which have already proven themselves can enter, but 1) then why the "public sector work revenue" requirement? And 2) that's not going to work for industries where government interest is much larger than private interest, like FLOSS.

But I suppose governments prefer the certainty that Accenture or local equivalents bring - a price an order of magnitude too high for a mediocre result and a 25% chance that the project will be fucked up and shelved, over the uncertainty of a small startup, who could either deliver something great, or overexert themselves and not finish at all...

kromokromo 1 hour ago | parent

Now that software is cheap, I don’t see why someone wouldn’t just build a clone. Cloud collaborative text editor and sheets and storage is all you really need. Plenty of good alternatives to Teams.

ben_w 1 hour ago | parent

The open-source clones already exist, and have done for a long time. As do Google Docs, which may have the disadvantages of being both closed-source and American, but the advantage of being free.

People pay a lot of money for professional versions anyway.

NetMageSCW 33 minutes ago | parent

Those are not alternatives.

petcat 1 hour ago | parent

Unfortunately this is what happened when the EU tried to build their own Teams alternative:

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-microsoft-teams-alternati...

> Absolute shit.

> The U.S. would “instantly” win a hypothetical tech war, an official moaned.

EU just has a long way to go. And the reality is that it will be so astronomically expensive that it is unlikely that they ever even truly try.

asanineassasin 1 hour ago | parent

Every citizen with potential to change the world- leaves europa for the us. The only "positive" exception- has been not the fat old west-west of europe, but the east. Jetbrains, CD Project Red, the svvedes- there is something subsversive and alive, software wise in the ashes of the USSR - and unlike germany and france, the old entrenched conglomerates can not sabotage that newcomers that easy there.

fakedang 57 minutes ago | parent

Everything is too expensive for European bureaucrats. Funny how the Europeans used to call the fledgling US in the 1700s a nation of shopkeepers, when right now, they are an entire continent's worth of lawyers and accountants (except for France and the UK, obv).

card_zero 7 minutes ago | parent

Who aimed the "nation of shopkeepers" epithet at the US?

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

It starts in Wealth of Nations, was picked up by a French revolutionary (still aimed at England, but in a more negative way), and Ben Franklin said something similar about Holland.

fph 54 minutes ago | parent

American big tech companies pay very few taxes, compared to European standards. This is part of what makes it difficult to compete with them.

Everyone in Europe is saying that the CCP is illegally subsidizing EVs and solar panels to conquer the European market, and that we need to protect from them by imposing tariffs: but if you think about it, this isn't too different from what America is doing with tech.

Aurornis 6 minutes ago | parent

> American big tech companies pay very few taxes, compared to European standards. This is part of what makes it very difficult to compete with them.

American big tech companies have to pay their workers a lot more than European tech companies.

Microsoft has to pay local taxes on sales in those countries. They are not paying American tax rates on European sales.

Even their American corporate tax rates, if raised to European levels, would still have ample room for profit.

Your argument is not supported by the data.

> but if you think about it, this isn't too different from what America is doing with tech.

It’s nothing like economic dumping. America is not pumping money into Microsoft to dump Microsoft Office into European markets.

Those European companies could come to the US, open an office here, and be under the exact same rules as Microsoft.

The situation is not alike at all.

Scarblac 1 hour ago | parent

The French government for instance sponsors LaSuite ( https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ , no English language web page of course ).

But I think the hardest thing to replace is Active Directory, Outlook, all the integration with Windows, all the admins certified on Microsoft technology. It's not about the actual application "MS Office", it's about all of IT (that line was not AI).

hvb2 42 minutes ago | parent

> But I think the hardest thing to replace is Active Directory, Outlook, all the integration with Windows, all the admins certified on Microsoft technology

Nah, it's the users. Those are resistant to change even more. When they miss deadlines that they can now blame, sometimes rightfully, on the software change

lunar_rover 1 hour ago | parent

You can't clone decades of history.

oblio 44 minutes ago | parent

> Now that software is cheap

Despite what you hear techies say, "really bad software" didn't really exist before, except for some very small enterprise niches. Stuff like Windows, Photoshop or other categories that techies complain, has always hovered between "bad" and "above average" with some moments of hitting "quite good". Really bad software was software that barely did its main job.

Well, really bad software is now super cheap to create.

That won't really change software economics outside of corporate malpractice (those small enterprise niches) or regulatory capture.

Average software is probably only marginally cheaper and good software will be as expensive as always because expectations have shifted up.

jruohonen 1 hour ago | parent

> Europe will never slow

I am not sure about the word choice, but they, ...

> European governments

probably like BDSM or something.

lowkeyokay 1 hour ago | parent

According to the article the Agency for Digital Government (Digitaliseringsstyrelsen) initiated a pilot in spring 2025 to use Collabora[1]. A General Election was called (not related) which put the project on hold indefinitely. No plan to pick it up agian, and no evaluation is planned.

The article mentions that the (38) test persons had reported some frustrations with typography, and track-changes during the test.

1: https://www.collaboraonline.com/

tokai 49 minutes ago | parent

Its an old classic using an election to kill off or stall projects in ministries or public institutions. I bet some bureaucrat or Statens It doesn't want the trouble of this moving along.

Grombobulous 5 minutes ago | parent

I also love the idea of ditching Microsoft and I have done so for my personal life, but if your work day lives and breathes documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks, there really is no better option out there than Microsoft Office.

I’d even go as far as arguing that it’s priced very fairly and rather low compared to software of similar complexity. It’s priced low enough that pretty much any business of any size can justify the cost.

I use OnlyOffice to handle documents and spreadsheets when I need to, but if I was doing that on a daily basis I’d absolutely pay for an Office license.

lakeviewterrace 1 minute ago | parent

> OnlyOffice

Best Latvian office suite?

sanskritical 1 hour ago | parent

I send a fair amount of physical mailings. This requires me to do a mail merge from a spreadsheet to adhesive labels. I will buy whatever brand of inkjet paper filled with adhesive labels is the cheapest at that given time. The manufacturer gives a template for the labels. Every year or so I will check the feasibility of switching to LibreOffice or OnlyOffice or whatever the thing people say is the open source future of office software is. I will try to do this same exact action, which every office in the world likely does a significant number of times per year. Every year, once I figure out how to mail merge (sometimes, a drastically different process in the interface, whereas Microsoft has kept this relatively intuitive throughout the ages) I end up with misaligned labels on a sheet of ruined label paper, despite the alleged format compatibility of the open source alternatives.

I hate Microsoft. I hate having to use Windows. But nobody in the free software community has ever made this not a nightmare. I suppose I might take a picture of the fucked up product and ask Claude if it can fix my fucking labels. That might actually work.

toomuchtodo 1 hour ago | parent

Create a bounty, I'm in for at least a couple hundred $ in tokens to solve this, assuming MIT or copyleft license is used to avoid future commercial capture.

https://bounties.fulu.org/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50167818

apercu 28 minutes ago | parent

I hate to say this butt I wonder if you could just generate a CSV (I use python for this sort of thing) and send to a vendor to just make the labels for you? (Admittedly this is a North American view point) but it might actually be less effort (time for you) and cheaper.

gavmor 27 minutes ago | parent

At what point does implementing it yourself become a savings?

orangesilk 6 minutes ago | parent

> despite the alleged format compatibility

that never existed. While Microsoft has published a specification of their file formats, the never described how to render them. So a clone cannot make it look like Microsoft Office.

Blame it on Microsoft. Stop the vendor lockin and leave Microsoft today

galaxyLogic 4 minutes ago | parent

Maybe there should be an app just for doing mail-merge. That should be fairly simple I assume?

wg0 1 hour ago | parent

Can't they vibe code these apps in Rust? Is AI a fad?

functionmouse 1 hour ago | parent

no

no

seanclayton 56 minutes ago | parent

functionmouse 2 minutes ago | parent

my favorite :D

stackghost 51 minutes ago | parent

You can have it vibe coded, non-trivial, and good. Pick two.

realusername 11 minutes ago | parent

https://getartcraft.com/apps/wordcraft

It's happening, although it's just the beginning

fn-mote 1 hour ago | parent

Knew this was coming after reading the history of Microsoft in Latin America.

selimthegrim 39 minutes ago | parent

Is this like the history of Coca-Cola in Latin America

mentalgear 33 minutes ago | parent

Or the horrifying American Fruit Company (Chiquita now) in South America ?

JoeAltmaier 28 minutes ago | parent

Who was it that sent a gunboat to Hawaii and ousted their government, then demanded it be a state. The feds resisted for a while but that's how we got Hawaii - at a fruit company mercenary gunpoint.

quesera 19 minutes ago | parent

That was Dole, according to the Hawaiians I know.

lakeviewterrace 7 minutes ago | parent

The Americans overthrew the monarchy to prevent the Japs from doing the same. However, the British and Europeans did plenty of raping and pillaging years before. It's why to this day the Hawaii state flag still carries the Union Jack, as a reminder of how the British brought them syphilis.

tokai 27 minutes ago | parent

Maybe the Greenland deal had secret provisions on sticking with microsoft /s

penguin_booze 17 minutes ago | parent

It's all set forth under section 1, 'Notice of invasion', subsection 3, 'conditional treatment of natives'.

pipes 26 minutes ago | parent

Please can you take the time to elaborate. The comment as you have left it doesn't add much without explanation. There is more and more of this on hacker news.

lakeviewterrace 19 minutes ago | parent

That's not true, it adds innuendo.

asanineassasin 1 hour ago | parent

In a world- with https://github.com/storytold/gridcraft - who still needs excell? In such a world- where its obvious that MS Office is easy replaceable with whatever some singularity demon created - longterm government migration plans like this make no sense?

nradov 57 minutes ago | parent

How is the compatibility for VBA scripts? If not near 100% then it's going to be kind of useless for most enterprises.

scosman 1 hour ago | parent

I’m vibecoding an excel in rust just to see if it can be done and what are the limits.

https://github.com/scosman/freecell

So far it’s GPU accelerated (GPUI), cross platform, supports 95% of excel functions, supports charts, is about 40x faster than Numbers, and can render 240fps.

I thought I’d leave this process with a new appreciation for manual dev/details. I haven’t found that yet. I’m getting more into architecture details, writing more benchmarks, testing more. I know there are limits, but I’m still trying to find them.

It would be absolute garbage if I wasn’t already an engineer. It probably is absolute garbage in ways I don’t know because I haven’t read the code. But the app is… quite good. If someone invested into something like this full-time for 6 months it's hard to imagine what you'd need excel for.

quesera 33 minutes ago | parent

I'm not normally one to quibble about software naming collisions, and I have literally never run MS Windows on any hardware ever in my life.

But this collision seems inauspicious.

scosman 26 minutes ago | parent

It's a spreadsheet app (cells) that's free. FreeCell. I mostly thought it was funny.

The card game and computer version predate windows -- it's not a MSFT creation.

quesera 23 minutes ago | parent

I get it, and I know it, but I still think it's more funny than good.

(but I did not downvote, I suspect that's other peoples' opinions about your optimism :)

NetMageSCW 29 minutes ago | parent

If you don’t support PowerQuery (which I don’t see mentioned for IronCalc even as a future goal) you are long way from Excel for many.

nikanj 56 minutes ago | parent

It's been over 20 years since I saw the first announcements that the German government is moving to Linux + OpenOffice.

Any day now.

Orygin 47 minutes ago | parent

Will come the day Microsoft stops bribing politicians to stay on MS Office and Windows.

NetMageSCW 35 minutes ago | parent

It will come the day open source developers prioritize the same things enterprises and governments do.

fsflover 31 minutes ago | parent

Profit and popularity?

Orygin 29 minutes ago | parent

Yeah you're absolutely right, pretty sure the bribes have nothing to do with it and it's because open source is worse. /s

oskcwidjwjxjwjj 11 minutes ago | parent

I mean, the bribes have absolutely everything to do with it but so does the fact that open source alternatives more often than not fall painfully short.

kjuulh 24 minutes ago | parent

My mom still uses OpenOffice at her job (municipality), and honestly they haven't really felt a huge difference, they still get their work done like before, but heck there were some training to do as they were switching. I suspect at this point they would need the same training just to get back to word etc.

galaxyLogic 7 minutes ago | parent

Neverthelessx having the ability to use clones helps when negotiating with MS.