EEVblog® Electronics Community Forum
Products => Computers => Topic started by: Karel on April 11, 2026, 03:42:15 pm
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France is ditching US software for homegrown alternatives of Google Docs, Microsoft Office, Zoom
European governments have long sought to reduce their dependency on non-European (i.e., American) software.
While individual municipalities and government sectors have recently begun switching to homegrown options,
France's latest announcement signals a broader shift away from tools such as Windows, Microsoft Office, Zoom,
and Google Docs.
https://www.techspot.com/news/112032-france-starts-moving-government-systems-windows-linux.html (https://www.techspot.com/news/112032-france-starts-moving-government-systems-windows-linux.html)
https://linuxiac.com/france-launches-government-linux-desktop-plan-as-windows-exit-begins/ (https://linuxiac.com/france-launches-government-linux-desktop-plan-as-windows-exit-begins/)
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Unfortunately, this too will likely fail. The reason is the quiet opposition from tens of thousands of Microsoft Windows -trained IT support persons.
In my experience, it is much harder to retrain a Windows professional into a Linux professional, than to train a Linux professional from scratch. The reason appears to be the huge amount of subconscious routine knowledge, that suddenly no longer applies. Not only do they have to learn the new thing, but also un-learn what they have already learned, at pretty big personal expense (time and effort).
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Yes, but if there is a shift to thin clients and web office applications, then it's somewhat familiar to users, adequate for many of them, and requires less Linux IT support to run it all. After the thin clients are running Linux, the job is then to replace MS365.
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I suppose that means that France finds no problem with protection of domestic markets by other countries. No more French wine or cheese or airplanes. Or perhaps a ban on French CAD systems.
This strikes me as just as stupid as certain leaders waging tariff wars.
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Things like Excel and Word hit maturity a decade ago.
They can easily be supplanted by LibreOffice.
A spreadsheet with equations? Great idea. I even use it as a quick DB with ODBC.
A document writing program with styles? I can muddle my way through.
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They can easily be supplanted by LibreOffice.
I don't think its easy at any large scale of users. While I like LibreOffice, I use Word at work simply because everyone in my office does, and all our clients. It's a standard. And users get upset if you force them to switch to LO, because it's not perfect at rendering Word documents (because MS doesn't want it to be). And users get upset at spending time fixing things, only to find they broke again when someone else edited that doc with Word. All that time costs more than the Word license, unfortunately.
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I suppose that means that France finds no problem with protection of domestic markets by other countries. No more French wine or cheese or airplanes. Or perhaps a ban on French CAD systems.
This strikes me as just as stupid as certain leaders waging tariff wars.
This is not about the commerical aspect. In fact as far as can see here in EU we are not happy that we have to reinvent the wheel and many would be happy to keep paying for US software. Yes there were in the past some experiments at town level and we know how they ended.
Please read this right because is something way more troublesome: its the loss of trust in US products at the political/government level that is forcing a new and bigger try. Making this switch only to feel proud and independent is the wrong reason to do it and most people know it despite the misleading wording in the OP.
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And users get upset if you force them to switch to LO, because it's not perfect at rendering Word documents (because MS doesn't want it to be).
That simply is not true: Microsoft opened up the file format many years ago. The problem with file fidelity is that to achieve identical rendering, you must FLAWLESSLY mimic every single behavior of the source program, including bugs.
LibreOffice not only doesn’t have all the features and functions of Word (no matter what its proponents claim), but moreover, Word uses a quite unique document object model that nobody else has wanted to copy. Translating between that and the more common tagged format of LibreOffice etc is nontrivial.
The Word object model was invented back when computers had very little RAM. The problem with ordinary tagged formats is that to determine the formatting of any piece of text, you must parse the entire document from the beginning, since it could be affected by an opening tag right at the beginning. To allow users to edit text that can’t fit in memory in its entirety, Word completely divorced formatting from the text itself. Instead, spans of text have no formatting within them, but instead are associated with a stylesheet which contains its entire formatting. If you select a word and bold it, for example, it breaks up the bold word and the spans before and after into different spans, and the bold word gets a different stylesheet. The association of text spans and their styles is kept in a separate table, which also tracks the order of the text. So not only is the text not formatted with tags, it can be physically stored out of order! (The original binary file format is actually basically a lightweight file system.) In the past, when disks were slow, like floppies, Word even defaulted to “fast save”, where it just appended modified text to the end of the file and amended the association table to refer to the new text spans, rather than rewriting the entire file. (Yep, this meant that you could roll back edits, which led to the leaks of sensitive or embarrassing information!)
None of that design is necessary today, but that architecture remains. And nobody else stands a snowball’s chance in hell of reproducing it, since it’d be a mammoth undertaking.
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The russians started with that in 2014, afaik, so you may ask the ru participants here on the results.. :)
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I suppose that means that France finds no problem with protection of domestic markets by other countries. No more French wine or cheese or airplanes. Or perhaps a ban on French CAD systems.
You have reversed cause and effect.
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Part of the problem are the EULAs from microsoft. I don't know the up to date versions, but there was an issue that makes many MS products not meeting the requirements to use them for personal data. So for much of government use Windows 11 and MS office just don't meet the requirements.
So it is kind of only going by the older law. Not sure if MS changed the rules, but in most aspects Win11 only got worse with transfering data.
The switch over takes quite some training, both for the normal users and the system administrators.
In Germany the city of Munich once also did a change to Linux. AFAIK the switched back to MS however. AFAIK is came with better conditions from MS.
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Rteodor]Please read this right because is something way more troublesome: its the loss of trust in US products at the political/government level that is forcing a new and bigger try. Making this switch only to feel proud and independent is the wrong reason to do it and most people know it despite the misleading wording in the OP.
+1!
What the French are doing isn't just 'teasing' or trolling. It's one of the first, directly tangible results of the fact that trust in the USA has been utterly lost. The matter is very, very serious, and I get the impression that Americans utterly fail to understand it for what it is. Every action begets a reaction. It's only now that the first tangible reactions are slowly beginning to show up.
'Trust arrives by foot and leaves on horseback'.
Trust, that they had gained for how they helped and fought for and with us in WW2(*). I don't see that trust re-appearing during my lifetime. Nor in the lifetime of anyone alive today. Perhaps future generations. Perhaps not.
Utterly amazing how the cooperiation and trust has been flushed down the drain, for absolutely NOTHING. Nobody gains from this apart from our adversaries.
(* over here people haven't forgotten about this. My particular area though was liberated by the Canadians in 1944 and they paid a very heavy price for it (Black Friday during the Battle of the Scheldt). It's commemorated here every year, 80+ years later. Streets, quarters and squares have been named in their honour. The area a bit more to the east was liberated by the Poles (the same soldiers who a little later got thoroughly shafted by Churchill e.a.)). We remember very well.
Apart from all that, I gave MicroSoft the finger in 2007 and switched to Linux. Have been very happy with it ever since. Does everything I require of it. I'm sure the French will be fine too.
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And users get upset if you force them to switch to LO, because it's not perfect at rendering Word documents (because MS doesn't want it to be).
That simply is not true: Microsoft opened up the file format many years ago. The problem with file fidelity is that to achieve identical rendering, you must FLAWLESSLY mimic every single behavior of the source program, including bugs.
You've been duped by OOXML, which was its main intention; to create a standard which so esoteric it's of little use to anyone else who wished to make a parity replacement for Word, yet ticked the government check boxes for open standards. ODT was standardised 2 years before OOXML, which MS pushed through in a hurry to in response to governmental push for open standards, they didn't want ODT to get a foothold. Note they chose not to act in good faith and use the ODT standards (meaningfully, or by default), or assist in their improvement. No, it was all about keeping the golden goose propped up.
Fidelity needs well documented on-disk standards AND rendering which adheres to those standards.
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/03/27/odf-is-the-future-ooxml-is-the-past/
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Well, I don't know how it's going to pan out, but I don't see what the big surprise is. It's been in the talks for years. Any government should be independent from companies such as MS or Google, even the US government IMHO.
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It's kind of inevitable, as Linux, its apps, and its ability to run windows apps, keep getting better every year while Windows keeps getting worse.
I don't know if this thing in France will succeed, but one will eventually.
There is a chance SteamOS may consolidate things a bit and bring about a new desktop linux distro for the general public.
Being able to install/run any windows app in Linux reliably without needing to faff around would be a big driving factor.
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Munich did that in 2004, including their own distro (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux). They ditched everything and moved back to Windows 15 years later. Lower Saxony also decided to rely on OpenSuse in 2006 and the decision was reversed a bit over a decade later. What are the chances French “revolution” is going to be any different?
The problem with authorities switching to penguinic ecosystems is always the same. It’s the reasons behind the decision. All the wrong reasons. What today drives them to use a Linux distro will in a few years make them switch to Windows. Good if it’s anything more than opportunism and short-lived hope to save a few bucks or fulfill a temporary political goal. That fizzles out quickly and what state agencies are left with is:- Staggering short-term financial costs. The kind that is most visible and a low-hanging fruit for any hyena searching for an easy target.
- Extreme pressure from corporations. From which Microsoft is actually the least of concern. Rather think of ERP, document management, threat protection companies.
- Their own managers and accountants, who are mentally incapable of perceiving world beyond what Windows ecosystem already fills in best. And Microsoft knows that: this is why they don’t need to do too much and can just wait. They understand that the systematic issues will lead to them being called.
- In western countries: laws that punish not being a total jerk.
What kind of an outcome do you expect from the above situation?
Unless there is a social change (in the wider population) and unless authorities comprehend that FOSS is not about taking things without paying, there is no way I can see Linux distros or other open solutions stand a chance long-term. Sure, EU Parliament and European agencies — having to accommodate activist groups and the past “technological neutrality” rule — may once in a while support open choices,(1) but that’s rather an exception.
On the humorous side, North Korea embraced it a long time ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS). ;)
(1) At least on paper. Because both the details and actual state-level implementation or use differ widely. And the “technological neutrality” rule is a double-edged weapon.
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I suppose that means that France finds no problem with protection of domestic markets by other countries. No more French wine or cheese or airplanes. Or perhaps a ban on French CAD systems.
You have reversed cause and effect.
No, I was pointing out lemming behavior. One country does something stupid (claimed to be punishment for something). Said nation claims home country won't be harmed while target country feel the pain of their supposed transgression
Now a second country does the same thing.
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:P
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Munich did that in 2004, including their own distro (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux). They ditched everything and moved back to Windows 15 years later. Lower Saxony also decided to rely on OpenSuse in 2006 and the decision was reversed a bit over a decade later. What are the chances French “revolution” is going to be any different?
For the early aughts, a 10-15 year lifecycle on a big IT project would probably qualify as quite successful.
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You'll have a french "ordinateur" that has a "dc" (disque compacte) running on "CD" (courent directe). The installed Os distro will be Xunil with only support for AZERTY keyboards.
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Munich did that in 2004, including their own distro (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux). They ditched everything and moved back to Windows 15 years later. Lower Saxony also decided to rely on OpenSuse in 2006 and the decision was reversed a bit over a decade later. What are the chances French “revolution” is going to be any different?
For the early aughts, a 10-15 year lifecycle on a big IT project would probably qualify as quite successful.
The projects were succesful because they had AisleRiot, KPatience, and PySolFC in their menu only.. :D
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I suppose that means that France finds no problem with protection of domestic markets by other countries. No more French wine or cheese or airplanes. Or perhaps a ban on French CAD systems.
Do they have a choice in this matter? :-DD
Through the 21st century, the biggest new feature of every M$ Office version N was producing documents that can't be opened by version N-1, even if they are simple enough that N-1 could handle them in principle. And the biggest export of their home country in general was instability around the world.
What's the value proposition of M$ and U$ anymore?
It's greed for the sake of greed.
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When a document, made with ms office, doesn't look right in Libreoffice, it's the fault of Libreoffice.
When a document, made with Libreoffice, doesn't look right in ms office, it's the fault of Libreoffice.
When a document, made with ms office version x, doesn't look right in ms office version y, it's ... normal!
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Based on my own experience (including as a volunteer user-facing Linux IT support at an University), I do believe that open source based solutions could much better serve people in the long term. The key feature is customization, making the tool better fit for purpose.
The issue is social inertia. We do have tens of thousands of people who will absolutely object to, and many fail, retraining from Windows to Linux. Just shifting your Windows knowledge to Linux desktop environments works for a small number of lightweight users, but not for support personnel. I know this as a practical fact, having observed it close-by.
Subcontractors, service providers, et cetera will apply pressure at the higher levels, those who make the decisions. Local companies aren't a problem, because they can and will adapt; it's the government-sized internationals that can buy just about anything. (I'm not talking about bribes; I'm talking about making certain decisions so politically beneficial to the decider that they simply cannot refuse. Politicians first and foremost interest is, unfortunately, always their own; most just explain to themselves that what benefits themselves, benefits the rest of the country too. It's just human.)
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Munich did that in 2004, including their own distro (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux). They ditched everything and moved back to Windows 15 years later. Lower Saxony also decided to rely on OpenSuse in 2006 and the decision was reversed a bit over a decade later. What are the chances French “revolution” is going to be any different?
For the early aughts, a 10-15 year lifecycle on a big IT project would probably qualify as quite successful.
They didn’t switch back because of a planned life-cycle. The reason they did is the cumulative, mutually-enforcing effect of the points I listed. In particular with Munich that even got explicitly revealed in press releases at the time.
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As a (i think) basic/simple office user, i find LibreOffice to be fully adequate for me.
Where i occationally have "missed" MS Office , was when opening advanced excel sheets, where macros or VBS was heavily used.
Ie. STM once had a MCU PLL caculation excel sheet, that Libre did not like.
And my neighbour used a "Diabetes excel sheet", that she got from her doctor.
Libre didn't like that too.
My wife used Libre at home , and MS Office at work.
She complained about the Text documents looking diffferent, but that was due to MS using MS copyrighted fonts per default.
Libre did a decent job of substuting them with non copyrighted fonts. But they (printouts) weren't 100% alike.
My guess is that for 90% of the users - Libre would be an "easy fit".
For the last 10% (Power users) - Quite some work would have to be done, in converting the VBS & Macros.
But if/when the majority of users would switch to LibreOffice, i guess it would be MS that begins to "not look the same".
My wife switched to Libre, and newer looked back.
When changing job, and there were no Free Office License via the company anymore.
She didn't want to "self pay" for a Yearly Office365 license.
Btw:
I have converted many "simple" MS Win users from MS Office to LibreOffice.
Libre works excellent on Windows too.
I'm all in for Europe to get an "Independant choice" of OS/Office, and hopefully payment methods.
I still remember when ICC did "misbehave" according to the recent US GVMT.
Didn't the ICC President loose access to his MS hosted e-mails ?
And I'm quite sure i read several other ICC menbers, also went "into bad standing" , and suddently couldn't pay with VISA/MC or Paypal.
I expect that "Freedom of Speech" should apply to EU citizens too.
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I switched to Linux in 2021 after using Windows for 23 years. Now I have Debian/XFCE everywhere, Desktop, Laptop, Raspberries, I'm really glad I have such a lightweight and reliable system instead of bloated M$ crapware.
I think any EU country should hire developers to work full time on open source softwares, it would benefit not only to administrations but also to everyone.
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For the people here who think it isn't possible, in 2017 the French gendarmerie moved 70,000 computers to GendBuntu Linux.
2024: 97% of workstations running GendBuntu (103,164 stations).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu?useskin=vector (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu?useskin=vector)
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The issue is social inertia. We do have tens of thousands of people who will absolutely object to, and many fail, retraining from Windows to Linux. Just shifting your Windows knowledge to Linux desktop environments works for a small number of lightweight users, but not for support personnel. I know this as a practical fact, having observed it close-by.
Subcontractors, service providers, et cetera will apply pressure at the higher levels, those who make the decisions. Local companies aren't a problem, because they can and will adapt; it's the government-sized internationals that can buy just about anything. (I'm not talking about bribes; I'm talking about making certain decisions so politically beneficial to the decider that they simply cannot refuse. Politicians first and foremost interest is, unfortunately, always their own; most just explain to themselves that what benefits themselves, benefits the rest of the country too. It's just human.)
Yep, a simple "the boss/government has decided to migrate to Linux" won't work. Most PC users are afraid of change. We need to explain the reasons (plus road map) and tell a story to motivate employees/people. And we have to accompany them during the whole migration process (there's no reason to be afraid).
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I'm all in for Europe to get an "Independant choice" of OS/Office, and hopefully payment methods.
I still remember when ICC did "misbehave" according to the recent US GVMT.
Didn't the ICC President loose access to his MS hosted e-mails ?
And I'm quite sure i read several other ICC menbers, also went "into bad standing" , and suddently couldn't pay with VISA/MC or Paypal.
I expect that "Freedom of Speech" should apply to EU citizens too.
As a side note, EU law has a provision to deal with companies discriminating or sanctioning against EU citizens unlawfully. AFAIK, that provision wasn't invoked yet because of 'diplomatic' reasons.
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Austria's armed forces switch to LibreOffice
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Austria-s-armed-forces-switch-to-LibreOffice-10660761.html (https://www.heise.de/en/news/Austria-s-armed-forces-switch-to-LibreOffice-10660761.html)
Danish Ministry switching from Microsoft Office/365 to LibreOffice
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/07/08/danish-ministry-switching-from-microsoft-office-365-to-libreoffice/ (https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/07/08/danish-ministry-switching-from-microsoft-office-365-to-libreoffice/)
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She complained about the Text documents looking diffferent, but that was due to MS using MS copyrighted fonts per default.
ah this
copyrighted fonts
i hate this
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And users get upset if you force them to switch to LO, because it's not perfect at rendering Word documents (because MS doesn't want it to be).
That simply is not true: Microsoft opened up the file format many years ago. The problem with file fidelity is that to achieve identical rendering, you must FLAWLESSLY mimic every single behavior of the source program, including bugs.
You've been duped by OOXML, which was its main intention; to create a standard which so esoteric it's of little use to anyone else who wished to make a parity replacement for Word, yet ticked the government check boxes for open standards. ODT was standardised 2 years before OOXML, which MS pushed through in a hurry to in response to governmental push for open standards, they didn't want ODT to get a foothold. Note they chose not to act in good faith and use the ODT standards (meaningfully, or by default), or assist in their improvement. No, it was all about keeping the golden goose propped up.
Fidelity needs well documented on-disk standards AND rendering which adheres to those standards.
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/03/27/odf-is-the-future-ooxml-is-the-past/
Did you even read, let alone attempt to understand, my entire comment?!?
I haven’t been “duped”, I literally explained in detail why it’s impossible to have 100% document fidelity. Getting the data in and out — and whether it’s stored as binary or XML — is the easy part. Knowing what to do with it is the hard part. As I said: you must flawlessly reproduce every single feature, behavior, quirk, and bug.
The only point you and I differ in is whether this fact is deliberate or not: you claim it is. I maintain that it doesn’t matter whether it is deliberate or not, because from a technical standpoint, it’s an impossible task regardless. Microsoft didn’t have to try and be evil: technology made it impossible anyway.
Those governments which wanted Office to switch to “open” file formats did not understand that what they were asking for is not actually possible. So it’s no wonder they got a kludge that technically checks the box, but doesn’t really do what they wanted. That kinda tends to result from unrealistic expectations.
Microsoft fully documented both the binary and XML formats, but having the documentation still leaves you with the monumental/impossible task of recreating the Word engine to actually make full use of the data. OOXML simply changes the container format for the data. It doesn’t change the document object model, which is inherent to the way Word works. You can’t use any other document object model without translation, which is going to be lossy in at least some situations.
Those are your only two options: translate the data or recreate the entire rendering engine.
And the reverse is equally true: since Word can’t change its engine, for it to work with ODT, it must use a translator, which it does. But translation is lossy. (And honestly, Word’s ODT support isn’t that bad.)
My main point, though, is simply this: don’t act like the task at hand was trivial, and the only reason it doesn’t work perfectly is because MS sabotaged it. In reality, while I’m sure MS didn’t really want to do it, the sheer difficulty of the task makes perfection impossible, even if you want to do it.
As others have pointed out: even between different versions of Word, there can be fidelity issues. And that’s something MS definitely didn’t do on purpose.
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My main point, though, is simply this: don’t act like the task at hand was trivial, and the only reason it doesn’t work perfectly is because MS sabotaged it. In reality, while I’m sure MS didn’t really want to do it, the sheer difficulty of the task makes perfection impossible, even if you want to do it.
I said the task was deliberately made harder by a poor OOXML standard that MS never intended to be actually useful. See LO link I gave, they said;
OOXML, or Office Open XML, was not designed for interoperability, but to do something very specific: to encode Microsoft Office’s binary formats in XML in such a way as to allow Microsoft to claim compliance with the standard without relinquishing control over users through lock-in.
As others have pointed out: even between different versions of Word, there can be fidelity issues. And that’s something MS definitely didn’t do on purpose.
We both agree that MS is imperfect. You have a softer view of them than I do. I still remember the 'Linux is a cancer' statement, and I don't believe that has been entirely eradicated at MS.
They definetly chose to not use ODF formats as default standard, because that reduces lock-in, benefits competition in the marketplace, and the consumer.
They definetly added useless features in Word designed to needlessy obsolete older versions of Word.
etc, etc..
MS continue to be a monopolist happy to abuse market position for there own gain over customer choice, the evidence is right there in Windows. MS definitely chose that path.
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My main point, though, is simply this: don’t act like the task at hand was trivial, and the only reason it doesn’t work perfectly is because MS sabotaged it. In reality, while I’m sure MS didn’t really want to do it, the sheer difficulty of the task makes perfection impossible, even if you want to do it.
I said the task was deliberately made harder by a poor OOXML standard that MS never intended to be actually useful. See LO link I gave, they said;
OOXML, or Office Open XML, was not designed for interoperability, but to do something very specific: to encode Microsoft Office’s binary formats in XML in such a way as to allow Microsoft to claim compliance with the standard without relinquishing control over users through lock-in.
As others have pointed out: even between different versions of Word, there can be fidelity issues. And that’s something MS definitely didn’t do on purpose.
We both agree that MS is imperfect. You have a softer view of them than I do. I still remember the 'Linux is a cancer' statement, and I don't believe that has been entirely eradicated at MS.
They definetly chose to not use ODF formats as default standard, because that reduces lock-in, benefits competition in the marketplace, and the consumer.
They definetly added useless features in Word designed to needlessy obsolete older versions of Word.
etc, etc..
MS continue to be a monopolist happy to abuse market position for there own gain over customer choice, the evidence is right there in Windows. MS definitely chose that path.
How much effort is worth investing in a task that cannot succeed? Especially when it goes against your own business interests?
I’m not saying I necessarily agree with Microsoft’s choices — heck, I’m primarily an Apple user, and have been since the days when Microsoft was the mortal enemy #1 — but I also don’t think it’s fair to pretend that any other for-profit company would have behaved differently. Nor am I willing to rule out that Microsoft actually did make a good-faith effort, and OOXML is the best they could come up with. (Given that user expectations were that existing documents would be faithfully rendered, how can you even do that with a format that doesn’t represent all the features and options in your program?)
Despite not being a programmer myself, I do have a background in the (commercial, for-profit) software industry, so I am willing to look at things from that perspective, too. And as it happens, the product my employer sold (reference management software, i.e. a specialized database to help you make your bibliography) worked with both Word and ODT documents, and required the programmers to have intimate understanding of both formats’ object models, since you have to if you’re going to modify documents. Their conclusion was that Word’s object model, despite being more complex, was better thought-out, and that Word’s API for modifying a document was much, much better than OpenOffice/LibreOffice’s API. There were things you just couldn’t do in ODT because the format simply wasn’t complete enough. That’s not to say that it never will be, but one of the things Word has going for it is that it’s been around for 40 years, so plenty of time to add every feature under the sun. (Something most people don’t realize is how many obscure features Word has that they will never use, or even realize are there. Replacing Word in a workflow not only means file formats, but feature integration that simply isn’t there in the alternatives. For most use cases, these aren’t used and won’t be missed. But in a major migration like this one in France, it’s almost guaranteed they’ll run into such missing features and will either need to reimagine workflows to work around them, or invest in implementing those features in the open source software they intend to use.)
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How much effort is worth investing in a task that cannot succeed? Especially when it goes against your own business interests?
To a point. Then people realise your not playing nice and look elsewhere.
Note the EU fined MS 1.6 billion euros in the last couple of years for bad business practices.
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How much effort is worth investing in a task that cannot succeed? Especially when it goes against your own business interests?
IMHO a lot, since it's a Supplier & OS lock-in too.
First - Let the buisinesses run MS if they want, need it.
But EU & the individual countries should endorse LibreOffice as their "Official Office package".
Meaning that all "Official correcpondance" etc. to citizens , would be made with LibreOffice.
That would enable most private users to use LibreOffice too, making quite a large userbase.
Then the LibreOffice users , would also have the choice of switching away from MS Windows, if so desired.
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She complained about the Text documents looking diffferent, but that was due to MS using MS copyrighted fonts per default.
Libre did a decent job of substuting them with non copyrighted fonts. But they (printouts) weren't 100% alike.
You can get some of them (Andale Mono, Arial Black, Arial, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet, Verdana, and Webdings) by installing the ttf-mscorefonts-installer package in Debian derivatives (Ubuntu, Mint, et cetera). (See SourceForge project (https://sourceforge.net/projects/ttf-mscorefonts-installer/files/).) They are properly licensed by Microsoft, even though Microsoft no longer distributes them themselves. For the rest of the fonts MS provides, you need to acquire a license (https://www.myfonts.com/a/font/form/microsoft-typography-licensing). The exact same .ttf font files will work, though; it's just the licensing rules that limit their use outside Windows.
Personally, I do prefer the DejaVu fonts used e.g. here at EEVBlog. They look nice, and the license (https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/License.html) is permissive. Thus, with say FontForge, one can create a new variant adding new glyphs to use for say timing diagrams; the Unicode private use area (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_private_use_area) is dedicated for exactly this purpose. That is, those glyphs will then be compatible with all applications, from plain text editors to LibreOffice/Inkscape/Gimp et cetera. You can even package it as a webfont for use on a web page, like this forum does. Very useful, if you have a special use case "locally standardized" glyph set.
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For the people here who think it isn't possible, in 2017 the French gendarmerie moved 70,000 computers to GendBuntu Linux.
2024: 97% of workstations running GendBuntu (103,164 stations).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu?useskin=vector (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu?useskin=vector)
Austria's armed forces switch to LibreOffice
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Austria-s-armed-forces-switch-to-LibreOffice-10660761.html (https://www.heise.de/en/news/Austria-s-armed-forces-switch-to-LibreOffice-10660761.html)
Danish Ministry switching from Microsoft Office/365 to LibreOffice
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/07/08/danish-ministry-switching-from-microsoft-office-365-to-libreoffice/ (https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/07/08/danish-ministry-switching-from-microsoft-office-365-to-libreoffice/)
I don’t recall anybody saying it isn’t possible. Many state agencies did install some software taken from the FOSS communities, some even Linux distros. Above I gave famous examples myself. Examples that also show it’s an unstable equilibrum, and the agencies are equally likely to jump to proprietary solutions at any moment. All because the choice was made for all the wrong reasons. Adoption is even higher than just these major cases, much higher, because there is a large number of smaller projects that use open solutions as components. The ordering party didn’t care, didn’t make that choice, likely is not even aware; the contractor simply delivered a product or service with such a component. These are also going to be discarded as easily as they were introduced.
Why is there GendBuntu? Not because French state seen benefits in the open approach. It exists, because at the time it incurred less costs in the budget. If the next Windows release is cheaper, GendBuntu is going to be slaughtered without a second thought. They also didn’t move to open solutions other than the operating system.
Why does Bundesheer move to LibO? Not because Austrian army sees benefits in the open approach. The move is a reaction to Microsoft’s insistence on cloud solutions, coupled with the current resurgence of isolationist and mercantilistic sentiments. The moment Microsoft changes the stance or political winds change, the reason disappears too. Though, given military’s particular nature, there are chances LibO may stay there for longer than elsewhere. And note they didn’t resign from other proprietary solutions either — it’s just the office suite.
This is the same story, repeated over and over again, for years.
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Nor am I willing to rule out that Microsoft actually did make a good-faith effort, and OOXML is the best they could come up with.
Having read the OOXML standard back then, and noted the utter strangeness of how it worked (tags in the XML tree applied to sibling nodes, the definition of a tag was sometimes famously of the order of "do borders like Word 6 did"), I am willing to rule out a good faith effort. It was done exactly for the same reason MS implemented POSIX subsystem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem) for Windows NT: to fill a requirement on paper, nothing more. It sufficed for contractual obligations, and doing anything more/better/further would have been against their then completely-against-open-source-and-open-standards business tactics. I didn't like it then, but I fully understood immediately why they did it that way.
My prediction of what will happen is that the IT support personnel will fail to become as efficient in Linux as they were for Windows, and because there is so many of them, they cannot just fire them en masse, especially not in France. You'd have a much easier time and an order of magnitude better results/efficiency doing the transition with completely new support personnel, but that is just not possible: it would be a political suicide to even try.
It will fail, but not because of Linux or Windows or technology: because of humans being unwilling and unable to learn, once they feel they have a career, and invested time and effort in what they already know and can do.
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I suppose that means that France finds no problem with protection of domestic markets by other countries. No more French wine or cheese or airplanes. Or perhaps a ban on French CAD systems.
Do they have a choice in this matter? :-DD
Through the 21st century, the biggest new feature of every M$ Office version N was producing documents that can't be opened by version N-1, even if they are simple enough that N-1 could handle them in principle. And the biggest export of their home country in general was instability around the world.
What's the value proposition of M$ and U$ anymore?
It's greed for the sake of greed.
Of course, there's a choice. All of the high speeches and indignation for what? I sense entitlement and self-righteousness. If the US does something protectionist, it's exporting instability, but if another country does it, it's righteous reactionism.
You just used the term "value proposition" when addressing a nation of people and then claimed they are all in it for the sake of greed. That's ironic.
Entities building power and claiming cost reduction or dependency reduction have been going on forever. While Linux is a global, decentralized project, a significant portion of its kernel development is driven by U.S.-based companies, including Intel, Red Hat, Google, and IBM, often with employees working on company time. The Linux Foundation is also headquartered in the U.S., contributing to its strong influence. Fleeing the US influence and dependence seems to be a failure out of the gate if that's the purpose.
Microsoft is a corporate beast, no different from any other corporate beast. These things are everywhere around the world. Governments are a different kind of beast and often worse than the corporate ones. It is almost certain that the underlying government bodies see a path to gain more power by taking this action. The bureaucracy will grow because this path requires it, and that's beneficial to the beast's growth in power and control.
I am certainly not a big fan of Microsoft. I have companies I hold in higher regard, and I can certainly list many for which I have much more disdain. But Microsoft puts a lot of money back into France, according to public information.
https://news.microsoft.com/fr-fr/2024/05/13/microsoft-announces-the-largest-investment-to-date-in-france-to-accelerate-the-adoption-of-ai-skilling-and-innovation/
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-invest-4-billion-french-064001520.html
Microsoft employs around 2,000 people in France, with a primary headquarters located in Issy-les-Moulineaux, near Paris. By comparison, MS employs 20k people around its headquarters, which means France has 10% of that number in the country. I suppose the proper reactionary path is for MS to abandon France and move to another, more stable country, per the logic here.
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It will fail, ...
The French gendarmerie managed to do it.
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For the people here who think it isn't possible, in 2017 the French gendarmerie moved 70,000 computers to GendBuntu Linux.
Just make sure that Ludovic Cruchot and his gang of nitwits don't find the ASCCI Art files to sent to the 0 column printer ...
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It will fail, ...
The French gendarmerie managed to do it.
Not surprising. The French are quite tech savvy. In the 1980's they already had an online system for doing online purchases through a computer terminal (Minitel) long before people heard about internet. When they shut it down deep in the 2000's there where still millions of users. France is big enough for these kind of systems to make economic sense without needing to export to foreign countries.
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because of humans being unwilling and unable to learn, once they feel they have a career, and invested time and effort in what they already know and can do.
Here's the thing : i want to make a cabinet. I know how to do it with my set of tools. You take away the tools and give me something different. Similar, but different. Some tools will be better, some will be worse. This now becomes a hurdle for me to do my job. I want to get that cabinet built. I don't want to deal with figuring out how to cut a precise angle using the saw you provided.
My original saw had a setting for cutting angle. The one you gave me doesn't. When i raise this issue you tell me : work around it, or, since you have the plans for the saw, modify it and share the modification . Yeah. i use saws, i don't make them. i make cabinets !
I see this all the time. It is counterproductive and a source of endless irritation.
switching tools is not as easy as it looks.
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How much effort is worth investing in a task that cannot succeed? Especially when it goes against your own business interests?
IMHO a lot, since it's a Supplier & OS lock-in too.
I don’t think you understood my question?
“A lot” means here “it is worth it for Microsoft to invest a lot in trying to make open file formats for Office, even though it can’t succeed and goes against its business interests”.
But doing so decreases lock-in.
I’m arguing that Microsoft didn’t have to make an active effort to increase lock-in, because merely investing the minimum in openness (as opposed to investing a lot) was more than sufficient to ensure lock-in.
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How much effort is worth investing in a task that cannot succeed? Especially when it goes against your own business interests?
IMHO a lot, since it's a Supplier & OS lock-in too.
I don’t think you understood my question?
You are correct here ... sorry i missed your point.
“A lot” means here “it is worth it for Microsoft to invest a lot in trying to make open file formats for Office, even though it can’t succeed and goes against its business interests”.
But doing so decreases lock-in.
I’m arguing that Microsoft didn’t have to make an active effort to increase lock-in, because merely investing the minimum in openness (as opposed to investing a lot) was more than sufficient to ensure lock-in.
Could be plausible.
MS Office has always been the "Golden Goose". Not the one time "few bucks", made on a one time Windows OEM license.
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MS Office has always been the "Golden Goose". Not the one time "few bucks", made on a one time Windows OEM license.
Absolutely the golden goose. They have extensively attempted to turn that into a lock-in for Azure by making it unpleasant to run Exchange on-premises.
As they have also positioned their desktop management platform as a "cheap" competitor in the MDM, most enterprises take this easy path.
Pay a per-user license fee to get Office, Teams, MDM, and more. Honestly, I doubt you can beat them on cost by doing what France has said they will do.
And on top of that, the MS integration and functionality across companies, governments, and so on will make this even more unpleasant.
I see this movement by the French government as something only governments can afford to do. Maybe startups, too, since they don't have a lot invested. But at any significant scale, the training costs and loss of productivity during the transisition would be massive and too costly for most to consider. In the private area, I would call that decision "career-limiting". The mantra "no one got fired for buying IBM/Cisco," etc., comes to mind.
I call these "opportunities to get yourself promoted to a customer".
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Of course, there's a choice. All of the high speeches and indignation for what? I sense entitlement and self-righteousness. If the US does something protectionist, it's exporting instability, but if another country does it, it's righteous reactionism.
Sucks to be the leader of the free world :P Righteous or not, it is reactionism just like uncontrolled globalism of the past was monkeying the US too. How much of it was choice, how much brainwashing and how much coercion I don't know, but post-war Western Europe never amounted to more than an America copycat with extra socialism thrown in.
You just used the term "value proposition" when addressing a nation of people and then claimed they are all in it for the sake of greed. That's ironic.
What's ironic is that the word "nation" comes from Latin "born", which is the opposite of a population whose only shared trait is having sought better life by immigrating to some place at some time. Whole concept is a greed magnet, attracting the greediest of the world as surely as socialism attracts the laziest. And the value proposition of this social construct has been deteriorating for a while, including before the particular administration which some love to blame for all ills.
Microsoft is a corporate beast, no different from any other corporate beast. These things are everywhere around the world.
Hell no. For one, Eastern Bloc was shit enough that no enshittification was needed or even could have been afforded :D Microsoft is a symptom of the mentality that individual greed motivates people to work for common good. Maybe it's true for a while, maybe it risks becoming greed for the sake of greed afterwards, who knows.
Entities building power and claiming cost reduction or dependency reduction have been going on forever. While Linux is a global, decentralized project, a significant portion of its kernel development is driven by U.S.-based companies, including Intel, Red Hat, Google, and IBM, often with employees working on company time. The Linux Foundation is also headquartered in the U.S., contributing to its strong influence. Fleeing the US influence and dependence seems to be a failure out of the gate if that's the purpose.
That's true, but it's infinitely safer than Windows. Countries serious about technological independence like China are investing into Linux too and I'm sure they could keep a fork going if the US suddenly sanctions open source software exports. Anyone with development resources can do it. There currently seems to be no point going further and building yet another OS from scratch when you can latch onto a successful open source one.
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I see this movement by the French government as something only governments can afford to do. Maybe startups, too, since they don't have a lot invested.
Form where I'm standing the world has moved away from MS-Office. I deal with quite a few small companies and startups. The past 10 years the requests to use MS-Office document formats have dried up completely for me. I see most customers using Google docs or LibreOffice.
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Well, either Windows or Linux are computer related, except the French don't use computers.
Instead of computers, they have ordinateurs. 8)
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You just used the term "value proposition" when addressing a nation of people and then claimed they are all in it for the sake of greed. That's ironic.
What's ironic is that the word "nation" comes from Latin "born", which is the opposite of a population whose only shared trait is having sought better life by immigrating to some place at some time. Whole concept is a greed magnet, attracting the greediest of the world as surely as socialism attracts the laziest. And the value proposition of this social construct has been deteriorating for a while, including before the particular administration which some love to blame for all ills.
The US citizenship is about 85-90% born in the US vs. naturalization. In Europe, the number is about 90% of the citizens born there. Not a huge difference, is it?
Now, Poland, the flag you fly; that country can brag about 98% of its citizens being born there, which is about a match for Japan.
Based on your argument, would you say there are no nations? Would you claim that the entire world was populated by immigrants at some point, and therefore that there are no nations because the word "nation" has a Latin source of "born"? All of them many times over too by different tribes and different sources of humans. This argument really doesn't make any sense, does it? Socialism seems to have attracted its fair share of greedy people, hasn't it?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sylvanlebrun/2025/04/01/the-countries-with-the-most-billionaires-2025/ (https://www.forbes.com/sites/sylvanlebrun/2025/04/01/the-countries-with-the-most-billionaires-2025/)
Note that China is actually higher since they count Hong Kong separately for some reason.
For more recent numbers, see here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires)
If you go by the Huron list, the US is second to China.
Greed for money and power is universal. The US certainly has problems, and hence the claim to be working towards "a more perfect union" is a goal. It's only been 250 years this year, you know. Some roads and buildings in other countries are older.
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I see this movement by the French government as something only governments can afford to do. Maybe startups, too, since they don't have a lot invested.
Form where I'm standing the world has moved away from MS-Office. I deal with quite a few small companies and startups. The past 10 years the requests to use MS-Office document formats have dried up completely for me. I see most customers using Google docs or LibreOffice.
I think that agrees well with my views. As I mentioned, startups rarely invest in learned behaviors and workflows, and while many can bring that baggage with them from other companies, startups are often young in their staffing.
This is exactly why Microsoft, Cisco, etc., spend tons of money each year on the EDUs. Getting folks in the ecosystem early pays off later. Google does this too and, by and large, is getting its fair share of young people exiting university with a penchant for Google software and email.
It also happens to be the source for the most successful Linux distribution (Android).
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I see this movement by the French government as something only governments can afford to do. Maybe startups, too, since they don't have a lot invested.
Form where I'm standing the world has moved away from MS-Office. I deal with quite a few small companies and startups. The past 10 years the requests to use MS-Office document formats have dried up completely for me. I see most customers using Google docs or LibreOffice.
Google docs is pretty good ,so are the online versions of office. Presentations, documents (powerpoint / word) not really an issue. The sticky point is excel ... None of the alternates can run excel macro's (including the online version of office 356). I have tons of excel spreadsheets that do certain calculations for board design. Things i collected or wrote over decades. I even have excel psreadsheets that talk GPIB and collect data directly into graphs through the VBA engine.
Many companies are in that situation. Porting those is an impossible task. If only there was a way to run the VBA macros unmodified in google docs it would be the death of office. I don't know of anyone that uses VBA in word or the other office applications.
Office is used because of legacy Excel abased applications.
I ditched MS Access when i found out that you can use the free odbc driver with CSV files. No need for proprietary database formats. simple CSV tables. Anything in the same directory becomes a table for that driver. you can version them through GIT
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Poland just released its own instant messanger for authorities: Narodowy Komunikator mSzyfr (≈ National Messanger mCipher). And authorities only, no access for the general public.(1)
It’s advertised as “open source.” What is open source? Well… internally it relies on Matrix. Source is not available, the entire application is proprietary, apparently available only through a dedicated smartphone app, requiring Android and subscription to Google Store, and usage of Microsoft Authenticator.(2) Authentication through other methods (e.g. Yubikey) is not supported. E2E is guaranteed through saying so in the info pages. Out of 17M PLN (≈$4.7M, 4M€) spent on developing it, no single cent went to the Matrix project/community. Matrix is not even attributed.
Did Poland do this because somebody believes FOSS is the way? No. Similar to Bundesheer it’s because they want to host it themselves. As opposed to the older solution, which was… oh, wait… on-premises, isolated version of Threema (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threema#Threema_OnPrem). Clients of which are all AGPL.
(1) In Polish: Portal Gov.pl (https://www.gov.pl/web/baza-wiedzy/komunikator-mszyfr), Spiderweb: Polski rząd chce pogonić WhatsAppa i Signala. Tym je zastąpi (https://spidersweb.pl/2026/04/mszyfr-co-to-bezpieczny-komunikator.html).
(2) They don’t ban apps other than Microsoft Authenticator, but explicitly state they’re unsupported.
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The US citizenship is about 85-90% born in the US vs. naturalization. In Europe, the number is about 90% of the citizens born there. Not a huge difference, is it?
Another 10% of Americans don't even have citizenship and yet are claimed to be as good Americans as any other, at least by Americans. So that's what I find ironic, on one hand self-proclaimed group of free people who freely chose to live in free land and a "meaningless clump of cells" (Americans' own language referring to each other), on the other some grandiose "American nation". Get over it, you're a bunch of opportunists by definition and proud of it. As for EU being a wannabe US copycat, that's well known.
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It’s advertised as “open source.” What is open source? Well… internally it relies on Matrix. Source is not available, the entire application is proprietary, apparently available only through a dedicated smartphone app, requiring Android and subscription to Google Store, and usage of Microsoft Authenticator.(2) Authentication through other methods (e.g. Yubikey) is not supported. E2E is guaranteed through saying so in the info pages. Out of 17M PLN (≈$4.7M, 4M€) spent on developing it, no single cent went to the Matrix project/community. Matrix is not even attributed.
Well, your (1) states that it's a replacement for Signal and WhatsApp.
Haven't they done a good job recreating those?
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Well, your (1) states that it's a replacement for Signal and WhatsApp. (…)
It also doesn’t mention that Matrix is the underlying technology in mSzyfr. Unfortunately, for now you need to hope I do not lie. :)
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Earlier many of the programs didn't work right. But today everything is a browser window anyway.
Yes, even your "local applications" are often browser windows.
Added with the need to detach from the unreliable states of america, I can see this working.
Belgium also made their own messaging app iirc.
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It’s not relevant that what Poland released is a messaging app. I believe you missed the point of that post, in the context of what is being discussed in this thread. And also what I said before.
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.......you go by the Huron list, the US is second to China.
Greed for money and power is universal. The US certainly has problems, and hence the claim to be working towards "a more perfect union" is a goal. It's only been 250 years this year, you know. Some roads and buildings in other countries are older.
In our street here is a hospital that was founded in 1340.
Or, as a London woman said to an American:
"We should have been more careful rebuilding the town after the big fire!"
"????!!??"
"Yes, after 1666!"
Gerhard
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Oh yeah?! Hold my beer!
Some are having iPad tablets now, but we used to have tablets about 7-8000 years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C4%83rt%C4%83ria_tablets
;D
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I don't want to deal with figuring out how to cut a precise angle using the saw you provided.
That's just the end users.
It's the IT support that will be the real problem. Think of them as your mentors or neighbors or colleagues that are supposed to be experts in the new equipment, and instead of telling you exactly how that cut could be done, they tell you you have to use a hand saw instead. Or that it is just impossible, and you need to figure out something else. Why? Because they just don't like the new equipment themselves; they too prefer the old comfortable stuff instead.
The power of open source comes from the support personnel. In an optimal situation, they guide end users, but also monitor the needs and workflows of the end users, and communicate those to local developers, which make sure the tools support the most efficient workflows.
That is what I have done since '97 or so; as an IT support person, teacher, HPC sysadmin, and even for a couple of research groups as a researcher myself. Without that, open source is just a zero-cost unreal mirage, a misconception. With that, users making proverbial "cabinets" get the best tools possible for the tasks at hand. I know, because I've done it myself, successfully, time and time again. But the social friction and inertia is immense: it requires the humans involved to be well aware of how poor tools they now have. (My strategy was to just cruelly show what could be possible first, to make them realize that.)
If you want to imagine what could be possible, think about the case where you get a plethora of small businesses that help anyone with not just Linux/FOSS IT support, but also help them optimize their workflows. The companies have enough long-term vision to understand that staying small they stay nimble and competitive without huge administrative costs (most multinational companies are mostly administration), but co-operating (say with one company providing development and support personnel training, another providing support) they can compete with even the multinationals. The problem with this is getting it going, and the fact that company growth will hurt their competitiveness; and that just does not gel with current investment and company-running strategies at all. Today, the best you can do with Linux is purchasing a support agreement for the distribution you're using; forget any hopes of local support, unless you hire and train the support personnel yourself.
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It's the IT support that will be the real problem.
The French gendarmerie managed to do it.
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Get over it, you're a bunch of opportunists by definition and proud of it. As for EU being a wannabe US copycat, that's well known.
I'm over it. Glad to hear we are living rent-free in your mind. :-+
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It's the IT support that will be the real problem.
The French gendarmerie managed to do it.
And many companies around the world have managed to do it as well, yes. Look at IBM, for example. The Ministry of Justice in Finland has used OpenOffice for years now, too.
Do you understand what it means politically when an entire government tries to do it, with tens of thousands of workers currently enjoying pretty high-paid jobs required to completely retrain themselves or get fired?
In Finland, University of Helsinki failed to maintain even student-accessible Linux workstations because of this. Around the turn of the century, they were common (as in entire classrooms full of Linux workstations) in the Faculty of Science (city center and Kumpula campuses), but they just couldn't keep them supported. Students needed them, but as the IT support was separated to its own unit (https://www.helsinki.fi/en/center-information-technology/services), they unilaterally chose to no longer support them, citing difficulty of hiring suitable support personnel IIRC. The administration is too far above actual teaching and student needs to understand such decisions, even though they do the huge licensing deals (without actually knowing whether those deals make any sense). The faculty instead decided to offer STEM students a laptop for a tiny bond sum, originally 100€, installed with locally-supported Linux, Cubbli (https://wiki.helsinki.fi/xwiki/bin/view/Cubbli/User%20documentation/). I developed the first few versions of the self-registration Debian package, a GUI tool that generated local user accounts based on the University AD details over Eduroam, as a free volunteer, just to support the students and the Linux efforts. The entire university has a bit over 31,000 students, 5,200 academic staff, and about 3,500 non-academic staff, so it's about third of the size of the French Gendarmerie.
In Finland, firing anyone from a government job or non-academic position in an University is almost impossible, due to the labour laws and extremely strong unions here. "Quiet quitting" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_quitting) usually just leads them being shifted to another department or position, usually with same or higher pay but with fewer duties. It's only taxpayer money, after all. I wonder how many IT support personnel the Gendarmerie had to "shift", "retire", or fire. I suspect it isn't easily done in France either.
One way this can work — noting that I'm not familiar with how the French Gendarmerie did it — is to motivate and train the support personnel first, years before the transition. You need to go through the IT support administration, and carefully root out the change-fearing maintaintainers-of-status-quo, and basically force or brainwash the administration to be the proponents of the change. (Maybe strongly worded; I do mean careful social engineering and political control.) At the actual user-facing support personnel level, you must show how the change is in their own interests also. And, at the end, those who won't perform in the new system, have to be fired or transferred. I'd be very interested to hear how the Gendarmerie handled all that; it must have been a crucial part.
I know several computational physicists, who absolutely hate open source (calling it always "open sores"), even though they are capable of adapting software tools to their own needs, and occasionally have encountered bugs they had to fix themselves. So, not just "fear" or "phobia" of any unknown thing; just very strong dislike of the entire idea. When the same happened with commercial proprietary software, they are utterly nonchalant about it, because they understood that a commercial company must focus resources where they have the biggest bang for buck. This kind of social, by definition irrational, attitude must not be ignored either. Some are just fanboys and haters, regardless of their capabilities and skills.
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purchasing a support agreement for the distribution you're using.
You raise a valid point. But there are only few distros that come with paid support. Even less if you want to run certain applications. When Sun workstations and solaris started disappearing the switch to Linux started happening. The tool vendors like Mentor Cadence, Synopsis, Magma and others all pointed at Red Hat. They tested their products on very specific version of RHEL. If you installed it on any other distro you were totally on your own. If your design contains problems : sorry bub. we only guarantee and do bugfixes on this particular version.
More recently i ran into a problem with an Oracle install on CentOs. We had to migrate to something else. The problem was that either the Oracle engine wouldn't run on it, or, if we had a distro that would run the particular Oracle version, then the accessing application wouldn't run or be certified on that distro... Upgrading the oracle version was a no-go as the interfacing application needed a specific version and we were mid-design.
I've had the same problems with other tools like the Siemens teamcenter and NX. They need specific versions and specific distros. Try any "unapproved" combination and you are on your own. if it breaks or screws up : sorry bub, we don't test against that. you should have used xyz...
That is a big issue with linux: there are too many flavors. And commercial applications are typically tied to one particular distro and a few versions, especially if you want support for both linux and the running application.
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There are real problems in switching to a new ecosystem. I have switched to LibreOffice for personal use, for two reasons. First, its interface is more like the MS Office interface that I spent many years learning than the current MS Office interface. Secondly, at the time I made the switch, MS Office was not available for purchase, only for rent, and I didn't want to do that. For personal use that decision has worked fine, but I only have to satisfy myself.
LibreOffice does most tasks well, but as previously pointed out, it isn't compatible with MS automated documents. I have a fairly sizeable investment in VBA functions to do engineering computations. Things like probability density and inverse probability density for many distributions. Blackbody calculations. All out the window. It is not obvious to me that I can replace this functionality without diving into the LibreOffice source code. In any case substantial time would be involved learning the interface and then generating the functions.
The real problem is document interchange. Complex documents created in MS don't come across well. It is more than just "looks different". Illustration titles can get separated from their illustrations. Indexes scrambled. It doesn't matter whose fault it is. I don't know how broad this problem is, I can only report that I have encountered. Are there problems between OpenOffice and LibreOffice? As Nominal Animal points out even the distro may matter.
Issues like this are deadly to business and government. Before I retired I often ran into requirements that proposals and bids be generated in a specific version of software, just to avoid these problems.
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It's the IT support that will be the real problem.
The French gendarmerie managed to do it.
And many companies around the world have managed to do it as well, yes. Look at IBM, for example. The Ministry of Justice in Finland has used OpenOffice for years now, too.
Do you understand what it means politically when an entire government tries to do it, with tens of thousands of workers currently enjoying pretty high-paid jobs required to completely retrain themselves or get fired?
The French gendarmerie moved more than 100,000 stations to Linux. If they can do it at such a scale,
some ministry can do it as well. Somehow they managed to retrain their administrators (or fired them, I don't know).
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That is a big issue with linux: there are too many flavors.
No, that's the perception stemming from assumptions and experience gathered from the proprietary software world. I will fight you to death on this: you reduce the number of Linux flavors over my dead body. I am a software developer myself, too, and not tied to any specific distribution. I currently use two completely different ones: OpenWRT and a number of Debian derivatives.
It is perfectly possible to make even proprietary software that works on basically all Linux distros. And I don't mean runtime images (Snap/Flatpak/Appimage), just a specific runtime directory and symlink configuration for associated libraries. Why isn't it done? Because it is different, and requires learning and quite some effort to understand how to do it and why. Not worth it, because everyone expects software to either be distro-specific, or be provided as a runtime image. It'd be pearls before swine to do that. And yet, perfectly possible, although dbus and systemd-subsumed services do make it much harder than it used to be.
By reducing open source to what fits the traditional proprietary software view and approaches, you remove most of its true power. It is like shooting yourself in the foot. I do recognize that you want a working solution now rather than a better one sometime in the future, but these choices have long-term consequences. To me, having seen and supported and used Linux in different environments, losing the variety is losing its utility.
This is also why I never recommend Windows users to switch to Linux. They just don't get it, just like some of my computational physics colleagues don't get FOSS, even though they have all the requisite skills. Too much to un-learn, to suddenly refuse to accept as a given fact, before one can even understand the new concepts. And not enough reward at the end.
Just think: How many people will even accept that the variety in Linux implementations is its core strength, instead of pining for unification around a common distribution everyone would use? Not many. Portability was killed decades ago by proprietary software, and is now an utterly weird idea even to professionals.
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The French gendarmerie moved more than 100,000 stations to Linux.
Taking two decades to do so.
If they can do it at such a scale, some ministry can do it as well.
Utterly ridiculous assertion, based on wishful thinking: you disregard both the political impact, and the time scales here.
Besides, the question is not whether it is possible, but whether it will succeed in practice. As we know from U of H and Münich and others, there are a myriad ways how this can "fail", and not too many ways how it can succeed.
I do know how it could be made to succeed — by revamping the entire approach to computer use as a tool; including replacing courses on Word with courses on structured word processor use, and ensuring at every stage that it empowers the users and makes their workflows more efficient, never worse. I also know, from practical experience, that it is the IT support personnel and administration that can make it succeed or fail. And that means the issue whether such a transition will succeed or fail is not technical, but social and political.
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The French gendarmerie moved more than 100,000 stations to Linux.
Taking two decades to do so.
If they can do it at such a scale, some ministry can do it as well.
Utterly ridiculous assertion, based on wishful thinking: you disregard both the political impact, and the time scales here.
Besides, the question is not whether it is possible, but whether it will succeed in practice. As we know from U of H and Münich and others, there are a myriad ways how this can "fail", and not too many ways how it can succeed.
I do know how it could be made to succeed — by revamping the entire approach to computer use as a tool; including replacing courses on Word with courses on structured word processor use, and ensuring at every stage that it empowers the users and makes their workflows more efficient, never worse. I also know, from practical experience, that it is the IT support personnel and administration that can make it succeed or fail. And that means the issue whether such a transition will succeed or fail is not technical, but social and political.
Taking that long and still not done. I read somewhere that it's about 95% complete, and that critical systems and issues with specialized and legacy software would require major projects funded in and of themselves to get transitions started. As I recall, the major issues were exactly what you've called out. Key challenges included managing the transition to a new interface, training staff, and ensuring compatibility. These are the same challenges I recall reading that Germany faced when attempting the same sort of transition.
The key metric no one seems to publish is how much it costs them to work through these projects. They will often quote some number that they saved on license fees, but won't say what they spent to achieve the outcomes so far. And there is the ongoing issue that they haven't actually achieved the goal since these critical systems haven't been migrated.
I still believe these are projects that governments can "afford" to pursue, but they sell them to their constituents and end up spending more without actually achieving the goal as the bureaucracy grows.
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requires learning and quite some effort to understand how to do it and why.
and effort to test that it works correctly on all the variants... there is your problem.
A tool like Cadence Opus or Virtuoso (chip layout) is incredibly complex. They simply do not have the time nor manpower to try if it runs correctly without UI glitches ,font scaling issues and other stuff. Also the output generation needs to be correct. You can't have a problem where a tape out on RHEL produces different masks from running on ubuntu. Then there's also the deployment issue. this distro needs this installer, that one needs another..
Those tools are developed on a specific distro and they will only warrant it to run correctly on that distro. Deviate and you are on your own. Don't come crying if your tape-out doesn't work and you lost a multi-million dollar maskset and a fab cycle...
These are problems that don't exist on windows or MacOS. there is one kind of installer. There is also one UI server.
Anyway not my battle. i don't use use linux anymore. (stopped when we had that oracle problem when Centos was end of life. Moved the db to run on govcloud and ditched the local install and the oracle licenses. )
I make cabinets, not tools. I use screwdrivers, i don't make them. No time and / or desire to go into that rabbithole. An operating system should get out of my way. It;s there to read keyboard and mouse, manage the filesystem and run applications. If it can't run the applications i want to use, tough luck. I have a Mac and a PC with Windows. Serves me well. Decades ago i had a Sun Sparcstation as well but that ecosystem died and many of the tools were ported to Windows-only. Programs like Catia migrated from the unix world to the windows world.
Unix (not just linux) is simply too fragmented to test a program runs on all flavors. It is too much effort that is a distractor from the real work that needs to be done.
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How much effort is worth investing in a task that cannot succeed? Especially when it goes against your own business interests?
IMHO a lot, since it's a Supplier & OS lock-in too.
I don’t think you understood my question?
You are correct here ... sorry i missed your point.
“A lot” means here “it is worth it for Microsoft to invest a lot in trying to make open file formats for Office, even though it can’t succeed and goes against its business interests”.
But doing so decreases lock-in.
I’m arguing that Microsoft didn’t have to make an active effort to increase lock-in, because merely investing the minimum in openness (as opposed to investing a lot) was more than sufficient to ensure lock-in.
Could be plausible.
MS Office has always been the "Golden Goose". Not the one time "few bucks", made on a one time Windows OEM license.
Eh, the big bucks for MS historically was Windows licensing, because practically every non-Apple preassembled computer sold has a license. (Including the gazillions of computers used for specialty applications that weren't desktop office use.) But nowadays, the big bucks are from big corporate/government/education site licenses where they bundle everything together, including Windows, Office, and whatever else the customer needs.
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and effort to test that it works correctly on all the variants...
Why?
If it is designed to be portable, there is no reason or need to test all the variants; simply that the facilities respond to random differences in the expected manner. This is easily done in an automated manner.
The one stable interface is the Linux kernel - userspace one, including the /proc and /sys pseudofilesystems. Userspace libraries (and select runtime services' like dbus and others in the systemd sphere) is where portability issues arise from. So, for portability, you do not integrate those, and instead interface to a dynamic subset of them.
Those tools are developed on a specific distro and they will only warrant it to run correctly on that distro.
Yes, because that is how proprietary software is done, and how software development has been taught for the last two or three decades. It does not mean it is the only way, or even the best way. It is just what is the current way. Some truly believe no other way exists, or could exist, because that is what they are used to.
I am not going to argue with you about this, because you are arguing about how things are done now, and I am arguing how things could be done better, but how social and political forces in specific non-user quarters make any change exceedingly difficult; and how one huge factor is exactly people used and fixed into the ways things are done now. I fully agree with you how things work now! And I'm content to work within those limits myself; I'm not the one proposing anyone else switching to Linux here or elsewhere! I've never said it is easy or cheap to make software portable across Linux distributions, just that it is possible if desirable enough. And, as many members here well know, I'm happy to help with proprietary problems and not divulge details to anyone, and am not a FOSS zealot at all.
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Denmark has also decided the same thing a few months ago. I don't recall that making this much noise, but this time it looks a bit viral. It's like everyone is suddenly talking about France moving to Linux on social media for a reason I'm not sure about. It looks like it's being discussed everywhere. People are probably linking that to the current world situation, which would explain the sudden interest. But there are numerous past stories about, for instance, the NSA caught spying on european countries. It's not like the question of "sovereignty" is new.
I think many are overestimating the "complexity" of what most people working in public administrations do with computers. Most of them use ad-hoc software they've been trained on and otherwise make pretty basic use of general-purpose office software. For most office documents not handled by ad hoc sofware, they would probably do as well with document editing software from the 90's. As long as they can launch programs, do some basic editing and copy some files with a file manager, that's about it. After that, they use database systems a lot and as long as the front-end looks the same, they don't care about the OS.
The bulk of the work for transitioning would really be with system administration and porting existing ad hoc software (if needed) to a new platform. Personel training would comparatively not be that big a deal. But the IT aspect of it could well become a nightmare.
Now they're probably not too happy at MS and they'll probably try pretty hard to force their way back. Curious to see that.
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I am arguing how things could be done better, but how social and political forces in specific non-user quarters make any change exceedingly difficult; and how one huge factor is exactly people used and fixed into the ways things are done now. I fully agree with you how things work now!
i'm not denying things couldn't be done better. But there is another factor at play : legacy.
Codebases of commercial unix based tools are often "ancient". They date back to the days of the Nova, VAX and sun workstations (like most chip layout tools). they are not going to rewrite that. Proven to work. There's a reason outfits like banks are still running emulated ibm360 processors running a 360 os running a Cobol application on the latest and greatest hardware (emulation on top of emulation on top of emulation on top of virtualization. it's nuts, but you can test the virtual machine is correct. Then running your application is simply a matter of bringing over the entire stack, including the operating system. The hardware is now irrelevant). They don't dare touch it for fear of introducing issues !. Same for things like Sabre ( the flight booking system)
Fro command line or daemon style processes it is easier. Things that UI driven are more complicated due to dependencies.
To save development and verification time you simply eliminate variables. This kernel, these libraries, this config. Now all the dependencies are known and nothing will come get in the way. This is the old "but it runs fine on my computer" issue. To solve that : clone the computer, warts and all.
can it be done better ? yes. The question is : how much time and money are you willing to throw at it ? The carpenter needs that saw ... he's got cabinets to make.
Example, I get comments like "why you stick to Altium ? why don't you use KiCad or Diptrace or Cadence or Mentor or Zuken or whatever".
Well , i've been using Altium since 1988 when it came on a single floppy disk and ran under DOS 3.21 in EGA mode... every version including the enterprise installs with 500+ users. That's 38 years ! I know that thing inside and out, i have been an alpha and beta tester, i had the SDK, and been in areas i cant talk about.
I can try to use a different tool but there is going to be a tool learning curve (not the process of pcb layout itself, using the tool. I know how to make the cabinet. The new saw has a learning curve).
I will never be as fast as i am now. I will get frustrated, my productivity will tank and stress will go up. I will be in a race against people that are already proficient in the other tool. My job evaluation will be bad because i will be slower...
I'm simply not interested in doing that. I Have a board to design. I've turned down many job opportunities. "But we offer cross-training". Not interested. I don't need the stress and frustration. After two heart attacks i need to take it easier...
That is a big factor at play inside many companies. The cost of retraining their workforce. Not just users, but also developers : they are also a workforce. And It people are also a workforce.. Time is money. Time to market is crucial , whether you are making cabinets or saws.
It's a difficult situation. can it be done better ? again, yes. Who will foot the bill ?
I personally think Web-based applications are the future. They run in an os-independent environment : a browser engine. That engine is available for different OSs.
The application doesn't care where it runs. It's a common virtual machine : The browser.
- For the application developer the Hardware, OS , middleware is all abstracted away. If it runs in the browser it runs everywhere.
- For the user it is the same whether they are on windows, macos, chromeos or Linux or are using a Dell , HP or Apple computer. Completely hardware and OS agnostic.
The backend can be whatever is required. Drop the entire contraption in a container, OS and all, and run it on a virtual system. Can it be done better ? yes. More power efficient ? yes. But can the deployment be easier and faster ? i don't think so. You send me the preconfigured docker image and i spin it up. I tell my user to point to a webpage. My work is done. So what if it consumes a bit of processing power and electricity. I save it on the front end.
just my two cents.
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I think many are overestimating the "complexity" of what most people working in public administrations do with computers. Most of them use ad-hoc software they've been trained on and otherwise make pretty basic use of general-purpose office software.
exactly ! And these days those apps run in a web-browser. That makes them hardware and OS independent.
And not just government. I was at Lowe's a couple of days ago (big home improvement store.) , ordering a door. The salesman had a flashy Mac computer .. running Chrome (yes, chrome, on a mac...) , pointing to a web page that presented ... a Terminal emulation program.
text interface, 80x25 .. navigation using arrow keys and numerical keypad ..
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France is replacing 2.5 million Windows desktops with Linux - and I mapped out its new stack
- France's government is switching from Windows to a Linux desktop.
- The desktop will be based on the police Linux distro, GendBuntu.
- The distro includes France's own suite of open-source desktop programs.
For decades, I've been saying Linux is a better desktop than Windows. Lately, more people have been
switching to Linux. There are many reasons to swap Windows for Linux, including Microsoft leaving
Windows 10 users in the lurch, the increased viability of gaming on Linux, easier-to-use Linux desktop
distros, broader hardware support, and rising concerns about security, privacy, and data control.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/france-leaves-windows-for-linux-desktop/ (https://www.zdnet.com/article/france-leaves-windows-for-linux-desktop/)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsxjDJps01g (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsxjDJps01g)
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I think many are overestimating the "complexity" of what most people working in public administrations do with computers.
FWIW, I don't; I fully agree with your assessment. It is also why I don't expect that much pushback from end users, unless they're not properly supported by their IT personnel.
To repeat ad nauseam, it is the support personnel that can torpedo the entire endeavour, just by opposing the change by quiet quitting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_quitting).
Personel training would comparatively not be that big a deal.
Except for the support personnel that consider themselves experts now, and feel that asking them to retrain is an offensive suggestion.
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I love FOSS. With all my heart, to the point many probably can’t even imagine. I didn’t have Windows as my primary OS since 2010. Around Windows 10 release I started to explicitly refuse to use that system too because of what pile of turd it became. But I love the movement, the idea, as a part of a wider concept that redefines how the society as a whole may work. Not because I delude myself that Linux is the best for the sake of being Linux. Or that Linux ecosystem is the best, because in fact it’s in many ways inferior. As of 2026 it’s even worse and inadequate for the general population than it is to experts.
If he was saying that for decades, his comparison included Windows 3.x and then Windows 9x. That’s a very low bar to set.
Perhaps it’s time to revise opinions? Microsoft hires very good developers for no less than quarter century. As soon as the management allowed them to do their job Windows seen an enormous improvement. Claiming any major technological superiority of Linux distros over Windows in 2020s to me sounds like a pure form of fanboyism. The kind that gets wet from the mere thought of Linux being present everywhere, but without knowing why.
The management of Microsoft (as well as Apple and Alphabet) makes decisions that anger people dependent on their systems. But that’s a relatively recent thing, so Vaughan-Nichois couldn’t use this particular issue as an argument for decades. To the point of this being ridiculous: the landscape the aforementioned giants are now trying to destroy, to the dismay of many users, has been created primarily by Microsoft-IBM tandem in the first place.
That is also not technological shortcoming, but an organizational/social issue. Which means that the moment Linux becomes popular among the general population, gets endorsed by any major corporation, and appears on the radar of lawmakers, it undergoes exactly the same process as the competitors. And we have an empirical evidence, because that did already happen: Android. Do you really think that if BigName Linux becomes the standard installed on 4 billion computers, you’ll be able to use it without subscription to app-store, privacy infringement, government identification on every step, a mandatory backdoor, centrally-controlled ecosystem, vendor lock-in features preventing switching to another distro, and being used as a test lab? If you do, I say: you are completely missing the source of the problem, fail to see beyond the narrow tech brain’s perception, smelled too much cuberanarchy fumes, possibly all three.
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Except for the support personnel that consider themselves experts now, and feel that asking them to retrain is an offensive suggestion.
Every IT shop I've worked in and around for 30 years has tons of fiefdom lords. They have honed expertise in the systems there. It's worse in government than private industry, as it is often near impossible to cull bad actors for lots of reasons.
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To repeat ad nauseam, it is the support personnel that can torpedo the entire endeavour, just by opposing the change by quiet quitting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_quitting).
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I have never met any IT person that was happy they were working with Microsoft products.
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I have never met any IT person that was happy they were working with Microsoft products.
My first professional programming environment was VB6. Certainly I could not complain. I also had to rely on spreadsheets for half of my career. Excel was uncomparably better than Calc. My favourite ball mouse was Microsoft Mouse 2.0.
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I have never met any IT person that was happy they were working with Microsoft products.
Interesting! Overwhelming majority of the many (career ones, excluding students temping) I met here in Finland between 1996 and 2010 were happy/happiest working with Microsoft products, and did not use Linux voluntarily or at all. Finnish strangeness? Things could be changing? :-//
Do note that I could very well be wrong in my pessimism here. I'm often wrong. It is the basis of the opinion, the reasoning and not the opinion itself, that yields an interesting discussion, after all.
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I have never met any IT person that was happy they were working with Microsoft products.
Interesting! Overwhelming majority of the many (career ones, excluding students temping) I met here in Finland between 1996 and 2010 were happy/happiest working with Microsoft products, and did not use Linux voluntarily or at all. Finnish strangeness? Things could be changing? :-//
Do note that I could very well be wrong in my pessimism here. I'm often wrong. It is the basis of the opinion, the reasoning and not the opinion itself, that yields an interesting discussion, after all.
I suspect sampling bias. Few IT professionals work in both environments equally and thus have a bias towards what they are familiar with. And current users of Windows will most contact Windows familiar IT professionals while current Linux users will most contact Linux IT pros.
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I suspect sampling bias.
I personally used and supported Mac OS, Windows, Unix, and Linux at the time, and met with all sorts of end users, if that matters.
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Yes, the usual office applications are very similar nowadays. Maybe OpenOffice is some years back, but does it matter? For many, many years i have been using Linux for all online computing, while i used some applications that did not (yet) exist for Linux under MS Windows on an offline PC.
I'd guess it is extremely stupid to try and do business using an online Windows computer. One might as well send copies of everything to US competitors. I think after recent developments in the US everybody else needs to think carefully.
Of course there are security risks with Linux as well. As far as i understand large parts of a distribution like Ubuntu or Debian come from the US. One needs independent specialists to understand what it is. And one has to tell people clearly what it's all about. Otherwise US infiltration will persist.
Regards, Dieter
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I suspect sampling bias.
I personally used and supported Mac OS, Windows, Unix, and Linux at the time, and met with all sorts of end users, if that matters.
I've been an administrator for Solars, BSD, Linux, and Windows. Some OS2, AIX, and a few less knowns in between. For many years in my youth, I was a *NIX snob. I didn't think very highly of Windows. But, I also looked down at Linux as it was and in some ways remains inferior to the proper UNIX systems. I'm still a system five fan.
I once did a Director of IT job for 3-4 years and my teams managed MacOS and Windows for end users. The biggest constraint today is having a proper device management platform to control and manage the fleet. Maybe there are Linux tools to do that but I'm unfamiliar with them. Someone has to control versions and updates and compliance. Many entities I work with today in sensitive areas control down to USB access, if you can do a screen shot, and lots of things. Maybe the French government has none of these security concerns.
The other major hurdle is that office applications are the last thing that I believe will be a problem. It will be government specialty applications that no one has bothered to fund an upgrade for in 20 years. Maybe they have planned all this out and its not just a knee jerk reaction to temporary geopolitical crap fest.
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I think recent moves were triggered by a severe security fault at the EU headquarters in Brussels. They found that important EU documents on their servers used to change over night and that those changes were executed by hackers in the US. Those are hostile acts and there is a need to stop it.
One important difference between Linux and Windows is the rythm of updates. Linux may be less fancy but it is more stable. We should not argue with our fears but the way MS Windows implements updates constitutes a terrible security risk. I can understand that this is inacceptable for critical systems. Of course specialists can control Windows updates, but those won't be independent specialists.
By the way: I think the same problem exists inside the US. One corrupt system administrator can ruin all good intentions of many others.
Regards, Dieter
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The other major hurdle is that office applications are the last thing that I believe will be a problem. It will be government specialty applications that no one has bothered to fund an upgrade for in 20 years. Maybe they have planned all this out and its not just a knee jerk reaction to temporary geopolitical crap fest.
Most of the adminstrative software used by governments, municipalities and so on need to be kept up-to-date to deal with the never ending changes of laws, regulations and directives.
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To repeat ad nauseam, it is the support personnel that can torpedo the entire endeavour, just by opposing the change by quiet quitting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_quitting).
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I have never met any IT person that was happy they were working with Microsoft products.
I have met tons of them over the years. They’re not rare.
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I think recent moves were triggered by a severe security fault at the EU headquarters in Brussels. They found that important EU documents on their servers used to change over night and that those changes were executed by hackers in the US. Those are hostile acts and there is a need to stop it.
One important difference between Linux and Windows is the rythm of updates. Linux may be less fancy but it is more stable. We should not argue with our fears but the way MS Windows implements updates constitutes a terrible security risk. I can understand that this is inacceptable for critical systems. Of course specialists can control Windows updates, but those won't be independent specialists.
By the way: I think the same problem exists inside the US. One corrupt system administrator can ruin all good intentions of many others.
Regards, Dieter
@dieter
Can you provide sources for your allegations that hackers from the US changed important EU documents overnight?
Here are the two incidents that have been publicly investigated:
2015–2018 EU Diplomatic Cable Breach: A three-year-long cyberespionage operation was discovered in 2018 where hackers breached the EU's diplomatic communications network (COREU).
Source of Intrusion: Security firm Area 1 attributed the intrusion to hackers working for China's People's Liberation Army.
Nature of Attack: The hackers did not typically edit documents on the server but rather "downloaded thousands of cables". They created an open internet site to host the stolen, sensitive documents, which contained information on global trade and anxieties about the Trump administration.
March 2026 European Commission Breach: The European Commission confirmed a major cyberattack in March 2026 against its cloud infrastructure on the Europa.eu platform.
Details: Attackers gained unauthorized access to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account and stole over 350GB of data, including email server dumps, databases, and confidential documents.
Attribution: The hacker group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility. The only identified and arrested member was French.
The US is to blame for a lot, but I don't see any here. Maybe this is just misinformation?
I don't see how Linux solves anything within the allegations or facts.
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I think recent moves were triggered by a severe security fault at the EU headquarters in Brussels. They found that important EU documents on their servers used to change over night and that those changes were executed by hackers in the US. Those are hostile acts and there is a need to stop it.
One important difference between Linux and Windows is the rythm of updates. Linux may be less fancy but it is more stable. We should not argue with our fears but the way MS Windows implements updates constitutes a terrible security risk. I can understand that this is inacceptable for critical systems. Of course specialists can control Windows updates, but those won't be independent specialists.
By the way: I think the same problem exists inside the US. One corrupt system administrator can ruin all good intentions of many others.
Regards, Dieter
How is this not true for Linux?
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@dieter
Can you provide sources for your allegations that hackers from the US changed important EU documents overnight?
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I remember reading about this in a German newspaper, maybe this year. One detail i remember: that the modified documents were to be voted the next day, so little chance for parlament member to find the modifications.
My problem is that Google doesn't provide information on this. Know why? And European institutions try to hide certain facts as well.
You see, todays news about the strait of Hormuz didn't help with currencies. Normally with good news, we see Dollar and Euro rise. But it doesn't happen.
I really prefer to work on a piece of firmware or hardware that i have on my table.
Regards, Dieter
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How does linux help with all this? Politics handles problems by allocating resources. Probably many MS-certified professionals will leave and independent professionals will enter.
Just found this:
https://euobserver.com/211609/how-big-tech-wrote-secrecy-into-eu-law-to-hide-data-centres-environmental-toll/ (https://euobserver.com/211609/how-big-tech-wrote-secrecy-into-eu-law-to-hide-data-centres-environmental-toll/)
They avoid the term "hacker" but make it appear more as social engineering/curruption.
The "digitaleurope" lobby group mentioned in the text has as corporate members:
amazon, cisco, google, hewlett packard, intel, jp morgan, meta, microsoft, nvidia, oracle, tiktok, visa - among others.
Regards, Dieter
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@dieter
Can you provide sources for your allegations that hackers from the US changed important EU documents overnight?
..
I remember reading about this in a German newspaper, maybe this year. One detail i remember: that the modified documents were to be voted the next day, so little chance for parlament member to find the modifications.
My problem is that Google doesn't provide information on this. Know why? And European institutions try to hide certain facts as well.
You see, todays news about the strait of Hormuz didn't help with currencies. Normally with good news, we see Dollar and Euro rise. But it doesn't happen.
I really prefer to work on a piece of firmware or hardware that i have on my table.
Regards, Dieter
I am just as apt to consider news corrupt and government very corrupt, but this just appears to be a lot of nothing. I'd be very interested to see the reference. I searched for references using many different search systems and AI, and could find nothing but social media tin foil hat conspiracy theories with nothing but political reasons behind them. Very likely an organization that would benefit from distrust between Western nations, but who knows?
How does linux help with all this? Politics handles problems by allocating resources. Probably many MS-certified professionals will leave and independent professionals will enter.
Just found this:
https://euobserver.com/211609/how-big-tech-wrote-secrecy-into-eu-law-to-hide-data-centres-environmental-toll/ (https://euobserver.com/211609/how-big-tech-wrote-secrecy-into-eu-law-to-hide-data-centres-environmental-toll/)
They avoid the term "hacker" but make it appear more as social engineering/curruption.
The "digitaleurope" lobby group mentioned in the text has as corporate members:
amazon, cisco, google, hewlett packard, intel, jp morgan, meta, microsoft, nvidia, oracle, tiktok, visa - among others.
Regards, Dieter
This is totally different than the accusation you made of US hackers. The above is called politics and lobbying. If you want to call it corrupt, I'm with you, but it's not hacking.
Again, the spread of "US hacks EU government" is likely in the best interests of some entities, and I can't tell you it's not true, but I can tell you I have found references that match your accusations.
And in the end, none of what is proposed would change any of the corruption and political backdoor crap that is going on today. It's grandstanding for the purposes of gaining some political credit of "Look at me, I stood up to the Trump/US" and has really little to do with properly taking measures to ensure the country's data is secure and reliable.
There's no such thing as a non-hostile environment for your data. Any information security professional will tell you the same thing. You secure your data and build access redundancies and controls for the worst possible case all the time, 100% of the time. If done properly, it matters little if another government got a peek at the data. The fact is that the US and France share tons of secret data because, of course, they do.
I think recent moves were triggered by a severe security fault at the EU headquarters in Brussels. They found that important EU documents on their servers used to change over night and that those changes were executed by hackers in the US. Those are hostile acts and there is a need to stop it.
One important difference between Linux and Windows is the rythm of updates. Linux may be less fancy but it is more stable. We should not argue with our fears but the way MS Windows implements updates constitutes a terrible security risk. I can understand that this is inacceptable for critical systems. Of course specialists can control Windows updates, but those won't be independent specialists.
By the way: I think the same problem exists inside the US. One corrupt system administrator can ruin all good intentions of many others.
Regards, Dieter
How is this not true for Linux?
You're nailing it; corruption doesn't know OS boundaries that I know of.
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I think you are living in the past.
If you listen to recent talks of J.D. Vance, he is bluntly announcing the destruction of the European union by the US. The situation has changed completely after the Greenland threats and after the actions of the US military in Ukraine and near east.
Europe will cut relations to the US, but everybody is afraid of more terrorist attacks from the US. So they won't attack the US government, but they can reduce/cut economic and technological dependencies. Recently a trade union between Brasil and EU was signed. There can be fair relations, but not with the US. Turning off light for US military installations in Frankfurt may happen much later.
Regards, Dieter
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I'm much more worried about the unelected EU leadership, the commission, myself.
Conversely, I believe local and small to medium scale open source development for bespoke tooling could help a lot of cities, municipalities, counties, states, and countries. Adapt the tools to the culture, instead of trying to unify culture to hide differences. I like the richness and variety of human cultures, not the impersonal "international city" non-culture; and although we can leverage scale to reduce costs, there is a point where it leads to less innovation and more stagnation.
For the last twenty to twenty-five years I've been surprised that it hasn't picked up, even though the solutions I've made have shown it to be superior approach (to COTS fit-for-all but nobody in particular software solutions). They are just tools, but then again, with better tools you can get much better results. I've described most of my suspicions and reasoning why it hasn't picked up in earlier messages.
We also live in an era where governments fear people, and want to control people quite tightly. Not just actions, but also speech and even thoughts. The politicians are much closer to billionaires and huge corporations and lobbying organizations than the people, so the world they believe we have is different to the one most people live in. This adds huge pressure to unify and standardize and limit.
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I think you are living in the past.
If you listen to recent talks of J.D. Vance, he is bluntly announcing the destruction of the European union by the US. The situation has changed completely after the Greenland threats and after the actions of the US military in Ukraine and near east.
Europe will cut relations to the US, but everybody is afraid of more terrorist attacks from the US. So they won't attack the US government, but they can reduce/cut economic and technological dependencies. Recently a trade union between Brasil and EU was signed. There can be fair relations, but not with the US. Turning off light for US military installations in Frankfurt may happen much later.
Regards, Dieter
I like living in the past; they know me, and they seem saner.
I have to admit, you've got one heck of a list of conspiracy theories. You must spend a lot of time on social media soaking up disinformation, or are you the source?
- The claim that US hackers changed EU political documents overnight. As far as I can tell, this never happened. Unfortunately, politicians and lobbyists aren't hackers we can lock up. Wish they were.
- Claim that JD Vance has bluntly announced the US would destroy the European Union. I'm assuming you made this up, too, since you didn't provide a source, and I'm tired of looking for such. Vance certainly criticized the EU, but that's not even on the same planet as your accusation
- The US military hasn't had any actions in Ukraine other than to supply arms and money to fight against Russia. Maybe you think Russia and the US are the same.
- More terrorist attacks from the US? I suppose you can call anything you want a terrorist attack, that's like calling people NAZIs and demeaning the insult near every time it's done.
I'm sure France will be fine with whatever they choose to do. France and the US have long had strong trade ties; those may be changing, and France may blame the US and vice versa.
But none of these false accusations you've made will be of impact because everyone knows they are false.
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I'm much more worried about the unelected EU leadership, the commission, myself.
Conversely, I believe local and small to medium scale open source development for bespoke tooling could help a lot of cities, municipalities, counties, states, and countries. Adapt the tools to the culture, instead of trying to unify culture to hide differences. I like the richness and variety of human cultures, not the impersonal "international city" non-culture; and although we can leverage scale to reduce costs, there is a point where it leads to less innovation and more stagnation.
For the last twenty to twenty-five years I've been surprised that it hasn't picked up, even though the solutions I've made have shown it to be superior approach (to COTS fit-for-all but nobody in particular software solutions). They are just tools, but then again, with better tools you can get much better results. I've described most of my suspicions and reasoning why it hasn't picked up in earlier messages.
We also live in an era where governments fear people, and want to control people quite tightly. Not just actions, but also speech and even thoughts. The politicians are much closer to billionaires and huge corporations and lobbying organizations than the people, so the world they believe we have is different to the one most people live in. This adds huge pressure to unify and standardize and limit.
You know, I have 30 years of IT behind me, and I spent so much of my career complaining about customization. I was driven by issues with upgrades, maintenance, and so on.
I have come to be more aligned with your view. Standardization is key in the architecture, but the solutions should be more custom the closer to the user you get. I believe this has long been a problem due to the high demand for developers and a shortage of them.
But it would appear that AI is changing that dynamic.
I can't agree with your last view enough. I also believe that it is in the best interests of governments, those in power, and the wealthy to keep people at odds with one another. If we look at the rise of algorithms that drive anger and misinformation (look at dierter1's post, which most likely propagates such), we see a constant effort to keep people upset with each other. Power and money are all fake and illusions. Keeping people "believing" and not talking and working together is in the best interest of those who benefit from the illusion.
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Standardization is key in the architecture, but the solutions should be more custom the closer to the user you get.
Exactly; well put.
I also believe that it is in the best interests of governments, those in power, and the wealthy to keep people at odds with one another. If we look at the rise of algorithms that drive anger and misinformation (look at dierter1's post, which most likely propagates such), we see a constant effort to keep people upset with each other. Power and money are all fake and illusions. Keeping people "believing" and not talking and working together is in the best interest of those who benefit from the illusion.
Fully agreed.
_ _ _ _ _
One funny aspect of this is that many of the forces here emerge from second-order effects of past decisions, rather than by design. Like keeping people upset with each other: to those in power, it looks very much like engagement, which makes them more malleable to manipulation by those who make a profit of the upset — and let's face it, even our newspapers now do, what with all headlines having become clickbait and so on. No need for conspiracy crap; we manage to build our own dystopias voluntarily.
That is what I fear about these grand transition plans: if they fail somehow, people will blame Linux, and not the project. The second-order effects of that could be scary. And if they succeed by making another Android locking it down, it will at best add only maintenance burden without benefits to the open source projects; and at worst, if they standardize on a particular Linux distribution, may reduce choice among those of us already using Linux. (Like before widespread adoption of https, there were all sorts of Internet Exploder -only e-banking widgets, for example in South Korea; locking out Linux users.)
There is lots to lose here for those already using Linux, even though I believe everyone involved has only the best of intentions.
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@cyclotron
Nobody cares whether you denounce facts as conspiration.
- The US tech industry has been manipulating EU politics by manipulating documents to be voted upon. We don't know exactly how it happened.
- The talk of of J.D. Vance about the destruction of EU happened during his visit to Hungary in the context of the recent elections there.
- In the context of the Ukraine conflict we remember the insane "Fuck the EU" by special envoy Newland.
We also remember that the Cuba crisis happened after the US intended to install nuclear weapons in Turkey. In order to avoid nuclear war the final deal was the removal of Soviet nuclear weapons from Cuba and dropping the plans for Turkey.
Ukraine is much closer. Ukraine is suffering a terrible war for years now and Cuba is suffering a US embargo.
- I remember very well ancient times when the US would back up military action by diplomatic preparations, e.g. with the United Nations. What we see now and what i called terrorist attacks is completely different. The current US president talked about "cleaning up Gaza" and making it a nice beach with hotels. And on the first day of the current Iran adventure CIA published that the US was under no current threat from Iran. Israel is one of the US? Since when? So Washington is also responsible for the killing spree in South Lebanon?
Even the pope is speaking clear language now. The catholic church represents a lot of people - among them about 53 million voters inside the US and the Italian president, a former best friend of Trump. Worldwide the church is much bigger than the US. Today the front page article in "Die Zeit", a respected german newspaper, is about how to boycott US products.
This thread is about how to boycott US products (Microsoft).
Regards, Dieter
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This thread is about how to boycott US products (Microsoft).
No, it is not. It is about not relying on US products for critical software infrastructure in EU. It is a completely different thing.
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This thread is about how to boycott US products (Microsoft).
No, it is not. It is about not relying on US products for critical software infrastructure in EU. It is a completely different thing.
I think it can be expanded to say that everyone, companies, nations, our moms, all need to consider where they spend their money, store their data, and what is being done in their names.
Proper security should be used by all, and we, the people, should demand it and demand much more. I hope the French people hold their government responsible for the delivery of their claims.
It's going to be a technical roller coaster ride and will likely cost a fortune. Wonder what wealthy people are going to make the most on this effort.
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@cyclotron
Nobody cares whether you denounce facts as conspiration.
- The US tech industry has been manipulating EU politics by manipulating documents to be voted upon. We don't know exactly how it happened.
- The talk of of J.D. Vance about the destruction of EU happened during his visit to Hungary in the context of the recent elections there.
- In the context of the Ukraine conflict we remember the insane "Fuck the EU" by special envoy Newland.
We also remember that the Cuba crisis happened after the US intended to install nuclear weapons in Turkey. In order to avoid nuclear war the final deal was the removal of Soviet nuclear weapons from Cuba and dropping the plans for Turkey.
Ukraine is much closer. Ukraine is suffering a terrible war for years now and Cuba is suffering a US embargo.
- I remember very well ancient times when the US would back up military action by diplomatic preparations, e.g. with the United Nations. What we see now and what i called terrorist attacks is completely different. The current US president talked about "cleaning up Gaza" and making it a nice beach with hotels. And on the first day of the current Iran adventure CIA published that the US was under no current threat from Iran. Israel is one of the US? Since when? So Washington is also responsible for the killing spree in South Lebanon?
Even the pope is speaking clear language now. The catholic church represents a lot of people - among them about 53 million voters inside the US and the Italian president, a former best friend of Trump. Worldwide the church is much bigger than the US. Today the front page article in "Die Zeit", a respected german newspaper, is about how to boycott US products.
This thread is about how to boycott US products (Microsoft).
Regards, Dieter
@dieter1
It is surreal that you have made the claims I pointed out earlier without any supporting evidence. Are you trying to be humorous?
I have called your ridiculous accusations a conspiracy theory to be polite. I have much harsher views of what you are doing if you are actually serious.
You have not addressed any of the falsehoods I've pointed out. Instead, you go on spouting off. Love hearing yourself?
I've wasted time trying to find some sort of thread around the world that might be related, and there's nothing.
If you have a problem with companies being able to lobby and politicians listening too much to them and wealthy people, then we agree, and that might be a bit related to this thread. But to claim all this other crap is just over-the-top nonsense.
Please try to refrain from posting inflammatory political views for my benefit. I know politics are against the rules on the forum, and I'm sure there's always a line. I feel you're over it.
At least I can add you to the internet ignore list. Suffice it to say, I won't have to suffer the waste of time with more of this garbage.
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I think i am representing recent political developments in a fairly objective way. No surprise that appears difficult for some in the US.
Remember Huawei? I assume exactly the same will happen to US companies in Europe. I always bought iphones, but the next one will certainly be a different brand.
We have also seen legal action against the use of (mainly US based) internet platforms and of cellular phones in several countries for youngsters, like in Australia and Brasil.
Regards, Dieter
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I'm thinking (and also hoping really hard) that this time it's "different". A while ago several judges from the ICC ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court ) got their credit cards blocked by the usa and some more childish petty behavior, and we here in Europe are fed up with that clownish behavior and overall dependence on the usa. One of the goals now is to replace mastercard and visa for Wero, (an european system). And along the way credit card transaction fees will drop from the current 3% to about 0.2%. The goal is not to make profit from the transactions, but to keep that money in the economy to make it move smoother.
https://europeanbusinessmagazine.com/europes-24-trillion-breakup-with-visa-and-mastercard/
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I'm thinking (and also hoping really hard) that this time it's "different". A while ago several judges from the ICC ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court ) got their credit cards blocked by the usa and some more childish petty behavior, and we here in Europe are fed up with that clownish behavior and overall dependence on the usa. One of the goals now is to replace mastercard and visa for Wero, (an european system). And along the way credit card transaction fees will drop from the current 3% to about 0.2%. The goal is not to make profit from the transactions, but to keep that money in the economy to make it move smoother.
https://europeanbusinessmagazine.com/europes-24-trillion-breakup-with-visa-and-mastercard/
Great. But I think you've read something wrong, or more likely, the media you've read is intentionally twisting facts.
Here are some facts as best I can find them from proper reports:
1. The EU doesn't put 24 trillion through VISA and Mastercard. 24 trillion was Visa and Mastercard's global number a couple of years ago.
2. VISA and Mastercard only handle about 60% of the transactions in Europe. So there are other options already.
3. Wero isn't replacing anything; it's an additional service being hyped up and sold to citizens by corporations' intent to leverage the current geopolitical topics to make money.
4. VISA and Mastercard will remain in the EU. No one in their right mind would want to jeopardize the 1 trillion in tourist dollars spent through those networks by US tourists alone, let alone the total.
5. Wero is planned for 13 countries and not all of the EU at this time. That leaves another 14 EU nations out of the network, and of course, no one visiting the UK would be able to use it.
The US has several account-to-account systems, and many countries do. Wero is just another one, being pushed by banks intent on making money. There are more ways to make money than the transaction fees.
I would think that if the EU were serious, it could put a payment card system in place that would provide true parity. But I suspect that's not the goal.
Why do you think the media outlets like the one you posted intentionally twist the facts? It's right there in the URL itself. The implication that the breakup is over 24 trillion.
I had to go back and look at what the ICC did. As you allege, the ICC opened investigations into two states over which it has no direct jurisdiction. It appears those states objected to that and used their independent authority to counter the overreach. I agree that there is childish and petty behavior there on all counts, including the ICC.
The ICC was petty and childish to waste money and resources in cases where it well knew it held no jurisdiction. The states that objected and took their own actions in counter were petty and childish because they knew the ICC's childish and petty actions had no impact on them due to lack of jurisdiction. But, of course, the arrest warrants issued might be a problem if those whom the ICC targeted visited a state under the ICC jurisdiction, so I guess someone felt tit-for-tat was warranted.
I still don't know what this has to do directly with France moving government systems off of Windows to Linux. Maybe just a chance to bring politics more into focus in this thread?
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Wero is meant to become a competitor to Paypal and the other payment services.
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..Wero..something like Wirecard??? ;D
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Wero is meant to become a competitor to Paypal and the other payment services.
Not really. It is a lower cost replacement. In the Netherlands we have had a similar online payment system for 20+ years already (under a different brand name) and most online stores use it even if they are not located in the EU (for example the likes of Mouser, Amazon, Aliexpress). It allows to pay for goods in a webshop directly from your bankaccount using the bank's own app (or online environment) to approve the payment. It is much cheaper and much more convenient. Wero is an EU wide adoption of the local online payment systems used in Belgium and the Netherlands.
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Contrary to Paypal, when I checked, Wero had zero fee for single-person businesses and the fees for merchant accounts were pretty low. The service is linked to many banks directly, so that's convenient. Strictly european, though.
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Wero is a European mobile payment system that replaced Giropay in Germany, Paylib in France, Payconiq in Belgium and Luxembourg, and iDEAL in the Netherlands.
The service was launched on 2 July 2024 by the European Payments Initiative. The service competes with PayPal, credit cards and similar services.
It started as a real-time payment system in 2024. From late 2025, extended online payment functions were added on a step-by-step basis.
Point-of-sale payments (paying at the physical checkout) are planned to start in 2026.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)?useskin=vector (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)?useskin=vector)
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Indeed, from what I understand Wero is going to be extended to have all the functionality that Visa and Mastercard has, and for the whole of the EU.
At the moment there is a 2% to 3% commission for the use of visa/mastercard, and those companies are forcing the sellers to eat up the difference, if they don't, then they get kicked out of the visa/mastercard system.
Once Wero has gained enough traction (and with around 0.2% commission rate) then the shops get enough power to say: Well, we're willing to keep on Visa/Mastercard, but we're going to charge the customers who do so with this extra commission. And this will be a gradual process, probably starting with shops that are not very much dependent on tourism, but it will spread. And it will force those creditcard companies to either accept this much lower commission, or get ousted completely. The current situation that american companies are making money from payments here in Europe is quite absurd.
Excessive politics removed
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Once Wero has gained enough traction (and with around 0.2% commission rate) then...
... Wero will start to increase their commission rate to 2 or 3% like Visa and Mastercard.
But that's just my guess.
I believe the real goal is to have something "European", not necessarily something better or cheaper than the competition...
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Once Wero has gained enough traction (and with around 0.2% commission rate) then...
... Wero will start to increase their commission rate to 2 or 3% like Visa and Mastercard.
But that's just my guess.
I believe the real goal is to have something "European", not necessarily something better or cheaper than the competition...
Agreed. That's the typical method of companies. There are already 40% of transactions in the EU that don't go through Visa or Mastercard, so there's competition in payments. I wouldn't expect cash to be that prevalent.
Anyway, I'm not sure this is relevant to the thread's topic other than tangentially. Greed and power are the universal corruptions all nations suffer. I certainly see a value in taking some interest in your nation's sovereignty. Something European is good in my view.
France will purchase Linux from someone, and that competition is good. If it works, you might see some changes in other products on the market.
Wero is going to add competition to the market, which is good.
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Here in Finland, people pay online using standard SEPA transfers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area) integrated into web carts. At payment time, it means I choose my own bank, log in with my own personal details, and am shown the payment details and amount; I choose my account (at that bank) and accept the payment. The confirmation of the payment is provided instantly to the online shop. There are only a few different banks here in Finland, and all the cart providers support all banks (including the biggest ones, associated with the largest two banks).
The security of this scheme depends on the human seeing and verifying the exact URL (or at least exact fully qualified domain name) for their own bank, because the main danger is browser-based man-in-the-middle redirection/fake website attacks. It becomes fragile when browsers mangle the URL, especially domain name part, and especially so for non-technical people.
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Once a tourist wondered how bad it must be in Finland, even pocket change level is paid with a credit card.
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meanwhile our local carpark machines have not taken credit cards for 3 years. We have had to pay with change which is inconvenient or an app that charges a £0.20 fee on as little as £1.20 so quite extortionate. It's like lower income households can't afford to even park in the local town.
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Once a tourist wondered how bad it must be in Finland, even pocket change level is paid with a credit card.
Heh! Although technically, I do believe a lot of the bank cards used here are actually debit and not credit cards. For example, I mainly use my MasterCard Debit card. For purchases under 50€, I often use the contactless RFID in it, too. I admit, it was a bit annoying to switch to RF-shielded wallet/credit card holder.. but nowadays, I do find it easier/nicer/faster to use than coins or cash, definitely.
For some strange reason, I do still somehow slowly accumulate 5¢ coins.
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meanwhile our local carpark machines have not taken credit cards for 3 years. We have had to pay with change which is inconvenient or an app that charges a £0.20 fee on as little as £1.20
Dont worry they'll remove the cash option soon so you'll have no choice but pay the additional fee.
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meanwhile our local carpark machines have not taken credit cards for 3 years. We have had to pay with change which is inconvenient or an app that charges a £0.20 fee on as little as £1.20
Dont worry they'll remove the cash option soon so you'll have no choice but pay the additional fee.
Well they did a survey, they were offering to get rid of cash and put card payments back, the options were clearly about the cost of card transactions and collecting the cash. But this is an expensive car park.
What I do hate is when companies plead with you to pay cash because of all these nasty fees on cards. When they do this I just make sure I pay by card because I know it means that either they are unhinged or they are dodging tax. For me card payment fees are 1.5-2%, less than paypal!!! if I were to take cash to the bank I would be charged at least as much and it would cost my time. If I were employing someone to do it their time would definitely already make it costly. So cash businesses are tax evaders as far as I am concerned like our local chippy. Notices all over the place about these nasty banks taking our money. Hm, let me see, what are the chips made of? Hm, where do they come from? oh yes a farmer. Farmers in the UK are always claiming poverty, so the potatoes are bought cash, so another load of dax evasion.
I always pay by card, because I want taxes owed to be paid, that is how we pay for society.
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Well, as the topic has drifted, I do see it as related in that France's move has at least been framed as giving it more control over who has access to French data.
I'm sure the French government doesn't mind collecting information about its citizens' digital transactions and payments. The US government loves to collect that data. The fees and data collections are everywhere. The grocery store will charge you a fee if you don't let them collect your information by presenting a loyalty card.
I know VISA claims to sell only anonymized and aggregated information. They also collect those fees from merchants and require them to not pass that charge on. In essence, if a merchant sells you a product for cash at a lower price than CC, they would be in breach. It's like forcing the merchant to make more money on cash transactions. Of course, the products all have fees incorporated into the prices, as well as the taxes that governments impose on the OEM, the wholesaler, and the merchant.
As long as any merchant continues to agree to Visa or MC's use, they can't make deals on how you pay. So, with WERO or others that may charge the merchant less, the merchant will happily pocket that extra money. DEBIT is also welcome because there's no merchant fee, but they get to use the CC system and keep the additional markup on products. Win Win.
In the US, there are exceptions. Costco accepts only one CC system and DEBIT cards. In the US, they accept only Visa, and in Canada, they accept only MasterCard. Because they charge a customer a membership fee and take all these extra steps to avoid signing the agreements on transactions, they feel they can be profitable with razor-thin margins, and the customer gets a deal.
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The grocery store will charge you a fee if you don't let them collect your information by presenting a loyalty card.
Meanwhile the uk's cheapest supermarket dont do loyalty cards
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The grocery store will charge you a fee if you don't let them collect your information by presenting a loyalty card.
Meanwhile the uk's cheapest supermarket dont do loyalty cards
Actually, that's true for the US too. I'm just being dramatic. I just get grumpy seeing companies do everything possible to increase revenue but make their services better. See the US ISP market for the worst of the worst.
Aldis is German, so is Trader Joe's. Aldis is cheap and requires no loyalty card. Joes is moderate to more expensive.
Food Lion, one of my area's largest grocery stores, is actually a Dutch company; they pretty much require loyalty cards for the best pricing.
Stop & Shop, Hannaford, Giant Food, are also Dutch and may be the same mega corp as Food Lion.
7-Eleven, one of the largest convenience stores in the US, is owned by a Japanese company. The US is heavily diversified in foreign ownership of lots of stuff.
Canada owns about 30% of the foreign-owned agricultural land and forests in the US.
The Netherlands holds about 12%, Italy 6%, the UK 6%, and Germany 5%. China makes the news a lot with its 1%.
Foreign-held assets and resources within the US are substantial. With France kicking off, "we are doing our own thing and won't buy from a US company, they may find the US reciprocates and doesn't buy from French companies. Not the best of outcomes, but the potential is there. All it takes is a viral video, and suddenly, the US consumer goes elsewhere. It has hit some companies pretty hard when it happens. Ask Anheuser-Busch InBev how they felt about that Bud Light fiasco.
T-Mobile, Siemens, British Petroleum, Shell, Nestle, Stellantis, Sodexo, Danone, L'Oreal, LVMH, Snieder Electric, Michelin, and these are just some of the big money brands. BP Shell has been the most valued company in the US at various times. Wonder how it would play out in the news if the US said it wouldn't buy from any of these companies.
The knee-jerk reactions to issues in global politics aren't surprising. What used to be statesmen and women who represented people globally are nothing more than bullies, all of them on the same playground picking noes and fights. Citizens sit back and cheer on their teams.
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In essence, if a merchant sells you a product for cash at a lower price than CC, they would be in breach. It's like forcing the merchant to make more money on cash transactions. Of course, the products all have fees incorporated into the prices, as well as the taxes that governments impose on the OEM, the wholesaler, and the merchant.
But cash has fees as well, at least in the UK. Banks started offering "free" accounts, but nothing is free, they went ryan air style with business banking, "oh but you want that thing, oh that's going to incur a fee". If I showed up at my bank and presented them an amount of cash to deposit into my business account I would be charged a similar fee to what stripe charges me to take a card payment, not to mention my time and as I mentioned earlier the cost of parking in town.
I remember as a child being amazed by the pod in tube transport system in the supermarket watching the cashiers count up the money, put it into the pods and send it up tubes from each till - often. They don't have those anymore, and I'm sure the supermarket does not miss them. I'm sure they had a cost, not only to install but also to maintain and run, the cashiers time counting the cash out and putting it in there. So even from the moment a customer hands over cash there is an immediate overhead cost, just to get it from the cash machine to the office upstairs where no doubt another human was counting it out.
The last time I used cash in a supermarket, despite the cash machine telling the "kid" how much to give me they struggled to translate that into individual coins.
Larger businesses asking for cash are run by idiots who think their workers must just need something to do, small businesses encouraging cash are tax evaders. My wife works for a charity shop chain and they encourage cash, but then it takes 15-30 minutes at the end of each day for 2 employees to deal with it, so 0.5-1hr of labour a day, that is about 1% of the cash takings and that is not taking into account the extra time a cash transaction takes and with a que of people at the tills you need more people on tills.
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The last time I used cash in a supermarket, despite the cash machine telling the "kid" how much to give me they struggled to translate that into individual coins.
I have seen cash registers at a local store here (Safeway) that actually show a picture of the cash drawer to "the kid" showing how much of each bin he need to return.... It doesn't show values, just 2 of this , three of that bin... You can only hope the bin has the right denominations in it... And the coins come out of an automated dispenser.
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Here many places are card only, cash is too expensive.
Small specialty shops or places where walk in customer is an exception may still have a triple system.
A computer for sales, a payment terminal for cards and a cash register for book keeping.
Piggy bank, no idea how much its service fee is today.
Some banks have a coin machine for deposits and self serving it can be free, 1k of coins a month is max for one bank.
There's possibly also a note to coins machine, maybe a change is needed before you can deposit piggy bank notes for free.