German ministry hellbent on taking back control of 'digital sovereignty', cutting dependency on Microsoft

The Federal Ministry of the Interior (Bundesministerium des Innern or BMI) in Germany says it will reduce reliance on specific IT suppliers, especially Microsoft, in order to strengthen its "digital sovereignty". In an official statement, the Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer states that “in order to ensure our …

[Roland6]

Re: About time.

>Anything but Europe. Have you never heard of Brexit?

Don't worry Boris will throw some of that £350m at it, so we can have BJnix, naturally it will be better than anything those pesky foreigners can come up with...

[Avatar of They]

Re: About time.

Yeah, like the GPS replacement, or the space agency or... oh wait I see what you did there.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Here for navigation

Have you checked if they slurp your data? I have, and guess what, the "FREE!" comes at a usual price...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Here for navigation

last time I looked they were not a not for profit. I don't trust companies that claim they the are ethical with data without providing evidence for those claims. https://twitter.com/RogerNg61805223/status/1174102259141107712

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: About time.

If the whole of the EU slung some serious resources at IT maybe we can actually break the stranglehold the US has.

Here we go again. Have you any idea how much resource is required? Basically you’d have to recreate something as good as MS Office, Windows, even Outlook, etc. I know there’s projects like Libreoffice, but frankly that’s just so far behind you may as well start again. And Linux on the desktop remains is so niche it is effectively insignificant.

And that’s before you consider how much stuff has built up inside Microsoft’s ecosystem. All those macros, formulae, Visio drawings.

Like it or loathe it, MS’s stuff is a de facto standard. And to a large extent these days it’s an open standard. If you wanted to clone Office you can, but that’s a really big job. All of MS’s file formats are open, so in principle it can be done, but be prepared to blow billions doing so and supporting it. Plus whilst there’s dozens of disparate Linux distros, Windows and MacOS will continue to be the only OSes you can use en masse across an entire economy’s desktop / laptop user base.

Germany and the EU would be better off using their influence (carrot and stick) to shape MS to their needs. The alternative is to waste time trying to displace them and persuading everyone recreate everything they’ve already produced in MS’s ecosystem in some new, incomplete and no-good-outside-the-EU alternative.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: About time.

" If you wanted to clone Office you can, but that’s a really big job."

Just as well somebody's done it. I use one of those clones every day.

"Germany and the EU would be better off using their influence (carrot and stick) to shape MS to their needs."

Much easier and cheaper to drop some Euros to the Document Foundation if they need something specific that's not already in there.

[ma1010]

The long term

In the long term, the choice is obvious:

A) Commercial software that, these days, is rented to you by companies that slurp your data, jack up the rent at whim, force updates that can break your system, and who may discontinue support for products at their whim. OR

B) Go with open source that avoids most of these problems.

The hard part is, of course, getting from A to B. Don't know if it's true, but I was told that years ago, there was a meeting of California state IT high-ups at which it was decided that they were going to junk MS and go Linux statewide. Didn't happen, of course, for reasons that I'm sure are obvious to El Reg readers. But, as the article points out, if you can take small steps and train everyone in those steps as you take them, you can eventually get somewhere better. But it will take careful planning and a training budget.

[G R Goslin]

Re: The long term

"We are also considering alternative programs to replace certain software. This will be done in close coordination with other EU countries.”

Read this as "We want to make a gesture, but by doing it in coordination with other EU countries, we have made sure it will never be done

[A.P. Veening]

Re: The long term

Read this as "We want to make a gesture, but by doing it in coordination with other EU countries, we have made sure it will never be done

I wouldn't bet on it if I were you. The Germanic and Nordic language speaking countries are in agreement on that and don't have a real problem with leaving the Romanic (and Slavic) language speaking countries biting the dust.

[veti]

Re: The long term

The only problem "open source" really solves is the one about having too many qualified applicants for your vacancies. Go OS, and basically you need to become a software company - with all the headaches that involves - in addition to the business you actually make money from.

[EBG]

but..

every company is, in part, a software company now (since HMRC binned paper returns, I mean every). It's just a question of how much you outsource.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish them luck but we all know the inevitable backhanders and brown envelopes will stop this in it's tracks. Outsourcing such as the cloud is just a cost cutting exercise that won't end well once they all up the prices and even then it doesn't matter because you won't be able to switch providers without downtime.

[Doctor Syntax]

"I wish them luck but we all know the inevitable backhanders and brown envelopes will stop this in it's tracks."

It seems to have done so at city level but maybe not at national govt. level. Microsoft can't open regional offices all over Germany.

[Teiwaz]

"I wish them luck but we all know the inevitable backhanders and brown envelopes will stop this in it's tracks."

It seems to have done so at city level but maybe not at national govt. level. Microsoft can't open regional offices all over Germany.

I suppose at the very least it might panic MS into giving better rates for a new contract.

[Anonymous Coward]

Never quite got the point of cloud data storage and SaaS

(0) Cloud storage: You never get to hold on to you data physically. Lest we forget about the thefts from Amazon, but seriously, you if you believe that you won't be held hostage at some point in time, then you are seriously mistaken.

(1) SaaS: You decide that you are going to rent software to manage and/or manipulate and/or make a profit from Data in (0). And the software decides the format for the data, in some closed source format.

Seriously, this is the current best business practise? I guess you should expect this when all the advice, even from the el reg comes from vendors.

[gnwiii]

Consider liability

In the past, large organizations have often favored commercial options because, in the event of trouble, they could blame the supplier. Now, however, many risks have ambiguous chains of responsibility. Did an employee click on a link that installed malware? Should the vendor have provide software that didn't have as many security issues? Does it benefit anyone to blame unknown and/or untouchable perpetrators? Suppliers of proprietary IT kit are use licenses and contracts that shield them from liability and require dubious arbitration mechanisms to resolve disputes.

An instructive example occurred in Nova Scotia this week after a construction crane fell across several buildings (one under construction). Tenants of two occupied buildings were require to evacuate until the crane was removed, but the construction company could not arrange insurance in a reasonable time frame, so the province (e.g., taxpayers) had to exercise its sovereignty to declare a state of emergency and assume liability so the work could start immediately. Note that delay increases risks of further damage and added delays if another storm occurs.

Mission critical IT systems in large organizations should never have been allowed to reach a state where the organization can't assume effective control if something (ransomware, loss of a data centre to acts of nature or war, etc. ) goes bad. At present, however, expertise is in short supply because security has been pushed to the edge instead of being baked in during development. This means it will be painful for many organizations to reach a position where they could assume control, and they are exposed to elevated risks until they improve their position.

[Imhotep]

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in

This happens periodically. Some state or city decides they are going to go open source, they don't have the expertise on staff to support it, the users complain - and everything is abandoned and Microsoft cashes some more checks.

Didn't we watch this play out at some German city/state recently?

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in

>Didn't we watch this play out at some German city/state recently?

Munich, but to be fair they did it particularly badly (it was after all a government IT project)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in

The study mentions that 33% of them used Windows all along because of Windows-specific applications. So they had to support two operating systems at the same time as well as doing in-house development for both of them. I'm not sure what they tried to get out of their "highly customized version of Ubuntu", though.

Frankly most IT managers out there are either dumb or have a hard time to create a holistic IT approach because of internal politics.

[A.P. Veening]

Re: Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in

Frankly most IT managers out there are either dumb or have a hard time to create a holistic IT approach because of internal politics.

Either being dumb or being crippled by internal politics (and usually a combination of both) isn't limited to IT managers, it is rather usual for managers of all other departments as well.

[Danny Boyd]

G-suite?

I must be missing something - they say they are concerned with Microsoft's telemetry, and they consider Google G-Suite as an alternative? Is this some sick kind of joke?

[Anonymous Coward]

And doesn't get me started on the idiots that use Outlook and Google mail services

Yeah you can trust them not to look at you emails.

[Anonymous Coward]

I do believe it is long past the tme where it is appropriate that kids are educated solely in Microsoft products.

Surely better to teach using OS and then let further ed or employers reskill them if neccessary, actually transition ISNT so hartd for users, coming from one who has also moved from Microsoft through both Mac and OS.

If the new generation workforce is coming out of school familiar with OS (with out the "ZOMG what is this strange software?" panic that seems to happen now when kids are confronted by anything that isnt from slurp,) then companies - and communities can move on from this lock in enabled extortion.

Once data is stored or processed elsewhere it isnt "yours" anymore, and as a citizen, I abhor the practice of submitting data that I am legally required to give the government, or other private data amassed by healthacre etc to a private company just because they hold the power to take it, That adat should remain on servers owner and operated by those who I have to give the data to.

[Anonymous Coward]

People never learn using an OS - they learn to use applications. The OS needs to be less intrusive as possible. Any OS that gets in the way requiring complicate hops to perform basic operations will go nowhere. Most people are not IT techies, and see computers just as something they have to use even when they would like to work without. Moreover, applications may be far more complex to use than an OS (from a user perspective), and "reskilling" user to use different applications with different GUIs and workflows can become quickly quite difficult and expensive.

While in large organizations IT people need something that can be easily deployed, configured and maintained remotely.

[sum_of_squares]

"People never learn using an OS"

To me the GNU core utils are closely related to the Linux Kernel. Is "chmod" a programm or an extension of the operating system? Yes, you could use Linux without the GNU stuff, but nobody really does this (and vice versa).

I think this is one of the more profound distinctions when it comes to Linux vs Windows. What people comes to mind are often comparisons of "Can LibreOffice Calc be a good replacement for MS Excel?". But the real difference is that Linux is all about enableing the users while Windows is all about dumbing down users. The core of Linux is having a toolset of things that do one thing particularly well. Windows is all about having a "one size fits all" approach where the UI of PowerBI looks a lot like the UI of Excel even though they are vastly different from each other.

Even the most stupid user can use Linux nowadays, nevertheless you should encourage users to learn more and become curious instead of abstracting everything away and trying to enforce a digital lock-in for the sole purpose of maxing out some companies income.

[Unicornpiss]

Maybe a little off track..

"People never learn using an OS"

Well, you may be right, and that's part of another problem. I've lost count over the years of how many high-level people with advanced degrees and lofty salaries I've met that don't understand how to do basic copy n' paste, how to zip/unzip a file, or the difference between a file and a shortcut, a mapped 'drive' vs. a UNC path, or even the critical thinking skills to parse an error message that tells exactly how to solve the problem that's occurring. And these are people that surely used a computer at least starting with their college years.

[Richard Plinston]

> you could use Linux without the GNU stuff, but nobody really does this

except _everyone_ with an Android phone.

[Anonymous Coward]

A Linux From Scratch (LFS) project would be a good a way to train kids in IT related classes about the use of a non-Microsoft OS. That's a long term fix. In the short term Governments will have to pony up to retrain IT staff in GNU/Linux and BSDs usage; of course, there's a lot of overlap across those OSs. Those are things that are worth doing.

[Alister]

Some of the arguments, such as the risk of cloud downtime, seem familiar from years back; and yet it has not impeded cloud adoption.

That's because those making the decision to move to the cloud, in nearly all cases, are blind and deaf to the consequences, and only see the immediate cost benefits.

[yoganmahew]

And further the beancounters don't understand the risk.

A cloud provider with a bazillion tenants has an average of near zero downtime. But amongst that bazillion, there are tenants that are degraded for hours or days. If you count your average uptime by tenant (regardless of size), a large tenant down is the same as a small tenant down - effectively a rounding error.

But what if it's you?

Beancounters need to look at not the change they will hit an outage, but the impact of the outage when it inevitably hits them. How would they cope with a week's outage? Or a permanent loss of data (like AWS-E tenants sufferred last week)? Does that mean an on-prem backup solution is required? How much would that cost? (egress is expensive). How long would it take to deploy? Can it even be deployed?

It's surely just a matter of time before cloud ransomware.

[briesmith]

Alfie - tell me, what's it all about?

The cloud - somebody else's computer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Story over here at the Beeb....

Microsoft president: Don't move fast and break things

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-49768347/microsoft-president-don-t-move-fast-and-break-things

Are Microsoft taking the piss ?

[Doctor Syntax]

"Are Microsoft taking the piss ?"

When weren't they?

[Aussie Doc]

Surely they jest

Drop MS and consider Google G-suite??? And don't call me Shirley ---->

[NE-bot]

The lack of OSS money has been noticed for a while

This article brings to mind some collected research by the excellent Nadia Edhbal who has an extensive tech life including VCs.

She collated some stuff on this here: https://nadiaeghbal.com/research/

But yes, it looks like the dominant tech model for sustainable OSS is develop the software, sell the support + ready made cloud options. It works BUT a) is never going to be massive money and b) as this article points out, is vulnerable to being bought out by more unscrupulous companies with large cash piles like MS/Goog.

Technically speaking, OSS should be more sustainable, better for the world etc, but current real world conditions are against it.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: The lack of OSS money has been noticed for a while

"as this article points out, is vulnerable to being bought out by more unscrupulous companies with large cash piles like MS/Goog."

Or even IBM. But from the business's point of view, as opposed to the users', that could be part of the business plan.

[Anonymous Coward]

The inherent risks in IT dependency on commercial software vendors

“The paper examines the risks inherent in IT dependency on commercial software vendors”

Seems like a good idea for the use of Open Source software, that way you're not locked into any one commercial vendor.

[Anonymous Coward]

Retraining is a canard

A common wail is that people must be "retrained" to use OSS. Believe it or not, the majority are not that stupid/inflexible and adapt quickly. (Principle of least astonishment and all that.) There will always be those complaining that they cannot embed videos in their spreadsheets or whatnot.

(Note from my past: Decades ago, I was attending an industry conference on crypto in embedded systems. One of the speaker -- consultant -- spent his half hour railing against Linux in the military because of "retraining" costs, rather than discuss what he said he would. The week after, MS released a completely new i/f for Windoze.)

[FrogsAndChips]

Re: Retraining is a canard

And retraining is unavoidable with MS products anyway. I can't count the number of hours I have wasted after Office updates trying to find out where the hell some icons had been relocated. WHY DO YOU NEED TO RESHUFFLE THE BLOODY RIBBON EVERY 3 MONTHS???

[briesmith]

Don't buy bundled software; find out what you need and buy that.

Microsoft can bully home and SME users but it can't bully big buyers like the NHS, the Police (although they're doing a good job bullying themselves with the NEP) and so on. They need to bring pressure on Microsoft and others to end bundling. In all our best interests.

[root01]

Start by creating a list of open source software covering specific areas like the french government does with Socle Interministériel de Logiciels Libres (SILL)