According to the article the Agency for Digital Government (Digitaliseringsstyrelsen) initiated a pilot in spring 2025 to use Collabora[1]. A General Election was called (not related) which put the project on hold indefinitely. No plan to pick it up agian, and no evaluation is planned.
The article mentions that the (38) test persons had reported some frustrations with typography, and track-changes during the test.
I send a fair amount of physical mailings. This requires me to do a mail merge from a spreadsheet to adhesive labels. I will buy whatever brand of inkjet paper filled with adhesive labels is the cheapest at that given time. The manufacturer gives a template for the labels. Every year or so I will check the feasibility of switching to LibreOffice or OnlyOffice or whatever the thing people say is the open source future of office software is. I will try to do this same exact action, which every office in the world likely does a significant number of times per year. Every year, once I figure out how to mail merge (sometimes, a drastically different process in the interface, whereas Microsoft has kept this relatively intuitive throughout the ages) I end up with misaligned labels on a sheet of ruined label paper, despite the alleged format compatibility of the open source alternatives.
I hate Microsoft. I hate having to use Windows. But nobody in the free software community has ever made this not a nightmare. I suppose I might take a picture of the fucked up product and ask Claude if it can fix my fucking labels. That might actually work.
Create a bounty, I'm in for at least a couple hundred $ in tokens to solve this, assuming MIT or copyleft license is used to avoid future commercial capture.
European governments have been pretending to drop Microsoft for 20 years, I suppose the first one that did it got a big discount, and now they do it whenever they want to reduce costs. Europe will never slow, and in fact will continually increase, its dependency on the US forever.
We propagandize them against all alternatives, like Russian energy and Chinese everything, and employ all of their academics and politicians at our nonprofits and universities, sprinkling credentials all over them. Europeans love a credential; makes them feel superior. Money well spent.
It's all well and good to evangelize but the problem is that we are only evangelizing and not actually making alternatives. Programmers tend to accept an MVP as an alternative because we can deal with the rough edges, but real users don't see it that way.
The other day I was watching a manager wrestle with Excel. He couldn't select information to send it to somebody who wanted it, because it was trying to do a collaborative spreadsheet thing and had got itself locked up somehow. He ended up taking a photo of the screen and texting it.
This. I've been around these kind of pushes in my part oif EU for a long time and the reality is: there's a lot of talk and demands and not many people signing up for tenders, development or maintenance work.
The opinion is that "the public workers don't need it" for every feature missing in Linux or LibreOffice. I can only imagine how a fight to upstream such features would look like even if someone took on a support contract.
With Microsoft at least the governments get shared fate with large corpos who also need enterprise features.
Now that software is cheap, I don’t see why someone wouldn’t just build a clone. Cloud collaborative text editor and sheets and storage is all you really need. Plenty of good alternatives to Teams.
But I think the hardest thing to replace is Active Directory, Outlook, all the integration with Windows, all the admins certified on Microsoft technology. It's not about the actual application "MS Office", it's about all of IT (that line was not AI).
The open-source clones already exist, and have done for a long time. As do Google Docs, which may have the disadvantages of being both closed-source and American, but the advantage of being free.
People pay a lot of money for professional versions anyway.
American big tech companies pay very few taxes, compared to European standards. This is part of what makes it very difficult to compete with them.
Everyone in Europe is saying that the CCP is illegally subsidizing EVs and solar panels to conquer the European market, and that we need to protect from them by imposing tariffs: but if you think about it, this isn't too different from what America is doing with tech.
Every citizen with potential to change the world- leaves europa for the us. The only "positive" exception- has been not the fat old west-west of europe, but the east. Jetbrains, CD Project Red, the svvedes- there is something subsversive and alive, software wise in the ashes of the USSR - and unlike germany and france, the old entrenched conglomerates can not sabotage that newcomers that easy there.
Everything is too expensive for European bureaucrats. Funny how the Europeans used to call the fledgling US in the 1700s a nation of shopkeepers, when right now, they are an entire continent's worth of lawyers and accountants (except for France and the UK, obv).
I al stilhed har Digitaliseringsministeriet droppet sit ellers meget omtalte pilotprojekt med et open souce-baseret alternativ til Microsofts Office-pakke, som ministeriet ellers anvender i stor stil.
Projektet blev søsat i sommeren 2025, da knap 40 medarbejdere i ministeriet gik i gang med at teste open source-systemet Collabora som alternativ til Office. Systemet blev dengang leveret af danske cBrain.
Dengang sagde daværende digitaliseringsminister Caroline Stage (M), at pilotprojektet var et 'kærkomment skridt i den rigtige retning' frem mod at frigøre sig fra afhængigheden af Microsoft opg at hun ønskede at hendes ministerie skulle være spydspids for frigørelsen fra amerikansk teknologi.
Det kan du læse mere om her: Her er den løsning, som skal erstatte Microsoft Office for alle medarbejdere i Digitaliseringsministeriet
Nu meddeler en pressemedarbejder til Version2, at projektet blev droppet, da der blev udskrevet valg i foråret.
Og der er ingen planer om at genoptage det, hedder det. Projektet er ikke blevet evalueret som det ellers var planen.
Og det ærger professor Mikkel Flyverbom fra CBS.
"Det er en fin ide at afprøve alternativer i et pilotprojekt. Jeg ville dog ønske, at ministeriet benyttede muligheden for at lære af pilotprojektet og dele de erfaringer med andre dele af den offentlige sektor," skriver han i en mail til mediet.
Digitaliseringsministeriets departement er i dag lagt sammen med andre ministerier, så ministeriet i dag hedder Forsknings-, Uddannelses-, og Digitaliseringsminister med Christina Egelund som minister.
Med afslutning ved valgudskrivelsen i slutningen af februar 2026 nåede open source-piloten kun at være i luften i godt et halvt års tid.
Pilotprojektet koblede Collabora ind i ministeriets centrale sagsbehandlingssystem, F2, der leveres af danske cBrain, og det var planen, at de 38 test-ansatte allerede fra første dag skulle udarbejde ministeriets dokumenter, præsentationer og tabeller uden Microsofts Word, PowerPoint og Excel.
Særligt funktioner som ’track changes’ og konvertering mellem Microsoft-formater og open source-formater bliver noget af det, ministeriet vil arbejde med i testperioden, hed det dengang.
Pilotprojektet skulle afklare, om britiske Collabora overhovedet kunne understøtte ministeriets arbejdsgange og behov på tilfredsstillende vis. Det står i dag uklart, om det har været tilfældet, da projektet ikke er blevet evalueret.
Der var dog flere historier fremme om, at Collabora-projektet havde ført til visse frustrationer blandt ministeriet ansatte.
Blandt andet har der været med formateringer af typografier, afsnitsformateringer, blanke sider og udfordringer med track changes.
In a world- with https://github.com/storytold/gridcraft - who still needs excell? In such a world- where its obvious that MS Office is easy replaceable with whatever some singularity demon created - longterm government migration plans like this make no sense?
I decided to build an OSS excel-like app for fun in Rust. Thought I'd hit a wall and hate it. Ended up with GPUI based 240fps app that's way faster than Numbers on my Mac. It's not feature complete, but every feature I need (graphs, 95% formula coverage, fast). Hard to imagine a world where folks pay a ton for desktop software in the future.
According to the article the Agency for Digital Government (Digitaliseringsstyrelsen) initiated a pilot in spring 2025 to use Collabora[1]. A General Election was called (not related) which put the project on hold indefinitely. No plan to pick it up agian, and no evaluation is planned.
The article mentions that the (38) test persons had reported some frustrations with typography, and track-changes during the test.
1: https://www.collaboraonline.com/
I send a fair amount of physical mailings. This requires me to do a mail merge from a spreadsheet to adhesive labels. I will buy whatever brand of inkjet paper filled with adhesive labels is the cheapest at that given time. The manufacturer gives a template for the labels. Every year or so I will check the feasibility of switching to LibreOffice or OnlyOffice or whatever the thing people say is the open source future of office software is. I will try to do this same exact action, which every office in the world likely does a significant number of times per year. Every year, once I figure out how to mail merge (sometimes, a drastically different process in the interface, whereas Microsoft has kept this relatively intuitive throughout the ages) I end up with misaligned labels on a sheet of ruined label paper, despite the alleged format compatibility of the open source alternatives.
I hate Microsoft. I hate having to use Windows. But nobody in the free software community has ever made this not a nightmare. I suppose I might take a picture of the fucked up product and ask Claude if it can fix my fucking labels. That might actually work.
Create a bounty, I'm in for at least a couple hundred $ in tokens to solve this, assuming MIT or copyleft license is used to avoid future commercial capture.
https://bounties.fulu.org/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50167818
Knew this was coming after reading the history of Microsoft in Latin America.
Can't they vibe code these apps in Rust? Is AI a fad?
You can have it vibe coded, non-trivial, and good. Pick two.
no
no
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
It's been over 20 years since I saw the first announcements that the German government is moving to Linux + OpenOffice.
Any day now.
"alternativ til Microsoft Office-pakke"
That says it all; that governments run with this "pakke".
European governments have been pretending to drop Microsoft for 20 years, I suppose the first one that did it got a big discount, and now they do it whenever they want to reduce costs. Europe will never slow, and in fact will continually increase, its dependency on the US forever.
We propagandize them against all alternatives, like Russian energy and Chinese everything, and employ all of their academics and politicians at our nonprofits and universities, sprinkling credentials all over them. Europeans love a credential; makes them feel superior. Money well spent.
It's all well and good to evangelize but the problem is that we are only evangelizing and not actually making alternatives. Programmers tend to accept an MVP as an alternative because we can deal with the rough edges, but real users don't see it that way.
The other day I was watching a manager wrestle with Excel. He couldn't select information to send it to somebody who wanted it, because it was trying to do a collaborative spreadsheet thing and had got itself locked up somehow. He ended up taking a photo of the screen and texting it.
This. I've been around these kind of pushes in my part oif EU for a long time and the reality is: there's a lot of talk and demands and not many people signing up for tenders, development or maintenance work.
The opinion is that "the public workers don't need it" for every feature missing in Linux or LibreOffice. I can only imagine how a fight to upstream such features would look like even if someone took on a support contract.
With Microsoft at least the governments get shared fate with large corpos who also need enterprise features.
It's usually clear to all parties that the tendering process is theatre, and they've already picked the company that'll get the contract
Now that software is cheap, I don’t see why someone wouldn’t just build a clone. Cloud collaborative text editor and sheets and storage is all you really need. Plenty of good alternatives to Teams.
The French government for instance sponsors LaSuite ( https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ , no English language web page of course ).
But I think the hardest thing to replace is Active Directory, Outlook, all the integration with Windows, all the admins certified on Microsoft technology. It's not about the actual application "MS Office", it's about all of IT (that line was not AI).
The open-source clones already exist, and have done for a long time. As do Google Docs, which may have the disadvantages of being both closed-source and American, but the advantage of being free.
People pay a lot of money for professional versions anyway.
Unfortunately this is what happened when the EU tried to build their own Teams alternative:
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-microsoft-teams-alternati...
> Absolute shit.
> The U.S. would “instantly” win a hypothetical tech war, an official moaned.
EU just has a long way to go. And the reality is that it will be so astronomically expensive that is is unlikely that they ever even truly try.
American big tech companies pay very few taxes, compared to European standards. This is part of what makes it very difficult to compete with them.
Everyone in Europe is saying that the CCP is illegally subsidizing EVs and solar panels to conquer the European market, and that we need to protect from them by imposing tariffs: but if you think about it, this isn't too different from what America is doing with tech.
Every citizen with potential to change the world- leaves europa for the us. The only "positive" exception- has been not the fat old west-west of europe, but the east. Jetbrains, CD Project Red, the svvedes- there is something subsversive and alive, software wise in the ashes of the USSR - and unlike germany and france, the old entrenched conglomerates can not sabotage that newcomers that easy there.
Everything is too expensive for European bureaucrats. Funny how the Europeans used to call the fledgling US in the 1700s a nation of shopkeepers, when right now, they are an entire continent's worth of lawyers and accountants (except for France and the UK, obv).
You can't clone decades of history.
> Europe will never slow
I am not sure about the word choice, but they, ...
> European governments
probably like BDSM or something.
Is there a version without a paywall?
https://wallhop.io/https://www.computerworld.dk/art/297226/d...
Does this work?
Full Danish text here:
I al stilhed har Digitaliseringsministeriet droppet sit ellers meget omtalte pilotprojekt med et open souce-baseret alternativ til Microsofts Office-pakke, som ministeriet ellers anvender i stor stil.
Projektet blev søsat i sommeren 2025, da knap 40 medarbejdere i ministeriet gik i gang med at teste open source-systemet Collabora som alternativ til Office. Systemet blev dengang leveret af danske cBrain.
Dengang sagde daværende digitaliseringsminister Caroline Stage (M), at pilotprojektet var et 'kærkomment skridt i den rigtige retning' frem mod at frigøre sig fra afhængigheden af Microsoft opg at hun ønskede at hendes ministerie skulle være spydspids for frigørelsen fra amerikansk teknologi. Det kan du læse mere om her: Her er den løsning, som skal erstatte Microsoft Office for alle medarbejdere i Digitaliseringsministeriet
Nu meddeler en pressemedarbejder til Version2, at projektet blev droppet, da der blev udskrevet valg i foråret.
Og der er ingen planer om at genoptage det, hedder det. Projektet er ikke blevet evalueret som det ellers var planen.
Og det ærger professor Mikkel Flyverbom fra CBS.
"Det er en fin ide at afprøve alternativer i et pilotprojekt. Jeg ville dog ønske, at ministeriet benyttede muligheden for at lære af pilotprojektet og dele de erfaringer med andre dele af den offentlige sektor," skriver han i en mail til mediet.
Digitaliseringsministeriets departement er i dag lagt sammen med andre ministerier, så ministeriet i dag hedder Forsknings-, Uddannelses-, og Digitaliseringsminister med Christina Egelund som minister.
Med afslutning ved valgudskrivelsen i slutningen af februar 2026 nåede open source-piloten kun at være i luften i godt et halvt års tid.
Pilotprojektet koblede Collabora ind i ministeriets centrale sagsbehandlingssystem, F2, der leveres af danske cBrain, og det var planen, at de 38 test-ansatte allerede fra første dag skulle udarbejde ministeriets dokumenter, præsentationer og tabeller uden Microsofts Word, PowerPoint og Excel.
Særligt funktioner som ’track changes’ og konvertering mellem Microsoft-formater og open source-formater bliver noget af det, ministeriet vil arbejde med i testperioden, hed det dengang.
Pilotprojektet skulle afklare, om britiske Collabora overhovedet kunne understøtte ministeriets arbejdsgange og behov på tilfredsstillende vis. Det står i dag uklart, om det har været tilfældet, da projektet ikke er blevet evalueret.
Der var dog flere historier fremme om, at Collabora-projektet havde ført til visse frustrationer blandt ministeriet ansatte.
Blandt andet har der været med formateringer af typografier, afsnitsformateringer, blanke sider og udfordringer med track changes.
In a world- with https://github.com/storytold/gridcraft - who still needs excell? In such a world- where its obvious that MS Office is easy replaceable with whatever some singularity demon created - longterm government migration plans like this make no sense?
How is the compatibility for VBA scripts? If not near 100% then it's going to be kind of useless for most enterprises.
I decided to build an OSS excel-like app for fun in Rust. Thought I'd hit a wall and hate it. Ended up with GPUI based 240fps app that's way faster than Numbers on my Mac. It's not feature complete, but every feature I need (graphs, 95% formula coverage, fast). Hard to imagine a world where folks pay a ton for desktop software in the future.
https://github.com/scosman/freecell