- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
Yeah, this is how monopolistic digital companies operate. Every time you try and pivot from their bullshit “ecosystem” you encounter “technical difficulties” because they’ve surreptitiously extended their tentacles beyond their products. Getting off of these systems will take a concentrated effort and it’s unfortunate that governments just aren’t willing to do it.
Microsoft’s specification has previously caused problems for other vendors like LibreOffice’s The Document Foundation (TDF) too. There is some controversial history behind this feud between the two formats
No, there was no feud. What happened is that when Microsoft had to create an open document format that everyone could use, they purposefully made their format impossible to implement by anyone. IIRC, The open doc forma spec does it all and is 1500 pages large, whereas the Microsoft format doc is well over 6000 pages long and contains closed parts still anyways.
This is just standard Microsoft strategy and it worked again and dumb fucks again decided to stay married to Microsoft Microsoft because at apparently they love being abused
This is borderline fake news. This pilot project was launched poorly by the ministry responsible for digitisation because the minister wanted his own project running so he could bash other ministries for not doing anything. It’s ironic, like rain on your wedding day.
There are multiple pilot projects across the Danish range of ministries. Many are in much better shape because they’ve actually been thought through: example
This is not particularly surprising since Collabora leverages the Open Document Format (ODF) rather than Microsoft’s proprietary OOXML specification. Microsoft’s specification has previously caused problems for other vendors like LibreOffice’s The Document Foundation (TDF) too.
While it seems elections killed this initiative, the above is why I recommended EuroOffice or OnlyOffice for converts. It has a more MS feel and much, much better support for conversions.
I’m still confused why TDF hasn’t put more time into opening other formats.
100% it was a hot dumpster fire of a Sharepoint deployment that made it impossible to migrate.
Has anyone discovered exactly what SharePoint does yet? /s
pilot phase with 38 ministry employees kicked off last year to trial Collabora’s suite with Office documents. However, this trial was terminated when elections took place earlier this year. A spokesperson confirmed that the experiment had concluded, and would not resume again. They also confirmed that no evaluation benchmarking Collabora’s performance against Microsoft Office had taken place either.
So it was a performance more or less, without any plan to actually switch.
When elections took place could mean someone that won was pro America or Microsoft
There was no real change of power, Denmark is still ruled by their xenophobic self-declared social democrats busy teaming up with Italian post-fascists to undermine international rule of law. While there is little meaningful difference between Mette Fredriksen and Georgia Meloni she’s pretty much as left as Danish politics goes, the only parties left of this mess (the Ø and Å lists, not kidding) are marginal and have never had real power.
Traditionally Denmark has had no political line for themselves, and have followed America completely. They are completely new to trying to think original thoughts in terms of foreign policy, and we should expect to see them stumble a bit. I guess it’s refreshing to see them pretend to try.
Yeah, even little pockets of US government are making Linux desktop builds because of licensing and hardware constraints.
Kind of hard words like xenophobic, fascist for parties democratically voted for by the majority of voters.
So it stops being xenophobic or fascist when a majority elects them? The literal Nazis were elected by a plurality; would more votes have made them not fascist or not xenophobic?
Georgia Meloni represents Fratelli d’Italia, the successor party of the Alleanza Nazionale, which in turn is the successor of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, which was Mussolini’s party. The succession is direct enough that Fratelli d’Italia still uses the same logo as MSI; a tricolor flame.
See if you can spot the similarity:

If anything I was being generous to Georgia Meloni by referring to her party as post-fascist rather than straight out fascist. There is a clear continuation here. This is not a matter of opinion.
As for the Social Democrats in Denmark being xenophobic, there’s ample evidence. The fact that they would introduce ghetto laws to get rid of immigrant neighbourhoods - and even call them ghetto laws themselves - is one interesting high-profile example.
I don’t know why you don’t already know this, but fascists and xenophobes are capable of voting as well.
I dont know any of denmarks politics, but both can be true. The NSDAP was more or less democratically elected, MAGA as well
Saying the NSDAP was democratically elected to power is a perpetuating a fascist lie. The NSDAP was always using undemocratic methods, such as political violence and voter intimidation, and finally, outright banning and persecuting political opponents and entire political parties. That is not being elected more or less democratically.
If you have been taught bad history, then enlighten yourself, rather than continuing to give fascists false legitimacy.
That has happened in the US for at least about a century and people still consider our presidents democratically elected.
I have been taught good history, by my professors at uni, I am teaching history myself actually, have today actually.
Of course they had their propaganda, scare tactics against opponents and so on. Just like all populists, from the AfD, to MAGA. But they were in ar least one State in the Koalition, so part of the government, in 1930.
After that they were more and more populistic and hateful and despite that they won more and more votes over the following years
Errm, I don’t know how to tell you this, but…
This is a real quote:

It is kinda true though, we just call it something else. And fascism is on the rise here, along with xenophobia. We were always among the first to join the USA in wars while suppressing any questions from critics in the process.
It specifically says that performance wasn’t benchmarked.
The root cause is incompatibility with Microsoft’s proprietary document format causing fuckiness for LibreOffice based Collabora. E.g. formatting issues.
They could’ve tried the Russian alternative but I guess they’d prefer to gargle Microsoft’s fetid cock some more.
I think they meant that the whole thing was “a performance”… A theater. Not that the performance of the product had anything to do with it.
deleted by creator
Performance as in performative
Doesnt Office export to .odt too? Was any IT savy person involved in this?
It does export to odt, but it still messes up document formatting. Of course this is a solvable issue from a technical perspective, but it’s still a lot of man hours to do so for every single document and template across an entire government.
Microsoft’s format is “open” but they don’t follow their own standard so it’s effectively proprietary. I’d be surprised if the odt export even works.
The format isn’t the problem; the rules for rendering content outside the PDF are more suggestions.
And honestly, even if the rules were adhered to, there’s no way in F that Microsoft would comply just for this very reason
the Russian alternative
You say that like it’s not simply swapping which one you have in your mouth.
It isn’t the same thing, no. The Russian alternative got forked by some EU corporation and relabeled to Euro Office. Further, it’s FOSS, so it can be truly independently audited unlike Microslop’s garbage.
I will urge LibreOffice/Collabora any day. I don’t really care for the Russian BS suite because it still adheres to Microsoft’s proprietary “open” document standards, and so long as you use that bullshit you’ll never own your own documents. You’ll always be beholden to their garbage one way or another.
They also confirmed that no evaluation benchmarking Collabora’s performance against Microsoft Office had taken place either.
So it was a performance more or less, without any plan to actually switch.
Nope. There’s was no evaluation. No reason to assume this.
sounds like they didn’t try very hard
A big org, all at once, will almost always fail.
Those IT departments aren’t scoped to change the world all at once, and, on the receiving end, government workers generally aren’t a class of people who respond well to large changes.
Satya Nadella pets a white cat.
You can be sure Microsoft was working its utmost hardest to make this not work, and make it look bad. All the more reason to get away from them as fast as possible.
The best way is to stop using office documents altogether. It’s legacy computing that at shouldn’t be needed any more.
I could easily believe that it was more work than they expected and so they decided that it wasn’t worth it after all, but man. Do it anyway.
They’re getting threatened by the US and they can’t even change a word processor, lol good luck to them
How big was the bribe?
I genuinely, genuinely don’t understand the need for microsoft office. A text editor has sufficed for everything I have ever wanted to do.
Excel spreadsheets bigger than databases. And the userbase doesn’t know any other options because of monopoly.
It’s actually amazing that Microsoft has been able to keep their users inside their walled garden for so many decades. When I was a teenager in the 90s, the same argument was used… That their users don’t care to look for other options. And it’s as true now as then.
too quick to surrender
Something is rotten in the state.
They got the call.











