Digital Minister wants open standards and open source as guiding principle
57 comments
·June 6, 2025dust42
joker99
While I understand where you’re coming from, it’s important to mention that the German military buys googles software and hardware to self host an air gapped google cloud. I know that to some it’s a distinction without a difference, but if you want to have a modern(-ish) private cloud _now_, there’s not a lot of non-American competition out there, plus there’s the entire topic of support and consulting services. It would be great if Europe could get its head(s) out its behind and build a competitor (which is not easy, just look at how not great gcp is compared to aws) but they need a solution _now_.
And having worked together with the German government on IT projects, I’ll say that the _only_ way an OSS project would be even considered is if there’s a company backing the project that has extreme amounts of passion, patience and passibility. In the end, they need some _entity_ that is _legally responsible_ - and it’s always better if that entity is not them ;)
yobbo
What about possible future employment as a "consultant" in a much more generous (and sexy) private corporation?
thyristan
They could have bought local for the simple part of the tender, and got the rest from Google for the complicated things no local vendor could offer. Or even split by criticality of the data.
But they didn't even do that.
xvilka
NextCloud exists and already works though.
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FirmwareBurner
> While I understand where you’re coming from, it’s important to mention that the German military buys googles software and hardware to self host an air gapped google cloud.
The fact the Google cloud is private for the military doesn't matter. The core issue is that Germany, the richest EU country, is incapable of building its own cloud infra for its defense. It's a laughing stock to posture how the EU is getting rid of US tech when EU's biggest economy is entangling itself even deeper with the US big-tech. Andit's not just Germany.
> but they need a solution _now_
AFAIR Europe has been saying "we need X now" for over 10 years, that I'm more than fatigued by it.
Things don't magic themselves into existence out of thin air just because you need them _NOW_. You need to make smart investments and incentives into the private sector both for investors and the workforce, to get the results the US has.
The problem is EU wants the nice things the US has built, but without putting the long term effort, similar how a guy wants to have the body of Thor but doesn't go to the gym and eats french-fries all day.
> I’ll say that the _only_ way an OSS project would be even considered is if there’s a company backing the project that has extreme amounts of passion, patience and passibility.
And why wasn't a German company like SAP or T-Systems able to do it?
qznc
Well, the richest country on earth can afford that. Nearly everybody else cannot. China probably does. The EU could if they would manage to collaborate.
FirmwareBurner
EU countries are domestic competitors to each other economically and culturally, always have been for hundreds of years, hence the constant wars. They're only united politically in the EU when it comes to negotiating international issues.
For example, an EU country won't hesitate to torpedo another country's energy, economy or industry plan if they can score political points at home for their voters or to protect their own domestic industry players from the other members. That's also one of the reasons why Switzerland and Norway refused to join the EU.
EU is like a marriage between 27 people instead of 2, always at each other's throats but never(until 2020) divorcing. This is not the ideal environment that scales tech companies. That's why there no big tech from Europe.
qznc
Having a common enemy might help though.
constantcrying
The Bundeswehr is a bureocracy with a small army attached. It is totally irrelevant where they host their stuff their main purpose is administrating themselves and for that it is irrelevant who hosts your "sensitive information".
tetris11
Europe really does seem to be leading the way with open source gov tech.
If this is successful (and I hope it is), the world will have no choice but to follow.
This really could be the beginning of the end of Microsoft as an ever-present aspect when filling in forms, tables, templates, etc.
rwyinuse
I really hope this will be successful. Living in Finland, I was surprised to find out that last year our public sector spent over a billion Euros on Microsoft licenses alone, while simultaneously following austerity politics elsewhere, making cuts that badly impact people's lives to save way smaller sums of money.
No wonder EU's tech industry and economy in general aren't doing well, when we let so much money flow to America, even though we absolutely have the talent to build good enough systems over here.
simiones
> No wonder EU's tech industry and economy in general aren't doing well, when we let so much money flow to America, even though we absolutely have the talent to build good enough systems over here.
You have to be careful with this line of thinking, because as you've stated it, this justifies concepts like Trump's tariffs based on trade deficits.
The reality is that Finland won't be any richer (nor poorer, of course) if it spent 1+ billion euro on some EU or even Finnish alternative to MS; nor if it were spent on consulting and/or a government IT office. Trade is not a problem in itself.
The real concern is that letting Microsoft be the only game in town for business software of this type lets them control prices - that just having some trustworthy alternatives would allow the same services to be obtained for, say, 500M euro instead.
The other concern is related to tech dependence - that the government's reliance on MS services allows the US to use a threat of denying access to MS products as a strong-arming tactic in any negotiations.
Finally, the concern that a US company - and, implicitly, US security services - has access to potentially highly confidential data is a national security risk, though the impact is hard to measure.
akdor1154
> The reality is that Finland won't be any richer (nor poorer, of course) if it spent 1+ billion euro on some EU or even Finnish alternative to MS.
If Finland sends €1B to the U.S, then there's €1B more on a U.S. balance sheet.
If Finland sends €1B to Finish companies, then clearly Finland has €1B more in it than it otherwise would.
So 'Finland the government balance sheet' would be unchanged, but 'Finland the aggregate of people and businesses' would indeed be richer.
pu_pe
> You have to be careful with this line of thinking, because as you've stated it, this justifies concepts like Trump's tariffs based on trade deficits.
The difference is that if you are using tariffs to stimulate local industrial capacity, this can take many years and you might have competitive disadvantages (ie wages, access to supply chains, etc.). If you are replacing software like Windows and Office with open source alternatives and you put the money from the licenses into your local tech sector to develop a support ecosystem, I think this is both achievable and would make your country richer too.
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close04
> this justifies concepts like Trump's tariffs based on trade deficits
It doesn't have to. Thinking you want to spend locally and building options isn't a problem - you can just invest in local capacity to deliver, build it and they will come. Artificially putting barriers (tariffs, threats) so people have to spend locally is the problem. Don't confuse these 2 just because they achieve the same and people spend more at home and less elsewhere.
> if it spent 1+ billion euro on some EU or even Finnish alternative to MS
Even if you end up paying the same, 1bn Euro spent locally goes a lot further than 1bn Euro spent across the ocean.
mvdwoord
One can hope... There is some precedent in Germany, esp. in Munich with LiMux. No clue how successful that project now really is though.
Tainnor
As it says on that page, the project was discontinued in 2017 - although they did later make another U-turn and committed to open source without, in my understanding, fully going back to LiMux.
Arainach
>If this is successful (and I hope it is), the world will have no choice but to follow.
Why do you believe this is so?
It's important to remember that many of the dominant enterprise software companies aren't there as the result of a secret conspiracy - it's because they're very good at listening to what their customers want and delivering it.
Saying "we want this open" sounds nice, but the sticker shock of paying for development, maintenance, and hosting is the tip of the iceberg. The real problems and expenses are in support and training.
Companies like Microsoft excel here - they have dedicated support teams to escalate to empowered to understand the problems of large customers and get them fixed. Paying an engineer to investigate why your USB badge reader doesn't work on Linux on Lenovo laptops on Thursdays is more expensive than a significant number of Windows licenses.
Your comment could be pulled directly from Slashdot back when the German Government decided to try SUSE.
solarkraft
> When asked whether the emerging Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernization had already set up a "signal group" for messaging exchange, the head of department replied that the ministry was still "on a wild goose chase" following the US TeleMessage affair. It was still sounding out which infrastructure would be best for this.
I wonder where they will land. Since this is a CDU minister coming from a corporation, I would have instinctively have expected him to side with big business and go with the Microsoft stack.
Both that he wasn’t a part of the CDU before joining the government and that he seems to understand the principle of digital sovereignty is a very positive sign to me.
Because of this I am certain that they are evaluating OpenDesk (https://www.opendesk.eu/en) by the German center for digital sovereignty (https://www.zendis.de/), which tries combines Collabora Online, OpenXChange, Matrix, XWiki and some smaller tools into a cohesive suite.
Them ending up choosing it would be a natural fit sovereignty wise and not unprecedented - the military‘s BWMessenger is already basically a version of Element.
But I also wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t. Being a former CEO, the man will understand how the efficiency and reliability of the IT infrastructure will affect his organization‘s productivity - and I fear those products are definitely behind the top of the line commercial solutions in that regard. That said, Microsoft also keeps fumbling with its products and ministry workers are likely already used to sub optimal processes, so maybe in the name of sovereignty it will be worth it.
jansenmac
The top six contributors to Open Source globally are American Companies. In the top 10 there are no European companies, 9 are American and 1 is Chinese. https://opensourceindex.io/
Affric
Then SAP, SUSE, odoo, Canonical, Elastic, Jetbrains appear in the next 10.
Europe is not in a strong position in hardware (NVIDIA, AMD, Intel) and that would take a long time to get closer.
But it’s fundamentally because the EU has until recently had a very cooperative relationship with the US.
tonyhart7
red hat punching above its weight
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ulrischa
Germany is not the poster cild when it comes to digitalisation. Schools do not have tablets, public health uses fax, areas with poor Internet speed...
impossiblefork
Tablets in schools are a terrible idea.
We initially introduced that kind of thing in Sweden, but it turns out that introducing these things is correlated with worse test results, so there's actually debate about possibly going away from them, despite the convenience for teachers.
cjpearson
Germany certainly has its issues with digitalization, but bringing TikTok into the classroom should not be its top priority.
meepmorp
> but bringing TikTok into the classroom should not be its top priority
dismissing the legitimate use of computers in education as "bringing TikTok into the classroom," is incredibly bullshit way to respond to OP
Semaphor
Schools often do. Not sure if I agree with that being good, though.
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msgodel
[flagged]
lemma_peculiar
while it is true that most apps are now designed around being dopamine traps, there are lots of great applications for tablets in a school context. just think about not carrying around books, wasting paper, taking notes.
tablets are impactful if, and only if, pupils don't have garbage apps on them
Affric
I am unsure if tablets offer anything better than paper so long as what kids carry is very deliberately kept light.
msgodel
[flagged]
v5v3
It's shocking that European countries, whose populations have high digital literacy, who have many leading universities, and can attract talent globally to move to europe has failed to challenge US dominance in tech.
It's only Trump's America First policies that is pushing EU to react very late.
thyristan
Besides money, people and knowledge that sister comments have mentioned, there is another huge factor:
Aversion to risk. No european company, bureaucracy, government is as bold and risk-taking as those over the pond. Only when something has been proven, stamped, certified and established, will it be used. So new and small OSS projects, startups, and generally new ways of doing things will have a far harder time overall.
There is even the tendency to spend tons of public money on stuff like GAIA-X to establish European cloud infrastructure. And then never using it because all that new-fangled stuff where one would be the first user cannot ever be good and viable. Thereby forgetting that money has already been paid to make it exactly like the European governments wanted it to be, and that any service needs its first users to grow over the teething problems...
captainbland
It's money. No one in Europe has been willing to front the vast amounts of investment capital that get put up in the US. We've collectively been freaking out about state finances non-stop since 2008 and imposing various fiscal straight jackets on ourselves (except for where it comes to free money for wealthy pensioners which is apparently an unstoppable force of nature at this point)
I think in general it's also the case that in Europe and the UK, technology has been a very upwardly mobile career path with many people who end up with good incomes but no familial network to fall back on and not accumulating any personal wealth or stability until they're already considering retirement.
This basically means technologists in Europe are not empowered to be entrepreneurial as bootstrapping is impractical around full time work and the investment often isn't out there.
ndepoel
Us Europeans have been extremely naive and complacent for the past decades. We've been all too happy to rely on America for our tech and defense needs, and America has been all too happy to provide. There have been plenty of warning signs in the past that this situation is not as self-evident as we'd like to believe and not sustainable in the long term, but so long as things keep churning along we'd rather just ignore the problem instead of proactively tackling it and becoming more self-sufficient.
And yes, now that America are showing their true colors with Trump leading the way, finally, finally we are starting to see that maybe this isn't how we should want things to be. It's still going to take a long time for Europe to shake off its dependence on the US tech industry and truly start to challenge it, but hopefully this is a wake-up call that will gradually push things in the right direction.
constantcrying
How do you attract "top talent" with half the salaries of the US? Being a software developer in Germany was never an especially lucrative career.
They can not even get intra European "talent" to do these jobs. Germany is notorious for its low level of digitalization and it's staggering lack in Software competency.
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sputr
"Open standards & open source" is such a blast from the past. Namely 2010s Pirate Parties.
Garlef
No money mentioned? Empty talk.
kkfx
Do see NGI Taler (GNU Taler by EU/ECB) and Tourbillon project vs the recent https://www.biometricupdate.com/202506/mastercard-halfway-to...
It is clear that with digital money the sole way to make people trust them is being open and it's clear that those who reign in moneyland do not want to loose their comfy position.
Two weeks ago the same website (heise.de) reported that the german military will use Google cloud services [1].
If there is any place where local cloud and open standards would make sense, then it seems to me the military would be it. I can't really imagine that the US would ever use another country's IT infrastructure to host sensitive information.
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Bundeswehr-relies-on-Google-Clo...