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The Danish Ministry of Digitization is to completely abandon Microsoft in the coming months and use Linux instead of Windows and switch from Office 365 to LibreOffice. Minister Caroline Stage (Moderaterne) announced this in an interview with the daily newspaper Politiken. It comes just a few days after the country's two largest municipalities initiated similar steps. This summer, half of the ministry's employees will be equipped with Linux and LibreOffice. If everything goes as expected, the entire ministry will be free of Microsoft by the fall, Politiken summarizes.
The Ministry of Digitalization's move away from Microsoft is therefore taking place against the backdrop of a new digitalization strategy in which the Kingdom's "digital sovereignty " is given priority. According to newspaper reports, the opposition is also calling for a reduction in dependence on US tech companies. Just a few days ago, the administration of the capital Copenhagen announced its intention to review the use of Microsoft software. The second-largest municipality, Aarhus, has already started to replace Microsoft services. Stage has now told Politiken that they should cooperate and that it is not a race. All municipalities should work together and strengthen open source.
When asked how her ministry would react if the changeover was not so easy, Stage replied that they would then simply return to the old system for a transitional period and seek other options: "We won't get any closer to the goal if we don't start." So far, she has only heard from employees who welcome the move. But in her ministry, which is mainly concerned with digitalization, she expects a lot of interest anyway. She also assured them that the initiative is not about Microsoft alone, as they are generally far too dependent on a few providers.
As background to the move, the article also refers to the events at the International Criminal Court, where an email account operated by Microsoft was disconnected. This caused an uproar across Europe. In Denmark, there is also the fact that the new US President Donald Trump has been announcing for weeks that his country wants to take over Greenland. The island in the North Atlantic is a self-governing part of Denmark, and the outrage at Trump's proposal is huge. The desire to reduce dependence on US companies is therefore evidently even greater there than in the rest of Europe.
Xlsx is actually an open standard, but only if you use strict mode, which Microsoft conveniently does not make the default option when saving. You have to choose it explicitly when saving.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
I know this phrase gets trouted out a lot (possibly to the point of being fatiguing to hear), especially when it comes to MS, but this is a textbook case of their Embrace, Extend, Extinguish mantra.
Have an open standard (Embrace)... add a bunch of non-open components (Extend)... to fuck over compatibility with competitors and prevent them from gaining market share (Extinguish).
That's what I meant. Microsoft created the Office Open XML format as an open standard, but they don't follow their own standard and make their "extended" version of the standard as the default.
Other Office suites like Libre Office support this format via strict mode, which is not selected by default when you save these files using the Microsoft Office suite.
Technically even Google does this with Chrome: Open standard JS but they also use custom components, sites that use these components break on other browsers.
It's only open in name.