Europe Pub (PieFed)International Criminal Court to ditch Microsoft Office for European open source alternative
Jure Repincwww.euractiv.com/news/international-criminal-co…
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38271574
The International Criminal Court (ICC) will switch its internal work environment away from Microsoft Office to Open Desk, a European open source alternative, the institution confirmed to Euractiv.
German newspaper Handelsblatt first reported on the plans. The switch comes amid rising concerns about public bodies being reliant on US tech companies to run their services, which have stepped up sharply since the start of US President Donald Trump’s second administration.
For the ICC, such concerns are not abstract: Trump has repeatedly lashed out at the court and slapped sanctions on its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan.
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dfyxFor anyone wondering: openDesk, the solution they’re using, wasn’t developed from the ground up. It contains standard open source tools like Nextcloud, Matrix and Collabora.
It’s sort of bothers me that government business will be handled in the cloud of some random company. Sure, a lot of these things are open source but… Do we get to compare checksums?
Is this separate from the Suite Numerique project or is it the german branded version? I’m worried that we (european governments) are not leveraging existing projects enough. In a way it’s good to have options, but also imagine if we all worked towards a very polished real alternative to the Google ecosystem.
perfect! as we see government work harder and closer with companies to kill innocent people for profit, target activist, and any moment can switch from democracy to dictatorship, we can have some comfort on them handling systems of the “ICC”
It’s still an open source project. I don’t know if an independant company would be better, but imo it’s a great first step to see that the german government is investing in digital sovereignty. That may not make the ICC sovereign, but on the other hand, would it make sense for every country to have their own stack?
porcoesphinoThey’d be doing an enterprise install but here’s the gitlab readme for the open desk community edition and with links for a Kubernetes installation:
https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/deployment/opendesk/
oce 🐆I’m glad they finally had an easy to understand example of why depending on a closed source ecosystem from a foreign country is insane for any kind of public authority.
a German-developed software
a […] software
\sigh
That’s like requesting 1 happiness or 11 lovely.
MisterFrogIf it makes you feel better, this may be a mistranslation from German where saying “eine Software” is appropriate.
RedjardThe software in question consists of at least 3 softwares. Thus
1 software = 3 software
1984Never heard of open desk…
Why not pick the typical LibreOffice?
katy ✨opendesk is eu driven backed by funding specifically for enterprise and government institutions.
They use collabora online for document editing (you self host this service). Collabora is LibreOffice based.
Jack Riddle[Any/All]they seem to do different things. The opendesk website tells me that besides documents they also do identity management, email, cloud storage and videocalls.
I mean sure. But what is the quality of those services, specially since this is kind of an unknown software in the Linux world…
Although they didn’t pick LibreOffice, the project which I personally use, a move from the entire ICC to choose opensource software is insane. Hopefully, and likely any funding they will do to improve software will go to the opensource community
If the OpenDesk software is open source, will that mean each government body will start using a different flavor of it? Seems like an upkeep nightmare for governments.
Standards address this issue. Set them, adhere to them, have a mechanism to adjust them or create new ones when absolutely needed
Microsoft has and will continue to do Trumps bidding when it cones to the ICC, so this is a very good but also very late decision.
rnercle“very late” for you, now; in hundred years it may be considered a timely decision taken early on at the start of the American MAGAification
In my opinion, any Public Administration depending on software without control over the source (paying contractor is another debate) is a bad idea, you don’t have to wait for a company to go rogue (for its client) to realize it.
What transparency can you get if you don’t know your software ? Trusting publisher without permanent audit is worthless, also, with this amount of dependency, corruption could arise just to keep it.
If in the future they consider it good timing, this should be considered a defeat.
The ICC is one of those orgs where not having their data sitting on silicon valley servers is a big friggin’ deal, and they should have probably thought of that years ago.
I look forward to a Europe fully on its own cloud and software stacks or at least FOSS options.
How about own cloud stack on nextcloud?
I haven’t tried NextCloud but it looks more like a hosted application stack like M365 rather than a general purpose cloud like AWS/Azure/gcloud. What would be really cool is a homegrown cloud that emulated AWS/Azure/gcloud API’s so that you could easily port existing applications over.
Why stop there? Let’s get our own internet too. Euronet or something.
Let’s hope that this process will continue even after Trump
I’d hope so considering the current US administration is friendly with multiple people they have charged and issued warrants for such things as crimes against humanity and genocide. And the US has access to Microsoft data which likely includes all documents stored in any Office cloud products.
It will probably end up running better for them anyway.
Seriously, I use Office at work, and I wonder everyday why anyone subjects themselves to it. Then I subject myself to it because that’s what I’m supposed to use. But I sure as hell don’t at home.
I had never heard of Open Desk before, what do we know of this suite?