Submission + - Dutch Tax Authorities Cancel Microsoft 365 Cloud Rollout (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Netherlands’ Tax and Customs Administration has abandoned its planned Microsoft 365 public-cloud rollout. Why? The reasons were clear at the Open Source Summit Europe conference, where the Linux Foundation (LF) released the 2026 State of Open Source in Europe. In it, the nonprofit, pro-open-source organization revealed that 94% of European Union (EU) organizations say digital sovereignty is important, with 61% considering it very important. As Thierry Carrez, the Linux Foundation Europe GM, said in his keynote, “Europe has clearly heard the message on digital sovereignty.”

In an interview onstage at the summit, Nithya Ruff, chair of the LF board, added that it’s not just Europe: “Digital sovereignty is a need that the entire world feels, whether it’s Sierra Leone or the US or China.” It’s not just the Dutch tax collectors, though. The Netherlands is also exploring switching from Windows and proprietary software to Linux and open-source programs across the board. [...] The Netherlands had planned to switch to Microsoft 365 in 2025. The idea then was to complete the rollout by the end of 2026. About 5,000 employees had already migrated when the Dutch Advisory Council on ICT Assessment recommended reversing the public-cloud rollout in June. The government paused the plan in July; the latest announcement replaces that rollout with an on-premises/open-source approach.

The Tax and Customs Administration isn’t replacing all of Microsoft Office with a single open-source suite, at least not yet. Instead, the government will keep the existing Microsoft software for now. Looking ahead, State Secretary for Finance Eelco Eerenberg set out the replacement timetable in a letter to Parliament: “In 2027, the provision for mail and calendar will be realized on-premises. Later in 2027 and 2028, European open-source solutions for personal storage and collaboration will follow. This allows us to work toward a sustainable and more autonomous solution for these functionalities.” [...] For now, the on-premises email/calendar environment will still use Microsoft software, including Outlook. The open-source portion concerns personal storage and collaboration, not a wholesale replacement of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or the entire desktop environment.

Submission + - China's CXMT Claims DRAM Breakthrough (startupfortune.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: China's ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) announced key progress in a DRAM architecture that rivals had pursued for years, plunging shares of memory chip makers including Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron. The technology is called 4F^2, shorthand for a memory cell design where each cell occupies an area of four square F, with F representing the minimum line width a chipmaker can etch. Smaller area per cell means more cells per chip, which means more storage density without shrinking the wafer. CXMT said the breakthrough rests on something it calls a Vertical Surrounding Gate transistor, a vertical gate structure meant to fix current leakage while cutting the unit area each cell needs. CXMT plans to ship a DDR5 RDIMM product built on this architecture before the end of 2026. Shim Dae-yong, a former SK Hynix vice president, told The Korea Herald earlier this year that extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, which has been banned from China by US-led export control, is effectively unavoidable at advanced DRAM nodes, and that a realistic alternative path is to go vertical and “narrow part of the gap by pushing vertical integration without EUV.” He meant stacking chips, but a vertical transistor applies the same idea inside every cell. Chinese technology giant Huawei is also applying the similar approach, known as LogicFolding, to its latest CPU and GPU chips and license its patents to Qualcomm. Citrini projects China's combined DRAM capacity could approach 1.41 million wafer starts per month by 2030, enough to make China the world's second-largest DRAM production base, trailing only South Korea.

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