The European Commission Is Testing an Open Source Alternative To Microsoft Teams (euractiv.com) 69
The European Commission is preparing to trial a communications platform built on Matrix, the open source messaging protocol already used by the French government, German healthcare providers and European armed forces, as a sovereign backup to Microsoft Teams.
Signal currently serves as the backup tool but has proven too inflexible for an organization the Commission's size, it said. The Matrix-based solution could also eventually connect the Commission to other EU bodies like the Parliament.
Signal currently serves as the backup tool but has proven too inflexible for an organization the Commission's size, it said. The Matrix-based solution could also eventually connect the Commission to other EU bodies like the Parliament.
Finally, it is happening (Score:5, Insightful)
The move away from MS crap. Not for the reason I expected, but still.
The fatal mistake that Microsoft made was disable the email of the chief prosecutor at the International Court of Law. At that point, it became blatantly obvious and impossible to ignore that MS will do whatever the US administration wants to its international (and probably national) customers. The EU administration observed this event very carefully and drew its conclusions. Obviously, this will be a process over the next 5-10 years or so, but MS is cooked.
Re: Finally, it is happening (Score:5, Insightful)
What did it take to destroy Microsoft?
Corpocracy + fascism + consistently bad US foreign policy.
Sort of a perfect storm that turns what probably seemed like a sweet deal for the big tech companies into a nightmare scenario of break up. I bet they wish they still had Biden and the Dems in power, that let corporate interests run much of the government as long as they had diversity policies.
Re: Finally, it is happening (Score:4, Interesting)
Can they? (Score:5, Interesting)
Can the EU actually pull this off? There are some tools that MS has, which nobody else has:
1: AD/Entra. Maybe in the past, we had directory services and policy object servers that could scale up and out, but right now, AFAIK (and please correct me) AD/Entra are the only game in town if you have millions of users and need to handle AAA (authentication, authorization, auditing), of users, machines, and other objects, with GPOs and other policies attached. Yes, there is FreeIPA/IdM, and it works well, with replication, performance, and security. I'd assert it has a smaller attack profile than AD. However, it doesn't scale as well as AD can. AD can figure out how to replicate itself, and handle all kinds of oddball conditions.
Note, this can't be a cloud service. Ideally, authentication should either be on-prem, or at least hybrid, so even without network connectivity, people can log into their machines and do offline work, even if caching isn't doable.
2: A unified file sharing protocol. NFS v3 doesn't cut it for users. NFS v4 takes a well tuned environment to work. S3 is awesome for objects, but definitely not something you want to use as a VM storage backend. We need to have a protocol that allows for file sharing with the robustness of S3, but have additional commands for block I/O, so that can be as fast as possible. This would allow for things like versioning, object immutability, maybe even tiers of compression and encryption. However, as it stands now, SMB/CIFS is king, with nothing really dethroning it.
3: Something to replace Outlook/Exchange. A standardized mail, calendaring suite that has all the C-level features needed. This can be hard, as there are a lot of systems out there (Google WorkSpace, Zimbra, Zoho)... but feature-wise and usability-wise, MS comes out ahead, if only because people are familiar with it, and it does well enough.
4: SharePoint. Don't laugh, but SharePoint and Confluence are unique programs. There are other Wiki programs that can do the job, but the ability to import things in and make workflows happen make those two commercial programs extremely useful, especially in maintaining documentation.
5: GitHub/GHE. If I have a F/OSS project, and forget about it, I am pretty much certain that 5-10 years from now, it will still be there and usable, perhaps someone finds it, forks it and makes it useful again. Other Git systems... not so much, and when stuff vanishes, that is history lost forever. This needs to have government support, and some sanity (so this doesn't get turned into someone's personal multi-terabyte storage of videos). Maybe more space if people "adopt" it. It also needs to span countries, just so if something happens in Europe, that source code would be available in the US.
6: MDM/RMM tools. Intune has its issues, but the Holy Grail would be something that could manage Macs, Windows machines, and many Linux distributions, as well as iOS, and Android devices. This would be both cloud based as well as available on-prem. This functionality is critical to a business's operations, and needs to be integrated into the OS. Ideally, for Linux, some parameter which can be inputted at install time to have the installer pause, go to a URL, pull code from there and then function like Autopilot or Apple's ABM provisioning.
7: I hate to mention this, but an IRM. Something like MS Purview. DRM is ugly, but in this case, it can be the one thing that is the difference between exfiltration or no.
8: A VDI cloud connection broker, as well as a VDI system. Otherwise, you are paying for Omnissa, Microsoft W365 or AVD, Citrix, or something else, and those are not cheap. Having a VDI system that is inexpensive and works well with Proxmox can bring a critical security tier to a company.
9: Don't laugh... a GPG keyserver combined with transparant GPG in mail apps and webmail. We have moved away from tried and true encryption to stuff based on "trust me". Enough. We need to see about going back to the GPG standard.
Getting rid of Teams is a positive, but to break MS's iron grip, there are a lot of other basic enterprise items which need to be made into vetted, maintained, open source projects.
Re: Can they? (Score:3)
Re: Can they? (Score:4, Insightful)
because all the MS centric IT people will block it.
That is a concern. A Unix-admin can essentially administrate anything. But an MS admin is a basically a joke to the rest of the computing world.
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The truth hurts.
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Though I agree, in principal at least, some past attempts at requiring open source had lead to various "source available" licenses that are still proprietary. It can be an easy way for them to keep their foothold where needed, and mostly defeats the purpose of the open source requirement.
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Not true. All the problems solved are not unique to the MS island and solutions exist outside of that. Unless by "unique" you mean the MS logo on things?
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1. AD is just LDAP, rebranded.
2. SMB is horrible. NFS is better, and surprisingly viable for data centres. For home use, SFTP seems to be the way to go.
3. Microsoft didn't invent email.
4. Honestly, I never used SharePoint. And Confluence is something I avoid after having used it.
5. Microsoft didn't invent git, or gitweb. They bought GitHub for obvious reasons, it is very central to the JavaScript ecosystem. But if you really need the SVN workflow for git, there are plenty of alternatives, like GitLab.
6
Re: Can they? (Score:2)
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Then you can add MLS to the Linux environment on top of permissions to create an even tighter model.
The disadvantage is that it's quite tricky to set up.
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1. AD is just LDAP, rebranded. 2. SMB is horrible. NFS is better, and surprisingly viable for data centres. For home use, SFTP seems to be the way to go. 3. Microsoft didn't invent email. 4. Honestly, I never used SharePoint. And Confluence is something I avoid after having used it. 5. Microsoft didn't invent git, or gitweb. They bought GitHub for obvious reasons, it is very central to the JavaScript ecosystem. But if you really need the SVN workflow for git, there are plenty of alternatives, like GitLab. 6. Something like Chef, Puppet, or Ansible? 7. DRM does not provide any security, it is just a defect. You want Unix permissons, just use Unix permissions. 8. Citrix is a nightmare. You need RDP, there are secure open source solutions. And X11 has network transparency as part of the core protocol. 9. Microsoft didn't invent GPG keyservers, and most mail user agents can do encryption transparently. Outlook being one of the exceptions.
Teams and XBox are the things that are keeping people using their Microsoft accounts. Teams has alternatives, like Jitsi and Matrix, but they are not interoperable with Teams. Microsoft Office is also something people cling to, even though LibreOffice can do the same, better, and without requiring any retraining.
Matrix has the ability to hook in compatibility with Teams but it's paid. If the rest of the world (other than the US) is already switching to something Open Source and better, why not just switch with them?
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To your first point, the EU has the eIDAS identity regulation and are rolling out self-sovereign identity based digital identity wallets to all citizens this year.
This enables a totally decentralised future of verifiable credential-based authentication and authorisation for services, obviating the need for AD
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AD is one thing, that can be done in an isolated environment (isolated from direct influence from Microsoft). Of course there can be software updates that can kill you but sanity checks can always be performed on incoming updates.
Entra is "One Ring To Rule Them All" and combined with Bitlocker it means that Microsoft and the US government has the ability to decapitate your company.
Re:Can they? (Score:5, Interesting)
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The move away from MS crap. Not for the reason I expected, but still.
The fatal mistake that Microsoft made was disable the email of the chief prosecutor at the International Court of Law. At that point, it became blatantly obvious and impossible to ignore that MS will do whatever the US administration wants to its international (and probably national) customers.
Not only Microsoft but every US tech company. All their bleating about their European arms being supposedly out of the reach of US government is just bullshit as long as the Cloud Act exists in the US. And that's why the rest of the world needs to reduce/eliminate their reliance on US technology companies.
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Indeed. Empty promises that come with no penalties, no liability and no consequences for them if they break them. Empty words of no value. But people and organizations have noticed now and there is nothing MS (and others) can do to get the cat back into the bag.
The thing is, building an MS free modern computing environment for enterprises and citizens is entirely possible. There is some effort that has to be spend at the start, but as soon as enough organizations do it (and it seems this may be happening),
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The question is, will they come all the way to the realization that the only thing you can potentially trust someone else's computer with is your encrypted data? Or will they just put their faith in other clouds which, when compromised, release the data of many parties at once?
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Well, we already know one cloud that has exceptionally bad security: Azure.
That said, you can do computations in a cloud. You just need to do proper risk management. Guess which clouds you cannot get the data for that risk management from? Azure, AWS, the Google cloud, etc. Select a smaller, local provider and you can get the audit reports, results from security tests, etc. I know because I have evaluated such reports for customers.
This won't work (Score:2)
Before I write this, I need to say I think Matrix is very impressive, and I've seen some amazing stuff built on that platform, even a FOSS Roblox-like application. I'm not criticizing the authors.
But.
Matrix is in many ways a proof of concept that just... falls short. It doesn't have the features of Teams, it has a very user-unfriendly encryption system that requires storing keys in local files, it's really not going to work.
Matrix proves the FOSS community can build something like this, but it isn't what th
Errrm ... Wutt?!?? You're not making sense. (Score:4, Informative)
Matrix is a protocol. It doesn't have any user facing "features" just like TCP/IP doesn't have any. Applications using matrix can have all the features you want, you just need to implement them.
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This is one of those "Technically partially true but in practice heavily misleading to the point of being ridiculous".
First of all, the EC is talking about the software suites commonly associated with Matrix, Element et al, which most certainly do have user facing features. Or else what are they adopting? Do you seriously think the EC is merely adopting a protocol? You think that would be worth a press announcement?
Secondly, yes, Matrix the protocol does actually have limitations. And those shape the applic
Noble, but missing one key thing (Score:1)
Most users are not very savvy, especially around new software. When you are making software for governments, you get A LOT of users, and Microsoft has made a whole business of educating and brute-forcing people to learn their systems.
I would love to see Teams get replaced, but we need FOSS that has the kind of support / docs / ecosystem to allow your least-common-denominator user to succeed.
Re: Noble, but missing one key thing (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Noble, but missing one key thing (Score:2)
Re: Noble, but missing one key thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Capitalist efficiency is a myth beyond SMEs. From a certain size on upwards, it goes to hell. To be fair, soviet-type manufacturing efficiency is pretty much the same or worse and they also have worse product quality issues in general. But then I look at where Win11 stands now and it is clear that capitalism with monopolies in place can match soviet incompetence easily.
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Capitalist efficiency is a myth beyond SMEs. From a certain size on upwards, it goes to hell. To be fair, soviet-type manufacturing efficiency is pretty much the same or worse and they also have worse product quality issues in general. But then I look at where Win11 stands now and it is clear that capitalism with monopolies in place can match soviet incompetence easily.
This. Bureaucracy is a function of size, not ownership.
I've worked in more small companies (sub 5000 employees) that have far too onerous bureaucracies compared to their size, more political infighting and fiefdoms than any of the government departments I've worked for. You understand why something the size of the NHS has it's bureaucracy, it's fucking massive so it can't function without it... However a mid size consultancy firm shouldn't have more, let alone significantly more and the NHS is pretty ef
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Just as an addition, SME usually means less than 250 employees (EU) or less than 500 employees (US, depends on the industry).
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At least Soviet manufacturing turned out some spectacular trucks.
Re: Noble, but missing one key thing (Score:2)
Erm, if the cost of Teams and the associated ecosystem had been spent on OSS solutions, paying programmers directly
What is your point? If you had all the money Microsoft spent on Teams you could build an open source version of Teams? Really? Do you not see the stupidity of that statement?
bypassing corporate costs like managers, stockholders, fancy real-estate, glitzy functions in golden ballrooms for 'charity' and all the things the entitled corporate hegemony demand in exchange for their 'skills', instead?
Well thank you for your kitchen-sink rant...
So, out of curiosity, where would someone come up with "the cost of (money spent on) Teams and the associated ecosystem" to develop the FOSS version of Teams and not have to either recoup the investment or (perish the thought) make a profit?
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It's an attractive idea but in practice fraught with issues. First, I don't want to wait until its ready so I'll end up with a Team license anyway. Second, this means I'm going to have to agree a feature set with my fellow contributors - many of these companies will be rivals, and some will have some dumb workflow that means it's absolutely vitalthat a message turns purple 33 1/3rd sec
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If it was spent that way what we would have is 30 different OSS solutions as each team would splinter as they argued what is the best approach and what should be standard, each one would be incompatible with every other one and they all would be missing a subset of essential features. While Teams is an ugly beast, what it does well is integrate and provide the basic essentials needed from labelling and meetings, calendar integration, chat, voice, video, team channels and permissions etc etc.
There's a video chat feature addon for Nextcloud that integrates into the built in calendar. Both integrate into the built in email application with a Sharepoint alternative addon, etc etc etc. Matrix already isn't the only solution but it's definitely a good one.
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I would love to see Teams get replaced, but we need FOSS that has the kind of support / docs / ecosystem
Which can happen when the money spent on the exorbitant costs of tech companies' products can instead be directed at OSS alternatives that can benefit everyone in the end, likely at much lower costs in the long run.
Re: Noble, but missing one key thing (Score:1)
Which can happen when the money spent on the exorbitant costs of tech companies' products can instead be directed at OSS alternatives that can benefit everyone in the end, likely at much lower costs in the long run.
Do you have ANY idea what kind of investment you are asking for with absolutely ZERO possibility of recouping the money spent?
Where do you imagine the literal millions of dollars it would take will come from?
Re: Noble, but missing one key thing (Score:5, Informative)
Where do you imagine the literal millions of dollars it would take will come from?
Asked Gemini to come up with some numbers:
- Cost of the MS Teams add-on (ignoring the base license): 5€ per user per month
- Estimated number of public sector employees in the EU: 35 million
That gives you over 2 billion € to spend every year. Seems doable.
Re: Noble, but missing one key thing (Score:5, Informative)
Did we miss something?
Yes, the fact that there are 12 months in a year.
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Re:Noble, but missing one key thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Most users are not very savvy, especially around new software.
That didn't stop people using Teams, a program that not only was rolled out to everyone with virtually no information beyond a few popup tooltips or training, but a program that drastically differed from the norms of other software (like no multi window support).
The users will be fine.
Re:Noble, but missing one key thing (Score:4, Interesting)
Most users are not very savvy, especially around new software.
That didn't stop people using Teams, a program that not only was rolled out to everyone with virtually no information beyond a few popup tooltips or training, but a program that drastically differed from the norms of other software (like no multi window support).
The users will be fine.
Just like the Office Ribbon caused a complete breakdown... oh wait, it didn't.
The "users can't accept change" excuse hasn't been valid for nearly 20 years now as almost everyone who grew up without a computer is nearing retirement. It's as stale and wrong as the "but who do I sue if things go wrong" argument (you can't sue MS if things go wrong, they have pages of legalese in the T&Cs expressly to prevent this).
People will adapt, those that don't will just find themselves in crappy, dead end jobs.
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I think it would be more accurate to say that The "experts can't accept change" is valid. The people most affected are those who have developed extensive muscle memory and finely tuned workflows for the software they use.
The "good" think about Teams is that it changes so god damn often that you can develop neither muscle memory no a workflow. I've lost count of how many times they've changed the multi-lingual support over the past 3 years.
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People use MS only because everyone else is using MS. That reduces training when one goes into a new org, and there are zillions of MS how-to videos because it's ubiquitous. It would take a while for a competitor to gain similar.
Re:Noble, but missing one key thing (Score:5, Insightful)
People use MS only because everyone else is using MS. That reduces training when one goes into a new org, and there are zillions of MS how-to videos because it's ubiquitous. It would take a while for a competitor to gain similar.
Exactly. And that is why this is likely a landslide. Whatever the EU Commission is going to use will have contributions integrated upstream and there will be commercial support from many vendors. European IT is in no way inferior, people are just lazy and stick to what they know unless there are very good reasons not to. These very good reasons have manifested now.
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The real question is how long EU will accept the shorter-term pain.
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With the US deteriorating, the EU has noticed it needs to wake from its comfortable slumber. I do hope this is enough, but only time will tell.
Re:Noble, but missing one key thing (Score:4, Interesting)
You may have overlooked that in Europe, both the overall administration and member states sponsor FOSS projects. You may also have overlooked that there are quite a few businesses maintaining and developing FOSS in Europe. The European Commission can get whatever is missing developed for them and make that FOSS as well. And they probably will and then anybody can use it.
Incidentally, I used a teaching video conference platform from an EU project some 20 years ago. The only thing was that it needed more bandwidth that was readily available in those days, so they used a complex TCP tunneling set-up for their tests that required scheduling 2 weeks in advance. My site just went with the ample bandwidth we had over regular Internet (10Mbps at that time) on the 2nd test and this all worked really well, including features like shared whiteboards, camera-switches, user cameras and voice, integrated quick test mechanisms, etc. And the bandwidth restrictions are not an issue anymore today.
Bottom line, it is not that hard to make a good video-conferencing tool. It does not need any kind of secret engineering or big magic. All it needed was bandwidth for the regular user to get to a reasonable level. And we have that now.
What are they looking to replace? (Score:3)
If they are looking for a chat app, then they may have success.
If they are looking for an integrated app in corporate groupware then they will fail miserably. As long as they don't side by side compare features such as Sharepoint integration, Outlook integration, the selection of commercially available meeting room hardware, etc. they may stand a chance, otherwise Teams offers a feature set that has no comparison with anything else.
God knows it needs it, no one uses that god awful piece of shit software for its performance.
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It's not a question of opening (and no they won't*). You can provide open access but it still requires someone to implement said features. It's hard to play catchup in the software industry.
*They won't because Teams is fundamentally a shitty web UI bolted on other Microsoft products. They'll provide basic interoperability with chat via federation if requested, but that's it. You're not going to have Sharepoint deeply imbedded in competitor products, or the either MS office suite (which it is).
*They won't be
Look at the Jokers coming out of the woodwork (Score:5, Insightful)
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Indeed. This is not hard to do and countless examples to be used as inspiration exists.
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I don't think it's a lack of expertise that's the point.
The EU of course has ample technological resources.
The problems are the incessant bureaucrats. The EU is suffused with and mired in endless bureaucracy.
The obstacle to replacing Microsoft will not be the code, it will be the necessity of ensuring every country gets their participation, gets their say, that every special interest gets served, that everyone has a piece of whatever is created.
Obvious solution - buy Zoom and open source it (Score:1)
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Nobody is going to buy Zoom.
Matrix can do everything Zoom can do, and do it better, and without the security holes.
And it is already open source. Free software, even.
Re: Obvious solution - buy Zoom and open source it (Score:1)
Virtual meetings in the cloud (Score:2)
Their new platform is called "Visio" ? (Score:2)
You don't need to be European to hate teams (Score:3)
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All Microsoft software is brittle. I use Windows 11 and 365 for work. Sometimes the ribbon just stops drawing correctly, especially in Excel but also sometimes in Word. If you lose network connection while editing files on a share for more than a moment (I presume the usual timeout value) then all the Office applications get bitchy about it. Word forces you to save to a new filename. Excel makes you confirm you want to overwrite. Teams blows up regularly and is slow at best. They did a tolerably good job wi
It's not the protocol that makes Teams successful (Score:2)
It's the billions Microsoft pours into development and marketing of the product that sits on top of that protocol.
Is this government-built software going to include live transcription and video recording? Is it going to have document storage and groups? Is it going to have virtual backgrounds? (If not, a lot of people would have to clean up the pile of junk behind them!)
Teams is not just a chat app built on a protocol. It's a huge all-in-one collaboration tool that is going to be hard to match.
Slack was the
Re: It's not the protocol that makes Teams success (Score:1)
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Moodle is a learning management system. What does that have to do with Teams or Slack or collaboration platforms in general?
It's time to move on (Score:2)
Yes it's clear that Europe must remove all US based products from their usage. The US is threatening Nato and can not be trusted anymore as an ally. Everybody must move to either a Europian software or open source. The US is completely done.