I'm working for the XWiki and CryptPad projects, which are integrated in openDesk. Here are a couple links / infos that can be interesting to understand the context of openDesk.
The openDesk project comes initially from an initiative of the Ministry of Interior of Germany in 2021, to build the alternative to Office 365. The project was progressively transferred in 2025 to a state-owned organization, the ZenDis (https://zendis.de), which oversees the global development of openDesk.
The source code is mainly available on https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk, where you will find mirrors of every project which is bundled into openDesk (Nextcloud, Collabora, Element, Univention, XWiki, Jitsi, OpenXchange, CryptPad, OpenProject, …)
There was also a couple public presentations about openDesk at FOSDEM during the past years :
I find it fascinating to see how much power Germany's "digital sovereignty" initiative has gained. In the beginning, it looked like yet another government thingy that nobody will use. But by now, they must be well above 100k government employees using it daily.
Also, in case you missed that: StackIt is the AWS / G Cloud competitor by LIDL: https://www.stackit.de/en/ It's the basebone for their app strategy with 100 mio+ client installs and about 500k employees.
Every time this happens Microsoft either threatens to move out or promises to move in with a chunk of their operation. Blackmailing with jobs has been very effective for them.
I think that strategy might be running out of steam though, before these projects seemed to have more commercial reasons or just pushing the idea of openness, but sovereignty is a much stronger ideal and much more likely to be the one that will weather the blackmail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collabora_Online ("Collabora Online (often abbreviated as COOL) is an open-source online office suite developed by Collabora, based on LibreOffice Online, the web-based edition of the LibreOffice office suite.")
Rightly so. They should have never used it in the first place. What with the US not recognizing the court it always made very little sense to me that they would rely on the infrastructure components to be supplied by the USA. The latest sanctions are just another step in something that was already in motion from day #1.
The world order at the highest level relies on the nations themselves to behave, especially the largest ones because nobody has the practical power to enforce the decisions of the court in case defendants are in places where the court is not recognized. To USA not recognizing the court has always shown that they don't care about the crimes they commit.
> To USA not recognizing the court has always shown that they don't care about the crimes they commit.
I'd nitpick the "don't care" part. To me, it's that they do care precisely because they know they are guilty. I think Trump is guilty for the boats being shot. Obama guilty for the drone strikes. W guilty for well, the whole shit show. Didn't really pay attention to Biden, but I'd assume drone strikes continued there too. From Clinton on back, I admit I just wasn't paying attention to those kinds of issues.
My understanding is that most of the post-cold-war targeted killings of dubious legality happened after 9/11; wikipedia claims that there were US norms against "targeted killings" from '76 to '01. Certainly the CIA did some shady stuff post 1976, but the President at least maintained the appearance of not knowing about them.
Especially since USA, home country of Microsoft corporation, is exhibiting military junta techniques.
USA is killing citizens of foreign countries, weekly via the "U.S. military conducting missile strikes against boats in the Caribbean and Pacific claiming they are shipping drugs".
These non-military victims, citizens, being killed intentionally are a violation of human rights.
So, reading the documentation in the [repo](https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/deployment/opendesk/...) it’s immediately made clear that you should use the Enterprise Edition for production use. (Since the German state is behind this, why not focus on totally free software for production use?)
But what really surprised me are statements like this in the README:
” Nextcloud Enterprise: openDesk uses the Nextcloud Enterprise to the build Nextcloud container image for oD EE. The Nextcloud EE codebase might contain EE exclusive (longterm support) security patches, plus the Guard app, that is not publicly available, while it is AGPL-3.0 licensed.
And
COOL Controller container image and Helm chart: Source code and chart are using Mozilla Public License Version 2.0, but the source code is not public. It is provided to customers upon request.
”
This, according with other paragraphs describing percentages of free and non-free code in certain components really makes me wonder…
It's a misconception that (A)GPL source code should be publicly available.
GPL family mandates source code access to people who can access to the software itself. So as long as ICC gets the source code of the NextCloud EE and the Guard app, the GPL is fulfilled.
This is how RedHat operates, and is not a violation of GPL.
Also, this is how you can build a business around GPL. You only have to provide source code to people who buys your software, or you can sell support to it.
But presumably, under the GPL, someone who obtained the source code, perhaps by paying for it, can freely publish that source code, and non-disclosure agreements are void.
Lawyers historically are notoriously linked to Microsoft and its formats as a somewhat unintentional industry side standard.
Moves like this hearten me as for certain lawyers the formats and standards they now will be expected to follow has just shifted, towards open source no less.
I remember when lawyers historically used WordPerfect for the same reasons. Now, I don’t know the details of how that industry shifted (MS dominance and WP shitting the bed with their GUI versions would be my guess), but it shows that it is possible.
I did MS Word support in the long long ago during its transition to dominance. There was nothing worse than getting a call from a lawyer who was forced off Word Perfect.
But how are they exporting such a modern document format? Holee crap, because it's still being sold an updated! https://www.wordperfect.com/en/
And the suite includes Quattro Pro, for those that are itchin' for that spreadsheet-flavored blast from the past. If I didn't already have the Apple suite on my Mac (which does all I need out of an office suite), I'd spend the $50 for home/student version just for the lulz.
You have got the trial version of Wordperfect for free, not sure it has everything (Quattro Pro) since you have to hunt around for other Corel products to get the trial versions (Corel Draw).
It is amazing to think how valuable Wordperfect originally was, for Microsoft to be mean to them, meaning they went from worth billions to worth nothing.
The UX is so clunky that I ended up giving up and started doing presentations in Google Slides, even if I then end up exporting them as a PDF to actually present/share.
Every time I try to use it, it feels like fighting my tool rather than my tool helping me. There is no one big bug; it's a million tiny things.
Recent versions? Because we deployed Nextcloud, I have been using and comparing OnlyOffice and Collabora for a bit, LibreOffice has been getting quite some work for presentations over the last year. My boss has issues with presentation editing (which is probably why we’ll end up with OnlyOffice), but was impressed by the features for the actual presentation.
And both the products I mentioned also support online collaboration and storage. See LibreOffice Online ( https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ ), OnlyOffice Workspace ( https://www.onlyoffice.com/workspace ) and OnlyOffice Enterprise ( https://www.onlyoffice.com/docs-enterprise ). I can't comment how feature compatible these are but alternatives do exist and that's good new for us. (Note that openDesk is based on a fork of LibreOffice Online, which is a commercial variant for those who don't want to bother implementing everything themselves).
Interesting, it seems I haven't interacted with this software for too long - makes sense in hindsight that there had been enough time to implement such features over the years. Thanks for correcting me.
I’m looking for more of a sharing experience. If I’m doing something locally myself I tend to use Mac pages, numbers or keynote. They’re underrated I think as local apps go. Getting a whole company on Mac just to use them is a non-starter though.
The lack of anything at all on the roadmap page [1] and lack of a link to their code repository on a blog post touting their open-source cred [2] does not build confidence. I found their code repo link in the comments here, after not finding it easily on their site.
EDIT: to be clear, I'm all for open source software, and for more options to tools from big tech firms.
I work for one of the several European companies building open source software that has been chosen as components of openDesk.
openDesk is solid, legit and serious.
Open source is a requirement. As such, money doesn't go to a startup building proprietary software that get bought a few years later by a big tech company and then all the investment is lost. They audit and check that licenses are open source and that the dependencies have compatible licenses.
It's publicly funded, by Germany* (for their needs, but it will grow larger than them). Their strategy is to give money to established European open source software companies so they improve their software in areas that matter to them, including integration features (user management, for instance, or file / event sharing with other software, many things) as well as accessibility. They take all these pieces of software and build a coherent (with a common theme / look & feel), turn-key, feature-rich suite. This strategic decision that has its drawbacks allows to get something fast with what exists today.
I'm not sure communication and the business strategy is all figured out / polished yet, but with the high profile institutions adopting it, it will come. Each involved companies wants this to succeed too.
I think this is huge. I'm quite enthusiastic. Software might not be perfect but with the potential momentum this thing has, it could improve fast, and each piece of open source software that is part of this as well along the way.
They have some real users too. I know of some out of my head. According to ChatGPT:
- Robert Koch Institute (RKI) – entered a contract on 11 June 2025 to use openDesk as the technical basis for the “Agora” platform for public‑health authorities.
- BWI GmbH – the IT infrastructure provider for the German armed forces (Bundeswehr); signed a framework contract for openDesk.
- Bundesamt für Seeschifffahrt und Hydrographie – also mentioned as an early adopter of openDesk.
- Föderale IT‑Kooperation (FITKO) – listed as a user in the EU OSS Catalogue entry for openDesk.
I think I read that some German states use the software too.
You never know what will happen in the long run but the solution will probably be maintained for some time given it's backing by the federal government of Germany.
> Robert Koch Institute (RKI) – entered a contract on 11 June 2025 to use openDesk as the technical basis for the “Agora” platform for public‑health authorities.
Wow - I was just thinking this would be good. Here in the UK Microsoft are slowly taking over healthcare with their terrible Dynamics 365 platform, and some competition would be really nice.
All else aside, Microsoft 365 as an office suite screams for disruption. If you don't believe me try actually using their copilot and observe the poor integrations with core products such as Excel/Word/Powerpoint. Sorry for the offtopic but it really hurts for those of us who are forced by their CIO to use this thing.
Yes, the product is terrible and easily beat out by a competitor. However, most people who are forced to use it is by dictate their own company CIO, hence MS has captive audiences.
IIUC Snowden sent complete trove to two publications only, and one of the computers containing the trove is destroyed through and through, disabling that publication for Snowden leaks.
Moreover, again as I understand, after a certain point the leaks are stopped, because the message was sent, and people now know the most important bits behind the curtain.
They are most likely compatible until a national security letter arrives. An American company then has to choose which law to comply with, and it's an easy choice.
But companies can be a lot shadier than we give them credit for. Like, remember that "wink payment" contract between Google and Israel? If Google knew what they were doing, they accepted the contract to do the illegal thing, so they'd sell their product and get money, but they were planning to simply not do the illegal thing, breaking the contract (the customer would never know and if they somehow did, you can't stop using a cloud on a dime) but not breaking any laws.
If Microsoft knows what they're doing, they'll accept contracts from EU customers that say "we will never give your data to US authorities", they break it immediately, don't tell the customer and the customer never finds out.
Alternatively, they can give the US government a bunch of nothing, in order to comply with the EU customer contract, and pretend this is all the data the customer had on their account. I doubt this will happen though.
Theres a difference between as an intelligence organisation having access to data, and "someone in power is angry because they watched a TV advert, I want to see what they know"
but, your over all picture is still, sadly correct.
* Limit the damage that a person can do- IE; don’t aggregate everything in the hands of one person.
* Tonnes of oversight into who accesses the data and why.
In theory the US chooses the latter, but only for nationals and the snowden leaks were proving that this was basically just a rubber stamp and constantly was bypassed on technicalities..
.. outside of the US, there’s no legal framework to protect your data from US authorities, no matter who they are, at all.
They couldn’t be more different. One is doing it in secrecy and for a “reason”, to spy on someone. The other one will do it in public because he can and doesn’t like your name.
> One is doing it in secrecy and for a “reason”, to spy on someone.
When it's secret, how can you ever check? Even if it was just because the person on top or in the middle had a personal judge, they'll always say it was for legitimate spying purposes and no-one has any way to call them out.
MSFT already operates in Europe via subsidiaries for a whole host of reasons. But hiving certain assets off in a subsidiary is very rarely effective to avoid laws and regulations that apply to the parent. The parent controls the subsidiary so a court or regulator having jurisdiction over the parent could order it to get what it needs from the subsidiary. This is particularly so in the US, which is kind of known for enacting overreaching extraterritorial laws.
> The parent controls the subsidiary so a court or regulator having jurisdiction over the parent could order it to get what it needs from the subsidiary.
But what if the parent’s jurisdiction orders the parent to order the subsidiary to do something illegal in the subsidiary’s jurisdiction? If local management obey the order, they risk being prosecuted by their jurisdiction’s authorities-so they’ll likely refuse. What is the parent going to do then? Fire them? But will any replacement act any differently? “Is this job worth going to prison over?” Most people answer “no”, and people who answer “yes” won’t last, because you can’t run a subsidiary from a prison cell.
I think the real issue here is that the US gets away with it because the EU is still so dependent on the US (see NATO) they can’t push back fully, at some point a political calculation takes over. So it could be that the US parent orders the subsidiary to do something illegal under EU law, and then the EU authorities choose to ignore it.
The laws I have read used the term “effective control”; if a shareholder is able to control the org (eg can replace the CEO or board), they are obliged to comply with government orders regarding that org.
There are attempts to lösen the control from the U.S. side like a cooperation between Microsoft/Azure and SAP or Google and T-Systems (deutsche Telekom) where the German side would run an "air gapped" region of those cloud stacks.
However I believe the rates in the end were too high to win notable contracts, but I haven't followed along in a while.
I'd be surprised if this isn't already the case. The extent to which you can do business in the EU without legal presence is limited.
It is not a huge amount of protection though. I mean we've already established that selling to 'terrorists' can be sanctioned even when selling through an intermediary. So what's stopping the US from ordering Microsoft to stop selling licenses to the ICC?
And then we've not touched on who is in control of the closed source of the many proprietary applications.
It's not about having a subsidiary, it's about the technical structure of 365 meaning Microsoft US has access to Microsoft EU servers and thus US employees can be compelled to follow US court orders.
They simply don't separate the infrastructure this way AFAIK.
Yes, and the Cloud Act pretty much forces upper management to ensure that there is always a US IT guy that can be compelled to implement the wishes of The US Federal Government, as the penalties apply to executives of US companies, too.
We can quibble about whether the term "threaten", which implies some moral wrong doing, is correct though. It's a law with defined criminal penalties. That's how criminal law works
If you’re Microsoft do you really want to anger the federal government? Companies aren’t as cavalier about taking them on as they used to be. They’re likely Microsoft’s largest customer by far, and they have the power to end you (which they nearly did once).
Microsoft has to follow US sanctions, even if they are misplaced. This isn't a choice on Microsoft's part here.
The ICC was applauded in the US in the when it went after Russia but when it goes after Israel it is sanctioned. It unfortunately hard to be impartial, like the ICC is, when it comes to international war crimes. The big players want you to play towards their favourites and only hold their enemies accountable.
Microsoft has to follow US law. If it believes an order has been issued unlawfully, it—and everyone who works there who follows the order—has a civic duty to oppose the order in court.
Quite a few of the things that European authorities have been getting worried about the US Government being able to force Microsoft to do are explicitly enshrined in US law. See, for example, the CLOUD Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
Microsoft employees in the EU are committing a crime if they do participate in the sanctions though.
There's an EU law, 'blocking statue' which also means that contracts can't be broken with reference sanctions even if the contracts themselves say they can be, and the services must be provided anyway.
This isn't GDPR type stuff. This is a path to infinite fines. Ending up jail for years is also a distinct possibility if you help people access their data, since spying on these institutions is actually treated as espionage. We recently passed a law here in Sweden forbidding espionage against international organizations in which Sweden is part.
Well, if ICC had issued an arrest warrant for Zelensky, it would most likely got sanctioned as well. Luckily, ICC is not headed by a Russian but by Israel hating Muslim with rape allegations pending.
MS could always refocus themselves as a global company (in the legal rather than marketing-only sense), and move their HQ out of the US, then there could be no Trump tantrums affecting other countries, the worse that could happen would be some sanctions on what would then be their in-country US affiliate, with no ability to affect their other global operations whatsoever. Why haven't they followed this approach? Haven't lost enough customers yet?
MS lives by corporate contracts and there are a lot of very powerful US companies that will roll over if Trump barks - if MS had already fled the US in a legal sense they'd definitely be in a better place but trying to leave during this administration would cause Trump's ire to focus on them and likely cost them an immense amount of money. I don't particularly like MS and both office and windows are declining in quality quickly so I wouldn't be opposed to the move but... nothing would sink that ship faster than losing a bunch of large US contracts as Trump toadies demonstrate their loyalty by bravely switching to alternatives.
Nobody has to do anything, least of all massive corporations with country-sized revenues. It's /always/ a choice to comply or to put up a fight and deal with the consequences.
It seems likely the ICC will issue an arrest warrant for Trump in the coming years. I see all their recent moves as a signal they want to distance themselves from the US so they can actually issue that warrant.
Trump's life-span is likely to not be a very large number of years from today given his age, and systemic health problems.
SO I expect ICC would find other people, e.g. Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, who are helping to commit these areguably war-crimes in the Pacific and Caribbean seas, the missile strikes against civilian non-US vessels.
There are quite a few reasons that should happen, but I won't hold my breath. And I that issuance really won't do anything worthwhile, except be a footnote in a history book.
I think the bigger question is why they were using microsoft products in the first place.
USA has been very hostile to the ICC under trump, but its not exactly a huge shift, bush was also incredibly hostile. It seems borderline incompetent to use a microsoft cloud offering given the political situation.
Not to mention given the type of work they do, seems like hosting stuff off site at all is a bad plan.
How much do you think they should spend on IT to be independent from Microsoft (serious question) ? Wikipedia mentions they employ 800 persons working in several buildings and a detention center for a budget of 141 million USD.
Microsoft O365 Business Premium per person is 22 USD per month so total per year is ~200k USD (online price, I imagine they can negotiate a bit for that amount of people).
I think its a core requirement of their mission, so essentially whatever is neccesary.
Their job is to investigate war criminal despite the usa trying to block them. Its not out of the question that nsa/cia/etc would use their ties at microsoft to try and get an advanced peek at the prosecution's case.
Yes all this is expensive. Their mission is not a cheap one. Doing it right costs money.
P.s. initially i mistead and got a laugh out of the idea of wikipedia operating a detention center.
The same reason most organizations use it -- inertia and because it's been the standard for so long, it's the best at what it does.
The startup I used to work at was exclusively on OSX + GoogleDocs, when we were small, but as we grew (and especially when the Finance team grew) more and more employees found a need for the MS Office Suite as well as apps that only run on Windows, so they started rolling out Windows VM's and then full Windows machines.
I don't know what native apps they needed Windows for (I wasn't doing IT work by then), but I was still setting up PC's when they said they needed Windows Excel (not Excel on Mac, not Office365) for some forecasting spreadsheet product they purchased - it only ran on native Excel. We gave them Windows in a VM on their Mac at first, but eventually they had more and more apps that ran on Windows and moved from Mac to Windows laptops.
People tend to underestimate the value of a solution that folks, especially less technical folks, are already trained on, comfortable with, and one that is known to work as expected.
It was basically "if the US ever plays this card, all hell will break loose for their IT companies". So ICC and others simply assumed it would not happen.
That's a very simplistic view of what Microsoft offers. They don't sell an office software package but a very robust solution for running the software side of a business.
The OS, office package, email (server and client), calendar, cloud & backup, BI, etc. all aligned work almost seamlessly with each other (compared to the alternatives for sure).
Nothing on the market comes close and that is the reason they are worth trillions, not because they use closed formats.
I'm sure people get killed all the time for using American services. It's just that they were all brown "terrorists", not liberal Intitutions situated in Europe, until now that is.
I know how to use MS Office. All my colleagues know how to use MS Office. People want to solve their daily problems, not learn how to use new software.
The "weird" alternative you expended political capital to put everyone on works slightly differently or lacks a feature out of the box?: "What were you thinking?!"
Lobbying - and likely a fair amount of network pressure from legal systems in various nations that lean towards using office for internal documents as a default.
That, and it's solid, well supported software most people are familiar with.
From those doing the paperwork with Microsoft procurement for Dutch government I learned there have been legal disputes going on for years about what even constitutes "telemetry". That was a decade ago, and even then there was push to move away from Microsoft in the government. Toward open source, or even Oracle.
I suppose that with the Dutch being Dutch all the lobbying M$ needed was suggesting a discount.
The main problem is that 365 is just far cheaper than the competitors for environments like this, maintaining and supporting an open source alternative would be an incredibly expensive undertaking.
Yes, but to get something nearly as good as 365 would realistically cost 100x as much as just buying from Microsoft.
Who would you even hire to do this? A big consulting firm known for delivering poor quality software, or an unproven startup? What kind of a process could you use to make such a selection in a way that would ensure a good outcome?
It’s the same as the old libreoffice vs. MS office debate. Yeah, you can download libreoffice for free. It sucks. What sucks even more though is how much money you will spend on support, training and all the inevitable productivity losses associated with weird software that approximately nobody you hire will have experience with.
But these are "European Tenders", which in practice usually translates to: race-to-the-bottom. Unless the tender was phrased specifically, from its very first inception, to aim at some polical goal - like open source, sovereignty, innovation, inclusiveness, etc.
>I think the bigger question is why they were using microsoft products in the first place.
Public institutions in Europe, in my experience, often have a confusing insistence on using Microsoft cloud products. Universities heavily push Office 365 and Teams, often trying to demand that faculty use them, while faculty continue to use alternatives as much as possible in order to actually work effectively. During the pandemic, the only online conferences I attended that insisted on running via Teams, against all reason, were run by a UK public institution, and they had as many embarrassing technical problems as might be expected.
This is despite Microsoft's cloud services being generally designed for businesses and often poorly suited for public institutions, especially universities. The services are fundamentally built with the assumption that work will primarily take place within a single organization, with clearly defined employees. European research collaborations constantly seem to be hobbled by needing to use hacks around this assumption, but the inexplicable importance of using Microsoft seems to outweigh these problems. In the most ridiculous case, a conference online during the pandemic asked everyone during registration to please not register using their university email address, but to use a personal one not associated with any Office 365 account, because they had no way of allowing access to Teams if the email address was managed by Microsoft at a different university. Yet still the importance of using Teams was paramount to the organizers.
I have had no clear explanation of why using Microsoft services is so important, despite them being so poorly suited to the institutions, so opposed (and often just not used) by many of the actual users, and arguably being used in ways that they are not really intended to be used. I've had some people claim it is necessary for GDPR compliance, despite the GDPR compliance of any US company being on shaky ground. Microsoft itself has described what seem like rather extensive contingency plans around US-enforced GDPR violations or requirements for service cutoffs (there is a blog post somewhere), but these must also imply a fear that such things could actually happen (and, of course, actually did happen with the ICC). It all seems rather strange.
> I think the bigger question is why they were using microsoft products in the first place.
There used to be this quaint idea of rule of law and things like that. We can always argue that governments were happy to get dirty and occasionally illegal, and they certainly were. But a) it was universally seen as a bad thing, and b) no country would have done it so blatantly and openly. Perversely, this narrative was important to advance the US’ interests because it opened opportunities for American companies to go deep into foreign administrations. Which they did.
So yeah, the clock ticked and now we’re in a new and exciting era for geopolitics and who knows what system will prevail in the end. What is certain is that the US abdicated their leadership.
> USA has been very hostile to the ICC under trump, but its not exactly a huge shift, bush was also incredibly hostile. It seems borderline incompetent to use a microsoft cloud offering given the political situation.
There is a difference between hostility as in "we won’t take part and won’t cooperate in any way" and "we’re also going to pressure private companies to steal your stuff". The ICC is also full of NATO countries and allies so any form of hostility has to be calibrated to keep them on your side. If you care about alliances, that is.
> Not to mention given the type of work they do, seems like hosting stuff off site at all is a bad plan.
Indeed. To be fair, it seems like a bad plan for most large companies with anything that looks like industrial secrets, let alone a government or such a supra-national organisation.
> So yeah, the clock ticked and now we’re in a new and exciting era for geopolitics and who knows what system will prevail in the end. What is certain is that the US abdicated their leadership.
In fact John Yoo, most famous for authoring the "Torture Memos" for Dubya over 20 years ago, has been perhaps the most prominent legal thinker arguing in favor of the actions Trump's taken against the ICC:
What can the incoming Trump administration do? It could impose severe sanctions on the ICC judges and its prosecutor, Karim Ahmad Khan, who engineered this debacle, by blocking their ability to transact business through our banking system, for example. It could threaten severe sanctions against any nation that arrested Netanyahu or Gallant pursuant to the ICC warrants. It could also display its contempt for the ICC by inviting the Israeli premier to the White House and Congress.
Furthermore, the Trump administration should take action against nations that are funding and supporting the ICC so generously. Some of the ICC’s largest financial benefactors, including Japan and the European Union nations, are also dependent on the United States for their security. Yet while asking Washington, D.C., to protect them, they finance a global institution that hamstrings our ability to do so. If Tokyo, for example, wants the United States to lead a new alliance to contain China, Trump can demand that Japan eliminate its subsidy for an international institution that seeks to undermine the American national sovereignty he was elected to restore.
There's a nearly straight through-line from the logic and approach to executive power Yoo helped architect under Bush and these attacks on the ICC under Trump. It's just that many have decided to bizarrely retcon the Bush administration into respected elder statesman instead of the lawless war criminals they were and are.
> In fact John Yoo, most famous for authoring the "Torture Memos" for Dubya over 20 years ago, has been perhaps the most prominent legal thinker arguing in favor of the actions Trump's taken against the ICC
True. Trump did not appear suddenly out of nowhere and he’s only able to do what he does thanks to people who prepared for this and have been pushing us down the slope for the last couple of decades. Thanks for the quote, it’s important we remember this sort of things.
> It's just that many have decided to bizarrely retcon the Bush administration into respected elder statesman instead of the lawless war criminals they were and are.
I think that’s the fact that Bush is at least able to finish a sentence. But yeah, you’re right. It was the golden age of enhanced interrogation techniques by masked men in black in illegal prisons in foreign countries.
I don't think that Trump himself really thinks all the things he's pushing for - I think most of it is coming from people who aren't him, and he's just the figurehead. It's not clear he's capable of understanding what he's doing, at this point, since he has dementia. I think the more emotional-outburst type stuff, like "You have 100% tariffs? We'll have 200% tariffs!" is him though.
The story of Microsoft's stack in a nutshell and why everyone is still so dependent on it. Migration is hard, and it only gets harder the longer you've built yourself on top of a particular technology.
Microsoft offered what basically amounted to "IT in a box." You got identity, email/groupware, an office suite, and an OS that ran on just about any IBM compatible PC and your own servers. You paid for the license, and then you controlled and hosted it after that. Microsoft was content to let you do whatever the hell you wanted with their software, and stuck to their promise to not break shit (backward compatibility for Win32).
That everything is now cloud hosted and stuffed with telemetry was a big rug pull, but it's not like everyone could just up and migrate to something else (and what else, for that matter, there's not much out there that matches). It was literally just this year that on-prem exchange support ended for the one-time purchase license, but even then on-prem is still available via subscription.
Microsoft gave every incentive in the world to get enterprises to stick with their stack, and it worked, so it's no wonder people are just now starting to panic a little and look for alternatives.
USA has been very hostile to the ICC since way before Trump.
The ICC was created in 1998 when Bill Clinton was president of the USA. He never ratified the Rome treaty. And then GW, Obama, Trump and Biden didn't either.
Very few americans batted an eye as far as I could tell. Your are after all by definition exceptional. (/s)
This is not a U.S. specific issue. Once you strip away all of the formalities, titles, and ceremonies, you'll realize there's no such thing as international law, at least not in any meaningful sense of the word.
The law, by definition is a rule backed up by the use of force, specifically state-sanctioned violence. If you write a law but do not have the ability to use a sufficient amount violence to enforce it when needed, you don't have a law at all, you just have a suggestion around how you'd like people and countries to behave.
The only way you could ever have anything resembling "international law", would be to have some sort of global military or police force capable of exerting enough violence to ensure that the law is followed, and I'm not even sure how such a thing would work.
There is international law. It is made up of all the treaties the big and small powers implemented together. But yes, not much is left now, but I would argue before Bush and 9/11 .. it was in a way better shape.
Global military is not necessary, just consensus to enforce it.
Practical example, there is no EU military, but there surely are EU laws EU members have to follow.
>Practical example, there is no EU military, but there surely are EU laws EU members have to follow.
EU has other levers to enforce compliance like ejection from Eurozone or Schengen Area.
Global military is required to enforce it because biggest stick wins. Many countries thinks Russia should be removed from Ukraine but no one has stepped up to provide the military to do so, ergo, in violation of international law they remain.
"Many countries thinks Russia should be removed from Ukraine but no one has stepped up to provide the military to do so, ergo, in violation of international law they remain."
I would argue, or rather I know many people from poorer countries argue, that why should they care that russia violates international law etc. if the US blatantly ignored it when they invaded Iraq? In other words, it is the same international like it is in the EU, just with less trust. Also the EU might fail (and there are challenges) if too many members act against the common interest. Then the enforcement will fail and so will all of EU.
(also, with international support and china not backing russia ... it would have worked without military involvement. Then the sanctioned would have worked. So ... some countries are just happy for the cheap bargain for russian oil)
> The only way you could ever have anything resembling "international law", would be to have some sort of global military or police force capable of exerting enough violence to ensure that the law is followed, and I'm not even sure how such a thing would work.
I'd push back a little bit on this. Much international law is just based on recipricol alturism. Chemical weapons are illegal. Why? Because they are a pain, and it sucks for both sides when they are used, so both sides have an interest in banning them.
I know its a hard cry from hard enforcement (to be clear hard enforcement does happen sometimes. E.g. UN interventions or even the ICC), but soft power is not nothing.
Its more like the sort of thing like how if you are a rude party guest you dont get invited to the. Sure its not the same as cops. At the same time most party guests are reasonably polite as a result of this pressure.
I know its not much, but i dont think we should count this out either.
Eventual consistency backed by international agreements is a very good start. Making sure that the bad guys eventually get their day in court is a fantastic thing. Even if they happen to be American.
Meanwhile people demand some kind of Hollywood-esque extra-national global strike force or else nothing is worth doing in terms of accountability? Get real. You are deflecting.
I feel like this comment ^ was made in bad faith. Providing an accurate description of reality is not an endorsement of that reality, but I'm pretty sure you already know this, and your comment here is more of a rhetorical tool than an addition to the discussion.
> Okay, I will spell it out: You are confusing might with right.
You are confusing describing the world with how it is and describing how it ought to be.
Might does tend to make right in geopolitics if you are a super power. That doesn't mean i like it, or think that it is right, its just the world we currently live in is.
> Bill Clinton was president of the USA. He never ratified the Rome treaty. And then GW, Obama, Trump and Biden didn't either.
Small point of order, but it is the Senate that ratifies treaties and not presidents. The Senate is heavily biased to overrepresent rural areas, which tend to be very conservative, and only 40% of senators can stop any ratification. The ICC has been the subject of massive amounts of conspiracy theories and misinformation in conservative media, so there's approximately zero chance that it could ever be ratified, unless the Senate's structure was made more representative of the people of the US rather than a conspiracy-minded subset.
If the Senate was a democratic representation of the will of the US it would not be hard to ratify the treaty.
You're probably very right on that, Clinton listened to Kissinger on foreign policy and somebody like Kissinger is very much at risk if the US follows international law.
> "The American Service-Members' Protection Act, known informally as the Hague Invasion Act[1] [sic] (ASPA, Title 2 of Pub. L. 107–206 (text) (PDF), H.R. 4775, 116 Stat. 820, enacted August 2, 2002) is"
ditches is a strong word here, we change software providers for different tooling all the time
dependency on american corps is a bit weird, when they wont move away from windows just for one presendential term surely? trump will be out in X years. whats the point?
some of these organisations are now more politically aligned than ever questioning their neutrality
It's actually not called Microsoft 365, but "the Microsoft 365 Copilot app" (not to be confused with Microsoft Copilot (a slop generator with the same logo))
Hei hei,
I'm working for the XWiki and CryptPad projects, which are integrated in openDesk. Here are a couple links / infos that can be interesting to understand the context of openDesk.
The openDesk project comes initially from an initiative of the Ministry of Interior of Germany in 2021, to build the alternative to Office 365. The project was progressively transferred in 2025 to a state-owned organization, the ZenDis (https://zendis.de), which oversees the global development of openDesk.
The source code is mainly available on https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk, where you will find mirrors of every project which is bundled into openDesk (Nextcloud, Collabora, Element, Univention, XWiki, Jitsi, OpenXchange, CryptPad, OpenProject, …)
There was also a couple public presentations about openDesk at FOSDEM during the past years :
* In 2024 : https://archive.fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3...
* In 2025 : https://archive.fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5...
I appreciate your comment. I'm thrilled to learn that CryptPad is part of the openDesk solution.
>CryptPad was selected to join the German "Sovereign Workplace" project, now called openDesk.
https://blog.cryptpad.org/2025/01/28/CryptPad-Funding-Status...
Many more details in this blog post from XWiki: https://xwiki.com/en/Blog/XWiki-CryptPad-knowledge-managemen...
I find it fascinating to see how much power Germany's "digital sovereignty" initiative has gained. In the beginning, it looked like yet another government thingy that nobody will use. But by now, they must be well above 100k government employees using it daily.
Also, in case you missed that: StackIt is the AWS / G Cloud competitor by LIDL: https://www.stackit.de/en/ It's the basebone for their app strategy with 100 mio+ client installs and about 500k employees.
Every time this happens Microsoft either threatens to move out or promises to move in with a chunk of their operation. Blackmailing with jobs has been very effective for them.
I think that strategy might be running out of steam though, before these projects seemed to have more commercial reasons or just pushing the idea of openness, but sovereignty is a much stronger ideal and much more likely to be the one that will weather the blackmail.
Looks like openDesk uses Collabora Online, which is itself based on libreoffice online - web based libreoffice.
https://www.opendesk.eu/en/product#document-management ("Collabora Online powers openDesk with a robust office suite designed for efficient teamwork and secure document editing.")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collabora_Online ("Collabora Online (often abbreviated as COOL) is an open-source online office suite developed by Collabora, based on LibreOffice Online, the web-based edition of the LibreOffice office suite.")
More than that--Collabora is a major (maybe the biggest) contributor to LibreOffice.
Rightly so. They should have never used it in the first place. What with the US not recognizing the court it always made very little sense to me that they would rely on the infrastructure components to be supplied by the USA. The latest sanctions are just another step in something that was already in motion from day #1.
The world order at the highest level relies on the nations themselves to behave, especially the largest ones because nobody has the practical power to enforce the decisions of the court in case defendants are in places where the court is not recognized. To USA not recognizing the court has always shown that they don't care about the crimes they commit.
> To USA not recognizing the court has always shown that they don't care about the crimes they commit.
I'd nitpick the "don't care" part. To me, it's that they do care precisely because they know they are guilty. I think Trump is guilty for the boats being shot. Obama guilty for the drone strikes. W guilty for well, the whole shit show. Didn't really pay attention to Biden, but I'd assume drone strikes continued there too. From Clinton on back, I admit I just wasn't paying attention to those kinds of issues.
My understanding is that most of the post-cold-war targeted killings of dubious legality happened after 9/11; wikipedia claims that there were US norms against "targeted killings" from '76 to '01. Certainly the CIA did some shady stuff post 1976, but the President at least maintained the appearance of not knowing about them.
Biden funded, supported, and repeated Hasbara propaganda to justify, the genocide in Gaza.
I'm all for calling him out for that, but none of that sounds like a clear-cut ICC crime.
Good move for ICC.
Especially since USA, home country of Microsoft corporation, is exhibiting military junta techniques.
USA is killing citizens of foreign countries, weekly via the "U.S. military conducting missile strikes against boats in the Caribbean and Pacific claiming they are shipping drugs".
These non-military victims, citizens, being killed intentionally are a violation of human rights.
So, reading the documentation in the [repo](https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/deployment/opendesk/...) it’s immediately made clear that you should use the Enterprise Edition for production use. (Since the German state is behind this, why not focus on totally free software for production use?)
But what really surprised me are statements like this in the README:
” Nextcloud Enterprise: openDesk uses the Nextcloud Enterprise to the build Nextcloud container image for oD EE. The Nextcloud EE codebase might contain EE exclusive (longterm support) security patches, plus the Guard app, that is not publicly available, while it is AGPL-3.0 licensed.
And
COOL Controller container image and Helm chart: Source code and chart are using Mozilla Public License Version 2.0, but the source code is not public. It is provided to customers upon request. ”
This, according with other paragraphs describing percentages of free and non-free code in certain components really makes me wonder…
It's a misconception that (A)GPL source code should be publicly available.
GPL family mandates source code access to people who can access to the software itself. So as long as ICC gets the source code of the NextCloud EE and the Guard app, the GPL is fulfilled.
This is how RedHat operates, and is not a violation of GPL.
Also, this is how you can build a business around GPL. You only have to provide source code to people who buys your software, or you can sell support to it.
Another example: Rock Solid curl [0].
[0]: https://rock-solid.curl.dev/
But presumably, under the GPL, someone who obtained the source code, perhaps by paying for it, can freely publish that source code, and non-disclosure agreements are void.
Yes. See Rocky Linux.
Lawyers historically are notoriously linked to Microsoft and its formats as a somewhat unintentional industry side standard.
Moves like this hearten me as for certain lawyers the formats and standards they now will be expected to follow has just shifted, towards open source no less.
I remember when lawyers historically used WordPerfect for the same reasons. Now, I don’t know the details of how that industry shifted (MS dominance and WP shitting the bed with their GUI versions would be my guess), but it shows that it is possible.
I did MS Word support in the long long ago during its transition to dominance. There was nothing worse than getting a call from a lawyer who was forced off Word Perfect.
> a lawyer who was forced off Word Perfect
My lawyers at big firms still use it, though they export .doc(x).
But how are they exporting such a modern document format? Holee crap, because it's still being sold an updated! https://www.wordperfect.com/en/
And the suite includes Quattro Pro, for those that are itchin' for that spreadsheet-flavored blast from the past. If I didn't already have the Apple suite on my Mac (which does all I need out of an office suite), I'd spend the $50 for home/student version just for the lulz.
https://www.wordperfect.com/en/product/professional-edition/
Look at those screenshots! It's still a Windows 95 look'n'feel (which some HN users might enjoy).
You have got the trial version of Wordperfect for free, not sure it has everything (Quattro Pro) since you have to hunt around for other Corel products to get the trial versions (Corel Draw).
It is amazing to think how valuable Wordperfect originally was, for Microsoft to be mean to them, meaning they went from worth billions to worth nothing.
Open Desk (since the article doesn't link): https://www.opendesk.eu/en
Does anyone have any experience using it?
I’d love to see pictures. I’d love to drop MS/Google docs for something I can control myself.
Have you tried LibreOffice ( https://www.libreoffice.org/ ) or OnlyOffice ( https://www.onlyoffice.com/desktop )? Both are pretty decent, and free, and also have commercial versions.
I've tried LibreOffice.
The UX is so clunky that I ended up giving up and started doing presentations in Google Slides, even if I then end up exporting them as a PDF to actually present/share.
Every time I try to use it, it feels like fighting my tool rather than my tool helping me. There is no one big bug; it's a million tiny things.
Recent versions? Because we deployed Nextcloud, I have been using and comparing OnlyOffice and Collabora for a bit, LibreOffice has been getting quite some work for presentations over the last year. My boss has issues with presentation editing (which is probably why we’ll end up with OnlyOffice), but was impressed by the features for the actual presentation.
MS365/Google docs is something entirely different to the old desktop office suites
It's a collaboration tool, with synced storage and file management etc
The overlap of a Venn diagram between users of these software is not very large - though there is some (overlap).
And both the products I mentioned also support online collaboration and storage. See LibreOffice Online ( https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ ), OnlyOffice Workspace ( https://www.onlyoffice.com/workspace ) and OnlyOffice Enterprise ( https://www.onlyoffice.com/docs-enterprise ). I can't comment how feature compatible these are but alternatives do exist and that's good new for us. (Note that openDesk is based on a fork of LibreOffice Online, which is a commercial variant for those who don't want to bother implementing everything themselves).
Interesting, it seems I haven't interacted with this software for too long - makes sense in hindsight that there had been enough time to implement such features over the years. Thanks for correcting me.
Such a polite response! So seldom seen in comment forums. I congratulate you.
I’m looking for more of a sharing experience. If I’m doing something locally myself I tend to use Mac pages, numbers or keynote. They’re underrated I think as local apps go. Getting a whole company on Mac just to use them is a non-starter though.
But would you be willing to pay for it? Would your company/organization be willing to move?
Absolutely not
Good. It is not befitting of the ICC to be using tools, and thereby funding, a company that has been helping states carrying out war crimes.
The lack of anything at all on the roadmap page [1] and lack of a link to their code repository on a blog post touting their open-source cred [2] does not build confidence. I found their code repo link in the comments here, after not finding it easily on their site.
EDIT: to be clear, I'm all for open source software, and for more options to tools from big tech firms.
[1] https://www.opendesk.eu/en/roadmap
[2] https://www.opendesk.eu/en/blog/open-source-software-trust
I work for one of the several European companies building open source software that has been chosen as components of openDesk.
openDesk is solid, legit and serious.
Open source is a requirement. As such, money doesn't go to a startup building proprietary software that get bought a few years later by a big tech company and then all the investment is lost. They audit and check that licenses are open source and that the dependencies have compatible licenses.
It's publicly funded, by Germany* (for their needs, but it will grow larger than them). Their strategy is to give money to established European open source software companies so they improve their software in areas that matter to them, including integration features (user management, for instance, or file / event sharing with other software, many things) as well as accessibility. They take all these pieces of software and build a coherent (with a common theme / look & feel), turn-key, feature-rich suite. This strategic decision that has its drawbacks allows to get something fast with what exists today.
I'm not sure communication and the business strategy is all figured out / polished yet, but with the high profile institutions adopting it, it will come. Each involved companies wants this to succeed too.
I think this is huge. I'm quite enthusiastic. Software might not be perfect but with the potential momentum this thing has, it could improve fast, and each piece of open source software that is part of this as well along the way.
* see also caubin's comment
At least they seem to be actively working on it:
https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk
They have some real users too. I know of some out of my head. According to ChatGPT:
- Robert Koch Institute (RKI) – entered a contract on 11 June 2025 to use openDesk as the technical basis for the “Agora” platform for public‑health authorities.
- BWI GmbH – the IT infrastructure provider for the German armed forces (Bundeswehr); signed a framework contract for openDesk.
- Bundesamt für Seeschifffahrt und Hydrographie – also mentioned as an early adopter of openDesk.
- Föderale IT‑Kooperation (FITKO) – listed as a user in the EU OSS Catalogue entry for openDesk.
I think I read that some German states use the software too.
You never know what will happen in the long run but the solution will probably be maintained for some time given it's backing by the federal government of Germany.
> Robert Koch Institute (RKI) – entered a contract on 11 June 2025 to use openDesk as the technical basis for the “Agora” platform for public‑health authorities.
Wow - I was just thinking this would be good. Here in the UK Microsoft are slowly taking over healthcare with their terrible Dynamics 365 platform, and some competition would be really nice.
All else aside, Microsoft 365 as an office suite screams for disruption. If you don't believe me try actually using their copilot and observe the poor integrations with core products such as Excel/Word/Powerpoint. Sorry for the offtopic but it really hurts for those of us who are forced by their CIO to use this thing.
Yes, the product is terrible and easily beat out by a competitor. However, most people who are forced to use it is by dictate their own company CIO, hence MS has captive audiences.
Related:
"IMPOSING SANCTIONS ON THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT" (white house, feb 2025) https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/impo...
Microsoft admits in French court it can't keep EU data safe from US authorities (jul 2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45822902
>Microsoft admits in French court it can't keep EU data safe from US authorities
Snowden leaked that fact before Microsoft made the admission. But it's good that it's coming from them officially nonetheless.
It kind felt like the ramifications of Snowden's leak were so wast that everyone just chose to forget about it.
IIUC Snowden sent complete trove to two publications only, and one of the computers containing the trove is destroyed through and through, disabling that publication for Snowden leaks.
Moreover, again as I understand, after a certain point the leaks are stopped, because the message was sent, and people now know the most important bits behind the curtain.
There's definitely a political game of pretending that the US clouds are somehow compatible with GDPR.
They are most likely compatible until a national security letter arrives. An American company then has to choose which law to comply with, and it's an easy choice.
That's what makes them incompatible.
But companies can be a lot shadier than we give them credit for. Like, remember that "wink payment" contract between Google and Israel? If Google knew what they were doing, they accepted the contract to do the illegal thing, so they'd sell their product and get money, but they were planning to simply not do the illegal thing, breaking the contract (the customer would never know and if they somehow did, you can't stop using a cloud on a dime) but not breaking any laws.
If Microsoft knows what they're doing, they'll accept contracts from EU customers that say "we will never give your data to US authorities", they break it immediately, don't tell the customer and the customer never finds out.
Alternatively, they can give the US government a bunch of nothing, in order to comply with the EU customer contract, and pretend this is all the data the customer had on their account. I doubt this will happen though.
Theres a difference between as an intelligence organisation having access to data, and "someone in power is angry because they watched a TV advert, I want to see what they know"
but, your over all picture is still, sadly correct.
For most of my life I also used to think there was a difference between the two. But now I realized they are actually just the same.
I understand the disillusionment. The gutting of the US machinery of state is disheartening to see.
it’s all just people at the end of the day.
Without oversight, abuse is inevitable.
You have two choices:
* Limit the damage that a person can do- IE; don’t aggregate everything in the hands of one person.
* Tonnes of oversight into who accesses the data and why.
In theory the US chooses the latter, but only for nationals and the snowden leaks were proving that this was basically just a rubber stamp and constantly was bypassed on technicalities..
.. outside of the US, there’s no legal framework to protect your data from US authorities, no matter who they are, at all.
They couldn’t be more different. One is doing it in secrecy and for a “reason”, to spy on someone. The other one will do it in public because he can and doesn’t like your name.
> One is doing it in secrecy and for a “reason”, to spy on someone.
When it's secret, how can you ever check? Even if it was just because the person on top or in the middle had a personal judge, they'll always say it was for legitimate spying purposes and no-one has any way to call them out.
Which of these is meant to represent the current regime in power in the U.S.?
does it matter if you are the one on the receiving end?
I don’t understand why this is the case though.
Could MS create a new EU based company in which it just owns shares ?
Or is the US cloud act so wide that they can demand data from all the companies a us based company has equity in?
MSFT already operates in Europe via subsidiaries for a whole host of reasons. But hiving certain assets off in a subsidiary is very rarely effective to avoid laws and regulations that apply to the parent. The parent controls the subsidiary so a court or regulator having jurisdiction over the parent could order it to get what it needs from the subsidiary. This is particularly so in the US, which is kind of known for enacting overreaching extraterritorial laws.
> The parent controls the subsidiary so a court or regulator having jurisdiction over the parent could order it to get what it needs from the subsidiary.
But what if the parent’s jurisdiction orders the parent to order the subsidiary to do something illegal in the subsidiary’s jurisdiction? If local management obey the order, they risk being prosecuted by their jurisdiction’s authorities-so they’ll likely refuse. What is the parent going to do then? Fire them? But will any replacement act any differently? “Is this job worth going to prison over?” Most people answer “no”, and people who answer “yes” won’t last, because you can’t run a subsidiary from a prison cell.
I think the real issue here is that the US gets away with it because the EU is still so dependent on the US (see NATO) they can’t push back fully, at some point a political calculation takes over. So it could be that the US parent orders the subsidiary to do something illegal under EU law, and then the EU authorities choose to ignore it.
So let’s say I am eu citizen I own a data center company in Brussels.
I sell 1 stock to MS USA. Can they at any point demand all my data ?
They can try, but presumably as a tiny shareholder you would tell them to go f themselves. Subsidiaries don't have that luxury.
The laws I have read used the term “effective control”; if a shareholder is able to control the org (eg can replace the CEO or board), they are obliged to comply with government orders regarding that org.
There are attempts to lösen the control from the U.S. side like a cooperation between Microsoft/Azure and SAP or Google and T-Systems (deutsche Telekom) where the German side would run an "air gapped" region of those cloud stacks.
However I believe the rates in the end were too high to win notable contracts, but I haven't followed along in a while.
https://www.heise.de/news/Digitale-Souveraenitaet-Microsoft-...
https://t3n.de/news/t-systems-sovereign-cloud-google-verwalt...
> Could MS create a new EU based company in which it just owns shares ?
That would be a seperate company, plus if its licensing tech from MS then it's still vulnerable to supply chain attacks.
I'd be surprised if this isn't already the case. The extent to which you can do business in the EU without legal presence is limited.
It is not a huge amount of protection though. I mean we've already established that selling to 'terrorists' can be sanctioned even when selling through an intermediary. So what's stopping the US from ordering Microsoft to stop selling licenses to the ICC?
And then we've not touched on who is in control of the closed source of the many proprietary applications.
It's not about having a subsidiary, it's about the technical structure of 365 meaning Microsoft US has access to Microsoft EU servers and thus US employees can be compelled to follow US court orders.
They simply don't separate the infrastructure this way AFAIK.
Oh I see the point. So MS US has credentials for the infra in EU.
So no reason to deal with any European citizen or court. You just threaten the US IT guy to give you the EU credentials.
Yes, and the Cloud Act pretty much forces upper management to ensure that there is always a US IT guy that can be compelled to implement the wishes of The US Federal Government, as the penalties apply to executives of US companies, too.
We can quibble about whether the term "threaten", which implies some moral wrong doing, is correct though. It's a law with defined criminal penalties. That's how criminal law works
If you’re Microsoft do you really want to anger the federal government? Companies aren’t as cavalier about taking them on as they used to be. They’re likely Microsoft’s largest customer by far, and they have the power to end you (which they nearly did once).
After Microsoft left politics mess up with their customer base something like that was to be expected.
Microsoft has to follow US sanctions, even if they are misplaced. This isn't a choice on Microsoft's part here.
The ICC was applauded in the US in the when it went after Russia but when it goes after Israel it is sanctioned. It unfortunately hard to be impartial, like the ICC is, when it comes to international war crimes. The big players want you to play towards their favourites and only hold their enemies accountable.
The US is also sanctioning Palestinian human rights groups, and kicking them off of US platforms like YouTube, because they make Israel look bad: https://theintercept.com/2025/11/04/youtube-google-israel-pa...
> Microsoft has to follow US sanctions
Microsoft has to follow US law. If it believes an order has been issued unlawfully, it—and everyone who works there who follows the order—has a civic duty to oppose the order in court.
Quite a few of the things that European authorities have been getting worried about the US Government being able to force Microsoft to do are explicitly enshrined in US law. See, for example, the CLOUD Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
>Microsoft has to follow US law.
while operating in the US
> while operating in the US
While having anything to do with America or the U.S. dollar.
Exactly what the big German corporations (as well as Ford by the way) did in the 1930s.
And IBM...
Microsoft employees in the EU are committing a crime if they do participate in the sanctions though.
There's an EU law, 'blocking statue' which also means that contracts can't be broken with reference sanctions even if the contracts themselves say they can be, and the services must be provided anyway.
This isn't GDPR type stuff. This is a path to infinite fines. Ending up jail for years is also a distinct possibility if you help people access their data, since spying on these institutions is actually treated as espionage. We recently passed a law here in Sweden forbidding espionage against international organizations in which Sweden is part.
Well, if ICC had issued an arrest warrant for Zelensky, it would most likely got sanctioned as well. Luckily, ICC is not headed by a Russian but by Israel hating Muslim with rape allegations pending.
Related, British intelligence firms on Qatari payroll were spying on the ICC head's rape accuser https://www.theguardian.com/law/2025/nov/06/qatar-linked-int...
MS could always refocus themselves as a global company (in the legal rather than marketing-only sense), and move their HQ out of the US, then there could be no Trump tantrums affecting other countries, the worse that could happen would be some sanctions on what would then be their in-country US affiliate, with no ability to affect their other global operations whatsoever. Why haven't they followed this approach? Haven't lost enough customers yet?
> the worse that could happen would be some sanctions on what would then be their in-country US affiliate
So what you are saying is the worst that could happen is they lose the entire US market, us based datacenters, and us based employees?
I think the question answers itself.
No. It would be run by a US affiliate using the Microsoft brand, paying royalties to a global company in some other jurisdiction.
That's not how laws work
That approach is also insane.
You’re always going to be vulnerable somewhere and there isn’t a better country to be if you’re in software, cloud services or AI.
Not to mention it’s not like Microsoft Execs want to pickup and leave the States either.
Don't need to. Would it be a big deal to hop on a plane to e.g. Switzerland once a year?
Doing that little is effectively the same as doing nothing at all, and they wouldn’t actually be insulated.
MS lives by corporate contracts and there are a lot of very powerful US companies that will roll over if Trump barks - if MS had already fled the US in a legal sense they'd definitely be in a better place but trying to leave during this administration would cause Trump's ire to focus on them and likely cost them an immense amount of money. I don't particularly like MS and both office and windows are declining in quality quickly so I wouldn't be opposed to the move but... nothing would sink that ship faster than losing a bunch of large US contracts as Trump toadies demonstrate their loyalty by bravely switching to alternatives.
Nobody has to do anything, least of all massive corporations with country-sized revenues. It's /always/ a choice to comply or to put up a fight and deal with the consequences.
As soon as they stole control from their customers computers, "leaving politics mess up with their customer base" was inevitable.
Or rather, stealing control from their customers computers is already leaving politics mess up with the customers.
Meanwhile in southern Germany.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Bavaria-wants-to-move-to-Micros...
Does someone have an English language link for this?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/31/international_crimina... ("International Criminal Court kicks Microsoft Office to the curb / "Rough justice? Redmond out as Germany's openDesk judged a better fit" (Oct. 31))
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/31/international_crimina...
(was submitted to HN 3 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45797515)
Firefox translate seems to work fine on it.
Related ongoing thread:
OpenDesk – a flexible all-in-one office suite for the public sector - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45838239 - Nov 2025 (19 comments)
I can't find a single screenshot of opendesk applications anywhere - including their own website. This is extremely strange.
It seems likely the ICC will issue an arrest warrant for Trump in the coming years. I see all their recent moves as a signal they want to distance themselves from the US so they can actually issue that warrant.
Trump's life-span is likely to not be a very large number of years from today given his age, and systemic health problems.
SO I expect ICC would find other people, e.g. Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, who are helping to commit these areguably war-crimes in the Pacific and Caribbean seas, the missile strikes against civilian non-US vessels.
There are quite a few reasons that should happen, but I won't hold my breath. And I that issuance really won't do anything worthwhile, except be a footnote in a history book.
I can't see any links to repos on the website, is it actually open?
https://www.opendesk.eu
https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/deployment/opendesk
https://opencode.de/en/software/open-desk-1317
A bit convoluted but there was an openCode link at the bottom which eventually leads you to the repository:
https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/deployment/opendesk
https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk
Thanks for the link, looks like they offer the whole stack of features and more.
Will it matter if the whitehouse realizes that they control accepting of email from the icc's domains for at least 80% of the worlds' email addresses?
I think the more concerning thing is what happens when the trickle turns into a deluge
I think the bigger question is why they were using microsoft products in the first place.
USA has been very hostile to the ICC under trump, but its not exactly a huge shift, bush was also incredibly hostile. It seems borderline incompetent to use a microsoft cloud offering given the political situation.
Not to mention given the type of work they do, seems like hosting stuff off site at all is a bad plan.
How much do you think they should spend on IT to be independent from Microsoft (serious question) ? Wikipedia mentions they employ 800 persons working in several buildings and a detention center for a budget of 141 million USD.
Microsoft O365 Business Premium per person is 22 USD per month so total per year is ~200k USD (online price, I imagine they can negotiate a bit for that amount of people).
I think its a core requirement of their mission, so essentially whatever is neccesary.
Their job is to investigate war criminal despite the usa trying to block them. Its not out of the question that nsa/cia/etc would use their ties at microsoft to try and get an advanced peek at the prosecution's case.
Yes all this is expensive. Their mission is not a cheap one. Doing it right costs money.
P.s. initially i mistead and got a laugh out of the idea of wikipedia operating a detention center.
Do you mean just the ICC ... or all government organizations in the same boat, just not necessarily realizing it yet, inside the EU?
The same reason most organizations use it -- inertia and because it's been the standard for so long, it's the best at what it does.
The startup I used to work at was exclusively on OSX + GoogleDocs, when we were small, but as we grew (and especially when the Finance team grew) more and more employees found a need for the MS Office Suite as well as apps that only run on Windows, so they started rolling out Windows VM's and then full Windows machines.
I'm curious which apps only run on Windows. We are also a MacOS + Google Workspace shop and the microsoft requirements have been slowly seeping in.
I don't know what native apps they needed Windows for (I wasn't doing IT work by then), but I was still setting up PC's when they said they needed Windows Excel (not Excel on Mac, not Office365) for some forecasting spreadsheet product they purchased - it only ran on native Excel. We gave them Windows in a VM on their Mac at first, but eventually they had more and more apps that ran on Windows and moved from Mac to Windows laptops.
It's basically the "No one gets fired for buying IBM" effect. Microsoft became the default. Everyone was familiar with it, and knew it would work.
People tend to underestimate the value of a solution that folks, especially less technical folks, are already trained on, comfortable with, and one that is known to work as expected.
This is exactly why Canva is handing out Afinity for free.
It was basically "if the US ever plays this card, all hell will break loose for their IT companies". So ICC and others simply assumed it would not happen.
That's a very simplistic view of what Microsoft offers. They don't sell an office software package but a very robust solution for running the software side of a business.
The OS, office package, email (server and client), calendar, cloud & backup, BI, etc. all aligned work almost seamlessly with each other (compared to the alternatives for sure).
Nothing on the market comes close and that is the reason they are worth trillions, not because they use closed formats.
I didn't say anything about what Microsoft offers.
I'm sure people get killed all the time for using American services. It's just that they were all brown "terrorists", not liberal Intitutions situated in Europe, until now that is.
I know how to use MS Office. All my colleagues know how to use MS Office. People want to solve their daily problems, not learn how to use new software.
I agree this is a big part of it.
Office sucks?: "Man Office sucks these days."
The "weird" alternative you expended political capital to put everyone on works slightly differently or lacks a feature out of the box?: "What were you thinking?!"
Lobbying - and likely a fair amount of network pressure from legal systems in various nations that lean towards using office for internal documents as a default.
That, and it's solid, well supported software most people are familiar with.
From those doing the paperwork with Microsoft procurement for Dutch government I learned there have been legal disputes going on for years about what even constitutes "telemetry". That was a decade ago, and even then there was push to move away from Microsoft in the government. Toward open source, or even Oracle.
I suppose that with the Dutch being Dutch all the lobbying M$ needed was suggesting a discount.
When I think of Teams, I don’t think of solid, well supported software.
The main problem is that 365 is just far cheaper than the competitors for environments like this, maintaining and supporting an open source alternative would be an incredibly expensive undertaking.
Maintaining ans support sounds like an opportunity for some EU businesses to me.
Sweet gov contracts.
Yes, but to get something nearly as good as 365 would realistically cost 100x as much as just buying from Microsoft.
Who would you even hire to do this? A big consulting firm known for delivering poor quality software, or an unproven startup? What kind of a process could you use to make such a selection in a way that would ensure a good outcome?
It’s the same as the old libreoffice vs. MS office debate. Yeah, you can download libreoffice for free. It sucks. What sucks even more though is how much money you will spend on support, training and all the inevitable productivity losses associated with weird software that approximately nobody you hire will have experience with.
In theory, yes, it could be...
But these are "European Tenders", which in practice usually translates to: race-to-the-bottom. Unless the tender was phrased specifically, from its very first inception, to aim at some polical goal - like open source, sovereignty, innovation, inclusiveness, etc.
>I think the bigger question is why they were using microsoft products in the first place.
Public institutions in Europe, in my experience, often have a confusing insistence on using Microsoft cloud products. Universities heavily push Office 365 and Teams, often trying to demand that faculty use them, while faculty continue to use alternatives as much as possible in order to actually work effectively. During the pandemic, the only online conferences I attended that insisted on running via Teams, against all reason, were run by a UK public institution, and they had as many embarrassing technical problems as might be expected.
This is despite Microsoft's cloud services being generally designed for businesses and often poorly suited for public institutions, especially universities. The services are fundamentally built with the assumption that work will primarily take place within a single organization, with clearly defined employees. European research collaborations constantly seem to be hobbled by needing to use hacks around this assumption, but the inexplicable importance of using Microsoft seems to outweigh these problems. In the most ridiculous case, a conference online during the pandemic asked everyone during registration to please not register using their university email address, but to use a personal one not associated with any Office 365 account, because they had no way of allowing access to Teams if the email address was managed by Microsoft at a different university. Yet still the importance of using Teams was paramount to the organizers.
I have had no clear explanation of why using Microsoft services is so important, despite them being so poorly suited to the institutions, so opposed (and often just not used) by many of the actual users, and arguably being used in ways that they are not really intended to be used. I've had some people claim it is necessary for GDPR compliance, despite the GDPR compliance of any US company being on shaky ground. Microsoft itself has described what seem like rather extensive contingency plans around US-enforced GDPR violations or requirements for service cutoffs (there is a blog post somewhere), but these must also imply a fear that such things could actually happen (and, of course, actually did happen with the ICC). It all seems rather strange.
> I think the bigger question is why they were using microsoft products in the first place.
There used to be this quaint idea of rule of law and things like that. We can always argue that governments were happy to get dirty and occasionally illegal, and they certainly were. But a) it was universally seen as a bad thing, and b) no country would have done it so blatantly and openly. Perversely, this narrative was important to advance the US’ interests because it opened opportunities for American companies to go deep into foreign administrations. Which they did.
So yeah, the clock ticked and now we’re in a new and exciting era for geopolitics and who knows what system will prevail in the end. What is certain is that the US abdicated their leadership.
> USA has been very hostile to the ICC under trump, but its not exactly a huge shift, bush was also incredibly hostile. It seems borderline incompetent to use a microsoft cloud offering given the political situation.
There is a difference between hostility as in "we won’t take part and won’t cooperate in any way" and "we’re also going to pressure private companies to steal your stuff". The ICC is also full of NATO countries and allies so any form of hostility has to be calibrated to keep them on your side. If you care about alliances, that is.
> Not to mention given the type of work they do, seems like hosting stuff off site at all is a bad plan.
Indeed. To be fair, it seems like a bad plan for most large companies with anything that looks like industrial secrets, let alone a government or such a supra-national organisation.
> So yeah, the clock ticked and now we’re in a new and exciting era for geopolitics and who knows what system will prevail in the end. What is certain is that the US abdicated their leadership.
In fact John Yoo, most famous for authoring the "Torture Memos" for Dubya over 20 years ago, has been perhaps the most prominent legal thinker arguing in favor of the actions Trump's taken against the ICC:
What can the incoming Trump administration do? It could impose severe sanctions on the ICC judges and its prosecutor, Karim Ahmad Khan, who engineered this debacle, by blocking their ability to transact business through our banking system, for example. It could threaten severe sanctions against any nation that arrested Netanyahu or Gallant pursuant to the ICC warrants. It could also display its contempt for the ICC by inviting the Israeli premier to the White House and Congress.
Furthermore, the Trump administration should take action against nations that are funding and supporting the ICC so generously. Some of the ICC’s largest financial benefactors, including Japan and the European Union nations, are also dependent on the United States for their security. Yet while asking Washington, D.C., to protect them, they finance a global institution that hamstrings our ability to do so. If Tokyo, for example, wants the United States to lead a new alliance to contain China, Trump can demand that Japan eliminate its subsidy for an international institution that seeks to undermine the American national sovereignty he was elected to restore.
There's a nearly straight through-line from the logic and approach to executive power Yoo helped architect under Bush and these attacks on the ICC under Trump. It's just that many have decided to bizarrely retcon the Bush administration into respected elder statesman instead of the lawless war criminals they were and are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_Memos
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/why-international-arrest-warrants...
> In fact John Yoo, most famous for authoring the "Torture Memos" for Dubya over 20 years ago, has been perhaps the most prominent legal thinker arguing in favor of the actions Trump's taken against the ICC
True. Trump did not appear suddenly out of nowhere and he’s only able to do what he does thanks to people who prepared for this and have been pushing us down the slope for the last couple of decades. Thanks for the quote, it’s important we remember this sort of things.
> It's just that many have decided to bizarrely retcon the Bush administration into respected elder statesman instead of the lawless war criminals they were and are.
I think that’s the fact that Bush is at least able to finish a sentence. But yeah, you’re right. It was the golden age of enhanced interrogation techniques by masked men in black in illegal prisons in foreign countries.
I don't think that Trump himself really thinks all the things he's pushing for - I think most of it is coming from people who aren't him, and he's just the figurehead. It's not clear he's capable of understanding what he's doing, at this point, since he has dementia. I think the more emotional-outburst type stuff, like "You have 100% tariffs? We'll have 200% tariffs!" is him though.
Because libreoffice is so poor.
No doubt they started using it in the 90s when you bought a copy of software, and Microsoft had no control over your computer.
The story of Microsoft's stack in a nutshell and why everyone is still so dependent on it. Migration is hard, and it only gets harder the longer you've built yourself on top of a particular technology.
Microsoft offered what basically amounted to "IT in a box." You got identity, email/groupware, an office suite, and an OS that ran on just about any IBM compatible PC and your own servers. You paid for the license, and then you controlled and hosted it after that. Microsoft was content to let you do whatever the hell you wanted with their software, and stuck to their promise to not break shit (backward compatibility for Win32).
That everything is now cloud hosted and stuffed with telemetry was a big rug pull, but it's not like everyone could just up and migrate to something else (and what else, for that matter, there's not much out there that matches). It was literally just this year that on-prem exchange support ended for the one-time purchase license, but even then on-prem is still available via subscription.
Microsoft gave every incentive in the world to get enterprises to stick with their stack, and it worked, so it's no wonder people are just now starting to panic a little and look for alternatives.
They were created july 2022. USA started threatening one month later in august.
The ICC was created in 2022?
USA has been very hostile to the ICC since way before Trump.
The ICC was created in 1998 when Bill Clinton was president of the USA. He never ratified the Rome treaty. And then GW, Obama, Trump and Biden didn't either.
Very few americans batted an eye as far as I could tell. Your are after all by definition exceptional. (/s)
This is not a U.S. specific issue. Once you strip away all of the formalities, titles, and ceremonies, you'll realize there's no such thing as international law, at least not in any meaningful sense of the word.
The law, by definition is a rule backed up by the use of force, specifically state-sanctioned violence. If you write a law but do not have the ability to use a sufficient amount violence to enforce it when needed, you don't have a law at all, you just have a suggestion around how you'd like people and countries to behave.
The only way you could ever have anything resembling "international law", would be to have some sort of global military or police force capable of exerting enough violence to ensure that the law is followed, and I'm not even sure how such a thing would work.
There is international law. It is made up of all the treaties the big and small powers implemented together. But yes, not much is left now, but I would argue before Bush and 9/11 .. it was in a way better shape.
Global military is not necessary, just consensus to enforce it.
Practical example, there is no EU military, but there surely are EU laws EU members have to follow.
>Practical example, there is no EU military, but there surely are EU laws EU members have to follow.
EU has other levers to enforce compliance like ejection from Eurozone or Schengen Area.
Global military is required to enforce it because biggest stick wins. Many countries thinks Russia should be removed from Ukraine but no one has stepped up to provide the military to do so, ergo, in violation of international law they remain.
"Many countries thinks Russia should be removed from Ukraine but no one has stepped up to provide the military to do so, ergo, in violation of international law they remain."
I would argue, or rather I know many people from poorer countries argue, that why should they care that russia violates international law etc. if the US blatantly ignored it when they invaded Iraq? In other words, it is the same international like it is in the EU, just with less trust. Also the EU might fail (and there are challenges) if too many members act against the common interest. Then the enforcement will fail and so will all of EU.
(also, with international support and china not backing russia ... it would have worked without military involvement. Then the sanctioned would have worked. So ... some countries are just happy for the cheap bargain for russian oil)
Trade is a vector, obviously.
> The only way you could ever have anything resembling "international law", would be to have some sort of global military or police force capable of exerting enough violence to ensure that the law is followed, and I'm not even sure how such a thing would work.
I'd push back a little bit on this. Much international law is just based on recipricol alturism. Chemical weapons are illegal. Why? Because they are a pain, and it sucks for both sides when they are used, so both sides have an interest in banning them.
I know its a hard cry from hard enforcement (to be clear hard enforcement does happen sometimes. E.g. UN interventions or even the ICC), but soft power is not nothing.
Its more like the sort of thing like how if you are a rude party guest you dont get invited to the. Sure its not the same as cops. At the same time most party guests are reasonably polite as a result of this pressure.
I know its not much, but i dont think we should count this out either.
I mean, yes, you stand with e.g. China. Congrats.
Edit:
Eventual consistency backed by international agreements is a very good start. Making sure that the bad guys eventually get their day in court is a fantastic thing. Even if they happen to be American.
Meanwhile people demand some kind of Hollywood-esque extra-national global strike force or else nothing is worth doing in terms of accountability? Get real. You are deflecting.
I feel like this comment ^ was made in bad faith. Providing an accurate description of reality is not an endorsement of that reality, but I'm pretty sure you already know this, and your comment here is more of a rhetorical tool than an addition to the discussion.
Okay, I will spell it out: You are confusing might with right.
> Okay, I will spell it out: You are confusing might with right.
You are confusing describing the world with how it is and describing how it ought to be.
Might does tend to make right in geopolitics if you are a super power. That doesn't mean i like it, or think that it is right, its just the world we currently live in is.
No, GP is stating that right can’t be enforced without being backed by might. Idk how that’s controversial.
A law with no enforceable consequence is no law at all.
> Bill Clinton was president of the USA. He never ratified the Rome treaty. And then GW, Obama, Trump and Biden didn't either.
Small point of order, but it is the Senate that ratifies treaties and not presidents. The Senate is heavily biased to overrepresent rural areas, which tend to be very conservative, and only 40% of senators can stop any ratification. The ICC has been the subject of massive amounts of conspiracy theories and misinformation in conservative media, so there's approximately zero chance that it could ever be ratified, unless the Senate's structure was made more representative of the people of the US rather than a conspiracy-minded subset.
If the Senate was a democratic representation of the will of the US it would not be hard to ratify the treaty.
Fair. Clinton signed it on his last day in office but didn't submit it to the senate for ratification. Seems like he wanted it both ways.
You're probably very right on that, Clinton listened to Kissinger on foreign policy and somebody like Kissinger is very much at risk if the US follows international law.
No one thought the US would get this insane.
> "The American Service-Members' Protection Act, known informally as the Hague Invasion Act[1] [sic] (ASPA, Title 2 of Pub. L. 107–206 (text) (PDF), H.R. 4775, 116 Stat. 820, enacted August 2, 2002) is"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
I dont know, when bush threatened to invade the netherlands over the ICC, that was pretty insane, and in some ways worse than sanctions.
Sure. But no one thought it, or anything like it, would actually happened.
ditches is a strong word here, we change software providers for different tooling all the time
dependency on american corps is a bit weird, when they wont move away from windows just for one presendential term surely? trump will be out in X years. whats the point?
some of these organisations are now more politically aligned than ever questioning their neutrality
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It's actually not called Microsoft 365, but "the Microsoft 365 Copilot app" (not to be confused with Microsoft Copilot (a slop generator with the same logo))
It IS called Microsoft 365
There seems to be no spreadsheet…
No Excel replacement? :/
From openDesk website:
> Create, edit and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations with full support for all major file formats
It's missing from the list of their products though :(
https://www.opendesk.eu/en/product
See the Socument Management section from the link you provided
> Create, edit and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations with full support for all major file formats.
Take a look at the Document Management section on that page
> Create, edit and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations with full support for all major file formats.
The document editing portion just uses Collabora which is based on Libreoffice.
The Excel replacement they use is this one: https://www.collaboraonline.com/calc/