The state of Schleswig-Holstein is consistently relying on open source

I'm a Windows/macOS developer, but I strongly feel that all national governments need to convert to Linux, for strategic sovereignty. I'm sure Microsoft, under orders from the U.S. government, could disable all computers in any country or organization, at the flick of a switch.

Imagine how Open Source Software could improve if a consortium of nations put their money and resources into commissioning bug fixes and enhancements, which would be of collective benefit.

Apart from a few niche cases, the needs of most government bureaucracies would be well served by currently available OSS word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and graphics software.

indeed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44336915 - Microsoft suspended the email account of an ICC prosecutor at The Hague

then https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45837342 - ICC ditches Microsoft 365 for openDesk

Yup.

Microsoft pledged not to intervene like that again, reclassifying its legal interpretation of its own services, and added language to its contracts to guarantee that it would fight future US attempts to do so:

https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...

When the US manages to force Microsoft to do something, it responds by trying to protect itself from the same scenario in the future. Because it wants profits. The ICC leaving Microsoft is the last thing Microsoft wanted.

oh, pinky promise? sure, let's keep sovereignty at stake then, all good.

Lengthy contracts between nation-states and corporations, developed and reviewed by teams of lawyers, and enforced by judges, are not exactly "pinky promises."

They will become pinky promises, once Microsoft gets ordered to do something by orange man or some three letters. There isn't really anything Microsoft can do about that, unless they decide to move headquarters and lots of employees out of the US. It basically doesn't matter what they have in contracts, as US law or just political power with access to enforce that power trumps (ha) any contracts they can sign.

> There isn't really anything Microsoft can do about that, unless they decide to move headquarters and lots of employees out of the US.

Actually there is, that's what the entire point of the sovereign clouds are. They reside physically in Europe, with legal control by Europeans, and European employees that can't be bossed around by the US. If the US orders Amazon to retrieve data from S3 servers located in a European sovereign cloud, Amazon employees in the US don't have the technical capability to do so, and the European data center employees are legally bound not to.