Dutch government builds Microsoft alternative on NixOS
Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS
The DAWO community is an open initiative where government, industry, and society collaborate on a digitally autonomous workplace for the Dutch government. It focuses on digital autonomy, security, and verifiability, using replaceable building blocks for AI, operating systems (DAWO-NixOS), cloud, and collaboration software. The project aims to reduce dependency on proprietary vendors like Microsoft by leveraging open, inspectable components.
Not one single product, but separate building blocks that work together. Every part can be inspected and replaced.
- askonomm
Any move away from the abusive big tech that exists in USA is a good move in my book. Microsoft just recently made a new patent where they will monitor you via camera and microphone to block your program/game to show you ads, and per ads viewed, you then earn credit to be able to use your program/game. It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
- hashar
France government has announced NixOS based systems some months ago:
- https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix a hardened/secured os
- https://github.com/cloud-gouv/bureautix-example an example to use securix to build an office deployment (with some packages https://github.com/cloud-gouv/bureautix-example/blob/main/co... )
- Kuyawa
I didn't know you could assign '#' to an alias, so here we go:
$ alias '#'='dsh --profile headless'
- solarkraft
Awesome! I believe NixOS is perfect for systems you just want to work and track reproducibly, like appliances (which a lot of server software is supposed to be). I’m glad people smarter than me are actually able to realize its advantages =)
In the same space, also check out openDesk initiated by the German Government (https://www.opendesk.eu/en) and La Suite by the French one (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/).
AFAIK, there has been some collaboration with the German government on La Suite, not sure about the others.
- ricardobeat
A note to the developers in the project, if anyone is reading: your repositories are in violation of the new Codeberg policy that forbids AI-generated code [1].
[1] https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
- fbn79
The highest problem is the office suite. If you think Libreoffice/Collabora can replace Microsoft 365 without friction the project could be a success. Honestly I do not think so as of today.
- FuriouslyAdrift
The actual code repository: https://codeberg.org/DAWO/DAWO-Core
- vanschelven
For a second I was worried that the actual code behind this was dead in the water ("3 months ago") but it's just one more click away:
- frzen
Do we even need to have a suite of tools for users to create spreadsheets, paste images into them, save them as a PDF, download to their local machine, sync to sharepoint, change permissions to include everyone in the entire universe to be able to see the file, email the link to another human in the company who opens it, uses a PDF editor to copy paste it back into excel, barely scratch the surface of tools within Excel to sum a column, reply back in a password protected word doc saying looks good to me.
I would much prefer to be using something like NixOS and not be depending on Microsoft etc but I can't imagine what the stack will look like if we don't revolutionise the work. Sensitivity labels, DLP, etc. are relics of people treating information on computers as if they are physical documents, and I can't see how I will have been paying for BP/E3/E5 licenses for users and then suddenly start to argue we don't need those features anymore after spending so long insisting users need to use them.
- Sha1rholder
So, could this push more software to publish to the official Nixpkgs?