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Dear Reader,

AI sure has been dominating the tech news. I guess I should admit, the fact that AI insiders are predicting that this technology will soon destroy humanity is probably news worth covering. But is it the only news? One AI giant says something, and all the rest have to weigh in. Then every politician has to have an opinion on the opinions of the AI giants. Sometimes I wonder how many of these news stories about AI are generated by AI, then read by another AI that generates the next news story.

I've been longing for one of those old classic stories I used to love to report on – open source success in the ongoing battle against proprietary software and vendor lock in. Those stories are still out there – they just get less coverage. However, the recent tariff threats and sabre rattling by the USA has caused a new awareness in Europe that it might be wise to seek alternatives to the proprietary tools controlled by US-based tech companies. This is my segue to say I actually did find one good story in the news that checked the box for open source ascendance.

The Swiss federal government has launched a pilot program to move 3,000 workstations from Microsoft's proprietary Office 365 office suite to an open source equivalent. More migration will come later if the pilot is successful. In all, the Swiss government operates around 54,000 workstations. According to the story in It's FOSS [1], Matthias Sturmer, Applied Sciences professor at Bern University, gave the following reasons for wanting to get away from Microsoft:

• risk of foreign access. US cloud legislation could expose Swiss government data to foreign authorities.
• risk to service continuity, as dependency on a single foreign vendor creates operational risk.
• escalating costs, as proprietary licensing fees are rising with no Swiss leverage.

One of the more interesting trends captured in his story is the rise of openDesk [2], a collaboration platform offering integration and support for a collection of well known open source tools. OpenDesk uses Collabora (basically, a web-based version of LibreOffice) for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. The suite also provides cloud storage with Nextcloud; email, calendar, and contacts with openXchange; instant messaging with Element; video telephony with Jitsi; and more. All these projects have a separate life, of course, but the openDesk team integrates them into a unified solution that can operate locally or in the cloud.

OpenDesk is a fork of an earlier project developed by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior and is currently maintained by Germany's Center for Digital Sovereignty in Public Administration. The French government also collaborated on the project.

I get that some people don't want the headache of learning a new operating system, but when it comes to office tools like a word processor or spreadsheet, I have always wondered why anyone would pay money for Microsoft products when they could be using free and functionally equivalent open source tools for a fraction of the cost. I hope the Swiss pilot will lead to further adoption in Europe, and maybe, new attention to the powerful tools available right now in the open source space.

Joe Casad, Editor in Chief