Bonum Certa Men Certa

How Denmark Avoids a “Scientology Cult” in IT

"37 letters with exactly the same words. Some of the senders didn't even care to remove the 'Type company name here' text.
"Simular letters has been circulating in Denmark as an e-mail from the Danish MD Jørgen Bardenfleth to customers and business partners.
"I call it fraud, cheating and disgusting. If I wasn't anti-Microsoft before, I am now. Disgusting !"

--Leif Lodahl



Summary: The rather secret story of migrations to Free software and ODF in Danish municipalities

A government delegate once compared Microsoft's methods to “Scientology cult” because along with its partners it is hunting down resistance to Microsoft products.



We have already seen Microsoft getting 'disobedient' CIOs fired/ousted, which is only to be expected from a company that endorses bribing people and using an "insider friend"/"fox". A lot of people still think of Microsoft as an innocent and professional company, but that's because they never encountered the wrath one does when getting on Microsoft's "wrong side" [1, 2] (or "Wong" side).

OSOR has just published this report which is encouraging news for ODF.

Representatives from three European member states, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands, took part in the second Open Document Format (ODF) interoperability workshop held in the Italian town of Orvieto at the beginning of this month.

Fabio Pistella, president of Italy's Center for ICT in Public Administrations (CNIPA), in his opening address told the attendees of the workshop that Italy is about to start a three-year promotion campaign on open source software, writes Roberto Gallopini, one of the organisers of the ODF workshop on his web blog.


OSOR has another new report about migration to ODF and Free software in Denmark (also here):

The municipality announced on 6 November 2009 that, as from the next week, it will start to use OpenOffice, alongside its proprietary alternative. However, the municipality plans to fully move to OpenOffice eventually.

Rødovre has installed OpenOffice on seven hundred desktop PCs.

The municipality's move to OpenOffice was announced at the annual OpenOffice conference 'OOoCon 2009' which took place in Orvieto, Italy, from 3 to 6 November 2009. At the conference, Leif Lodahl, a volunteer project manager for the Danish OpenOffice project, gave a presentation on the integration of existing document management tools with OpenOffice: "Moving to OpenOffice improves control over the documents and allows the municipality to automatically convert relevant documents to PDF."


Microsoft will not let this be. It never does, as Russian schools teach us.

“Microsoft will not let this be. It never does, as Russian schools teach us.”One of our readers from around this region writes: "Rødovre, Denmark, just west of Copenhagen, has kept secret its deployment of OOo on 700 machines until recently, to avoid interference from Microsoft. Over in Lyngby-Tarbæk, which has already made a switch to OOo, Microsoft is trying to get key municipal staff fired, a tactic which has been used with success elsewhere by finding weak-willed or easily "influenced" bureaucrats.

"Rødovre currently has OOo deployed parallel to Microsoft Office, an option that many are apparently unaware of being able to do. That allows the legacy software to be phased out gradually and smoothly."

Regarding an interference, worth including here is the Turku incident (cited in this Comes vs Microsoft exhibit along with other places in Finland and Scandinavia in general).

Our reader continues: "Underneath the facade of desktop software is a fight for control over the information flow and, by extension, the work flow and thus governance of the population. Rødovre is still limited by a proprietary document management system, but like other municipalities will publish open source extensions to OOo that work with that document management system. The fight to get Rødovre's governance out from under the absolute control of an outside, foreign interest is by definition a fight for local, if not also national, sovereignty. Sedition using backstabbing over smiles and beer is no less sedition through other means.

"There are good, FOSS-based document management systems in wide use already around the world, including but not limited to these:



"To paraphrase a point in the argument, a school does buy a text book when it does meet the educational requirements and especially when it is also cheaper than one that doesn't.

"It's not Microsoft fighting for a contract, it's Microsoft fighting to gain or retain control over the governance mechanism -- against the local, national and EU governments."

It may also be about gateways to and formats for accessing information, which is why Microsoft goes crazy over Google.

To say more about Denmark, there are the banking issues that are rarely talked about. In light of the Bing failure [1, 2], we also happen to learn that "it is an example that the problems exist even today, as they have at the beginning. The hole in Bing is about the same as last year's Danske Bank (DB) catastrophe. It was actually a consortium of banks, but we'll call it DB, who fell victim to Microsoft Sharepoint's security. DB's business and individual customers lost an inestimable amount of money by having inaccessible or pillagable online accounts. AFAIK the amount these customers lost has not been published it is so big."

We would like to finish with a somewhat mystifying new press release. Watch what it says there at the end:

Product highlights include new visual mapping of relational data sources; new XQuery code refactoring functionality; increased support for several EDI data formats; SOAP 1.2 support; and new integrated data sources including ZIP, Java™ Archive (JAR), Microsoft Open Office and OpenDocument.


Does Microsoft own OpenOffice.org and ODF now? Or is this an erroneous reference to Office 'Open' XML, which is a name Microsoft chose in order to confuse?

Related posts:



Danish tower
Keep Denmark free

Recent Techrights' Posts

Changing One's Name Won't Change One's Past
People who have earned a bad reputation are not magically "entitled" to reset
People Who Assault Women Are Not Victims of "Distress"
It seems like an American tradition. In a country with almost 50 presidents, not even one was a female.
Adoption of Gemini Protocol Still Growing
Gemini Protocol is being obscured by the media - it doesn't help that Google 'hijacked' the word "Gemini" - but people still manage to find out about it, download a client, and use it
Brett Wilson LLP "Takes it Personal" (Character Assassination, Not Professionalism). Everybody Can See That.
On behalf of violent men
Pissing Contests and Pissing Off Everyone
people who came from Microsoft are trying to vex and divide the community
Microsoft Repeats the Mistakes Made by the EPO After We Exposed a Major Microsoft/EPO Scandal 10 Years Ago
That scandal was all over the media, not just in English
 
Ubuntu is Becoming GAFAM-Like
What does that say about Canonical and Ubuntu?
Slopfarms Which Take Real Articles About GNU/Linux and Turn Them Into Copycats Which Are False
Even before the LLM hype those were quite common
The Firm That Picks on Techrights is Accustomed to Working With Criminals
Techrights never did anything illegal. So why is it being picked on by people who work with criminals?
Microsoft Said the Mass Layoffs Were for "Investment" in "AI", But It's Also Laying Off the "AI" and "Copilot" Staff
Months ago we showed many so-called "AI" people were getting the boot and this time it's the same
DryDeadFish is Dead, Long Live DryDeadFish
We kept checking, hoping it can recover from some temporary technical issue
For Quite Some Time Already Microsoft Attracts Crackpots, Scams, and More
Occasionally we talk about the situation at IBM as there are many parallels
Links 14/07/2025: Chatbots Broken Again, McHire LLM Shows Limits of the Hype
Links for the day
Slashdot Media Turned Linux Journal Into a Slopfarm and Now Slashdot Actively Promotes Anti-Linux Slopfarms
Yes, "no-nonsense" apparently means actual nonsense
Links 14/07/2025: Arresting Photographers, Threats to Revoke US Citizenship Over Criticism
Links for the day
More EPO Leaks on the Way
We hope that Mr. Rowan will actually try to refute what we say and show, not merely point the finger at the messengers
Decommodification is a Corporate Strategy Against Communities
systemd is led by Microsoft and hosted by Microsoft
copyleft.org 'Hijacked' by the People Who Attack the Person Who Created Copyleft
So far there's nothing "tasteless" in copyleft.org, but that can change at any time in the future
Asking People to Take Down Articles and Videos Only Makes These More Popular and "Viral"
If you do something bad, one of the worst things you can possibly do it try to silence those who speak about it
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, July 13, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, July 13, 2025
Two-Thirds Towards FSF Goal, Richard Stallman to Give Talks in Europe
There are 67 left before reaching the target
Gemini Links 14/07/2025: Politicised Tech and "Leaving GitHub"
Links for the day
The Demise of LLMs
We've just checked BetaNews again. They've dropped all the slop and went back to human authors.
Gemini Links 13/07/2025: Sonpo Museum of Art and FCEUX
Links for the day
Links 13/07/2025: UnitedHealth's Censorship Campaign, Australia Wary of China
Links for the day
Firing Away With Nonsense
Or fighting fire with fire
Links 13/07/2025: Climate Crisis, GAFAM Poisoning the Water
Links for the day
Turns Out LLMs for Code Don't Save Time and Don't Improve Quality
Neither legal nor useful
The Microsofters Will Have an Obligation to Compensate Us
This story isn't just about Microsoft. It's also about corruption, there are many women victims, there is abject "abuse of process", and many more scandals to be illuminated in years to come.
Reproducing at the EPO Instead of Producing Monopolies for Foreign Monopolies With Their Price-Fixing Cartels
Does the EPO recognise the need of well-educated Europeans to bear kids?
Valnet Inc. Dominates Real (Not LLM Slop) GNU/Linux Coverage in 2025
And likely in prior years, too
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Fund Raiser Goes on
Later this month we'll expose another OSI scandal
EPO Staff Representatives Issue a Warning About Staff's Health and Inadequate Care
Even the EPO's own stakeholders (money sources) are openly protesting against what the EPO became
Links 13/07/2025: Partly Assorted News From Deutsche Welle and CBC
Links for the day
Gemini Links 13/07/2025: Board Games and Battle Styles
Gemini Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, July 12, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, July 12, 2025
Plunder at the Second-Largest Institution in Europe
cuts, neglect, health problems, even early deaths
Links 12/07/2025: Political Developments, Attack on Opposition, Climate Actions
Links for the day
Gemini Links 12/07/2025: Melodic Musings and Small Web July
Links for the day
Links 12/07/2025: Jail in China for Homoerotica, South Korea Discriminates Against Old Workers
Links for the day
If Only Everything Was Rewritten in Rust, We'd Have No More Security Issues?
Nope.
Links 12/07/2025: Birdwatching and Fake/Misleading Wall Street 'Valuation' Figures
Links for the day
Gemini Links 12/07/2025: How to Avoid Writing, Apps for Android
Links for the day
Using SLAPPs to Cover Up Sexual Abuse and Strangulation
The exact same legal team of the Serial Strangler from Microsoft and Garrett already has a history fighting against "metoo"
EPO Staff Committee on Harassment in the Workplace
slides
Adding the Voice of Writers to UK SLAPP Reform
The journey to repair antiquated (monarchy era) laws will likely be long
EPO Takes More Money From Staff for Speculation (Pensions), Actuarial Study Explains the Impact
"The key change in this year’s Actuarial Study, due to cascading the new “risk appetite” from the financial study, is a significant increase of the total pension contribution rate of 5.7 percentage points, up to a total of 37.8%. This is driven by an unprecedented decrease in the discount rate of 105 bps down to 2.2%."
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, July 11, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, July 11, 2025