GoKawiil
Tech News
The European Commission rolled out a European-built video conferencing tool meant to serve as a sovereign alternative to Microsoft Teams, reducing reliance on US software. According to a report, internal staff reactions have been harshly negative, with one employee reportedly calling the tool 'absolute sh*t'.
The Netherlands is developing DAWO (Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid), a sovereign IT ecosystem built on NixOS, a Linux distribution with roots in Dutch-created Nix package-manager technology. The project aims to supply government and public institutions with a homegrown operating system, office applications, cloud services and management tools as alternatives to US software. Early pilot deployments of DAWO have already launched in private and local settings, with plans to expand across Dutch institutions.
Mozilla's head of Firefox, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo (referred to as Varma in the interview), said the company is seeing increased interest from enterprises and users in Europe and Asia who want browsers not controlled by any single government. He attributed this partly to Firefox's open-source nature and Mozilla's lack of extensive corporate infrastructure elsewhere. He also discussed Mozilla's approach to AI features, noting AI usage in browsers remains a small fraction of overall browser usage compared to billions of daily browser users.
The European Commission has proposed requiring data centers with over 500 kW capacity to disclose their energy and water usage through a standardized rating system, similar to appliance energy labels. The rules would not cap power or water consumption but would require operators to report water use relative to local water stress and disclose whether they recycle waste heat back into local energy systems.
Switzerland's Federal Chancellery and its Armed Forces Cyber Command are separately moving away from Microsoft 365 toward openDesk, a German-built open-source workplace suite covering email, calendars, documents and video conferencing. The Chancellery plans to run openDesk alongside Microsoft 365 for about 3,000 of 47,000 federal employees by the end of 2027, at an estimated cost of 9 million Swiss francs, while the military is proceeding faster on sensitive systems.
Switzerland's Federal Chancellery is spending 9 million Swiss francs to move 3,000 government workstations off Microsoft 365 tools like Outlook and Teams, adopting the open-source openDesk suite instead. The decision follows a successful pilot program called PoC BOSS, which tested the software with 172 federal employees who found it workable for standard office tasks, though large-scale video conferencing showed some limitations. The rollout is planned to be complete by the end of 2027, with potential to expand further across the federal workforce.
The Swiss Federal Chancellery is spending CHF 9 million to test the openDesk open-source suite as a replacement for Microsoft 365 across 3,000 federal employees, roughly 7% of the workforce, with migration targeted for completion by end of 2027. The pilot follows a proof-of-concept with 172 employees that rated document editing and email positively but flagged limitations in large-scale video conferencing, and it will run alongside Microsoft 365 rather than replace it immediately.
Germany has budgeted €108 million over four years to fund the eleventh version of its Government Site Builder, a PHP-based content management system already used by more than 80 federal agencies to run over 250 websites. The spending splits into €26.88 million for development, €73.2 million for migration and relaunch, and €8 million for operations. The author contrasts this with the roughly $730,000 the PHP Foundation received in total contributions in 2025.
The open Jabber/XMPP protocol is celebrating a quarter-century of existence, having been designed from the start as a federated, non-proprietary alternative to closed messaging platforms. The piece uses this anniversary to argue that digital services should be treated as infrastructure owned collectively, rather than left to corporate or single-nation control.