Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS

271

ffjfaase about 3 hours ago 117 commentsRead Article on dawo.community

DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

71% Positive

Analyzed from 2458 words in the discussion.

Discussion (117 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

askonomm•about 2 hours ago

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.

Thanemate•about 1 hour ago

> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

It's easy: The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal. Hardware vendors shipping PC's with Windows 11, corporations who went all in to Microsoft's tooling shove Microsoft Teams down your throat because "the company uses it", and the list goes on.

jacquesm•about 1 hour ago

I refuse to use 'teams', it's a pile of garbage and spyware to boot.

askonomm•about 1 hour ago

Well of course I wouldn't expect corporations to know what ethics or human decency is even if it stared them straight into the eyes, but I would expect governments to establish laws and regulations such that the psychopaths wouldn't be able to abuse people to no end.

DrBazza•about 1 hour ago

My pet peeve is changes in 'user agreements' for paid services that add increasing amounts of adverts and tracking, but if you decline, you can't use the service, but the service continues to charge you. For the service they're no longer supplying.

Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose. Decline -> Your subscription will be terminated, no further monies will be debut from your account, are you sure?

rkuodys•about 1 hour ago

I'm more interested in the cases where you buy your phone, for example, and after purchase you are asked to agree with terms and conditions. Money is paid already. If you do not agree, you cannot use the device. Worse still, if 2 days after thre is mandatory update that forces you to agree to new version. If you don't like them, you should be compensated for it, as it is hidden information from you as a buyer.

fc417fc802•about 1 hour ago

I've always viewed those as entirely invalid, at least from the standpoint of the spirit of our various legal systems and cultures. I recognize that any "binding arbitration" bits are enforceable (and an injustice). But the rest of it? Literal make believe. I will do as I please with the hardware that I paid for, its firmware, and any software that it came with. I will actively aid and abet anyone who seeks to reverse engineer same, circumvent associated technical measures, or evade the law while doing so. And all of that is good and virtuous behavior that improves society as far as I'm concerned.

embedding-shape•about 1 hour ago

Remove/changing functionality in a way that the original use case you had for the device, no longer applies, because of a forced software update or user agreement you have to accept, should let people return the hardware regardless of when it was purchased. Bananas that this is still legal for companies to do.

latexr•about 1 hour ago

In addition to being the plot of a Black Mirror Episode¹, Sony also owns a similar patent²

Do you have a link to the specific Microsoft patent you’re referring to?

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

² https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/

StLCylone•about 1 hour ago

I feel compelled to mention Oracle at this point. Isnt their entire business model suing their customers?

MonkeyClub•about 2 hours ago

Black Mirror has unwittingly been offering a lot of nice, horrible ideas.

m4tthumphrey•about 1 hour ago

Well I'd like to think Charlie Brooker, like many of us, could clearly say where humanity was heading. Some of the episodes that were considered far fetched 15 years ago are probably considered plausible at best and likely at worst now.

janlaureys•about 1 hour ago

Some episodes are currently being played out live in Ukraine.

throwaway270925•about 1 hour ago

Too many people seem to have taken it as a todo list instead of a warning...

amiga386•about 1 hour ago

I'm sure Black Mirror could offer up a cautionary tale like Don't Create The Torment Nexus

(https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538)

teekert•about 1 hour ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

artisinal•about 1 hour ago

Error! Please drink a verification can.

hashar•about 1 hour ago

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... )

solarkraft•about 2 hours ago

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.

mastermage•about 2 hours ago

This realy would be a great way to foster collaboration within the EU. To create an own independant Ecosystem outside of the microsoft world.

ricardobeat•about 2 hours ago

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-...

lucideer•about 1 hour ago

It's self-hosted on https://code.overheid.nl/ & they mirror a subset of it on Codeberg.

That might still be in violation but I would imagine it's low on Codeberg's radar since they're not making primary contributions there (& if I were DAWO I'd also be interested in limiting direct community agentic contrib).

gagik_co•about 2 hours ago

It’d make the most sense for the Dutch government (or DAWO) to have their own Forgejo instance if the goal is data sovereignty.

edit: looks like this was originally the case and then they moved?

cornedor•about 1 hour ago

They use both. https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK?q=dawo&sort=alphabetically as the official source, and https://codeberg.org/DAWO for the community parts.

utopiah•about 2 hours ago

clearly shows the need for federated forges, where you get to decide on your own rules but you still benefit from interacting with a broader set of collaborators.

amiga386•about 1 hour ago

That's likely to end up Balkanized like the fediverse, where every instance has a list of other instances they refuse to federate with, often because politics or petty drama. Though to be fair to the fediverse, sometimes it's because those other instances are full of child porn and most people just don't want to see that.

It amuses me that Mastodon Central uses corpo-friendly labels for the sites they won't federate with, e.g. (https://mastodon.social/about)

    tsundere.love   Suspended (Hate speech)
    you**.**ve      Suspended (Inappropriate content)

Whereas the more free-wheeling sites, like the ones Mastodon Central blocks, tell it exactly how it is: (https://tsundere.love/about)

    nadeko.pw      CP
    mk.fedcast.ch  Spam
    youjo.love     hosts at least one admitted pedo

poulpy123•about 2 hours ago

That's a recipe for drama as shown with mastodon when they got publicity few years ago

embedding-shape•about 2 hours ago

Yeah, waiting for this too, feels like the final piece of the puzzle. Tracking issue from Codeberg + more general information about the effort around the the ecosystem:

- https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59 ("[FEAT] implement federation")

- https://forgefed.org/

KomoD•about 2 hours ago

And Codeberg also blocks real people from accessing it, for who knows what reason. I just get "Access denied." with no more info.

But they do let me visit blog.codeberg.org

sevenzero•about 2 hours ago

Had that issue with HTTP accessed repo, switching to SSH solved it for me.

NoahZuniga•about 2 hours ago

Their instance is self hosted right, so this doesn't apply I think.

schnebbau•about 2 hours ago

Codeberg are going to have issues in the future when all code is AI generated (except for artisanal code of course, written for the love of the craft but not to achieve anything of merit).

Thanemate•about 1 hour ago

>but not to achieve anything of merit

Educating oneself to provide better quality of work still requires writing code by hand, and by extend is an achievement of merit.

max_streese•about 2 hours ago

Assuming writing code by hand is slower (which I agree with), why can't it still have merit compared to code written via llm harness?

schnebbau•about 1 hour ago

Because no one is going to hire developers who write code by hand, apart from a few niches. For the same reason that no one hires a courier who delivers by horse anymore, or a miller who uses windmills to grind their grain, or a cooper who continues to use wooden staves and iron hoops instead of forming plastic or metal containers, or...

applfanboysbgon•about 1 hour ago

Policies are enacted for current reality, not fantasy futures. If your magical fantasy becomes reality (it won't), they can just... change their policy. Of course, you aren't thinking about practical effects of policies on platforms, only on how it's an insult to your LLM-bro way of life.

schnebbau•about 1 hour ago

> If your magical fantasy becomes reality (it won't)

Keep huffing that copium my friend. I've set an alarm to follow up here in a couple of years.

graemep•about 2 hours ago

Is it on Codeberg? I looked self-hosted to me.

KomoD•about 2 hours ago

https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS says:

> DAWO Core has moved from https://code.overheid.nl to Codeberg to facilitate community collaboration.

galumptuous•about 2 hours ago

Does this mean European governments have or will have an alternative(s) to GitHub as well?

rvz•about 1 hour ago

I predict that Codeberg will soon realize that they have no choice but to loosen and allow AI generated code.

There is no point in being on the extreme end about banning any code generated by AI.

Regardless, there is AI generated code in many repositories on Codeberg anyway.

tcfhgj•about 1 hour ago

AI generated code is allowed on Codeberg, but not if it's mostly ai generated

lucideer•about 1 hour ago

I've seen so much commentary on the apparent strictness & extreme nature of Codeberg's approach & no actual examples of it.

They have a strict policy (which many have rightly pointed out is impossible to fully enforce), & their "enforcement" has mostly relied on good faith contributions to date. They're also accounting for the fact the ToS change came without advance notice for many of their users who were already making active use of agents, hence there remains many AI repos (I have yet to hear of any removals).

To me that seems like the best approach one can hope for - a lax policy is a slippery slope (presuming dissuading AI contrib is your goal), & wouldn't satisfy their legal concerns (hosting code of questionable copyright status), & strict enforcement isn't viable in any case (especially at their scale), so this seems to me to be the best compromise.

teekert•about 1 hour ago

It may be more a measure against explosive growth than being anti-AI in principle.

streetfighter64•about 2 hours ago

Fair note, but I'd avoid the cheap shot "more open". You'll just bring up the old flame wars about whether the MIT-style or GNU-style licenses are more open.

The same applies here, is it really "more open" to allow corporations to profit by removing the openness of your work?

ricardobeat•about 2 hours ago

Point taken, trimmed that. I do take issue with their position but not the place to start a new discussion.

embedding-shape•about 2 hours ago

Did you actually read through that post you linked? You realize not every project that was ever touched by a LLM is being thrown off? Read the "Some early, but informal guidelines" particularly, as you've seemingly missed that.

They're targeting slop and essentially spam, not everything that could possibly have been built by LLMs.

ricardobeat•about 2 hours ago

Quoting from the post:

    > If you see yourself on this list, you don't need to move right away, but
    there might be other places that better fit your needs:

    - Projects written and maintained with heavy use of LLMs

All of the commits I browsed here seem to be LLM-assisted, so these projects are in this category. The policy being fuzzy is in itself a problem - "likely to be tolerated" is not a great policy to have your entire government depend on.

Personally, the refusal on "Projects heavily tied to the LLM ecosystem, e.g. LLM-written tools to ease LLM usage" is enough reason, as that's a good chunk of what I've been working on.

rhamzeh•about 1 hour ago

> "enough reason for me to move out"

And that's not a bad thing. That's why they are communicating, so if you feel that is you and you're uncomfortable about it, you can move out and it's a win win.

Not everything should service all of us, especially not the smaller services. It's OK for places to have their own rules and them being upfront about this is a *good* thing.

embedding-shape•about 1 hour ago

> The policy being fuzzy is in itself a problem

No, the policy being fuzzy is a feature, because they're not 100% against all LLM usage, they're against slop and AI-spam, which is what they're trying to combat.

Laws are fuzzy, and we're doing mostly fine with this, of course there are edge-cases. But that's exactly why laws are fuzzy in the first place.

If you have a "automated software factory" or whatever the vibe-coders are up to today, then yes, Codeberg is probably not for you. But if you sit with a agent TUI in one tab, review things closely and don't just "throw code over the wall" without reviewing it, you have nothing to worry about with hosting code on Codeberg.

wafflemaker•about 2 hours ago

Not OP, but I stand corrected. Thought it was 100% no generated code. Now I know better, thanks! Looks like codeberg aren't as mad as I thought.

docheinestages•about 2 hours ago

Codeberg is trying to solve the right problem with the wrong solution. But hey, it's democratic!

lucideer•about 1 hour ago

I like Codeberg's solution (hard written policy, light good-faith based enforcement), what would you suggest as a better solution?

pards•14 minutes ago

> What DAWO stands for

> DAWO brings public values and technology together. The community pursues five primary goals.

But fails to state what the letters in D.A.W.O. stand for

gregsadetsky•10 minutes ago

"Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid", ie ~government digitally autonomous workplace.

See https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO

_bent•11 minutes ago

digitally autonomous workspace (for the) overheid

vanschelven•about 2 hours ago

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:

https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS

fbn79•22 minutes ago

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.

ritzaco•about 1 hour ago

Workplace is such a confusing overloaded term.

They also have "Mijn Bureau" which I tried out and wrote about here [0] which is the MS Office alternative.

I take it this is the layer below that, an operating system?

But it all looks quite fragmented still from what I can see, especially now that it's also split across GitHub and CodeBerg as well as being split across different organizations, and trying to collaborate with other efforts by other European countries while still remaining distinct.

[0] https://techstackups.com/articles/is-it-feasible-to-self-hos...

[1] https://github.com/MinBZK/mijn-bureau-infra

[2] https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO/src/branch/main/compone...

bialyalibaba•about 2 hours ago

Nixpkgs should reduce package count. Waiting 2 days for unbound CVE patch merge is unbearable.

bouk•about 1 hour ago

You don't have to wait? You just have to compile matter yourself

sneak•22 minutes ago

I’m really curious to see what the answer for MDM and Group Policy is on Linux. The SSO part is mostly figured out, but the reason places use Windows is often manageability.

Is there anyone doing MDM or policy enforcement on Linux other than Google Workspace + chromebooks?

parlortricks•about 2 hours ago

This is great, would love to understand why Nix over Lix or Guix.

TheFuzzball•about 1 hour ago

1. You can run NixOS with Lix (I do)

2. Because Guix is less mature and more, ehm, opinionated, than *ix + nixpkgs

Yizahi•about 1 hour ago

The same Dutch who voted on the eAIDS... ahem, sorry, eIDAS and ADDW car spyware? I'm not particularly excited about our new benevolent OS.

KomoD•about 2 hours ago

Site doesn't work for me.

www.dawo.community took too long to respond.

ndom91•about 2 hours ago

Are you in the US? Hehe

einpoklum•about 2 hours ago

What is it that they need/add above NixOS defaults?

flippingheck•about 1 hour ago

They likely offer at least some of:

* typical deployments

* training/consulting

* compliance with Ditch regulations

* shared infrastructure for custom builds, and CVEs

jimnotgym•about 2 hours ago

To save anyone else I asked Claude

"NixOS is a Linux distribution where your whole system is defined in one configuration file."

I didn't get that from looking at their website...

vustagc•about 2 hours ago

https://meatproxy.me/

jimnotgym•about 1 hour ago

Well what I wrote was not on the homepage of nixos.com, or obvious after a few clicks. Claude summarised it very nicely. I now know I don't need NixOS.

Perhaps the real meatheads are the ones who spam threads with anti-ai memes, rather than looking at the utility of what the ai provided?

russfink•about 2 hours ago

Hopefully the config is a little more descriptive than their README.md

sevenzero•about 2 hours ago

NixOS is also unnecessarily complicated and it's easy for someone that doesn't want to read 1000 pages of documentation to brick your system.

Probably has its uses, tried it twice myself and both times were a lot of struggling.

For me even Arch was easier to configure than Nix.

jimnotgym•about 1 hour ago

I can imagine. Those are often the sort of projects that struggle to put a one line description of what they are on their homepage. I inferred it was an OS, inferred it was Unix adjacent...but no answer on the rest. It could have been BSD or open Solaris based for all I could tell.

teekert•about 1 hour ago

That's the nice part, as an admin you are familiar with the complexity and use it for good. As a user, you never have to see it. (And you can even have some freedom for installing apps using flatpack/snap if needed.)

How would you role out the same config to thousands of Arch systems? Sure Valve does it, but I still think that is a "bolted on top" solution. Bootc could be another option though, but Nix solves reproducibility more elegantly, imho. Nix went back and asked "how can this be done better", where many modern solutions took what was already there.

dminik•about 2 hours ago

Each nixos rebuild creates a snapshot. While I also eventually moved off of nixos, I've yet to get a system that was as stable as it.

chpatrick•about 2 hours ago

The problem with Arch is that configuration is by hand so you have to do it every time. With Nix you configure it once and then you can deploy it anywhere. Also it's pretty much impossible to break since the system is immutable and you can boot to a different revision any time.

sevenzero•about 1 hour ago

I managed to brick my revisions/snapshots before

rantingdemon•about 1 hour ago

Yeah I also wonder about going for NixOS for this. For servers maybe, but for user focussed desktops? The support requirements will be complicated.

TitaRusell•about 2 hours ago

The history of the Netherlands is all about making things unnecessarily complicated.

When lesser nations rally around the flag and elect dictators we have meetings and consultations.

brnt•about 1 hour ago

Elk nadeel heb se voordeel.

Ylpertnodi•about 1 hour ago

Literally.