I'm working for the XWiki and CryptPad projects, which are integrated in openDesk. Here are a couple links / infos that can be interesting to understand the context of openDesk.
The openDesk project comes initially from an initiative of the Ministry of Interior of Germany in 2021, to build the alternative to Office 365. The project was progressively transferred in 2025 to a state-owned organization, the ZenDis (https://zendis.de), which oversees the global development of openDesk.
The source code is mainly available on https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk, where you will find mirrors of every project which is bundled into openDesk (Nextcloud, Collabora, Element, Univention, XWiki, Jitsi, OpenXchange, CryptPad, OpenProject, …)
There was also a couple public presentations about openDesk at FOSDEM during the past years :
* In 2024 : https://archive.fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3...
* In 2025 : https://archive.fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5...
>CryptPad was selected to join the German "Sovereign Workplace" project, now called openDesk.
https://blog.cryptpad.org/2025/01/28/CryptPad-Funding-Status...
Many more details in this blog post from XWiki: https://xwiki.com/en/Blog/XWiki-CryptPad-knowledge-managemen...
Also, in case you missed that: StackIt is the AWS / G Cloud competitor by LIDL: https://www.stackit.de/en/ It's the basebone for their app strategy with 100 mio+ client installs and about 500k employees.
https://www.opendesk.eu/en/product#document-management ("Collabora Online powers openDesk with a robust office suite designed for efficient teamwork and secure document editing.")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collabora_Online ("Collabora Online (often abbreviated as COOL) is an open-source online office suite developed by Collabora, based on LibreOffice Online, the web-based edition of the LibreOffice office suite.")
The world order at the highest level relies on the nations themselves to behave, especially the largest ones because nobody has the practical power to enforce the decisions of the court in case defendants are in places where the court is not recognized. To USA not recognizing the court has always shown that they don't care about the crimes they commit.
I'd nitpick the "don't care" part. To me, it's that they do care precisely because they know they are guilty. I think Trump is guilty for the boats being shot. Obama guilty for the drone strikes. W guilty for well, the whole shit show. Didn't really pay attention to Biden, but I'd assume drone strikes continued there too. From Clinton on back, I admit I just wasn't paying attention to those kinds of issues.
Only a year after Clinton signed the statute 9/11 was perpetrated. I can’t imagine any of the most powerful countries would have ratified it if they were in the midst of prosecuting a war.
Since then the US has softened on the ICC as it benefits them to maintain a relationship but, at this point why sign other than for ideological reasons.
And even if there was an intent to join there would likely be stipulations from the US. And it would have to pass the divided senate, after which it would likely go to the Supreme Court who with the current bench would certainly strike it down, meaning a constitutional amendment would be needed. It’s less feasible to join now than it ever has been unfortunately.
But what really surprised me are statements like this in the README:
” Nextcloud Enterprise: openDesk uses the Nextcloud Enterprise to the build Nextcloud container image for oD EE. The Nextcloud EE codebase might contain EE exclusive (longterm support) security patches, plus the Guard app, that is not publicly available, while it is AGPL-3.0 licensed.
And
COOL Controller container image and Helm chart: Source code and chart are using Mozilla Public License Version 2.0, but the source code is not public. It is provided to customers upon request. ”
This, according with other paragraphs describing percentages of free and non-free code in certain components really makes me wonder…
GPL family mandates source code access to people who can access to the software itself. So as long as ICC gets the source code of the NextCloud EE and the Guard app, the GPL is fulfilled.
This is how RedHat operates, and is not a violation of GPL.
Also, this is how you can build a business around GPL. You only have to provide source code to people who buys your software, or you can sell support to it.
Another example: Rock Solid curl [0].
Moves like this hearten me as for certain lawyers the formats and standards they now will be expected to follow has just shifted, towards open source no less.
Does anyone have any experience using it?
EDIT: to be clear, I'm all for open source software, and for more options to tools from big tech firms.
[1] https://www.opendesk.eu/en/roadmap
[2] https://www.opendesk.eu/en/blog/open-source-software-trust
openDesk is solid, legit and serious.
Open source is a requirement. As such, money doesn't go to a startup building proprietary software that get bought a few years later by a big tech company and then all the investment is lost. They audit and check that licenses are open source and that the dependencies have compatible licenses.
It's publicly funded, by Germany* (for their needs, but it will grow larger than them). Their strategy is to give money to established European open source software companies so they improve their software in areas that matter to them, including integration features (user management, for instance, or file / event sharing with other software, many things) as well as accessibility. They take all these pieces of software and build a coherent (with a common theme / look & feel), turn-key, feature-rich suite. This strategic decision that has its drawbacks allows to get something fast with what exists today.
I'm not sure communication and the business strategy is all figured out / polished yet, but with the high profile institutions adopting it, it will come. Each involved companies wants this to succeed too.
I think this is huge. I'm quite enthusiastic. Software might not be perfect but with the potential momentum this thing has, it could improve fast, and each piece of open source software that is part of this as well along the way.
* see also caubin's comment
https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk
They have some real users too. I know of some out of my head. According to ChatGPT:
- Robert Koch Institute (RKI) – entered a contract on 11 June 2025 to use openDesk as the technical basis for the “Agora” platform for public‑health authorities.
- BWI GmbH – the IT infrastructure provider for the German armed forces (Bundeswehr); signed a framework contract for openDesk.
- Bundesamt für Seeschifffahrt und Hydrographie – also mentioned as an early adopter of openDesk.
- Föderale IT‑Kooperation (FITKO) – listed as a user in the EU OSS Catalogue entry for openDesk.
I think I read that some German states use the software too.
You never know what will happen in the long run but the solution will probably be maintained for some time given it's backing by the federal government of Germany.
Wow - I was just thinking this would be good. Here in the UK Microsoft are slowly taking over healthcare with their terrible Dynamics 365 platform, and some competition would be really nice.
"IMPOSING SANCTIONS ON THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT" (white house, feb 2025) https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/impo...
Microsoft admits in French court it can't keep EU data safe from US authorities (jul 2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45822902
Snowden leaked that fact before Microsoft made the admission. But it's good that it's coming from them officially nonetheless.
but, your over all picture is still, sadly correct.
Could MS create a new EU based company in which it just owns shares ?
Or is the US cloud act so wide that they can demand data from all the companies a us based company has equity in?
However I believe the rates in the end were too high to win notable contracts, but I haven't followed along in a while.
https://www.heise.de/news/Digitale-Souveraenitaet-Microsoft-...
https://t3n.de/news/t-systems-sovereign-cloud-google-verwalt...
It is not a huge amount of protection though. I mean we've already established that selling to 'terrorists' can be sanctioned even when selling through an intermediary. So what's stopping the US from ordering Microsoft to stop selling licenses to the ICC?
And then we've not touched on who is in control of the closed source of the many proprietary applications.
That would be a seperate company, plus if its licensing tech from MS then it's still vulnerable to supply chain attacks.
The ICC was applauded in the US in the when it went after Russia but when it goes after Israel it is sanctioned. It unfortunately hard to be impartial, like the ICC is, when it comes to international war crimes. The big players want you to play towards their favourites and only hold their enemies accountable.
The US is also sanctioning Palestinian human rights groups, and kicking them off of US platforms like YouTube, because they make Israel look bad: https://theintercept.com/2025/11/04/youtube-google-israel-pa...
Microsoft has to follow US law. If it believes an order has been issued unlawfully, it—and everyone who works there who follows the order—has a civic duty to oppose the order in court.
There's an EU law, 'blocking statue' which also means that contracts can't be broken with reference sanctions even if the contracts themselves say they can be, and the services must be provided anyway.
This isn't GDPR type stuff. This is a path to infinite fines. Ending up jail for years is also a distinct possibility if you help people access their data, since spying on these institutions is actually treated as espionage. We recently passed a law here in Sweden forbidding espionage against international organizations in which Sweden is part.
Or rather, stealing control from their customers computers is already leaving politics mess up with the customers.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Bavaria-wants-to-move-to-Micros...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(was submitted to HN 3 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45797515)
Especially since USA, home country of Microsoft corporation, is exhibiting military junta techniques.
USA is killing citizens of foreign countries, weekly via the "U.S. military conducting missile strikes against boats in the Caribbean and Pacific claiming they are shipping drugs".
These non-military victims, citizens, being killed intentionally are a violation of human rights.
These people are members of international drug trafficking cartels that are highly armed and organized and kill thousands of people directly (and tens of thousands indirectly) every year. They are military combatants actively waging war against the US, and this is self-defense.
The US has been waiting for the host countries of these cartels to stop them for decades now, at the cost of millions of lives. To defend their behavior and claim that the US shouldn't defend its own citizens from foreign military powers is absolutely disgusting.
That is false. They're civilian. They are not proven to be "foreign military powers".
And in the case I'm misunderstanding what is written, above, perhaps this is a semantics issue?
I'd suggest perhaps "militarized" ..
I agree the direct/indirect death is true, deriving from these peoples' behavior. That in and of itself does not make them a military, but certainly a threat. And legally there is a due-process for handling that threat - missile strikes are not legal, here.
And there are lots of threats, with many ways that are appropriate to handle. For example, lots of people kill lots of other people, too - e.g. Trump killed 400,000 of us in his first term (mis-led us around COVID risks / mitigation), and has killed 600,000 foreigners in his second term (USAID sudden shut-down w/o replacement), that makes a MILLION DEAD ...
... given that, does this mean Trump deserves to be physically attacked by our military's missile command? I'd say "no, he should face legal action for his predictably hazardous mis-leadership."
- https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/11/new-revelations...
- https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary...
==> "As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children."
OpenDesk – a flexible all-in-one office suite for the public sector - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45838239 - Nov 2025 (19 comments)
SO I expect ICC would find other people, e.g. Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, who are helping to commit these areguably war-crimes in the Pacific and Caribbean seas, the missile strikes against civilian non-US vessels.
I hope it sticks, but I'm not holding my breath.
USA has been very hostile to the ICC under trump, but its not exactly a huge shift, bush was also incredibly hostile. It seems borderline incompetent to use a microsoft cloud offering given the political situation.
Not to mention given the type of work they do, seems like hosting stuff off site at all is a bad plan.
Microsoft O365 Business Premium per person is 22 USD per month so total per year is ~200k USD (online price, I imagine they can negotiate a bit for that amount of people).
Their job is to investigate war criminal despite the usa trying to block them. Its not out of the question that nsa/cia/etc would use their ties at microsoft to try and get an advanced peek at the prosecution's case.
Yes all this is expensive. Their mission is not a cheap one. Doing it right costs money.
P.s. initially i mistead and got a laugh out of the idea of wikipedia operating a detention center.
The startup I used to work at was exclusively on OSX + GoogleDocs, when we were small, but as we grew (and especially when the Finance team grew) more and more employees found a need for the MS Office Suite as well as apps that only run on Windows, so they started rolling out Windows VM's and then full Windows machines.
The OS, office package, email (server and client), calendar, cloud & backup, BI, etc. all aligned work almost seamlessly with each other (compared to the alternatives for sure).
Nothing on the market comes close and that is the reason they are worth trillions, not because they use closed formats.
Office sucks?: "Man Office sucks these days."
The "weird" alternative you expended political capital to put everyone on works slightly differently or lacks a feature out of the box?: "What were you thinking?!"
From those doing the paperwork with Microsoft procurement for Dutch government I learned there have been legal disputes going on for years about what even constitutes "telemetry". That was a decade ago, and even then there was push to move away from Microsoft in the government. Toward open source, or even Oracle.
I suppose that with the Dutch being Dutch all the lobbying M$ needed was suggesting a discount.
Microsoft offered what basically amounted to "IT in a box." You got identity, email/groupware, an office suite, and an OS that ran on just about any IBM compatible PC and your own servers. You paid for the license, and then you controlled and hosted it after that. Microsoft was content to let you do whatever the hell you wanted with their software, and stuck to their promise to not break shit (backward compatibility for Win32).
That everything is now cloud hosted and stuffed with telemetry was a big rug pull, but it's not like everyone could just up and migrate to something else (and what else, for that matter, there's not much out there that matches). It was literally just this year that on-prem exchange support ended for the one-time purchase license, but even then on-prem is still available via subscription.
Microsoft gave every incentive in the world to get enterprises to stick with their stack, and it worked, so it's no wonder people are just now starting to panic a little and look for alternatives.
Public institutions in Europe, in my experience, often have a confusing insistence on using Microsoft cloud products. Universities heavily push Office 365 and Teams, often trying to demand that faculty use them, while faculty continue to use alternatives as much as possible in order to actually work effectively. During the pandemic, the only online conferences I attended that insisted on running via Teams, against all reason, were run by a UK public institution, and they had as many embarrassing technical problems as might be expected.
This is despite Microsoft's cloud services being generally designed for businesses and often poorly suited for public institutions, especially universities. The services are fundamentally built with the assumption that work will primarily take place within a single organization, with clearly defined employees. European research collaborations constantly seem to be hobbled by needing to use hacks around this assumption, but the inexplicable importance of using Microsoft seems to outweigh these problems. In the most ridiculous case, a conference online during the pandemic asked everyone during registration to please not register using their university email address, but to use a personal one not associated with any Office 365 account, because they had no way of allowing access to Teams if the email address was managed by Microsoft at a different university. Yet still the importance of using Teams was paramount to the organizers.
I have had no clear explanation of why using Microsoft services is so important, despite them being so poorly suited to the institutions, so opposed (and often just not used) by many of the actual users, and arguably being used in ways that they are not really intended to be used. I've had some people claim it is necessary for GDPR compliance, despite the GDPR compliance of any US company being on shaky ground. Microsoft itself has described what seem like rather extensive contingency plans around US-enforced GDPR violations or requirements for service cutoffs (there is a blog post somewhere), but these must also imply a fear that such things could actually happen (and, of course, actually did happen with the ICC). It all seems rather strange.
There used to be this quaint idea of rule of law and things like that. We can always argue that governments were happy to get dirty and occasionally illegal, and they certainly were. But a) it was universally seen as a bad thing, and b) no country would have done it so blatantly and openly. Perversely, this narrative was important to advance the US’ interests because it opened opportunities for American companies to go deep into foreign administrations. Which they did.
So yeah, the clock ticked and now we’re in a new and exciting era for geopolitics and who knows what system will prevail in the end. What is certain is that the US abdicated their leadership.
> USA has been very hostile to the ICC under trump, but its not exactly a huge shift, bush was also incredibly hostile. It seems borderline incompetent to use a microsoft cloud offering given the political situation.
There is a difference between hostility as in "we won’t take part and won’t cooperate in any way" and "we’re also going to pressure private companies to steal your stuff". The ICC is also full of NATO countries and allies so any form of hostility has to be calibrated to keep them on your side. If you care about alliances, that is.
> Not to mention given the type of work they do, seems like hosting stuff off site at all is a bad plan.
Indeed. To be fair, it seems like a bad plan for most large companies with anything that looks like industrial secrets, let alone a government or such a supra-national organisation.
In fact John Yoo, most famous for authoring the "Torture Memos" for Dubya over 20 years ago, has been perhaps the most prominent legal thinker arguing in favor of the actions Trump's taken against the ICC:
What can the incoming Trump administration do? It could impose severe sanctions on the ICC judges and its prosecutor, Karim Ahmad Khan, who engineered this debacle, by blocking their ability to transact business through our banking system, for example. It could threaten severe sanctions against any nation that arrested Netanyahu or Gallant pursuant to the ICC warrants. It could also display its contempt for the ICC by inviting the Israeli premier to the White House and Congress.
Furthermore, the Trump administration should take action against nations that are funding and supporting the ICC so generously. Some of the ICC’s largest financial benefactors, including Japan and the European Union nations, are also dependent on the United States for their security. Yet while asking Washington, D.C., to protect them, they finance a global institution that hamstrings our ability to do so. If Tokyo, for example, wants the United States to lead a new alliance to contain China, Trump can demand that Japan eliminate its subsidy for an international institution that seeks to undermine the American national sovereignty he was elected to restore.
There's a nearly straight through-line from the logic and approach to executive power Yoo helped architect under Bush and these attacks on the ICC under Trump. It's just that many have decided to bizarrely retcon the Bush administration into respected elder statesman instead of the lawless war criminals they were and are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_Memos
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/why-international-arrest-warrants...
The ICC was created in 1998 when Bill Clinton was president of the USA. He never ratified the Rome treaty. And then GW, Obama, Trump and Biden didn't either.
Very few americans batted an eye as far as I could tell. Your are after all by definition exceptional. (/s)
The law, by definition is a rule backed up by the use of force, specifically state-sanctioned violence. If you write a law but do not have the ability to use a sufficient amount violence to enforce it when needed, you don't have a law at all, you just have a suggestion around how you'd like people and countries to behave.
The only way you could ever have anything resembling "international law", would be to have some sort of global military or police force capable of exerting enough violence to ensure that the law is followed, and I'm not even sure how such a thing would work.
Small point of order, but it is the Senate that ratifies treaties and not presidents. The Senate is heavily biased to overrepresent rural areas, which tend to be very conservative, and only 40% of senators can stop any ratification. The ICC has been the subject of massive amounts of conspiracy theories and misinformation in conservative media, so there's approximately zero chance that it could ever be ratified, unless the Senate's structure was made more representative of the people of the US rather than a conspiracy-minded subset.
If the Senate was a democratic representation of the will of the US it would not be hard to ratify the treaty.
dependency on american corps is a bit weird, when they wont move away from windows just for one presendential term surely? trump will be out in X years. whats the point?
some of these organisations are now more politically aligned than ever questioning their neutrality
Edit: and actually, just recently it was even more direct with it: https://web.archive.org/web/20251105125410/https://www.offic...
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