Yet another Hacker News

US sanctions force The Netherlands off Microsoft and toward alternative NixOS

107 points mywacaday 1 hour ago 51 comments

silverFork 1 hour ago | parent

It is more like self imposed sanction against US made products. There are now tons of open source operating systems and applications that can replace Microsoft products, which are basically some old programs. The replacements cost vastly less for use and support.

pipes 37 minutes ago | parent

Citation needed on the costs vastly less to support and use.

bluGill 31 minutes ago | parent

Very much. There are a lot of hidden costs in computers. What does IT cost you? If everybody already knows the other program how much productivity is lost before they figure out the slight changes with the new (they will learn but experts will need time to become experts).

edwinjm 14 minutes ago | parent

That’s not a citation. Of course you want to have actual research to substantiate these statements.

MadrasThorn 27 minutes ago | parent

Yeah. Trump has been ripping out US infrastructure globally. Trumps administration and vance(GOP finance chair) elon(doge) thiel(owns vance) need to be removed ASAP.

andrewstuart 53 minutes ago | parent

Good thing the Netherlands isn’t the most critical single node for advanced chip equipment, cause that could become awkward.

Oh wait, it is.

But it’s ok because Us President has made it clear the the USA doesn’t need anything Europe has. So, not a problem.

postepowanieadm 40 minutes ago | parent

USA and Netherlands (alone, and within EU) have signed an agreement concerning that about two months ago.

petcat 32 minutes ago | parent

The US government already exerts extensive control over ASML's business. The Netherlands can't leverage it in any kind of strategic way because a large part of the technology itself is American and it's very hard to untangle. It's the true definition of a "multi national" company.

llm_nerd 26 minutes ago | parent

>a large part of the technology itself

A tiny fraction of the technology itself started as an ineffective "American" invention, copying a Japanese discovery/invention. In fact when ASML acquired the company, specifically because it couldn't do what they wanted and they needed to vastly improve it, a Japanese company had a superior product in the same space, but ASML saw the Japanese company as too much political baggage given how protectionist the Japanese often are.

How funny it all turned out, right?

mupuff1234 18 minutes ago | parent

ASML sold nothing in Europe in 2026, they would implode if they stopped selling to US companies

mytailorisrich 13 minutes ago | parent

There is a lot of noise for public consumption but the reality is that the US control the Netherlands and most European countries, and in fact while this noise has become louder in recent years so has the dependency of Europe on the US...

clydethefrog 7 minutes ago | parent

The Dutch government let the USA store their nuclear weapons in the 60s in Vonkel already. We have long lost our sovereignty.

PorciiVorbesc 51 minutes ago | parent

I still don't get why EU governments and agencies don't standardize around an already existing industry proven OS the EU already has domestically, which is SUSE, and need to each go reinventing the wheel their own way, which leads to higher costs and more fragmentation across the EU.

I heard the reason was that NL doesn't know if SUSE will be sold off again and might end up in the hands of some US PE, but here's the thing, you're the government, you can just block the sale of companies related to sovereign national security like those making operating systems. You can just do things when you want to. You literally have that power. Exercise it for once FFS.

p_l 50 minutes ago | parent

Might be related to NixOS being strongly related to Netherlands and them picking local

PorciiVorbesc 46 minutes ago | parent

Yeah well that's why the EU federal idea is and will be a failure. It wishes to be the challenger to the US and China hegemony in theory, but then every individual country wants to be its own special mini-boss in its own playground hoping they'll be at the top of the helm, that develops and uses its own separate things that will hopefully get adopted by the other EU members.

nutjob2 32 minutes ago | parent

You have it in reverse. A federal EU enables EU countries to pool sovereignty and strength to protect itself from the US and China. It neither needs to or wants to challenge anyone. A federal system allows EU wide decisions to be made quickly and without petty parochial concerns.

Constituent states rightly can choose to make their own decisions in matters like this, it hardly effects anyone else, and they can choose to collaborate.

cgio 31 minutes ago | parent

Is that why US failed while building CP/m, Unix a few, Dos, Windows, MacOs, OS/2,…? A successful market does not impose monopolies. The more, the merrier.

PorciiVorbesc 28 minutes ago | parent

> A successful market does not impose monopolies. The more, the merrier.

Yeah but when it comes to national sovereignty you can't let your own products get steamrolled by the entrenched monopolies of your adversaries (Google, Microsoft, AWS, etc) just because you want the idealistic 'free market' while your adversary protects their monopolies to weaponize them against you making you indefinitely dependent on them.

toyg 20 minutes ago | parent

Cooperation and competition can be partial. Google and Microsoft compete internally and then cooperate when fighting external forces. There is no reason why this cannot work for European companies too.

The problem has more to do with the weak sense of belonging to a supranational identity. Californians and New Yorkers both identify as Americans before they identify as members of their home state; the opposite is true of most Europeans still. Change is slow.

azan_ 10 minutes ago | parent

When the market is as huge as US, there's lots of space for competition. Sadly in how EU is currently structured it would most likely be just german "Microsoft", spanish "Microsoft", french "Microsoft" etc.

dtech 42 minutes ago | parent

> I heard the reason was that NL doesn't know if SUSE will be sold off again and might end up in the hands of some US PE, but here's the thing, you're the government, you can just block the sale of companies

The Dutch government can famously prevent sales of German and Luxembourgish companies yes.

PorciiVorbesc 41 minutes ago | parent

I meant the EU, at EU level, not the Dutch government. Also it's not like the Dutch government can't cooperate with the other EU members like Germany and Luxembourg on such vital topics. Unless of course trust inside the EU is so lackluster that the Dutch government can't be sure where Germany and Luxembourg will stand, in which case it's already over for the EU.

graemep 39 minutes ago | parent

Does the EU have the power to block sales of companies on national security grounds? Or to get member states to standardise on software?

Its probably a good thing they do not have a standard, or at this point it would be Windows and pushing change through at the EU level would not be fast.

PorciiVorbesc 36 minutes ago | parent

>Does the EU have the power to block sales of companies on national security grounds?

Not on defense and national security, that's up to individual EU member states, but the EU does veto corporate mergers and acquisitions on Competition Law (Antitrust). So just find a loophole in that and use it to prevent SUSE be taken over by non-EU nations.

toyg 26 minutes ago | parent

The governments "just" doing this or that, are typically the tyrannical or unhinged variety you don't want to live under. If your law is written decently and you have a functioning judiciary, chances of a loopholes surviving scrutiny will be very low.

The European Commission could definitely ask governments (the European Council) to agree a new treaty or protocol that grants them veto powers on "federal security grounds", for sure. The European Parliament would likely rubber-stamp it too. Considering the current (and increasing) right-wing majorities across the continent, though, I find such scenario very unlikely.

sadbat-7874 26 minutes ago | parent

How is this any different from the United States?

eterm 38 minutes ago | parent

The EU level doesn't have enforcement mechanisms, EU law is applied through member states changing their laws.

graemep 41 minutes ago | parent

> but here's the thing, you're the government, you can just block the sale of companies related to sovereign national security like those making operating systems

Last time I looked it was a Swedish owned German company. The government of the Netherlands has limited power there. Given its history and performance its quite likely to get sold and might end up in American or Chinese hands or anything really.

MadrasThorn 49 minutes ago | parent

Trump attacking the Netherlands means transatlanticism is really dead.

I think this has a lot to do with how the case against Putin was built and Trump used his influence to disrupt it.

ParentiSoundSys 25 minutes ago | parent

It's because the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu for committing war crimes.

jonnybgood 14 minutes ago | parent

The US had issue with the ICC since it first began in 2002. Multiple administrations saw it as a problem.

antonvs 10 minutes ago | parent

And because Trump and co don't want to have to deal with such warrants against themselves.

It's the ultimate expression of US corruption. There's not even a pretense of fighting for justice any more, just fighting justice.

MadrasThorn 10 minutes ago | parent

I'm probably wrong but I could have sworn there was an article that came out when Trump was elected something happened with data on microsoft accounts/server huh. I guess it's ungoogable right now. Might have just been hosted by US gov. Must have been funding related.

Anyway I don't support ICC grabbing power it does not have over other countries who do not sign on.

If the ICC wanted to be consistent they should target Hamas leaders, Iranian leaders, ect

rapsey 11 minutes ago | parent

The EU is entirely subjugated to the US. No energy independence, militaries falling apart and out of date, no tech development or investment.

mittensc 6 minutes ago | parent

Maybe that's wrong?

The US can't even win a war in the middle east without NATO

What is the US going to do when China starts making their own moves?

p-e-w 49 minutes ago | parent

No problem. After the next election in the Netherlands, Microsoft only needs to promise to build a local headquarters there and the future government will roll back to Windows at twice the previous cost, which is exactly what happened in Munich.

98753579909754 47 minutes ago | parent

Sounds very social and very democratic.

Propelloni 16 minutes ago | parent

People make it sound as if Munich flip-flopped on Linux. The then ruling social-democrats and the greens started the LiMux project in 2003! The social-democrats and the conservative christians ruling in 2020 switched back to MS Windows. The current administration is mandating open source but not specifically Linux.

I use Linux since the year 2000 and it has been ruff in the early days, no doubt. The desktop competition were MS Windows 2000 and XP, often lauded as peak MS Windows. Apple had all but disappeared. But 2020 I'd wager that average KDE desktop vs. average MS Windows 10 desktop would be a draw. Today it would be a KDE desktop win, but that's more due to MS Windows 11 suckiness than the leaps and bounds Linux made.

HelloUsername 42 minutes ago | parent

Related: "Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS (dawo.community)" 25.sep.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49841563 581 comments

guidoiaquinti 36 minutes ago | parent

Several International Criminal Court (ICC) judges have been unable to access their bank accounts or receive routine salary payments and financial transfers due to financial blockages triggered by United States sanctions. In the country where they live

rapsey 17 minutes ago | parent

ICC judges getting the right wing activist treatment, except the activists get it from their own government.

flohofwoe 3 minutes ago | parent

Concrete examples please?

paulvnickerson 32 minutes ago | parent

They didn't have to go with NixOS...

AmazingTurtle 27 minutes ago | parent

Had to be a team of circle jerk external advisories that want to become rich by inflating the effort here

whazor 22 minutes ago | parent

They previously used openSUSE and then Fedora. But both have companies behind them, where-as NixOS does not. And with NixOS they are more sovereign.

andsoitis 8 minutes ago | parent

> They previously used openSUSE and then Fedora.

Why did those not work out? Why do they think things will be different with NixOS?

thrance 15 minutes ago | parent

I think it makes sense? You probably get an easier time reproducing a config on thousands of devices using NixOS?

vishalontheline 7 minutes ago | parent

andsoitis 4 minutes ago | parent

The more countries trade with each other and depend on each other, the better things are for peace and human advancement.

The zero-sum mindset that's de rigueur at the moment needs to die soon or the world that we'll inhabit is gonna suck.