Eight municipalities are already testing DAWO, the government's NixOS-powered work environment.

When the U.S. government imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) in early 2025, the consequences were far-reaching yet quickly enforced.

The restrictions cut off the ICC chief prosecutor’s access to Microsoft services, including email, followed by a freezing of his personal and institutional bank accounts in affected jurisdictions.

While this was happening, the Dutch government was watching, coming to the bitter realization that access to essential services depended on decisions made in the U.S.

Hence, their response to this is DAWO, short for Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid, or Digital Autonomous Work Environment for Government in English.

It is a framework that looks to tackle the government’s digital stack, covering the OS, an office suite, collaboration apps, cloud services, IT management tools, and AI, with all of it being built around a NixOS foundation.

Archived

  • Humanius@lemmy.worldEnglish
    77·
    7 hours ago

    The US really pissed away any strategic advantage it may have had with that little stunt sanctioning a few justices and prosecutors.

    It made it plainly obvious to anyone paying attention that American software cannot be trusted, and caused a bunch of countries to start preparing their exit strategy for building down their dependence on American software.

    And for what?.. So that they could be an annoyance to some people prosecuting the war criminal, and friend of the US government, Benjamin Netanyahu? That sounds like such a small win, if it causes you to lose the leverage completely.

    Edit: Not that I mind. It’s a good thing that it’s this plainly obvious that we cannot trust a reliance on anything American.
    It makes it cost a whole lot less political capital in order to get governments to move away from these dependencies.

    • Deacon@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      3 hours ago

      By acting like sovereign nations themselves they are teaching other nations that they need self sovereign tech, and once governments start building it, it is there for other users.

      Good, good.

    • Pat@lemmy.caEnglish
      21·
      5 hours ago

      The one potential upside to all of this is that countries now have a lot less need to adhere to the US mandated copyright protections established in the DCMA. Cory Doctorow has written much about this, and how the US used threats of trade sanctions to ensure other countries fell into line. Now that the US has deployed those sanctions against many countries and shredded any remaining trust and good will, countries have less motivation to adhere to those agreements and could abandon them. Doing so would potentially make it legal to push back against increasingly unhinged copyright protections, and allow citizens to do amazing things like fix your phone without risking a felony conviction. Doctorow says it all much better, he’s well worth reading on this and many other subjects.