As an illustration of it: I have been working for two years on a new national project for the french state. Le Référentiel National des Bâtiments (for National Buildings Registry) which aim at creating and distributing a id key to every building in the country.
The goal is to make databases about buildings much more interoperable.
One key aspect is to have a precise list of all buildings includings recent constructions and demolition. It gets interesting because we recognize nobody in the country has the perfect list of buildings so we radically open the data to let governement agencies, cities, companies, citizens write directly in the registry. Think OSM or Wikipédia but for an official dataset.
This approach is very experimental for the french state and we are encouraged to test it and disseminate our learnings in other state branches.
Since OSM is, among other things, a list of building, will there be exchanges between the two projects? Are the licenses of the two projects compatible?
Well, we have some connections with the community and we are discussing how to incorporate our buildings IDs in OSM. The other way around (OSM to national registry) seems more complicated for license reasons.
Last summer we tested the open approch by doing a "RNB Summer game". Basically, anyone could come on the map and send some error reporting, we had a score per player, per territory and a shared global score. The OSM community absolutely rolled ont the game :)
Also, OSM is way more than a list of buildings. The community is doing an incredible job and to be franc, they are quite impressive and inspiring.
This is just for show, and facts won't follow. It's not the first time a French government vows to stick to Open Source. Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception.
A few days after that, a major state-owned institution (Polytechnique) announced it was migrating (including the email system) to MS Office 365. Even if it violates several laws and official decrees (it's a semi-military school).
Source (fr) https://cnll.fr/news/polytechnique-men-office-365/
The turmoil caused by the two contracts you mention also prove that the new normal has already shifted towards open source. It's a slow process, but it's undeniable that we are making progress.
These initiatives are only for show. I work in one of the biggest French goverment entity and no one uses this. We still very much use Microsoft products for virtually everything, and everything "sovereign" (Resana, Pline...) just doesn't work or isn't as convenient
"Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception." → I've asked, twice, for the CNLL, the French Court of Auditors (Cour des Comptes) to work towards giving precise figures. This was rejected, but may reappear in a different form (given that the Court is currently running an enquiry on digital sovereignty - I hope, but I doubt, that they will be able to pull precise figures).
There's some aspects that make it a more nuanced situation:
- you won't see angry letters in the news about services sticking to open source after they chose to move in
- the reason the CNLL can point the finger at Poytechnique is because there are explicit directives. Not even having those would be way worse.
- "Most of the public money" : Open Source contracts won't be in billions of euros most of the time, especially as a lot of the money will go to internal hiring and only a slice to external contractors.
It doesn't come from nowhere, though. It results in having had to tolerate the French bureaucracy, French lies, empty promises, and French way of (not) doing things for decades.
and its coming on the back of US and Trumps tarif shittalk..
there's also talk about moving away from american software giants, among government sections in my country. Recently one such section moved from AWS to Hetzner (saving money in the process)
i've also heard talk about making EU-based alternatives to the office suite, etc.
This makes total sense. When a country is creating public software, it should be open source by default. This is the only way to create trust. In the long run, open source and closed source government software will probably differentiate dictatorships from democracies
At first glance I thought this was hyperbole, but after reflection I'm not sure it's even an exaggeration. Too much critical infrastructure of power (voting, census, taxation, reporting, compliance) runs of software for us to accept anything less than full transparency from our governments.
Real question is whether this is just symbolic or if the French state will actually redirect procurement pipelines + vendor mandates around these principles. i'd be more impressed if this came bundled with policy teeth, e.g. requiring all software vendors to deliver open-by-default interfaces or pushing funding toward open infra maintenance. Otherwise it's hardly much more than a manifesto
It will take time but yes. There are already numerous case studies. Libre office is already running on more than 500k gov computers. Anecdotical story, as a researcher I worked with a few French PhD students and they tend to send me documents Libre documents and spreadsheets.
This does not surprise me. I've had the sense that the French government has been really forward in open source thinking since my interactions with ETAlab back in 2017. They were tracking some really bleeding edge civic tech stuff before anyone else was (including g0v.tw and the vTaiwan project)
Software is sort of like real estate. It costs to maintain otherwise depreciates in value so you must be judicious with your investments. Unlike real property there’s not such a resale market, so you probably must be even more judicious.
It’s quite a thing for anyone to commit to software maintenance. The idea of open source that there will always be volunteers that reduce the fees you pay for maintenance is not a certainty.
Software is sort of like real estate. It costs to maintain otherwise depreciated in value so you must be judicious with your investments. Unlike real property there’s not such a resale market, so you probably must be even more judicious.
It’s quite a thing for anyone to commit to software maintenance. The idea of open source that there will always be volunteers that reduce the fees you pay for maintenance is not a certainty.
France has an undeserved bad reputation for this stuff. As a french citizen, I'm amazed to see how easy it has become to do anything administrative online, with great tools such as France Connect that allows a single login method for any administrative tool.
Most things don't work, and "France Connect" is really bad (it doesn't even accept non-ascii letters for your name or surname! which is insane coming from an official initiative of the French Government; they should at least know how to use the French language). Anything from the department of education is also abysmal, mostly broken, and needlessly convoluted.
The one amazing thing that works is the taxes collection system. The French tax code is incredibly complex with hundred of special cases; yet the online system to declare revenues is perfect: super clear to use with excellent instructions, never broken (even at the end of a period where usage peaks must be insane) and with no errors.
I don't know who constructed this but it's proof that the French gvt can make good software when they really care (ie, when money's at stake).
C'est vrai pour les particuliers mais vas voir le côté entreprise de impôts.gouv.fr et tu vas pleurer. C'est des sous menus dans des sous menus, si t'as plus qu'une page ouverte a la fois ça te déconnecte de l'autre, ...
Do you happen to now if France has public jobs for software devs or is it more like a governmental agency (which I guess is also a public sector job but feels different)?
AFAK each agency/entity manages its staff and can hire accordingly.
For the big project, my mental image is a public call for proposal, followed by one of the bigger groups (e.g. Cap Gemini) coming up with an initial solution that gets deployed. From there it becomes a mix of the public agency staff doing the day to day operation and maintenance, potentially including small bug fixes and updates, and external contracting again for wider range feature additions or changes like system wide security compliance.
Like distributing an iOS app in France that uses encryption? What a pain in the ass that is.
The bureaucracy was painful enough that we just removed from the French App Store and when someone complains we tell them to write their representatives to stop with these misguided laws.
Excuse me, monsieur, do you have a license for that math?
You can't sell encryption in France if you haven't proved it actually is strong encryption and not a rot13 or something, which is actually a _very_ good idea.
Could the implementation be better? Knowing french admin, 100% yes, but complaining about the law itself is, in my opinion, misguided. This is an overall good law that doesn't came from nowhere.
I'd love to see a coordinated drive to get most off the world onto opensource and off Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android as well as databases etc. American tech companies are making billions off these products that really are simple and could be replaced.
> American tech companies are making billions off these products that really are simple and could be replaced.
The trouble is that simple concepts are not necessarily simple to implement. Tuning software for performance (e.g. to handle a large user base), security, and maintenance are all resource intensive. Then you have to consider that large user bases have diverse needs, which results in more complex software. Then there are the largest hurdles of all, training people in the use of new software and interoperability during the transition.
This is great because it stops giving users to services which don't respect privacy. If you don't know CryptPad which provides forms but also many editors including Office with end to encryption, try it at https://cryptpad.fr
Curious to know if this extends to LLMs and if so how they would define open source. Specifically it would be nice to see repudiation of Meta's "Open" BS by a nation state.
Cette licence permet d'utiliser, reproduire, modifier et distribuer librement le code avec attribution, mais impose des restrictions pour les opérations dépassant 700 millions d'utilisateurs mensuels.
Interesting they only mention the 700 million users thing and not the other restrictions on use. Personally I could regard the prohibition against basically Google and Microsoft using it to be a minor transgression, it's the larger list of unacceptable uses that's the big problem.
I didn't call the data the source and in the past have explicitly argued that training data is not necessary to exercise the freedoms normally associated with open source.
Llama models have usage restrictions that go against any mainstream definitions of open source.
At this point Open Source doesn't mean anything anymore.
It is like everybody putting a "fat free" logo on highly processed junk food a few decades ago. Yes but what is fat exactly?
What really make me suspicious is there is now a very dense web of fake, captured foundations and non profits with a lot of money flowing through them. Most of them do not write any code of course and it is very hard to understand they purpose or what they do beyond "advocacy".
None of those Open Source advocates care about the most urgent problems like the fact that now almost every human has one of the most locked up system in its hand (yes I know about AOSP) or we can't trust the connected micro-controllers in our homes.
Instead they have as their top goal to fight things like climate change [0] (I wish)
Strangely postmarketOS (the ones trying to make possible that we don't have to trash those cellphones after 3 years) survives on €12656 in yearly donations, €11175 after banks fees [1]. So probably less than the monthly salary of most of those foundations executives and employees. Or probably the cost of one big Zoom meeting in the UN.
Also ask yourself why the FSF, GNU and RMS have been marginalized while Open Source became an UN level cause...
While in many way software freedom won the server and workstation battle, we lost all the new battlefront which opened in the last two decades:
- Phones (the thing in the hand of almost every human now. And sorry LineageOS and GrapheneOS are quickly being marginalized now by things like Google Play Integrity)
- Javascript (yes it is a big problem [0])
- the Cloud
- IoT
The FSF was actually pretty good at identifying those issue early on but was overwhelmed and probably marginalized because they were right.
Notice that none of those new "Open Source" advocates really care about those ubiquitous issues.
We won some battles but lost the war.
The fact France endorses some UN Open Source principles really doesn't matter.
You might think caring about software freedom is almost fringe but look at:
- The US freaking out about all those Chinese devices and cyber attacks,
- The EU now freaking out about US big tech and the cloud.
I believe the best way to safeguard sovereignty and safety is for everyone be able to control as much as possible what is running on our "computers" and as close to you as possible. The FSF [1] has been consistent regarding those issue and doing something about it. But also some other folks like OpenBSD [2].
Very unclear to me what the goals of the UN and the OSI type foundations really is.
The poster child for this is the OSI rejecting the SSPL.
For anyone unfamiliar, the SSPL is a modification of the AGPL. It expands which source code you have to release, under certain circumstances. More specifically, if you resell the software as a cloud service, you have to make the entire service open source and not just the original software. (It has not yet been tested in court what constitutes the entire service.) This is awfully bad for the business models of several OSI members, which make money by reselling free software as a cloud service surrounded by proprietary stuff like management and load balancing.
In response to that, I don't trust the OSI and neither should you.
(There are reasons the SSPL is bad - mostly GPL/AGPL incompatibility. Not being open source isn't one. The OSI's rant applies just as well to AGPL as it does to SSPL, yet they recognize AGPL.)
I would love to see more public funds going towards open source. Even if it were directed to private companies' cloud CI services, it would be a great boon. Many projects have to balance how many build/test configurations with the available CI resources.
Big smokescreen, they only open the most trivial software. "France Identité" the virtual ID card has been closed source since day 1 and also happens to use Play Integrity.
“Various companies use the US government to bully other countries, but they also use license audits as a reaction to projects that move to open-source software.”:
It was a subtle but satisfying (at least for me personally) moment in Tron: Legacy (2010) when Sam Flynn, the heir to ENCOM, breaks into the company HQ and releases their latest OS to the darknet for free, essentially forcibly-open-sourcing it as a protest against excessive corporate greed.
Does anyone know what Mercedes-Benz is doing? I can see why many of the others are on the endorsement list but this one seems out of place. I'm not a car nerd though so I'm sure there is something I'm really missing and be interested in learning about.
They have an entire webpage/associated github repository. It doesn't seem like they've published anything terribly well-known, but good on them for releasing some tooling
I remember knowing someone who worked in banking (completely non-technical role) telling me in 2011 I think about how a team doing work for him had lifted some code from a Mercedes Benz project and he was telling me how surprised he was that they could just do that.
As an American, this sort of brings back into question for me thoughts of, "What should constitute a public utility in a Capitalism society?" Upon doing some cursory research (so cursory that I'm afraid to provide links), it occurs to me that I was maybe under a false impression that there _are_ any nationwide public utilities in the first place. We basically have:
* The Federal Reserve
* The Interstate Highway System
* The Postal Service
* Homeland Security
* Medicaid/Medicare (does this even fit the list?)
* Other entitlements I'm also not sure fit this list
Did I leave anything major out? But getting to the point, I think the question is relevant because in order for something like this set of principles to take hold in the US I think we'd essentially have to kill certain classes of software in the private sector. Can you imagine the sorts of craziness that would ensure if the US government tried to adopt LibreOffice? Maybe it could happen at the state or municipal level, but we can't even agree that the government should own any of the power lines.
Yeah, these examples are all challenging in that they tend to represent more governance/funding than infrastructure. Out of both of our lists I think the USPS, highways, parks and land are the most infrastructure-related things. Of course these are all sort of weak analogues since software services are their own animal, but the fact that it’s a choice between governance, funding or a pittance of infrastructure projects I suppose makes the point.
You've limited your list to federal services. But state and local governments provide plenty more "public utility in a Capitalism society", don't they? Schools, fire protection, police for example.
The government getting interested in open source should terrify us all. The UN formally defining principles for what it means is a soft form of regulation that's only going to get more authoritarian over time. Traveling down this road, we're going to find ourselves living in a world where you're only allowed to share software if (1) you're working for a corporation, or (2) you're working for the government. Because (1) and (2) will have their lives managed and regulated and won't do anything they're not told to do. Anyone who wants to be a hobbyist who writes code of their own free will and shares it on GitHub just for fun will be criminalized, just like anyone today who wants to do farming just for fun is criminalized. Once they make these principles part of the law, it'll grow like the tax code, and be enforced. You used C and didn't write documentation? You're outlawed! Believe me when I say the government is not here to help. Code is speech and there'll be no freedom left the day our right to share what we've written in our preferred language in our own preferred way is taken away.
Really? It is up to them if they want to use what I wrote. Why would I get fined or jailed for not writing documentation? Good luck trying to prove any wrongdoing. If you want support feel free to hire me to do that, or just do it yourself, pretty much like big tech is doing right now with open source
Read "Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front" by Joel Salatin to learn about what the government did to farmers. The simple truth is you won't even have the ability to ask to be hired, because it will be illegal to demonstrate your skills in the first place.
This comes across as more than a little bit fanciful, nevertheless I agree with the sentiment. There's an awful lot of people on the sidelines with their eyes on gaining control over software with intentions that are not at all reflected by what they state publicly. We do not need some political body to come "help", they have no understanding of what makes this work in the first place and nothing of value to contribute.
As an illustration of it: I have been working for two years on a new national project for the french state. Le Référentiel National des Bâtiments (for National Buildings Registry) which aim at creating and distributing a id key to every building in the country.
The goal is to make databases about buildings much more interoperable.
One key aspect is to have a precise list of all buildings includings recent constructions and demolition. It gets interesting because we recognize nobody in the country has the perfect list of buildings so we radically open the data to let governement agencies, cities, companies, citizens write directly in the registry. Think OSM or Wikipédia but for an official dataset.
This approach is very experimental for the french state and we are encouraged to test it and disseminate our learnings in other state branches.
Nice!
Since OSM is, among other things, a list of building, will there be exchanges between the two projects? Are the licenses of the two projects compatible?
Well, we have some connections with the community and we are discussing how to incorporate our buildings IDs in OSM. The other way around (OSM to national registry) seems more complicated for license reasons.
Last summer we tested the open approch by doing a "RNB Summer game". Basically, anyone could come on the map and send some error reporting, we had a score per player, per territory and a shared global score. The OSM community absolutely rolled ont the game :)
Also, OSM is way more than a list of buildings. The community is doing an incredible job and to be franc, they are quite impressive and inspiring.
Very interesting news. Is there an official portal where we can follow this project or similar efforts ?
Good luck (and thanks)
Thanks. Here is the website (in french): https://rnb.beta.gouv.fr and the documentation (also in french): https://rnb.beta.gouv.fr/doc
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This is just for show, and facts won't follow. It's not the first time a French government vows to stick to Open Source. Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception.
Two months ago, the French government signed an "open bar" contract with Microsoft for the "Éducation Nationale" department. 152 M€, not for Open Source. Source (fr) https://www.april.org/nouvel-open-bar-microsoft-le-ministere...
A few days after that, a major state-owned institution (Polytechnique) announced it was migrating (including the email system) to MS Office 365. Even if it violates several laws and official decrees (it's a semi-military school). Source (fr) https://cnll.fr/news/polytechnique-men-office-365/
Facts (and code) are following. We're building a fully open source workspace (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en) among other ambitious initiatives (https://beta.gouv.fr/).
The turmoil caused by the two contracts you mention also prove that the new normal has already shifted towards open source. It's a slow process, but it's undeniable that we are making progress.
These initiatives are only for show. I work in one of the biggest French goverment entity and no one uses this. We still very much use Microsoft products for virtually everything, and everything "sovereign" (Resana, Pline...) just doesn't work or isn't as convenient
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did you redevelop everything from scratch or did you try to reuse existing open source tech ?
"Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception." → I've asked, twice, for the CNLL, the French Court of Auditors (Cour des Comptes) to work towards giving precise figures. This was rejected, but may reappear in a different form (given that the Court is currently running an enquiry on digital sovereignty - I hope, but I doubt, that they will be able to pull precise figures).
There's some aspects that make it a more nuanced situation:
- you won't see angry letters in the news about services sticking to open source after they chose to move in
- the reason the CNLL can point the finger at Poytechnique is because there are explicit directives. Not even having those would be way worse.
- "Most of the public money" : Open Source contracts won't be in billions of euros most of the time, especially as a lot of the money will go to internal hiring and only a slice to external contractors.
There's a slight increase in open source efforts. They recently released a react component framework for govt apps. They use keycloak very often.
I'm extremely tired of this attitude among French people that amounts to systematically shoot down any attempt at improvement with cynicism.
It doesn't come from nowhere, though. It results in having had to tolerate the French bureaucracy, French lies, empty promises, and French way of (not) doing things for decades.
Let's see what happens but I get that prior, demonstrable, actions are not conducive.
it's still a step in the right direction
and its coming on the back of US and Trumps tarif shittalk..
there's also talk about moving away from american software giants, among government sections in my country. Recently one such section moved from AWS to Hetzner (saving money in the process)
i've also heard talk about making EU-based alternatives to the office suite, etc.
I have some quotes about French sentiment, and it basically revolves around their need to have national grandeur despite being a lesser power.
France is all fanfare and rhetoric. Its fun stuff to play with in our imagination, but the ground reality of the world is different.
I have some quotes about US sentiment, and it basically revolves around their need to have national grandeur despite being a lesser power.
US is all fanfare and rhetoric. Its fun stuff to play with in our imagination, but the ground reality of the world is different.
-- A French
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What's the ground for this? Where's grandeur in this declaration? Your comment tell us more about your disdain for France than anything else.
This makes total sense. When a country is creating public software, it should be open source by default. This is the only way to create trust. In the long run, open source and closed source government software will probably differentiate dictatorships from democracies
> differentiate dictatorships from democracies
At first glance I thought this was hyperbole, but after reflection I'm not sure it's even an exaggeration. Too much critical infrastructure of power (voting, census, taxation, reporting, compliance) runs of software for us to accept anything less than full transparency from our governments.
If you agree, here's a petition: https://publiccode.eu
There’s always holes. How can we know for sure the binaries running on the voting machines are compiled from the open source repo?
It’s turtles all the way down.
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Free and Open Technology for a Free and Open Society
Real question is whether this is just symbolic or if the French state will actually redirect procurement pipelines + vendor mandates around these principles. i'd be more impressed if this came bundled with policy teeth, e.g. requiring all software vendors to deliver open-by-default interfaces or pushing funding toward open infra maintenance. Otherwise it's hardly much more than a manifesto
It will take time but yes. There are already numerous case studies. Libre office is already running on more than 500k gov computers. Anecdotical story, as a researcher I worked with a few French PhD students and they tend to send me documents Libre documents and spreadsheets.
Oh then it’s dead. LibreOffice never Just Works™. Ideological changes like this only work if they’re painless for the hoi polloi.
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I think it's more a guideline principle for public software, for exemple apps that are used by citizens to declare taxes, renews IDs...
This does not surprise me. I've had the sense that the French government has been really forward in open source thinking since my interactions with ETAlab back in 2017. They were tracking some really bleeding edge civic tech stuff before anyone else was (including g0v.tw and the vTaiwan project)
https://g0v.tw/intl/en/
https://info.vtaiwan.tw
Software is sort of like real estate. It costs to maintain otherwise depreciates in value so you must be judicious with your investments. Unlike real property there’s not such a resale market, so you probably must be even more judicious.
It’s quite a thing for anyone to commit to software maintenance. The idea of open source that there will always be volunteers that reduce the fees you pay for maintenance is not a certainty.
Software is sort of like real estate. It costs to maintain otherwise depreciated in value so you must be judicious with your investments. Unlike real property there’s not such a resale market, so you probably must be even more judicious.
It’s quite a thing for anyone to commit to software maintenance. The idea of open source that there will always be volunteers that reduce the fees you pay for maintenance is not a certainty.
France has an undeserved bad reputation for this stuff. As a french citizen, I'm amazed to see how easy it has become to do anything administrative online, with great tools such as France Connect that allows a single login method for any administrative tool.
Most things don't work, and "France Connect" is really bad (it doesn't even accept non-ascii letters for your name or surname! which is insane coming from an official initiative of the French Government; they should at least know how to use the French language). Anything from the department of education is also abysmal, mostly broken, and needlessly convoluted.
The one amazing thing that works is the taxes collection system. The French tax code is incredibly complex with hundred of special cases; yet the online system to declare revenues is perfect: super clear to use with excellent instructions, never broken (even at the end of a period where usage peaks must be insane) and with no errors.
I don't know who constructed this but it's proof that the French gvt can make good software when they really care (ie, when money's at stake).
In the same vein, amendes.gouv.fr is incredibly easy to use for paying fines.
C'est vrai pour les particuliers mais vas voir le côté entreprise de impôts.gouv.fr et tu vas pleurer. C'est des sous menus dans des sous menus, si t'as plus qu'une page ouverte a la fois ça te déconnecte de l'autre, ...
Do you happen to now if France has public jobs for software devs or is it more like a governmental agency (which I guess is also a public sector job but feels different)?
AFAK each agency/entity manages its staff and can hire accordingly.
For the big project, my mental image is a public call for proposal, followed by one of the bigger groups (e.g. Cap Gemini) coming up with an initial solution that gets deployed. From there it becomes a mix of the public agency staff doing the day to day operation and maintenance, potentially including small bug fixes and updates, and external contracting again for wider range feature additions or changes like system wide security compliance.
Like distributing an iOS app in France that uses encryption? What a pain in the ass that is.
The bureaucracy was painful enough that we just removed from the French App Store and when someone complains we tell them to write their representatives to stop with these misguided laws.
Excuse me, monsieur, do you have a license for that math?
You can't sell encryption in France if you haven't proved it actually is strong encryption and not a rot13 or something, which is actually a _very_ good idea.
Could the implementation be better? Knowing french admin, 100% yes, but complaining about the law itself is, in my opinion, misguided. This is an overall good law that doesn't came from nowhere.
Some apps have refused to distribute in French store for this reason, such as Syncthing apps Mobius and Synctrain.
Compare to the US Open Source Principles where things become public domain by default.
https://www.usgs.gov/products/software
I'd love to see a coordinated drive to get most off the world onto opensource and off Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android as well as databases etc. American tech companies are making billions off these products that really are simple and could be replaced.
> American tech companies are making billions off these products that really are simple and could be replaced.
The trouble is that simple concepts are not necessarily simple to implement. Tuning software for performance (e.g. to handle a large user base), security, and maintenance are all resource intensive. Then you have to consider that large user bases have diverse needs, which results in more complex software. Then there are the largest hurdles of all, training people in the use of new software and interoperability during the transition.
What a time to be alive to see Android on that list.
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A good news as part of this is that the United Nations is gathering the endorsements using end to end encrypted software CryptPad Forms (https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/GvF3q-LsyL-OZgX4G0r2p...)
This is great because it stops giving users to services which don't respect privacy. If you don't know CryptPad which provides forms but also many editors including Office with end to encryption, try it at https://cryptpad.fr
Curious to know if this extends to LLMs and if so how they would define open source. Specifically it would be nice to see repudiation of Meta's "Open" BS by a nation state.
https://www.comparia.beta.gouv.fr/modeles compares models and Llama different licenses are not mislabeled as "open source".
Also, https://opensource.org/ai/endorsements shows code.gouv.fr in the list.
Cool, thanks!
Interesting they only mention the 700 million users thing and not the other restrictions on use. Personally I could regard the prohibition against basically Google and Microsoft using it to be a minor transgression, it's the larger list of unacceptable uses that's the big problem.
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OSI's OSAID is complete and utter bullshit. Look to Debian if you want a real definition of open source AI.
https://opensource.org/ai https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy
They're just those eight guidelines. Not particularly precise, with intent mattering more than any definition. This isn't a policy, just a goal.
I wouldn't call data "source", whether a book, a sound track, video, etc.
In my view of the world, the code to train, the software to run, that's open source joy.
Now... should the trained, and vectored data be free? Maybe so.
But I bet this UN thing doesn't cover that.
I didn't call the data the source and in the past have explicitly argued that training data is not necessary to exercise the freedoms normally associated with open source.
Llama models have usage restrictions that go against any mainstream definitions of open source.
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At this point Open Source doesn't mean anything anymore.
It is like everybody putting a "fat free" logo on highly processed junk food a few decades ago. Yes but what is fat exactly?
What really make me suspicious is there is now a very dense web of fake, captured foundations and non profits with a lot of money flowing through them. Most of them do not write any code of course and it is very hard to understand they purpose or what they do beyond "advocacy".
None of those Open Source advocates care about the most urgent problems like the fact that now almost every human has one of the most locked up system in its hand (yes I know about AOSP) or we can't trust the connected micro-controllers in our homes.
Instead they have as their top goal to fight things like climate change [0] (I wish)
Strangely postmarketOS (the ones trying to make possible that we don't have to trash those cellphones after 3 years) survives on €12656 in yearly donations, €11175 after banks fees [1]. So probably less than the monthly salary of most of those foundations executives and employees. Or probably the cost of one big Zoom meeting in the UN.
Also ask yourself why the FSF, GNU and RMS have been marginalized while Open Source became an UN level cause...
- [0] https://www.digitalpublicgoods.net/digital-public-goods-alli...
- [1] https://postmarketos.org/blog/2025/03/17/pmOS-budget-and-fin...
I don't think I agree with any part of this take, other than postmarketOS having a bit more money would be nice.
Which part?
While in many way software freedom won the server and workstation battle, we lost all the new battlefront which opened in the last two decades:
- Phones (the thing in the hand of almost every human now. And sorry LineageOS and GrapheneOS are quickly being marginalized now by things like Google Play Integrity)
- Javascript (yes it is a big problem [0])
- the Cloud
- IoT
The FSF was actually pretty good at identifying those issue early on but was overwhelmed and probably marginalized because they were right.
Notice that none of those new "Open Source" advocates really care about those ubiquitous issues.
We won some battles but lost the war. The fact France endorses some UN Open Source principles really doesn't matter.
You might think caring about software freedom is almost fringe but look at:
- The US freaking out about all those Chinese devices and cyber attacks,
- The EU now freaking out about US big tech and the cloud.
I believe the best way to safeguard sovereignty and safety is for everyone be able to control as much as possible what is running on our "computers" and as close to you as possible. The FSF [1] has been consistent regarding those issue and doing something about it. But also some other folks like OpenBSD [2].
Very unclear to me what the goals of the UN and the OSI type foundations really is.
- [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html
- [1] https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/campaigns-summaries
- [2] https://www.openbsd.org/goals.html
The poster child for this is the OSI rejecting the SSPL.
For anyone unfamiliar, the SSPL is a modification of the AGPL. It expands which source code you have to release, under certain circumstances. More specifically, if you resell the software as a cloud service, you have to make the entire service open source and not just the original software. (It has not yet been tested in court what constitutes the entire service.) This is awfully bad for the business models of several OSI members, which make money by reselling free software as a cloud service surrounded by proprietary stuff like management and load balancing.
In response, the OSI put out this official blog post seething with anger but not a single rational argument: https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l...
In response to that, I don't trust the OSI and neither should you.
(There are reasons the SSPL is bad - mostly GPL/AGPL incompatibility. Not being open source isn't one. The OSI's rant applies just as well to AGPL as it does to SSPL, yet they recognize AGPL.)
I would love to see more public funds going towards open source. Even if it were directed to private companies' cloud CI services, it would be a great boon. Many projects have to balance how many build/test configurations with the available CI resources.
UN has Open Source principles but it took a budget decrease to consider it for itself and it's still not approved...
Big smokescreen, they only open the most trivial software. "France Identité" the virtual ID card has been closed source since day 1 and also happens to use Play Integrity.
What are the UN Open Source Principles? Can anyone share a link to the original document? I could not find anything relevant on Google.
“Various companies use the US government to bully other countries, but they also use license audits as a reaction to projects that move to open-source software.”:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1013776
I hope this sets a strong precedent for open source public software.
It was a subtle but satisfying (at least for me personally) moment in Tron: Legacy (2010) when Sam Flynn, the heir to ENCOM, breaks into the company HQ and releases their latest OS to the darknet for free, essentially forcibly-open-sourcing it as a protest against excessive corporate greed.
Leaking the source code is not forcibly-open-sourcing it, as multiple Windows leaks show.
Does anyone know what Mercedes-Benz is doing? I can see why many of the others are on the endorsement list but this one seems out of place. I'm not a car nerd though so I'm sure there is something I'm really missing and be interested in learning about.
They have an entire webpage/associated github repository. It doesn't seem like they've published anything terribly well-known, but good on them for releasing some tooling
https://opensource.mercedes-benz.com/projects/
I remember knowing someone who worked in banking (completely non-technical role) telling me in 2011 I think about how a team doing work for him had lifted some code from a Mercedes Benz project and he was telling me how surprised he was that they could just do that.
Thanks! I wish the page had linked to this!
Wonder when there will be a French equivalent of or funding for the Sovereign Tech Agency.
https://www.sovereign.tech/
As an American, this sort of brings back into question for me thoughts of, "What should constitute a public utility in a Capitalism society?" Upon doing some cursory research (so cursory that I'm afraid to provide links), it occurs to me that I was maybe under a false impression that there _are_ any nationwide public utilities in the first place. We basically have:
* The Federal Reserve
* The Interstate Highway System
* The Postal Service
* Homeland Security
* Medicaid/Medicare (does this even fit the list?)
* Other entitlements I'm also not sure fit this list
Did I leave anything major out? But getting to the point, I think the question is relevant because in order for something like this set of principles to take hold in the US I think we'd essentially have to kill certain classes of software in the private sector. Can you imagine the sorts of craziness that would ensure if the US government tried to adopt LibreOffice? Maybe it could happen at the state or municipal level, but we can't even agree that the government should own any of the power lines.
Federal Aviation Administration keeps the skies a public utility.
Federal Communication Commission keeps part of the wireless communication spectrum open to the public.
National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management keeps some public land available for everyone to use.
The Library of Congress.
National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service probably satisfy "Public Utility" as much as Medicaid.
Federal Emergency Management Agency would be another stretch, but not something I would consider an entitlement program.
Yeah, these examples are all challenging in that they tend to represent more governance/funding than infrastructure. Out of both of our lists I think the USPS, highways, parks and land are the most infrastructure-related things. Of course these are all sort of weak analogues since software services are their own animal, but the fact that it’s a choice between governance, funding or a pittance of infrastructure projects I suppose makes the point.
But I think that's the issue -
for libertarian,
National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service probably satisfy "Public Utility" as much as Medicaid.
this would not be public utility, etc.
You forgot NIST, which incidentally would probably be the appropriate agency to handle management of open source software
> Did I leave anything major out?
You've limited your list to federal services. But state and local governments provide plenty more "public utility in a Capitalism society", don't they? Schools, fire protection, police for example.
I cany see anywhere how they define open source? Because I am sensing it is pretty much GPL or even AGPL only.
I'm always hoping to see more coverage of this initiative to drive Open Source adoption both within the United Nations and globally...
https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/04/2350224/the-un-ditc...
Thanks for the slashdot link, which also links to the UN:
https://unite.un.org/news/osi-first-endorse-united-nations-o...
Is there other access to the French announcement?
That Mastodon link: social.numerique.gouv.fr, isn't viewable for me...
Disclaimer: I work for code.gouv.fr.
No, there is no official French announcement (yet).
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If it doesn't work due to JS being off, try this tool:
https://github.com/jwilk/zygolophodon
What business and role can the UN have to get into open source solutions?
> What business and role can the UN have to get into open source solutions?
The UN has a nine figure IT budget for starters.
These are principles, aka standards, not solutions.
Governance?
One word: Minitel
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Big move by France, leading the way in open source with real global impact!
The government getting interested in open source should terrify us all. The UN formally defining principles for what it means is a soft form of regulation that's only going to get more authoritarian over time. Traveling down this road, we're going to find ourselves living in a world where you're only allowed to share software if (1) you're working for a corporation, or (2) you're working for the government. Because (1) and (2) will have their lives managed and regulated and won't do anything they're not told to do. Anyone who wants to be a hobbyist who writes code of their own free will and shares it on GitHub just for fun will be criminalized, just like anyone today who wants to do farming just for fun is criminalized. Once they make these principles part of the law, it'll grow like the tax code, and be enforced. You used C and didn't write documentation? You're outlawed! Believe me when I say the government is not here to help. Code is speech and there'll be no freedom left the day our right to share what we've written in our preferred language in our own preferred way is taken away.
Yep you are basically describing the EU Cybersecurity Act if anybody care to read it and try to understand how things work in reality.
I don’t see how these principles could lead to people being restricted in the way you suggest.
Really? It is up to them if they want to use what I wrote. Why would I get fined or jailed for not writing documentation? Good luck trying to prove any wrongdoing. If you want support feel free to hire me to do that, or just do it yourself, pretty much like big tech is doing right now with open source
Read "Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front" by Joel Salatin to learn about what the government did to farmers. The simple truth is you won't even have the ability to ask to be hired, because it will be illegal to demonstrate your skills in the first place.
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This comes across as more than a little bit fanciful, nevertheless I agree with the sentiment. There's an awful lot of people on the sidelines with their eyes on gaining control over software with intentions that are not at all reflected by what they state publicly. We do not need some political body to come "help", they have no understanding of what makes this work in the first place and nothing of value to contribute.