Comment by idoubtit
19 hours ago
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
I disagree. I currently work as a phd student in a french lab and we're slowly but surely adopting these french government tools, and they work really well. It will take years, but the migration process is probably going to happen.
What problems did you encounter with Resana?
That’s not quite true. Sure, there is still a lot of proprietary software, but there is also a lot of effort put into going to the right direction. A lot of agencies publish data openly, code for major things like taxes is getting published. Trump helped significantly, but there are audits being done right now on the different kind of proprietary foreign software, with different levels of importance, and shuffling what we can to open alternatives (or closed but European, depending on the field).
The Office365 subscriptions are probably going to go last, because the effort to deploy alternatives and retrain the 200,000 people using them is enormous. It is a very visible aspect that won’t change anytime soon, but it does not mean that there is nothing else happening.
For example, the Renater tools are getting more and more use from all the research and higher education institutions. It’s not going to happen overnight, but it is shifting.
It's absolutely true that nobody in the French govt, French semi-public companies (so-called "SEMs") or French large private companies uses anything but Microsoft and the big US cloud providers.
But I don't think the open-source initiatives are "just for show" because nobody cares, and so there is no one to show it to.
They are more wishful thinking, random initiatives. "Let's do open-source!" and throw a couple million euros here and a couple thousand there, and we have the illusion of doing something.
What is made in that manner is also of incredible low quality; most of the time it doesn't work; I recently tried to do a "téléconsultation" with a hospital, which uses state-sponsored software. It was impossible to connect (and the login and password are sent in the same email! why bother with a password then??)
Data sources are not maintained or are incomplete. Data about road accidents don't mention the brand of the car because French car companies lobbied against it! (Which tells a lot about car quality in the first place). Etc.
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Hah. It used to be that Microsoft products were sleek, fast, and just plain more convenient than Open Source products. E.g. OpenOffice vs MS Office.
And honestly, OS stuff still often sucks quite a bit.
It's just that MS software has degraded to the point of utter shittiness (see: Teams) that now it's just plain worse than their own software from 15 years ago.
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not sure why you were downvoted. You're working there, so i guess your testimony is an interesting data point.
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> it's undeniable that we are making progress.
Yes, I agree that some public organizations in France are making progress with Open Source. For instance, free software is now common in universities (with local variations). And overall I think there's a central influence of the DiNum ("Direction Numérique", the Digital Department of the French State) in this direction. But I don't see how this UN charter makes any difference.
There's progress, though not related to this charter. And so slow that I would bet against "Open Source" becoming widespread in French schools within the next decade.
> Facts (and code) are following.
I'm sorry, but the current situation and the past experience makes it really hard to believe that facts will follow from this charter. At least facts matching the claim that the French government will be "Open by default: Making Open Source the standard approach for projects" (quote from the first point of the charter).
If "France endorses UN Open Source principles", it shouldn't just mean that it will publish some code. It should means that it intends to respect these principles, and that proprietary software becomes the exception within the French administration.
I can't believe this post is more than symbolic, because the French law already promotes Open Source and forbids non-UE proprietary software in many public contexts. But these laws are usually not applied. Why would a non-prescriptive charter do any better?
> And so slow that I would bet against "Open Source" becoming widespread in French schools within the next decade.
It's not a risky bet: no organisation this large, private or public, would manage to replace its IT this fast, even with appropriate funding (which schools don't have).
There's a reason why people say change in a company only happens as fast as people retire. large scale change is long, hard and costly.
did you redevelop everything from scratch or did you try to reuse existing open source tech ?
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.
"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).
Typical French reaction to anything positive.
Everytime someone actually does something nice in this country, there will be a dozen nay-sayers complaining uselessly that it is not perfect while doing nothing of value themselves.
It always saddens me to see a country with so much too succeed being so impaired by its own citizens.
This comment didn't impair anything being done, though.
I totally agree with it. The EU could do something non-performative by it and its governments stopping issuing documents in proprietary Microsoft formats and use OSS only.
> The EU could do something non-performative by it and its governments stopping issuing documents in proprietary Microsoft formats and use OSS only.
They would get hairy quickly, because the Office formats are actually open standards.
It’s also a tall order. How they run their administration is fundamentally the member-states’ prerogative, I don’t really see what lever the commission would have to bend the council on that subject.
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The constant criticism of people actually trying to do something by people who prefer sitting on their hands is impairing in itself.
People are basically constantly dragging everyone down including themselves while doing absolutely nothing.
I mean technically I guess they sometimes vocally protest in the street that they don't understand why someone else is not solving their own problem or that they would prefer we just pretended the problem never existed which is pretty much equivalent to doing nothing if not worse.
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> This is just for show
That is simply wrong.
The reality is that millions of people work for the government, directly or indirectly, and that not all of these people have aligned incentives, the same constraints, etc.
The people pushing open source initiatives in the french public sector are very serious about it. It is also true that there is a lot of inertia. The consequence is that, while most of the large administrations, including those that don't have that much wiggle room for initiatives, still use big-name proprietary solutions, more and more open-source and open-data gardens spring around, and that they provide a strong base for new initatives, both public and private.
Two examples I personally used are dvf [1], a database and application showing real estate sales, which I used to check market prices when I bought my home, and publi.codes [2], a simulator and an open-source law-as-code repository, which is one of the cornerstones of a friend's private company.
Would I like more of France's administration to move to open-souce? Sure, but it's not going to happen overnight. In the meantime, I'm grateful for the core of people dedicated to push the case, bits by bits, and I know their effort is certainly not just for show.
[1]: https://app.dvf.etalab.gouv.fr/ [2]: https://publi.codes/
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.
That's just governments being governments. I've spent 50% of my life in Sweden and 50% of my life in Spain, and everywhere it's the same. "had to tolerate the $NATION bureaucracy, $NATION lies, empty promises, and $NATION way of (not) doing things for decades" probably applies to most countries in the world, I know it applies for the countries I've lived in at least, and seemingly France too. Heard the same about every home country of my friends also.
Governments just move really slowly. Best we can do is cheer for the efforts we think will improve things, even if it'll take years, and protest about efforts we think are harmful.
There's a slight increase in open source efforts. They recently released a react component framework for govt apps. They use keycloak very often.
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.
Uh, I know n=1, but I used to work in a public research lab in France for almost a couple years, and already back then (4-5 years ago) they used tons of FOSS. Zimbra, Mattermost, Gitlab, the works. So I don't think it's all just theater.
Then again, if your employees still need PowerPoint, I say let them have it for now. You cannot switch a single company to FOSS overnight, let alone the entire public sector of an industrial nation.
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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
Just switching country names does not really work. The US is the very curious case of a super power that attempts to become a third world country.
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.
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