Comment by sylvinus
7 hours ago
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.
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.
What problems did you encounter with Resana?
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.
> 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.
I work from one of the biggest French companies and this is definitely untrue.
Everyone starting from the very top is concerned about the issue of sovereignty surrounding the cloud. This was true before and is even more true nowadays.
Obviously, everyone still use Office because, well, there is no alternative to Office. The only serious competitor is Google and it's a poor one on top of still begin an American company.
Still, you have some very successful initiative at the state level. Messaging is a good exemple. So is all the work done around GED and open data.
Do you realise how funny it is to see you complain that you can't see the car brands in a data base about road accidents while not realising how awesome it is that you have access to such a database?
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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.
> 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.
I sometimes feel like I live in a parallele universe reading the comments here on Office.
The addition of collaboration and how it seemlessly integrated with sharepoints while easing the sharing of documents make Office365 a blessing in most office environment. There is no way people are going back to sharing files like before after having worked this way.
this! this is so true for every big corporation product. Iphone is a shitty version of iphones from 10 years ago but with better cameras…. and windows is spamming me hard with their services
not sure why you were downvoted. You're working there, so i guess your testimony is an interesting data point.
They are downvoted because their statement (that this is “only for show”) is simply not true. It may be their experience, but I know a few people in different government agencies and I can say that it is far more than show. There are more arguments in the thread about why their point of view is partial.
Also, you are likely downvoted because talking about downvotes is boring and does not bring anything, and also because what was downvoted when you posted might be upvoted now, leaving these complaints look a bit silly.
> 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?
did you redevelop everything from scratch or did you try to reuse existing open source tech ?