Comment by jeynec
7 hours ago
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?
> this is definitely untrue
> Obviously, everyone still use Office because, well, there is no alternative to Office
So it is, indeed, true. Can you clarify what your point is, exactly? (Also: there is an alternative to MS Office, which is LibreOffice. It works ok. It's not as powerful, maybe (maybe!) but it's fine.)
> Do you realise how funny it is to see you complain that you can't see the car companies in a data base about road accidents while not realising how awesome it is that you have access to such a database?
No, I really don't. It's not "awesome" to have access to that data. This is public information. Citizens don't have to be grateful of what the state does. THE STATE WORKS FOR US, not the other way around.
And as it is, it's not very useful, since the most important data is withheld.
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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.