Comment by pyrale

> 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/