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Comment by paulfitz

7 hours ago

I work at Grist, the "tableur collaboratif" (collaborative spreadsheet) listed on the La Suite homepage. We're in the interesting situation of being both a NYC-based company, and open source software the French gov has adopted and is helping to develop. Grist is mostly a node backend. So it is a complicated story. The key is having code the gov can review and trust and run it on sovereign infrastructure.

Grist https://www.getgrist.com/

A write-up of how the French gov uses it https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...

17 comments

paulfitz

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yunnpp  1 hour ago

Your position is fantastic because it immediately puts to death all of that nationalistic nonsense about the EU becoming "anti-American" by enforcing privacy laws on US Big Tech etc, when in fact they are just protecting their citizens' rights against unethical business models regardless of origin. I might be naive, but your company to me represents a win for free/open software and cross-country collaboration.

That being said, I should ask: to what extent do you see being US-based an advantage or a problem in the current state of things? For example, in regards to exports controls, or any other such thing that may potentially limit your business scope depending on $current_admin.

sequoia  5 hours ago

wow it reminds me of Microsoft Access, a great piece of software in terms of rapidly building an application!

Does grist have forms?

  • gpm  4 hours ago

    Form support is touted on the homepage: https://www.getgrist.com/forms/

    For what it's worth, which isn't much because this is probably outdated: I remember trying grist a few years ago and leaving mildly unimpressed with form support (I think because I was hoping to have image upload in the forms and that wasn't supported yet).

    • paulfitz  3 hours ago

      Grist forms support uploads since 2025 https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/pull/1655

      Since it is relevant here: support for uploads was code written by a French contributor, and reviewed by a developer working for the French gov (ANCT/DINUM) and a developer working for Grist Labs. Grist Labs has since maintained and improved on it. The forms feature itself was inspired by an integration built by Camille Legeron at ANCT.

  • dylan604  4 hours ago

    I'm not an MS dev type, but I've often seen these forms questions. What made their forms so easy, or more in general what is so complicated about forms that this was even a tool so many liked?

    • znhll  4 hours ago

      MS Access was on its way out by the time I started working in software, but the simplest explanation I can give about why the "forms" question is this, let's say you're a business person and...:

        * You have a huge Excel document that's basically a DB. (What Access kinda was)
  * You want users to interact with said data document, i.e add record, find/query record(s), edit records
  * You add a "form" for users to do just that. You can also add a "login" form to give some users more permissions.

      It's basically if you could turn a SQlite file into a low-coded desktop app.

      1 reply →

    • inanutshellus  4 hours ago

      With Access, a business doing data entry could -- with a business user not a software engineer -- craft a Form and voila, easy onboarding to train new employees instead of filling out sheets of paper and filing them.