Great to see this on HN. fyi, La Suite is an umbrella project built by DINUM in France that started several years ago, mainly to enable people in the public administration to use more independent tools. It's built in-house, often on top of other open source technologies. E.g.: Matrix powers chat and LiveKit powers Visio (which was recently featured on HN as well when they announced it's rolled out to replace Zoom / Teams, etc [1])
I had a question since there's growing interest in open source adoption for digital sovereignty purposes in Europe; I produce open source software for civil servants as well (for mass appraisal/property tax valuation specifically), and I was wondering if you could offer any advice about how to best meet the needs of/approach European governments (both local and national) about open source collaboration? Do they prefer to develop their own things in house, or do they like to work with community projects?
In our case, they started building on top of our project and then reached out, so not sure I can share any lessons on this. With that said:
- I think administrations in the EU are (slowly but steadily) adopting "Public Money, Public Code" policies and looking more seriously at open source
- Note that policy / strategy on this depends a lot per country / local administration / project etc. I think most governments don't actively develop in house - France is quite the exception in this
- There are a number of conferences that might be relevant (FOSDEM for example just finished)
- We also benefitted from EU grants (e.g.: NLNet) to bootstrap our work and the early research phases
I think it definitely depends on the country, there isn’t a one-size fits all answer to this for the countries in the EU.
Even in this example, the French are building this in-house, but the Germans are repackaging this into their suite. And the Netherlands is on their way to do the same.
So the approach would be different depending on which country you approached.
My advice to you would be to follow government events like Hackdays to get yourself in front of people who can point you in the right direction
Do these administrations still purchase licenses for software or do they just create open source maintained by government employees?
How much are they willing to pay?
Because people in Europe are notoriously paid less so I am curious of the financial aspect.
Also curious about the logistics of ownership and support...
I know that my city's administration has a quite active development department.
I don't know the current salary ranges,but they offer other values like vacation days, Work-Life-Balance (proper time tracking to avoid extra hours etc), part-time.offera, child care options and some other benefits, which most corporations won't give in addition to being the state, which means they won't go bankrupt, won't do reductions in force in the way companies do it, ...
The description of the Docs project, at least on the OP page, is interesting:
"A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales. Built with Django and React."
An office suite's 'docs' component is usually a word processor and people sometimes try to (mis)use it for the functions you actually list - i.e., you can try to use Word as a wiki, linking pages somehow, but it's not nearly as efficient as a purpose-built wiki.
Based on the quote description, it looks like your project inverted the thinking: Is word processing not a/the primary function? Are the other functions truly prioritized - e.g., is the wiki somewhat as efficient as MediaWiki?
“Content over form” so you don’t really need all the formatting options of something like Word when you are just trying to write meeting notes.
They are definitely trending more towards a wiki, but it is still early days for this whole experiment. Though, many of the municipalities in the French gov are using it for their day to day work so it is clearly useful in some capacity. I don’t have numbers, but it’s definitely respectable
Think of Docs more of a modern, kind of Notion-style collaboration tool. It's not meant to be a Word replacement for full-scale document authoring (I believe La Suite will work with LibreOffice for that, but might be wrong here). The product vision is that Docs should focus on "Content over Form"; i.e.: make it easy to create well-structured documents (content), as opposed to Word which makes it easy to change every little visual detail of your document (form).
In addition, there are some advanced integrations with other products in La Suite. For example, video calls made in Visio can be automatically AI-transcribed and presented in a Docs document, etc.
Okay this is nowhere near an "Office suite". It is a cloud collaboration suite with a glorified markdown editor and with some extra utilities around. Almost nobody buys stuff like Google Docs and Microsoft Office for this reason.
From my experience using open-source collaboration groupware like Nextcloud, their solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow. Only thing that got somewhere near of the commercial offering is OwnCloud's Infinity Scale (OCIS) which is written in Go. It is no surprise since OwnCloud is indeed running an open-core business and you cannot use their binaries in businesses. OpenCloud is the "open-source" fork but they are already in legal trouble with OwnCloud due to industrial espionage claims.
If European governments are serious, the amount of money they _guarantee_ should be in the degree of tens of billions of Euros. Not fun 10k hackaton projects. The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it. And yes it will probably cause whatever current party to lose elections, independence has a price. It is high.
Genuine question: why do you consider it to be nowhere near an "Office suite"? It seems to me it fits the definition given by Wikipedia [1]. I guess it is less advanced than Google Workspace or Microsoft Office but it would cover all of my needs at work.
Google Docs is a document editor (opening/saving Microsoft office compatible documents, with layout, etc), not a wiki/markdown editor. The La Suite Docs seems a product more similar to Atlassian Confluence.
All of this goes out the window when you're dealing with a government bureaucracy that has hyper specific document formatting requirements.
This is a real foundational need of nearly every business at some point. Every court system and government agency has their own rules and they need to be tracked and followed perfectly. There are whole sub-industries around dealing with this for legal documents in MS Word.
You don't need to raise taxes for this, literally just stop wasting money on licensees once the open source projects are ready. It's not a "let do it in 3 months" thing, this will take at least a decade.
“Once ready” they’ll save (somewhat) on licenses, what about paying for it during the years it will take to build it, while it’s not ready?
When any random company makes a Build vs. Buy decision the question is “is this a core competency?” Most companies use a package from MS or GOOG because it’s unlikely that they’ll be so good at productivity software that it’s (A) worth distracting themselves from their actual job and (B) good enough. The same caveats apply here.
My initial thought was: why not fork LibreOffice and spend the extra dev time closing the gap between what it is and what they need?
But after some thought, I feel a cloud collaboration suite makes more sense as big orgs often run on online-first solutions like Sharepoint. So they can tick the essential boxes by being an online collaboration suite, and fill in formatting features later.
Though your points on speed and architecture do make me wonder if Python was their best choice...
> why not fork LibreOffice [...] But after some thought, I feel a cloud collaboration suite makes more sense
LibreOffice has a cloud version :). From what they presented at T-Dose like 10 years ago, it's basically an instance of the software running on the server, cut up into tiles and displayed on a webpage as zoomable image using Leafletjs, the same way that google maps worked before switching to vector graphics 15 years ago. Clicks and other input events are presumably emulated on the server and the resulting display update is sent back to the client, a bit like VNC but using a map library
Also: like when switching from AWS to EU provider, the goal is not feature parity. Not only it is costly to implement, but also a reason why so many features are in AWS or Office is to ensure vendor lock-in due to feature comparisons.
Learning to do more with less is a feature, not a bug.
> OpenCloud is the "open-source" fork but they are already in legal trouble with OwnCloud due to industrial espionage claims.
Can you expand on this or source this? I'm quite interested in OpenCloud, and haven't heard anything about this. I searched for a few keywords (espionage, legal, lawsuit), which only lands your comment on top.
They seem to avoid openly discussing and comparing products to avoid further action. Apparently some of the former members of OwnCloud have switch to Heinlein (maker of OpenCloud) and Kiteworks isn't happy about this.
Scaling horizontally is significantly cheaper than the additional engineering cost required to build these applications in statically typed languages, especially in developed nations like France.
The real bottleneck lies on the database side, but it is rare for an average organization to actually hit its limits. Don't think at Microsoft scale if you aren't them.
Server costs actually matter quite a bit at the scales of the incumbents in this space. Also, speed can be an important part of UX. Scaling horizontally won’t help if the engine itself is slow enough that there is noticeable lag even with just a single document getting edited by a dozen people.
I mean, let's face the reality, do you really think anything worthwhile in regards to tech projects will ever come out of government initiatives? I doubt it, especially in the EU.
The closest thing to an alternative office suite from an European company is Proton, and even that is barely a replacement.
Having tax reduction as a primary goal is terrible for society, because taxes are the primary mechanism for converting money from rich people into services for everybody, particularly poor people.
A small note: in 2026, classic office suites shouldn't even exist in my opinion, so if the EU were to create a glorified R/Quarto, essentially a LaTeX wrapper with some basic calculation capabilities added, it would be infinitely better than any office suite.
My personal setup is Emacs/org-mode, using babel for the rest; I use Python with Polars, Plotly, and very occasionally SymPy just to avoid using Maxima if I'm already in Python. I see no reason at all to use LibreOffice, MS Office, or anything similar. This is what's actually needed. Billions should be invested in IT training, not in copies of software from another era designed to let untrained secretarial staff use a desktop.
You use emacs so why should anyone else need MS Word? A large number of people use word processor software because it has advantages over typewriters or handwriting for their purposes rather than because they lack training in something more esoteric.
Sometimes I really like a spreadsheet. I found out at work that spreadsheets all have map / reduce now. That's fun. If there were a spreadsheet interface that was secretly R under the hood and tricked me into understanding R that would be neat.
> solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow
True as it may be that they are slow, I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages.
> The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it.
You do you, but increasing taxes to build products to replace products built by private enterprise sounds like a 180 degree opposite of what Europe needs to prosper.
This is pre MAGA thinking.
Investing in strategic industries that otherwise pose systemic risk to European economies wouldn’t be our first choice, but it’s now necessary.
> You do you, but increasing taxes to build products to replace products built by private enterprise sounds like a 180 degree opposite of what Europe needs to prosper.
Shhh, don't tell them.
(Kidding, of course.)
The best solution is skin-in-the-game, for-profit enterprise coupled with rigorous antitrust enforcement.
Companies will go a million times faster than open source. They're greedy and will tear the skin off of inefficiencies and eat them for lunch. That's what they do. Let the system of capitalism work for you. It's an optimization algorithm. One of the very best.
But when companies get too big and start starving off competition, that's when you need to declaw them and restore evolutionary pressure. Even lions should have to work hard to hunt, and they should starve and die with old age to keep the ecosystem thriving.
This is not a situation where you'll have thousands of people editing the same document, that'd be insane with Django for sure - but at general collaboration tooling with <100 (random number I made up) editing, Django is unlikely gonna be the bottleneck
Django is perfectly capable. I'd use Phoenix for its scalability and performance, if it were me, but I've built large-scale projects in Django before, and it worked well.
On this topic, I think it is worth mentioning Framasoft [1]
It is a French organization that offers plenty of alternatives to Google and other big tech products. A lot of them are just rebranded and hosted open source software, but they also develop their own, such as PeerTube and Framaprout (the last one is a joke, but PeerTube isn't).
Yup, I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned earlier but they're the ones behind PeerTube (which I see posted on HN a lot) and many other tools. They've been building google alternatives for over two decades now and many of their tools are quite mature
I don't think they can win over large company, they are just a small nonprofit organization, large companies want to work with other large companies.
Where they can make a difference is for fellow organizations and maybe small companies. A lot of them go to Google because that's the most convenient, even if it sometimes against their principles, they are proposing an alternative.
One minor criticism I have is that while they are not hiding the fact that they are rebranding off-the-shelf free software, they could give them a bit more visibility, should users want to self host at some point.
Thanks for posting an actual link to a demo, even if read-only. I tried some of the buttons on the site with rudimentary understanding of french, but all I found was login pages
Honest question, though I suspect you won't be able to give a complete answer : how shielded are you from political changes ? When the next president takes office, and they're more aligned with Trump than the current administration, will it also cause a backlash ? Or do you feel shielded by the "we're cheaper than MS licenses" ?
I'm intrigued as to why both these, and the Suite Numerique have chose Element / Matrix as the chat component. Every time I've tried to use Element / Matrix it has failed dismally for me and everyone else in whatever community is trialling it. Element itself was so buggy as to be unusable.
- an office suite, where La Suite is at least partly a coherent package bundling existing software which has documents, chat, video calls, etc but wouldn't really play the role of an office suite IIUC - they serve different purposes mostly
- E2EE, which comes with its unique set of benefits and drawbacks
(and yes, sadly at XWiki SAS we host our code on GitHub too, I wish it wasn't like this)
Yes I remember when UK regulator blocked Microsoft from buying Activision there were posts on r/Microsoft regarding their ability to send update to brick all Windows installs in UK and delete all Azure data of UK companies, how UK was a small insignificant market compared to BRICs so it wouldn't hurt MSFT stock price.
Given JD Vance obviously hates UK/EU way more than Trump, and he may be next US president, he may in fact threaten Microsoft to do it against UK and EU.
The trend up until the 2010s was that global companies were so big and ubiquitous that they could dictate the economic actions of nations, not the other way around. International military conflicts were influenced by the likes of Halliburton. Corporations were the new nation-states, countries were mere speed bumps in the flow of global capital. That was seen by some as a great thing, aligning everyone’s interests together and encouraging peace.
In that world, France betting on Microsoft is not only benign, it’s a positive. That’s also the world of Davos and Jeffrey Epstein.
We’re experiencing a global shift toward nationalism which has pushed back hard on that trend. There’s things to like about that and things to dislike, but those things differ wildly depending on your politics.
I'd say it goes beyond nationalism. Even countries that haven't succumbed to the far right are forced to play by the new rules. I've heard some refer to it as "neomercantilism".
The project benefits from the visibilityband community of GitHub and GitHub is completely replaceable with European hosted or self-hostable options should something untoward happen.
There's a huge difference between the origin of some open source software, where a service is hosted and where the company providing it is from.
You can take some open source software made in some other country and use it or fork it no strings attached to its country of origin. No leader from that country can decide to abruptly cut you off your usage of the software because they feel like it.
The big problem EUs continuous big talk on digital sovereignty,
which is a good and vital concept, is that funding is ridiculously
lacking.
Terms used like;
“European hyperscale cloud”
“Sovereign infrastructure”
“Strategic autonomy”
“European data centers for critical workloads”
Which ended up in various efforts and projects
Digital Europe Programme,
Recovery and Resilience Facility,
IPCE
(I am not deeply familiar with EU projects)
I believe funding was around low hundreds
of millions (€) total
To build one hyperscaler region might cost around €10 billion.
The second problem is that systems that were suggested
out of it still relied on US software stack, US computers,
etc.
It is not like the EU member states could not fund it,
some estimates say aggregated EU and member states have
spent €350 billion in Ukraine.
That is not to say they should not do that,
nor to suggest you have to chose one or the other
but it is demonstration
that EU+Member states can fund massive efforts,
If deemed important enough.
and EU+Memberstates so far have not felt an urgency or will
to really invest in digital sovereignty.
The EU doesn't really fund many things directly. It's total annual budget is just 170 billion euros. It can fund research and coordination projects but at the end of the day the EU is mostly a coordination mechanism for sovereign states. Looking purely at EU projects is not really a useful lense to get an idea of what is happening...
Honest question…given how developed our sensibilities are around docs, file storage, and spreadsheets, what is the hard part to this?
Don’t get me wrong…something is hard…I still use Microsoft Word because I feel like I have to. But what is keeping the industry from building a word processor that doesn’t suck and is capable of interfacing with .docx files?
Word has a billion features you did not know that exist. Getting something Word shaped is probably straight-forward enough (how long did it take to make Google Docs), but getting those dangling features and quirks would be a long haul.
Mimicking Excel - woof. This one is used by so many people in different ways, that unless you offer 1:1 bug compatibility, it would be challenging to get 100% of people to meet everyone's current use case.
It is interesting to see yjs with hoccuspocus being used. I am currently considering our options for real time document editing + full text search.
Seems like a common approach is something like using yjs for sync with a temporary LSM storage like rocksdb for updates and then periodically snapshot to postgres for full text search and compaction.
Nice to see the "true spirit" of OpenSource being practiced and growing in Europe...I hope other countries jump into this as well, with support and resources.
I'm a very light user and only moved to onlyoffice because it was freezing[0] on my then new laptop, but at least on mac, I feel like it needs a UI refresh, icons that are not blurry, a look at the performance when doing basic tasks, etc.
It's free and opensource, which is good, but it's not as polished as other paid alternatives.
The french can make mountains move for very little money. There army capabilities compared to the us relative to the investment is outstanding. Wouldn't wonder if they dethroned Microsoft office by strategically supporting open source.
Why is Django so popular among open-source projects like these, especially government funded? I’ve never happened to see a commercial project use it in my twenty years in the field. Ruby/Go or even bun or node would be much more approachable and performant options today.
> I’ve never seen a commercial project use it in my twenty years in the field.
This is very surprising to me considering some of the largest sites in the world are built on Django. Instagram, Pinterest, for instance. Large parts of stripe and Robinhood are implemented with Django. Eventbrite, bitbucket. I believe even Sentry is.
In Instagram's case, they do not use the ORM or Admin, and have an internal fork of the request handling/middleware stack that is 100% async (before the recent async bits were added to Django)[1].
It's great that Django's API design allowed them to move this way easily, but they aren't actually using Django in the traditional sense because it can't handle their scale.
I've found that with the Django ORM and DRF especially, it's very easy to create a poorly performing app by following the established patterns (N+1 queries being a huge problem created by DRF serializers). You need to be extremely diligent to create something performant in this ecosystem. Not every dev team has Armin Ronacher :P
Where I work we found this exhausting, and moved on to FastAPI and ASP.NET. We make our queries much more explicit using tools like Dapper, and now a senior engineer can have a much better idea how a particular route will perform just by reading the code (obviously, we still do some profiling).
It’s a pretty large app (I think >1M lines of Python). I ran a self hosted version for several years and found it performant and pretty easy to keep running and updated.
Does node or Go have a full-stack framework with any real usage? Those languages seem to have people that like piecing together libraries than using frameworks. Other languages all offer popular frameworks; Ruby on Rails, Java Spring, PHP Laravel, ASP.Net.
Django must be more popular than Rails in the EU these days. Most Django devs have never used Go or Node and have never heard about Bun. Django is in the category of battle-tested frameworks that are very boring and easy to get things done with.
Django is boring in a best possible way. Rather than spending six months setting up a bunch of microservices, you spend couple weeks on Django and ship a working product. Built in admin dashboard for example is a godsend at small scale.
+1. I got excited but https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ doesn't seem to be in English or any other European language. If you guys are hoping for Europe-wide adoption, start there.
And somehow, during the effort to achieve digital sovereigncy, they still manage to host the source on the Microsoft property of github 8-/
Given that the only step necessary to host git on the internet is making port 22 publicly accessible, I fail to see why so many projects are hosted on this malware site...
You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence, but they do. Over the years I have heard of many good Open Source Projects coming out of France.
I sometimes wonder if it is because of French vs English Language were you hardly hear of their projects in English speaking Countries.
I think an unsung hero in making open source broadly known and adopted in France is Framasoft [https://framasoft.org/en/], a non-profit association. They have since many many years an initiative to de-google internet and provide free and hosted alternatives and resources.
The French have amazing technologists, I worked with many stunningly brilliant French men and women across 3D gaming, film and media production. However, culturally they end up in a little "French pod" when not working in France because they know how to and really enjoy vigorous debate. If one cannot hold their own in their free wheeling intellectualized conversation and debate style, one might end up feeling insulted and stop hanging out with the frogs. There also seems to be a deep cultural understanding of design that is not present in people, generally, from other nations. That creates some interesting perspectives in software interactive design.
> You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence
France has always been super heavy on open source. They even used to host Les Trophées du Libre, international open-source software competition. FramaSoft (i.e. PeerTube) and VLC are also French.
The problem is that open-source projects funded by the taxpayer bring nothing long term to create companies that can compete or generate economic growth or develop future industries. They would be much better off creating a more business friendly environment and supporting private businesses through grants, procurements, etc the way the US are good at.
Of course, it is not forcing to use any whatng cartel web engines namely has noscript/basic (x)html interop support (aka classic web) and/or with public and as simple as possible network protocols anyone can implement a rich GUI client for.
Of course its SDK has components choosen with care to maximize alternative (present and future) availability and its code is not stored on microsoft github.com.
I was looking at the Meet repository as an example, people literally don't know how to write React, without drowning in `useEffect`, `eslint-disable`, `any`. React has it's issues (and a ton of them), but writing code like this, I expect it to end up exactly like Microsoft Teams quality wise.
Honestly, at that point, it's indistinguishable from LLM slop
I personally don't mind React, but I do acknowledge, after using it for a couple of years, that it seems to be a magnet for issues.
It's the kind of framework, where if you're not writing properly, mostly like [Thinking in React](https://react.dev/learn/thinking-in-react) (with some caveat for niche performance optimizations), you're going to have a rough time, and you're going to make life miserable for anyone that does know what they're doing
It has a weird learning curve, where you can ship something somewhat working, fairly fast, but to write it properly, with no bugs, you need to understand a lot of niche React-specific things, and their solutions (and those solutions are never useEffect https://react.dev/learn/you-might-not-need-an-effect).
At that point, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't already experienced with React. It's been an uphill battle, trying to work with anyone that is using React, without understanding how to write properly.
Exactly what it says on the tin, France's gov made an office suite, online based, and video calling as an alternative/sovereign version of GSuite/Office 365
It means that it is de-facto compatible with all operating systems.
Also means that the tooling to make collaborative work in this suite possible already exists because it's a common use case on the web and less so on native software (see Microsoft Office vs. Microsoft 365 online).
Sure, "all" operating systems. "All" that is OSes that have a web browser built for it that at least supports [TransformStream](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/TransformSt...)... And the browser and spec written and maintained mostly by people outside of France. Kinda compromises the point of being "sovereign" doesn't it?
Managing documents on the back end can be very sensible, depending on your work context. Not having to deal with installations is also a real advantage in a heterogeneous environment with a mix of US-controlled operating systems and unencumbered OSes. It also makes migration between them easier, since you only need a common browser to be supported.
There are definitely some benefits! Installation and updates become trivial. Also, collaboration is generally easier, because all you have to do is send a link.
These are the same reasons Google Docs took off, and they are real advantages.
Python and TypeScript... hard pass. Mediocre software made by mediocre web developers. Imagine a car manufacturer using wood instead of steel because they can only afford to pay cheap lumberjacks.
It's typical of non-technical people to ask for "like Facebook, but x y z." They just don't know the magnitude of effort required behind these projects.
For those unaware, this is likely in response to the current US political crisis in which the US might decide at any point spike the prices or stop offering licenses on Microsoft etc products.
Its part of La Suite which began planning in 2023. This is clearly marked in the linked README. Don't bring /r/politics level misinfo and speculation here.
This already happened when USA sanctioned ICC judge, blocking them from american services. With such special leadership I will not surprised USA to block politicians or citizens with influence from EU that do not align with extreme right views,
That one explivitly cites the ICC judge incident as one of the reasons, even zo the motion to reduce dependence on American big tech was voted before that happened
Great to see this on HN. fyi, La Suite is an umbrella project built by DINUM in France that started several years ago, mainly to enable people in the public administration to use more independent tools. It's built in-house, often on top of other open source technologies. E.g.: Matrix powers chat and LiveKit powers Visio (which was recently featured on HN as well when they announced it's rolled out to replace Zoom / Teams, etc [1])
I'm fortunate to be collaborating with them as their Docs product is built on top of our open source BlockNote text editor (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294 [2] https://www.zendis.de/en
I had a question since there's growing interest in open source adoption for digital sovereignty purposes in Europe; I produce open source software for civil servants as well (for mass appraisal/property tax valuation specifically), and I was wondering if you could offer any advice about how to best meet the needs of/approach European governments (both local and national) about open source collaboration? Do they prefer to develop their own things in house, or do they like to work with community projects?
In our case, they started building on top of our project and then reached out, so not sure I can share any lessons on this. With that said:
- I think administrations in the EU are (slowly but steadily) adopting "Public Money, Public Code" policies and looking more seriously at open source
- Note that policy / strategy on this depends a lot per country / local administration / project etc. I think most governments don't actively develop in house - France is quite the exception in this
- There are a number of conferences that might be relevant (FOSDEM for example just finished)
- We also benefitted from EU grants (e.g.: NLNet) to bootstrap our work and the early research phases
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I think it definitely depends on the country, there isn’t a one-size fits all answer to this for the countries in the EU.
Even in this example, the French are building this in-house, but the Germans are repackaging this into their suite. And the Netherlands is on their way to do the same.
So the approach would be different depending on which country you approached.
My advice to you would be to follow government events like Hackdays to get yourself in front of people who can point you in the right direction
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Do these administrations still purchase licenses for software or do they just create open source maintained by government employees? How much are they willing to pay? Because people in Europe are notoriously paid less so I am curious of the financial aspect. Also curious about the logistics of ownership and support...
I know that my city's administration has a quite active development department.
I don't know the current salary ranges,but they offer other values like vacation days, Work-Life-Balance (proper time tracking to avoid extra hours etc), part-time.offera, child care options and some other benefits, which most corporations won't give in addition to being the state, which means they won't go bankrupt, won't do reductions in force in the way companies do it, ...
Glad to be working as part of this initiative too!
Hi! Congratulations to you and Yousef. And I am lucky enough to be in a position from learning from both of you.
Anyone think what they might about La Suite, but blocknote is a solid product!
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I'm a little confused. You said LiveKit powers Visio. But isn't Visio a CAD and drawing app inside of Microsoft Office?
Visio here is most likely a shorted "visioconférence", the French word for video conference, or online meeting.
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The description of the Docs project, at least on the OP page, is interesting:
"A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales. Built with Django and React."
An office suite's 'docs' component is usually a word processor and people sometimes try to (mis)use it for the functions you actually list - i.e., you can try to use Word as a wiki, linking pages somehow, but it's not nearly as efficient as a purpose-built wiki.
Based on the quote description, it looks like your project inverted the thinking: Is word processing not a/the primary function? Are the other functions truly prioritized - e.g., is the wiki somewhat as efficient as MediaWiki?
I think that the point of the project is more:
“Content over form” so you don’t really need all the formatting options of something like Word when you are just trying to write meeting notes.
They are definitely trending more towards a wiki, but it is still early days for this whole experiment. Though, many of the municipalities in the French gov are using it for their day to day work so it is clearly useful in some capacity. I don’t have numbers, but it’s definitely respectable
Think of Docs more of a modern, kind of Notion-style collaboration tool. It's not meant to be a Word replacement for full-scale document authoring (I believe La Suite will work with LibreOffice for that, but might be wrong here). The product vision is that Docs should focus on "Content over Form"; i.e.: make it easy to create well-structured documents (content), as opposed to Word which makes it easy to change every little visual detail of your document (form).
In addition, there are some advanced integrations with other products in La Suite. For example, video calls made in Visio can be automatically AI-transcribed and presented in a Docs document, etc.
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That's the hacker spirit!
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Okay this is nowhere near an "Office suite". It is a cloud collaboration suite with a glorified markdown editor and with some extra utilities around. Almost nobody buys stuff like Google Docs and Microsoft Office for this reason.
From my experience using open-source collaboration groupware like Nextcloud, their solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow. Only thing that got somewhere near of the commercial offering is OwnCloud's Infinity Scale (OCIS) which is written in Go. It is no surprise since OwnCloud is indeed running an open-core business and you cannot use their binaries in businesses. OpenCloud is the "open-source" fork but they are already in legal trouble with OwnCloud due to industrial espionage claims.
If European governments are serious, the amount of money they _guarantee_ should be in the degree of tens of billions of Euros. Not fun 10k hackaton projects. The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it. And yes it will probably cause whatever current party to lose elections, independence has a price. It is high.
Genuine question: why do you consider it to be nowhere near an "Office suite"? It seems to me it fits the definition given by Wikipedia [1]. I guess it is less advanced than Google Workspace or Microsoft Office but it would cover all of my needs at work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_software#Office_s...
Google Docs is a document editor (opening/saving Microsoft office compatible documents, with layout, etc), not a wiki/markdown editor. The La Suite Docs seems a product more similar to Atlassian Confluence.
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If you scroll a little further down, you'll see that it lists components of an office suite as:
- a word processor - a spreadsheet application - presentation software
This doesn't look like it has any of these
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All _your_ needs at work.
All of this goes out the window when you're dealing with a government bureaucracy that has hyper specific document formatting requirements.
This is a real foundational need of nearly every business at some point. Every court system and government agency has their own rules and they need to be tracked and followed perfectly. There are whole sub-industries around dealing with this for legal documents in MS Word.
You don't need to raise taxes for this, literally just stop wasting money on licensees once the open source projects are ready. It's not a "let do it in 3 months" thing, this will take at least a decade.
“Once ready” they’ll save (somewhat) on licenses, what about paying for it during the years it will take to build it, while it’s not ready?
When any random company makes a Build vs. Buy decision the question is “is this a core competency?” Most companies use a package from MS or GOOG because it’s unlikely that they’ll be so good at productivity software that it’s (A) worth distracting themselves from their actual job and (B) good enough. The same caveats apply here.
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These projects will always need funding indefinitely if they are going to do it.
People always want more and it will never be finished.
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FramaSoft has been building "Dégooglisons" since 2001
https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/
> once the open source projects are ready.
so likely a decade or more of double spending in the meanwhile.
that's 2 election terms in France for context. Good luck making the political parties agree to this.
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My initial thought was: why not fork LibreOffice and spend the extra dev time closing the gap between what it is and what they need?
But after some thought, I feel a cloud collaboration suite makes more sense as big orgs often run on online-first solutions like Sharepoint. So they can tick the essential boxes by being an online collaboration suite, and fill in formatting features later.
Though your points on speed and architecture do make me wonder if Python was their best choice...
> why not fork LibreOffice [...] But after some thought, I feel a cloud collaboration suite makes more sense
LibreOffice has a cloud version :). From what they presented at T-Dose like 10 years ago, it's basically an instance of the software running on the server, cut up into tiles and displayed on a webpage as zoomable image using Leafletjs, the same way that google maps worked before switching to vector graphics 15 years ago. Clicks and other input events are presumably emulated on the server and the resulting display update is sent back to the client, a bit like VNC but using a map library
Interestingly neither their GitHub nor the La Suite front page (translated) actually mention "office" - that's what the OP titled it.
Let young people get fantastically wealthy in a low friction business environment and you'll get all the enterprise grade homegrown software you need.
From the FAQ:
> With Docs our job is not to replace Microsoft Office
https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-...
Also: like when switching from AWS to EU provider, the goal is not feature parity. Not only it is costly to implement, but also a reason why so many features are in AWS or Office is to ensure vendor lock-in due to feature comparisons.
Learning to do more with less is a feature, not a bug.
> OpenCloud is the "open-source" fork but they are already in legal trouble with OwnCloud due to industrial espionage claims.
Can you expand on this or source this? I'm quite interested in OpenCloud, and haven't heard anything about this. I searched for a few keywords (espionage, legal, lawsuit), which only lands your comment on top.
Sure. I didn't say exactly lawsuit because my source only says a threat from Kiteworks (parent company of OwnCloud):
https://github.com/orgs/opencloud-eu/discussions/262#discuss...
They seem to avoid openly discussing and comparing products to avoid further action. Apparently some of the former members of OwnCloud have switch to Heinlein (maker of OpenCloud) and Kiteworks isn't happy about this.
Europe is a little bit busy bleeding money for defence if you hadn't noticed. There's only so many 50bn EUR it can conjure up for something
It's fine, we don't need it all tomorrow. There's no credible threat right now, Russia's got their hands full with Ukraine.
Scaling horizontally is significantly cheaper than the additional engineering cost required to build these applications in statically typed languages, especially in developed nations like France.
The real bottleneck lies on the database side, but it is rare for an average organization to actually hit its limits. Don't think at Microsoft scale if you aren't them.
Server costs actually matter quite a bit at the scales of the incumbents in this space. Also, speed can be an important part of UX. Scaling horizontally won’t help if the engine itself is slow enough that there is noticeable lag even with just a single document getting edited by a dozen people.
I mean, let's face the reality, do you really think anything worthwhile in regards to tech projects will ever come out of government initiatives? I doubt it, especially in the EU.
The closest thing to an alternative office suite from an European company is Proton, and even that is barely a replacement.
you know le suite is a success, when random americans complain about it :)
good for the french, they made the right choice.
Or maybe the solution must be one rooted in reducing taxes. Make investing extremely attractively, and stop relying on taxes to solve everything.
I do not agree, I don't want EU to turn to US. Taxes should be on a level to support the welfare state.
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Having tax reduction as a primary goal is terrible for society, because taxes are the primary mechanism for converting money from rich people into services for everybody, particularly poor people.
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Stop relying on ~investors~ [the business oligarchy] to solve everything
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A small note: in 2026, classic office suites shouldn't even exist in my opinion, so if the EU were to create a glorified R/Quarto, essentially a LaTeX wrapper with some basic calculation capabilities added, it would be infinitely better than any office suite.
My personal setup is Emacs/org-mode, using babel for the rest; I use Python with Polars, Plotly, and very occasionally SymPy just to avoid using Maxima if I'm already in Python. I see no reason at all to use LibreOffice, MS Office, or anything similar. This is what's actually needed. Billions should be invested in IT training, not in copies of software from another era designed to let untrained secretarial staff use a desktop.
You use emacs so why should anyone else need MS Word? A large number of people use word processor software because it has advantages over typewriters or handwriting for their purposes rather than because they lack training in something more esoteric.
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It’s like you aren’t even interested in reinforcing Microsoft’s moat at all!
Sometimes I really like a spreadsheet. I found out at work that spreadsheets all have map / reduce now. That's fun. If there were a spreadsheet interface that was secretly R under the hood and tricked me into understanding R that would be neat.
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> solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow
True as it may be that they are slow, I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages.
> The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it.
You do you, but increasing taxes to build products to replace products built by private enterprise sounds like a 180 degree opposite of what Europe needs to prosper.
This is pre MAGA thinking. Investing in strategic industries that otherwise pose systemic risk to European economies wouldn’t be our first choice, but it’s now necessary.
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> True as it may be that they are slow, I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages.
Yes it is. It's the same reason desktop GUI apps are now slower than Windows 95-era apps that were written in C.
> I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages.
Depends which ones. Python? Definitely a source of slowness.
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It’s building infrastructure, which should lower costs in the long term. Seems like a good use of money from where I’m sitting.
> You do you, but increasing taxes to build products to replace products built by private enterprise sounds like a 180 degree opposite of what Europe needs to prosper.
Shhh, don't tell them.
(Kidding, of course.)
The best solution is skin-in-the-game, for-profit enterprise coupled with rigorous antitrust enforcement.
Companies will go a million times faster than open source. They're greedy and will tear the skin off of inefficiencies and eat them for lunch. That's what they do. Let the system of capitalism work for you. It's an optimization algorithm. One of the very best.
But when companies get too big and start starving off competition, that's when you need to declaw them and restore evolutionary pressure. Even lions should have to work hard to hunt, and they should starve and die with old age to keep the ecosystem thriving.
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To make matters worse, they are using Django. I can't take the EU serious any more.
What issue do you have with Django?
This is not a situation where you'll have thousands of people editing the same document, that'd be insane with Django for sure - but at general collaboration tooling with <100 (random number I made up) editing, Django is unlikely gonna be the bottleneck
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Read this (among other articles on the same subject): https://medium.com/@tk512/django-scales-stop-blaming-the-fra...
What has that to do with the EU?
What would you use instead?
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Django is perfectly capable. I'd use Phoenix for its scalability and performance, if it were me, but I've built large-scale projects in Django before, and it worked well.
At least it's not Laravel or .NET lol.
What an asinine comment, Django is good enough for several billion dollar companies. It's probably good enough to use in a government capacity too.
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On this topic, I think it is worth mentioning Framasoft [1]
It is a French organization that offers plenty of alternatives to Google and other big tech products. A lot of them are just rebranded and hosted open source software, but they also develop their own, such as PeerTube and Framaprout (the last one is a joke, but PeerTube isn't).
[1] https://framasoft.org/
Yup, I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned earlier but they're the ones behind PeerTube (which I see posted on HN a lot) and many other tools. They've been building google alternatives for over two decades now and many of their tools are quite mature
https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/
I hate to say it because it's cute but that website is not going to win over large companies to use these tools.
I don't think they can win over large company, they are just a small nonprofit organization, large companies want to work with other large companies.
Where they can make a difference is for fellow organizations and maybe small companies. A lot of them go to Google because that's the most convenient, even if it sometimes against their principles, they are proposing an alternative.
One minor criticism I have is that while they are not hiding the fact that they are rebranding off-the-shelf free software, they could give them a bit more visibility, should users want to self host at some point.
Lasuite Docs PM here. Awesome to see we’ve made it top the first page again! Thanks for the interest :)
I’ve compiled a bunch of answers in an FAQ on this doc https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-...
Cheers!
Thanks for posting an actual link to a demo, even if read-only. I tried some of the buttons on the site with rudimentary understanding of french, but all I found was login pages
Honest question, though I suspect you won't be able to give a complete answer : how shielded are you from political changes ? When the next president takes office, and they're more aligned with Trump than the current administration, will it also cause a backlash ? Or do you feel shielded by the "we're cheaper than MS licenses" ?
Vive la France !
Love the fact that you use USA date format, not rest-of-world.
Love the fact that your AI customer service bot takes a question and then asks for an email address for a reply.
Love your incoherently bolded statements: "The Docs app is a note taking and knowledge management software.
Love how the vast amount of emojis really clarify things and help the reader.
s/love/hate/g
Also worth looking at:
- Germany‘s OpenDesk: https://www.opendesk.eu/en
- Netherland‘s MijnBureau: https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau-infra/
I'm intrigued as to why both these, and the Suite Numerique have chose Element / Matrix as the chat component. Every time I've tried to use Element / Matrix it has failed dismally for me and everyone else in whatever community is trialling it. Element itself was so buggy as to be unusable.
I don't use Element myself but there was a recent HN discussion where people said it had improved significantly in last year or two.
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Hmm, and what of https://cryptpad.fr/
Though they also seem to be on github https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad
CryptPad is:
- an office suite, where La Suite is at least partly a coherent package bundling existing software which has documents, chat, video calls, etc but wouldn't really play the role of an office suite IIUC - they serve different purposes mostly
- E2EE, which comes with its unique set of benefits and drawbacks
(and yes, sadly at XWiki SAS we host our code on GitHub too, I wish it wasn't like this)
Made X-Wiki unrelated just happen to be the same country
Makes sense, using an office suite hosted by a hostile power isn't a very smart longterm strategy.
Yes I remember when UK regulator blocked Microsoft from buying Activision there were posts on r/Microsoft regarding their ability to send update to brick all Windows installs in UK and delete all Azure data of UK companies, how UK was a small insignificant market compared to BRICs so it wouldn't hurt MSFT stock price.
Given JD Vance obviously hates UK/EU way more than Trump, and he may be next US president, he may in fact threaten Microsoft to do it against UK and EU.
On one hand the dependence on Microsoft is generally bad.
On the other, we shouldn’t take the opinions of the sort of fan who hangs around on a corporation’s subreddit too seriously.
Wondering what software are China/Russia using in their public administration?
Local LibreOffice forks. And MS Office, of course.
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The trend up until the 2010s was that global companies were so big and ubiquitous that they could dictate the economic actions of nations, not the other way around. International military conflicts were influenced by the likes of Halliburton. Corporations were the new nation-states, countries were mere speed bumps in the flow of global capital. That was seen by some as a great thing, aligning everyone’s interests together and encouraging peace.
In that world, France betting on Microsoft is not only benign, it’s a positive. That’s also the world of Davos and Jeffrey Epstein.
We’re experiencing a global shift toward nationalism which has pushed back hard on that trend. There’s things to like about that and things to dislike, but those things differ wildly depending on your politics.
I'd say it goes beyond nationalism. Even countries that haven't succumbed to the far right are forced to play by the new rules. I've heard some refer to it as "neomercantilism".
Politicians in the EU are complicit to say the least. And I hope they'll prove me wrong.
It's not an office suite and the linked page doesn't claim it is.
The title should be changed.
Great, but why on GitHub? That doesn't seem very souverain to me
Git is distributed, the repository can be hosted concurrently at many places.
and the primary place they chose is owned by Microsoft
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The project benefits from the visibilityband community of GitHub and GitHub is completely replaceable with European hosted or self-hostable options should something untoward happen.
But they still chose an American company, github, lol ironic
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Not sure that it’s relevant to switch git hosts is trivial. And everyone is already there
Cause that's where the traction is. The beauty of git is that it's inherently distributed, github is just a clone like any other.
Underrated point: Bldg #1 needs to be sovereign hub for initiatives, for which OP is providing a first tenant…
I wait for frenchhub, in french only, no english translation, nothing. Typical french. Greetings from you EU neighbor.
A lot of the documentation in La Suite seems to be available in English.
given git is decentralized, my guess is github is just a public mirror.
GitHub is using Git which was developed by Linus Thorvald, a Finish and thus EU citizen.
That does not sound very sovereign by the US to me.
There's a huge difference between the origin of some open source software, where a service is hosted and where the company providing it is from.
You can take some open source software made in some other country and use it or fork it no strings attached to its country of origin. No leader from that country can decide to abruptly cut you off your usage of the software because they feel like it.
GitHub is literally Microsoft. US company with servers in the US. What you're talking about is the underlying technology.
This has been on HN a lot recently. For instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
The big problem EUs continuous big talk on digital sovereignty, which is a good and vital concept, is that funding is ridiculously lacking.
Terms used like; “European hyperscale cloud” “Sovereign infrastructure” “Strategic autonomy” “European data centers for critical workloads”
Which ended up in various efforts and projects
Digital Europe Programme, Recovery and Resilience Facility, IPCE
(I am not deeply familiar with EU projects)
I believe funding was around low hundreds of millions (€) total
To build one hyperscaler region might cost around €10 billion.
The second problem is that systems that were suggested out of it still relied on US software stack, US computers, etc.
It is not like the EU member states could not fund it, some estimates say aggregated EU and member states have spent €350 billion in Ukraine.
That is not to say they should not do that, nor to suggest you have to chose one or the other but it is demonstration that EU+Member states can fund massive efforts, If deemed important enough.
and EU+Memberstates so far have not felt an urgency or will to really invest in digital sovereignty.
The EU doesn't really fund many things directly. It's total annual budget is just 170 billion euros. It can fund research and coordination projects but at the end of the day the EU is mostly a coordination mechanism for sovereign states. Looking purely at EU projects is not really a useful lense to get an idea of what is happening...
This is something we must be angry with our tech leaders for
They thought they could support trump because they were upset with the democrats policies on crypto and AI cautiousness
But instead they got someone willing to break the world order and our alliances which will harm tech growth
Good! I'll definitely give it a try!! we still need a good email server system in open source and simple to install / maintain ?
Honest question…given how developed our sensibilities are around docs, file storage, and spreadsheets, what is the hard part to this?
Don’t get me wrong…something is hard…I still use Microsoft Word because I feel like I have to. But what is keeping the industry from building a word processor that doesn’t suck and is capable of interfacing with .docx files?
Word has a billion features you did not know that exist. Getting something Word shaped is probably straight-forward enough (how long did it take to make Google Docs), but getting those dangling features and quirks would be a long haul.
Mimicking Excel - woof. This one is used by so many people in different ways, that unless you offer 1:1 bug compatibility, it would be challenging to get 100% of people to meet everyone's current use case.
Shout out to Yjs, ProseMirror and BlockNote on which we relied to build LaSuite Docs
I wish them the very best, but I don't understand why it doesn't handle OpenDocument Format (ODF) natively.
It is interesting to see yjs with hoccuspocus being used. I am currently considering our options for real time document editing + full text search.
Seems like a common approach is something like using yjs for sync with a temporary LSM storage like rocksdb for updates and then periodically snapshot to postgres for full text search and compaction.
Take a look at my Y.js sync server at https://teleportal.tools if you are already using JS on your backend
Nice to see the "true spirit" of OpenSource being practiced and growing in Europe...I hope other countries jump into this as well, with support and resources.
What's wrong with libreoffice and collabra?
> What's wrong with libreoffice
I'm a very light user and only moved to onlyoffice because it was freezing[0] on my then new laptop, but at least on mac, I feel like it needs a UI refresh, icons that are not blurry, a look at the performance when doing basic tasks, etc.
It's free and opensource, which is good, but it's not as polished as other paid alternatives.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43038942
bonjour, je suis clippy ...
I would not be surprised if American PACs adopted this out of concern that US based office suites are politically compromised.
The french can make mountains move for very little money. There army capabilities compared to the us relative to the investment is outstanding. Wouldn't wonder if they dethroned Microsoft office by strategically supporting open source.
I came to bash on it but it looks nice, well done France!
Nice to see this kind of initiative, but looks like too little too late IMO. Reminds me of Nextcloud, which is great but quite slow.
Why is Django so popular among open-source projects like these, especially government funded? I’ve never happened to see a commercial project use it in my twenty years in the field. Ruby/Go or even bun or node would be much more approachable and performant options today.
> I’ve never seen a commercial project use it in my twenty years in the field.
This is very surprising to me considering some of the largest sites in the world are built on Django. Instagram, Pinterest, for instance. Large parts of stripe and Robinhood are implemented with Django. Eventbrite, bitbucket. I believe even Sentry is.
All commercial products.
In Instagram's case, they do not use the ORM or Admin, and have an internal fork of the request handling/middleware stack that is 100% async (before the recent async bits were added to Django)[1].
It's great that Django's API design allowed them to move this way easily, but they aren't actually using Django in the traditional sense because it can't handle their scale.
I've found that with the Django ORM and DRF especially, it's very easy to create a poorly performing app by following the established patterns (N+1 queries being a huge problem created by DRF serializers). You need to be extremely diligent to create something performant in this ecosystem. Not every dev team has Armin Ronacher :P
Where I work we found this exhausting, and moved on to FastAPI and ASP.NET. We make our queries much more explicit using tools like Dapper, and now a senior engineer can have a much better idea how a particular route will perform just by reading the code (obviously, we still do some profiling).
[1]: https://djangochat.com/episodes/django-instagram-carl-meyer
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Sentry is indeed, and is open source and self-hostable: https://github.com/getsentry/sentry
It’s a pretty large app (I think >1M lines of Python). I ran a self hosted version for several years and found it performant and pretty easy to keep running and updated.
> stripe
Stripe has always been a Ruby-heavy company.
Does node or Go have a full-stack framework with any real usage? Those languages seem to have people that like piecing together libraries than using frameworks. Other languages all offer popular frameworks; Ruby on Rails, Java Spring, PHP Laravel, ASP.Net.
The modern approach is to have a node-based fullstack framework like Next, SvelteKit or Astro, plus backend API services.
I’m afraid i am one of those people :)
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Django must be more popular than Rails in the EU these days. Most Django devs have never used Go or Node and have never heard about Bun. Django is in the category of battle-tested frameworks that are very boring and easy to get things done with.
Instagram uses it as their main backend. They have hundreds of million of daily users. Some of the critical backend services are in C++.
Depends on your definition of "use." They use an internal async fork, and don't use the ORM: https://djangochat.com/episodes/django-instagram-carl-meyer
Django is boring in a best possible way. Rather than spending six months setting up a bunch of microservices, you spend couple weeks on Django and ship a working product. Built in admin dashboard for example is a godsend at small scale.
or now you spend couple of hours/days with AI and produce a Rust implementation that will smoke Django 100X
Bun is a very recent and thus unstable and immature project.
It has also been acquired by Anthropic recently.
Does not look like a great choice.
It's very on-brand for France that the website is in French only, no English
+1. I got excited but https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ doesn't seem to be in English or any other European language. If you guys are hoping for Europe-wide adoption, start there.
And somehow, during the effort to achieve digital sovereigncy, they still manage to host the source on the Microsoft property of github 8-/
Given that the only step necessary to host git on the internet is making port 22 publicly accessible, I fail to see why so many projects are hosted on this malware site...
Very nice.
You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence, but they do. Over the years I have heard of many good Open Source Projects coming out of France.
I sometimes wonder if it is because of French vs English Language were you hardly hear of their projects in English speaking Countries.
I think an unsung hero in making open source broadly known and adopted in France is Framasoft [https://framasoft.org/en/], a non-profit association. They have since many many years an initiative to de-google internet and provide free and hosted alternatives and resources.
More people on HN seem to know of PeerTube than know of FramaSoft, the group that's building PeerTube
+1 on this, they had an amazing presence in the French community for 20 years and many of us own them our passion for FOSS.
The French have amazing technologists, I worked with many stunningly brilliant French men and women across 3D gaming, film and media production. However, culturally they end up in a little "French pod" when not working in France because they know how to and really enjoy vigorous debate. If one cannot hold their own in their free wheeling intellectualized conversation and debate style, one might end up feeling insulted and stop hanging out with the frogs. There also seems to be a deep cultural understanding of design that is not present in people, generally, from other nations. That creates some interesting perspectives in software interactive design.
> You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence
France has always been super heavy on open source. They even used to host Les Trophées du Libre, international open-source software competition. FramaSoft (i.e. PeerTube) and VLC are also French.
Isn’t VLC French also?
OCaml and early Prolog are from France:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Colmerauer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Institute_for_Research_... (INRIA)
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Two words: Fabrice Bellard
>would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence
You have not been paying attention.
The problem is that open-source projects funded by the taxpayer bring nothing long term to create companies that can compete or generate economic growth or develop future industries. They would be much better off creating a more business friendly environment and supporting private businesses through grants, procurements, etc the way the US are good at.
Of course, it is not forcing to use any whatng cartel web engines namely has noscript/basic (x)html interop support (aka classic web) and/or with public and as simple as possible network protocols anyone can implement a rich GUI client for.
Of course its SDK has components choosen with care to maximize alternative (present and future) availability and its code is not stored on microsoft github.com.
I was looking at the Meet repository as an example, people literally don't know how to write React, without drowning in `useEffect`, `eslint-disable`, `any`. React has it's issues (and a ton of them), but writing code like this, I expect it to end up exactly like Microsoft Teams quality wise.
Honestly, at that point, it's indistinguishable from LLM slop
I have met very few devs who know how to avoid useEffect
Why would one decide to even go with React in recent years anyway? Strangely I've seen it happen a lot too.
I'd have thought that Vue or Svelte would be a slam dunk choice. Do project managers love bloat and lag or something?
I personally don't mind React, but I do acknowledge, after using it for a couple of years, that it seems to be a magnet for issues. It's the kind of framework, where if you're not writing properly, mostly like [Thinking in React](https://react.dev/learn/thinking-in-react) (with some caveat for niche performance optimizations), you're going to have a rough time, and you're going to make life miserable for anyone that does know what they're doing
It has a weird learning curve, where you can ship something somewhat working, fairly fast, but to write it properly, with no bugs, you need to understand a lot of niche React-specific things, and their solutions (and those solutions are never useEffect https://react.dev/learn/you-might-not-need-an-effect).
At that point, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't already experienced with React. It's been an uphill battle, trying to work with anyone that is using React, without understanding how to write properly.
Another one?
Previously:
This week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
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Somewhat related, more overall context
France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294
Exactly what it says on the tin, France's gov made an office suite, online based, and video calling as an alternative/sovereign version of GSuite/Office 365
What's the value of it being online? Surely being able to run it as a native application would be preferable?
It means that it is de-facto compatible with all operating systems.
Also means that the tooling to make collaborative work in this suite possible already exists because it's a common use case on the web and less so on native software (see Microsoft Office vs. Microsoft 365 online).
Sure, "all" operating systems. "All" that is OSes that have a web browser built for it that at least supports [TransformStream](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/TransformSt...)... And the browser and spec written and maintained mostly by people outside of France. Kinda compromises the point of being "sovereign" doesn't it?
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Managing documents on the back end can be very sensible, depending on your work context. Not having to deal with installations is also a real advantage in a heterogeneous environment with a mix of US-controlled operating systems and unencumbered OSes. It also makes migration between them easier, since you only need a common browser to be supported.
There are definitely some benefits! Installation and updates become trivial. Also, collaboration is generally easier, because all you have to do is send a link.
These are the same reasons Google Docs took off, and they are real advantages.
Python and TypeScript... hard pass. Mediocre software made by mediocre web developers. Imagine a car manufacturer using wood instead of steel because they can only afford to pay cheap lumberjacks.
Ouch, harsh words!
But, what would be your stack of choice? Or, what stack gives you the most confidence?
This is a toy. It really makes it look like they aren't that serious.
It's typical of non-technical people to ask for "like Facebook, but x y z." They just don't know the magnitude of effort required behind these projects.
Office suite, cool! Looks Inside It's a Django app.
And it isn't an office suite at all
For those unaware, this is likely in response to the current US political crisis in which the US might decide at any point spike the prices or stop offering licenses on Microsoft etc products.
Its part of La Suite which began planning in 2023. This is clearly marked in the linked README. Don't bring /r/politics level misinfo and speculation here.
The first version for the "docs" program was released in May 2024
This already happened when USA sanctioned ICC judge, blocking them from american services. With such special leadership I will not surprised USA to block politicians or citizens with influence from EU that do not align with extreme right views,
I posted about Amsterdam municipality digital strategy for next 10 years (tldr dont use azure clown for important stuff) yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46917768
That one explivitly cites the ICC judge incident as one of the reasons, even zo the motion to reduce dependence on American big tech was voted before that happened
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