Comment by okanat
18 days ago
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.
> (opening/saving Microsoft office compatible documents, with layout, etc)
Not being Microsoft Office®-compatible does not make something not an office suite. In that case, there is (by design) only one Office® suite in the world
> not a wiki/markdown editor
I was wondering if you meant WYSIWYG editing as opposed to markdown editing, but then you say
> La Suite Docs seems a product more similar to Atlassian Confluence
which is WYSIWYG (the best web-based wysiwyg editor I've ever used, in fact; even if I'd never choose it for being a vendor lock-in that has shown they want to own your data by removing the self-hosted options, maybe with exceptions for giant enterprises idk but at least we had to migrate and it wasn't fun)
so then what are you saying? What makes an 'office suite' an office suite to you?
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> 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.
In the last 10 years I've been spending much more time at the office consulting and editing confluence and web pages (sharepoint / mkdocs / readme and other markdown based resources) than the cumulative time spent on word, excel, powerpoint and pdf documents. I imagine it is the same for a significant portion of the population.
Also, libreoffice is already a thing and nobody edits office365 documents using the web versions except when their employer can't/don't want to pay the license for the full version or the client is not vailable on their OS (linux users). Libreoffice doesn't have that problem, you only really need storage with sharing facilities, not featurefull web clients for your docs.
Work being done in offices is changing over time. I find myself writing less documents for printing and more for collaborating and sharing directly.
Even though many formal processes still require printable PDFs, we are slowly migrating to something paperless, or at least not paper-centric.
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For layouts and opening docs from other suites, it seems they rely on OnlyOffice, as listed on the marketing page of their Google Drive equivalent [1]. OpenDesk from ZenDiS (German counterpart to this project, also collaborating on La Suite) seems to rely on Nextcloud and Collabora Online for that [2]. Collabora and OnlyOffice are also present in Lasuite Drive's development environment [3].
Docs and Drive aren't the only products in this suite: they also provide alternative for Meet, Chat, GMail or Sheets. I have no doubt that Microsoft and Google products offer more features but my point still stands: a lot of employees (like myself) need productivity tools but only need the core features.
[1] https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/fichiers
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesk
[3] https://github.com/suitenumerique/drive/blob/46c9730d1b6d5c4...
markdown is superior in every way.
whatever doesn't map 1:1, imo just trash it.
if you can't do your work using markdown, you should be fired.
if i'm downvoted it is by people who deserve to be fired.
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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
It has two out of the three:
- Word processor: https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs
- Spreadsheet: https://github.com/suitenumerique/calc
Have you considered that “office suite” has drifted in meaning since Microsoft Office was introduced and things like:
- chat
- video calls
- notion
Might now be more important to an office than word processing or presentation software?
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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.
For a traditional office suite, you'd want a word processor with somewhat of a decent layout engine in it, a spreadsheet, something for slide presentations, something for rudimentary databases/datasources, and some sort of diagram drawing capability, and all of these integrated together.
By a "decent layout" engine, you'd like the ability to change fonts, add spacing between paragraphs, segment the page into regions, e.g. by changing the number of columns on a page, insert images and diagrams and choose how text wraps around them, create captions for embedded media, set page numbering policies (or navigational policies for web generation), generate table of contents, set table headers, make more complex tables with merged cells and different types of boundaries, generate table of references, generate tabs, then export to a web page, to a pdf, or to whatever other format you want, hopefully all from the same source. Then when you send it out for review, people can attach their comments to portions of the document, you can accept or reject their changes, there is a document revision history, etc.
So for example, you could write up a quarterly report by importing summary financial data into your spreadsheet, doing some basic analysis, export tables to your word processor, generate some bar charts or graphs, draw some boxes and arrows with your drawing program, stick that into your word processor, add some footnotes and hyperlinks, put the same info into a slide presentation. Then if you want, you could save that as a pdf or turn into a webpage, etc.
One time I had to write up documentation for various security certifications, and that was my introduction to the world of Microsoft office. Learning office made the project more fun, I had never used it before and was impressed with the functionality.
That said, I don't think most people who have office suites actually need a full powered office suite. Probably markdown + slack is enough for a lot of people, but I always like a good drawing or diagram.
Most people I know have shifted to google suite, it really has everything you need and is OS independent. But apart from the convenience of being browser-based, it is just another MS Office clone. The google drawing functionality is very basic, I often wish you could integrate something like excalidraw into it.
I am not suggesting this project needs to keep adding clones of MS Office functionality until it turns into Libre Office, but funded by the French government. That would be a waste. Instead, why not make it better? Reimagine it? Look, for example, at excalidraw. It's fantastic. It was really a fresh take on the stuff people were doing with visio.
I think there is lots of room to make a truly modern office suite instead of another MS Office rehash, so I would encourage this project to go its own way and do something interesting if they intend to be a replacement for proprietary office suites like google suite or MS Office.
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.
No, suggestion those caveats show that you are out of touch with what is at stake. This is about digital sovereignty, not saving money. It’s about not relying on the US. The US is literally forcing our hands here.
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Being able to operate sovereignly is a core competency for governments.
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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.
If the money is use to pay local developer, who reinvest most of it in a taxed local economy, it would need a HUGE amount of devs to match up the government's current MS license cost.
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.
This likely won't need billions of Euros to implement and will be an earmark in the budget. My point being it's not such a grandious project, from a continental perspective.
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.
you know le suite is a success, when random americans complain about it :)
good for the french, they made the right choice.
I'm a German resident on a track to be a citizen though. I am complaining because all these "EU independence efforts" are just posturing. I am all for European independence. However I am also aware that it takes quite a bit money and effort to make that happen.
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.
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.
A BND (German intel) analysis shows otherwise.
"The BND stated that these expenditures are being used not only to sustain the ongoing war in Ukraine but also to expand Russia’s sub-threshold operations against countries on NATO’s eastern flank."
https://defence24.com/armed-forces/half-of-the-defence-budge...
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Digital sovereignty is realistically part of defence.
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.
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.
To be fair ms word is rooted in a world paper once ruled and the paper/document metaphor is becoming increasingly less relevant.
I used to use it all day every day and now i use it once a year maybe (often for government related things, coz theyre often the only ones still asking me to fill out and sign PDF forms).
Most office functions are better supplanted with a decent cms, spreadsheet, email and something to let you create forms for people to fill in.
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.
Spreadsheets are perhaps the only pseudo-visual programming tool to have achieved significant widespread use, but they are terrible:
- the logic is hidden; until you click on a cell, you don't know "what it actually contains"
- there is no entry point, no main(), so there is no way to read it other than keeping 100% of what the sheet does in your head, or ignoring parts of it and risking breaking them while working on others
- the logic tends to be coded in single lines rather than multi-line with proper indentation, which makes reading it very difficult
This is just the conceptual basis, without even counting the improper auto-formatting of cells that has even led to renaming genes to prevent them from being considered dates https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam... or the absurdities regarding date calculations.
They can be convenient when you have to play around with a few pieces of tabular data, yes, but the price you pay is much higher than working with high-level languages that would be easy for even the average user to understand if only they had started with them.
Shiny?
It’s like you aren’t even interested in reinforcing Microsoft’s moat at all!
> 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 switched to Heinlein (the maker of OpenCloud) and Kiteworks isn't happy about this.
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.
Which it can’t. There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states
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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.
> taxes are the primary mechanism for converting money from rich people into services for everybody
Even California billionaires would rather leave the state than pay the 5% wealth tax. All to provide “services” that are generally superfluous or tied to corrupt kickbacks.
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Stop relying on ~investors~ [the business oligarchy] to solve everything
They're being asked, in this case, to solve a problem that business has already shown able to solve. More competition will also solve that oligarchy problem too.
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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.
> industrial espionage claims
?? this is not true, please provide a source
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929781
Couldn't agree more.
I always laugh my ass off when people cry about Microsoft and Office. Well, the thing is that there are no real competitors, and we can't blame them if everyone else is more incompetent than they are.
Apple has been pretending to work on an alternative for years, and it is still nowhere near as powerful/good.
But we live in a feminized world, where it is profitable to virtue signal by siding with the pretend victims even though they are not any better than the winners and, in fact, just as bad, as Apple routinely demonstrates.
> 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.
It’s called mercantilism. It was thoroughly refuted hundreds of years ago.
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> I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages.
Depends which ones. Python? Definitely a source of slowness.
Hard imagining well designed web app bottlenecked by server-side processing that is not offloaded to database, or done via bindings to libraries written in compiled languages.
> Definitely a source of slowness.
I would first blame the programmers, the design and lack of specialty offloading before blaming any programming language. Well designed web calls scale nearly linearly with usage and usually poor design or programming is the source of slowness. You can always trade language complexity for speed but assuming it is the cause of all perceived slowness is a poor man's view.
It is the same story every time again, first it was java, which has so many large scale projects most people won't even know it's running things they use, now it's apparently python who is to blame for all slowness on the web. When the next JIT or scripted language comes along which is not someone's favourite pet that will get the blame.
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Is this not a discussion about a web application? Order of magnitude matters. If Python is slower than Rust by 2 orders, but faster than IO by another 2 orders, are you not haggling just to shave off a few dimes on your 100 dollar bill?
> 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.
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.
> The best solution is skin-in-the-game, for-profit enterprise coupled with rigorous antitrust enforcement.
Don't we have enough examples showing that this simply cannot work long-term, because the for-profit enterprises will _inevitably_ grow larger than the government can handle through antitrust? And once they reach that size, they become impossible to rein in. Just look at all the stupid large american corporations who can't be broken up anymore because the corporation has the lobbying power and media budget to make any attempt to enforce antitrust a carrier killer for a politician.
I think it's very myopic to say that corporate structure is the "best solution".
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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
My issue is latency. Django is extremely slow.
Does it really need explaining why Office 365/Google Docs cannot be written in Django?
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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.
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?
Something like this that's proven itself: https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...
TLDR: C++, WASM, and some form of GRPC with C++ on the server side as well. Because you need a language that's fast, can contain high complexity and large programs without collapsing (which is a short list of languages) and can work fast for the bits that need speed.
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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.
It really depends on how it’s used. I love Django in certain specific situations. You know that saying though about when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail…
At least it's not Laravel or .NET lol.