The turmoil caused by the two contracts you mention also prove that the new normal has already shifted towards open source. It's a slow process, but it's undeniable that we are making progress.
These initiatives are only for show. I work in one of the biggest French goverment entity and no one uses this. We still very much use Microsoft products for virtually everything, and everything "sovereign" (Resana, Pline...) just doesn't work or isn't as convenient
I disagree. I currently work as a phd student in a french lab and we're slowly but surely adopting these french government tools, and they work really well. It will take years, but the migration process is probably going to happen.
Hah. It used to be that Microsoft products were sleek, fast, and just plain more convenient than Open Source products. E.g. OpenOffice vs MS Office.
And honestly, OS stuff still often sucks quite a bit.
It's just that MS software has degraded to the point of utter shittiness (see: Teams) that now it's just plain worse than their own software from 15 years ago.
> It's just that MS software has degraded to the point of utter shittiness (see: Teams) that now it's just plain worse than their own software from 15 years ago.
I sometimes feel like I live in a parallele universe reading the comments here on Office.
The addition of collaboration and how it seemlessly integrated with sharepoints while easing the sharing of documents make Office365 a blessing in most office environment. There is no way people are going back to sharing files like before after having worked this way.
This thread is comparing MS tools with the FR gov equivalents. So for word processing it would be Docs (https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/home/), which is a collaborative tool, with an integrated sharing feature.
> And 15 years ago, we just used Office files in a Dropbox folder. It solved all of our collaboration issues.
No, it did not.
I worked through that. Someone had to be in charge of the master version of all documents and ensure modifications were properly merged and not done simultaneously. Getting to the final version of anything was deeply annoying.
Now everyone can just work on the shared document. You see modifications as they happen. Office intelligently locks what needs to be locked. It just works. I can't tell you how much time this feature alone saves me.
I agree that the collaborative tools in the current office are better. It's just that they are not that _much_ better than before to justify all the negatives.
this! this is so true for every big corporation product. Iphone is a shitty version of iphones from 10 years ago but with better cameras…. and windows is spamming me hard with their services
That’s not quite true. Sure, there is still a lot of proprietary software, but there is also a lot of effort put into going to the right direction. A lot of agencies publish data openly, code for major things like taxes is getting published. Trump helped significantly, but there are audits being done right now on the different kind of proprietary foreign software, with different levels of importance, and shuffling what we can to open alternatives (or closed but European, depending on the field).
The Office365 subscriptions are probably going to go last, because the effort to deploy alternatives and retrain the 200,000 people using them is enormous. It is a very visible aspect that won’t change anytime soon, but it does not mean that there is nothing else happening.
For example, the Renater tools are getting more and more use from all the research and higher education institutions. It’s not going to happen overnight, but it is shifting.
It's absolutely true that nobody in the French govt, French semi-public companies (so-called "SEMs") or French large private companies uses anything but Microsoft and the big US cloud providers.
But I don't think the open-source initiatives are "just for show" because nobody cares, and so there is no one to show it to.
They are more wishful thinking, random initiatives. "Let's do open-source!" and throw a couple million euros here and a couple thousand there, and we have the illusion of doing something.
What is made in that manner is also of incredible low quality; most of the time it doesn't work; I recently tried to do a "téléconsultation" with a hospital, which uses state-sponsored software. It was impossible to connect (and the login and password are sent in the same email! why bother with a password then??)
Data sources are not maintained or are incomplete. Data about road accidents don't mention the brand of the car because French car companies lobbied against it! (Which tells a lot about car quality in the first place). Etc.
> It's absolutely true that nobody in the French govt, French semi-public companies (so-called "SEMs") or French large private companies uses anything but Microsoft and the big US cloud providers.
I work from one of the biggest French companies and this is definitely untrue.
Everyone starting from the very top is concerned about the issue of sovereignty surrounding the cloud. This was true before and is even more true nowadays.
Obviously, everyone still use Office because, well, there is no alternative to Office. The only serious competitor is Google and it's a poor one on top of still begin an American company.
Still, you have some very successful initiative at the state level. Messaging is a good exemple. So is all the work done around GED and open data.
Do you realise how funny it is to see you complain that you can't see the car brands in a data base about road accidents while not realising how awesome it is that you have access to such a database?
> Obviously, everyone still use Office because, well, there is no alternative to Office
So it is, indeed, true. Can you clarify what your point is, exactly? (Also: there is an alternative to MS Office, which is LibreOffice. It works ok. It's not as powerful, maybe (maybe!) but it's fine.)
> Do you realise how funny it is to see you complain that you can't see the car companies in a data base about road accidents while not realising how awesome it is that you have access to such a database?
No, I really don't. It's not "awesome" to have access to that data. This is public information. Citizens don't have to be grateful of what the state does. THE STATE WORKS FOR US, not the other way around.
And as it is, it's not very useful, since the most important data is withheld.
Office is a fairly unsignificant part of our cloud usage. I'm fairly sure we could come to an agreement with Microsoft if we needed to self-host.
> there is an alternative to MS Office, which is LibreOffice
People don't use Office like it's the 90s anymore. Everything which doesn't have seemless collaboration and document sharing is dead on arrival.
> No, I really don't. It's not "awesome" to have access to that data. This is public information. Citizens don't have to be grateful of what the state does. THE STATE WORKS FOR US, not the other way around.
The state doesn't owe you anything apart from safety and law enforment. Of course, you should be grateful that people fought for, put in place and maintain all the services you receive on top. They don't come by magic. That's actual people working.
The fact that you can easily and freely access this database is something to be celebrated. In most places, people who don't work for the state have to pay to access this or go through a public library and that's honestly perfectly fine.
It's baffling to me how the French seemingly fail to realise how incredible the breadth of services their government provides is and somehow manage to make themselves miserable rather than actually doing something of what they are gifted with.
> The state doesn't owe you anything apart from safety and law enforment.
The parent was a bit whiny, but this is most definitely not true. The people are not entities subject to the state, it is a democratic and social republic, not a soviet. The people are the state and as such, the role of the state is to do whatever the people want it to do. In France, the state is supposed to guarantee the rights of Man, which is more fundamental than the constitution and also broader than safety and law enforcement.
> It's baffling to me how the French seemingly fail to realise how incredible the breadth of services their government provides is and somehow manage to make themselves miserable rather than actually doing something of what they are gifted with.
This I can agree with :)
These threads are baffling, particularly considering what the people at INRIA are doing about trusted and transparent administration, and the massive effort put into sovereign software. It’s like everything is bad because they saw people using Windows at their city hall.
> It’s like everything is bad because they saw people using Windows at their city hall.
No. French state companies (including military schools! and the Department of Education!!) use Windows, MS Office, and US-based cloud providers en masse. Good for them, I guess. I don't really care.
But pretending to do the opposite is what gets me.
Or when the Head of the BPI (Banque Publique d'Investissement) goes on TV to say that France should only buy French tech, and you learn that the same BPI that he leads, just signed a huge contract with AWS, then that's upsetting. (He's also very concerned with China because the Chinese State finances some of its private industry; never mind that it's the whole purpose and mission of the BPI.)
That's the core regalian powers at the heart of the state. Basically, a state is there to ensure laws can be voted, that they are fairly enforced and that things can stay that way. This notably means that people are safe in the broadest sense. They are not going to be mugged, murdered or dispossessed. That also means that the state has the mean to stay a state without becoming part of the next door state, which is to say, has an army to defend itself. A state which can't guarantee that is a failed state (or a former state if it was invaded).
Anything else is the cherry on the cake. Most states do a lot more because their citizen decided through laws this was a good thing - things like social security or education. If your state does these things for you, well, you should be grateful because they are in no way owed to you. You get them through the good will of the citizen who preceded you, the care of the civil servants that provide them to you and the continuously renewed commitment of your fellow citizen. If the French felt a bit less entitled and a bit more grateful, the country wouldn't be in the sorry state it's currently in.
> If the French felt a bit less entitled and a bit more grateful, the country wouldn't be in the sorry state it's currently in.
Oh please. The French are doing far better than we (the US) are. Precisely because their electorate has made their aristocracy rightly fearful of them. Chopping off their heads tends to do that.
> Oh please. The French are doing far better than we (the US) are.
I’m French.
The French hasn’t chopped the head of their aristocracy. Despite going through five republics, two monarchies and two empires in the last two hundred years, the country has very much de facto recreated an aristocracy. It’s one of the most unequal when it comes to social mobility in the whole OECD. Ever heard of Bourdieu?
What France has is a lot of redistribution so its Gini coefficient is quite low and a very generous through currently financially unsustainable safety net. Public services are also working fairly well even if it used to be better. That’s why I hate how ungrateful most French are. People have no interest in maintaining and protecting what they have. They prefer whining constantly while waiting for other people to do the work. That’s how you end up with the far right and the far left at 30% despite them only peddling non sense.
I’m not really interested in commenting further on your weird fascist obsession. I think it would be good for the discussion if you brushed up on what is both fascism and a state however.
Living in the middle of a fascist breakdown of society makes me, and all of my freedom and safety loving friends, incredibly sensitive towards it. I've had a read of some of your other posts, and my initial read of you as some American maga idiot was wrong.
That said, you are incredibly lucky to be living in a fascism-proof society and you should be thanking your fellow countrymen, all the way back to the French Revolution, for this fact. You don't have women in your hospitals dying of perfectly treatable conditions because the idiots in power have decided women don't deserve bodily autonomy.
You don't have nazis holding chainsaws tearing through your federal government. You don't have students disappearing off the streets into offshore concentration camps. You don't have tyrants arresting judges. None of these things are happening, or could happen, in France because heads would roll, again.
So color me unimpressed by your naive notions about what fascism is and isn't.
>Everything which doesn't have seemless collaboration and document sharing is dead on arrival.
cryptpad do exist as well as collabora office and anyoffice running in a nextcloud.
My observation however is that despite the sharing capabilities of office365, a lot of people even in fortune500 companies still email .docx files to work collaboratively instead of using he sharing capabilities.
In "one" accident, maybe not very. But as a criteria to do statistical studies, make, model, year and maintenance would be quite interesting. The whole point of this data is to do studies.
But why focus on the car only? To me it would be interesting to know where has the driver got the driver license from. Or if they have a medical condition. Or maybe they have a stiff neck on the day of the accident. Were they distracted by children?
I’m probably failing to see the difference between Peugeot 208 or Renault 5 being involved in an accident. What insights could one expect from this info?
> To me it would be interesting to know where has the driver got the driver license from. Or if they have a medical condition. Or maybe they have a stiff neck on the day of the accident. Were they distracted by children?
Sure, but that's an information that is difficult to create; it will result from a police investigation (and even then, may or may not be accurate).
Mark, model and age of the vehicle is 1/ incredibly easy to get and 2/ 100% reliable.
It's not the end-all be-all of road safety, but it's interesting; and the fact that all it took to not publish it was some lobbying effort from car makers is incredible.
> So it is, indeed, true. Can you clarify what your point is, exactly? (Also: there is an alternative to MS Office, which is LibreOffice. It works ok. It's not as powerful, maybe (maybe!) but it's fine.)
The problem is not software capability. The problem is training staff to use new software, planning the transition, and make it happen smoothly. You cannot just end your contract and get a new provider when you’re talking about 100,000 licenses. In fact, Office is likely going to go last, because it is easier to update the backend and centralised infrastructure than the client software used by hundreds of thousands of people in something like 500 different agencies.
Hell, we regularly have glitches going from one version of Office to the next. When it’s a university administration that’s out of operation for 2 months it’s bad enough, but survivable. When it’s all of public-facing civil servants it’s a different matter.
> No, I really don't. It's not "awesome" to have access to that data. This is public information. Citizens don't have to be grateful of what the state does. THE STATE WORKS FOR US, not the other way around.
Right. The fact is that it used to be inaccessible, and now it is. We should demand more, of course, but bitching about it is short-sighted and counter-productive. More and more data is accessible, leading to more and more transparency and new uses. It could be better (and it is the citizens’ responsibility to vote to make it get better), but you have to start somewhere.
They are downvoted because their statement (that this is “only for show”) is simply not true. It may be their experience, but I know a few people in different government agencies and I can say that it is far more than show. There are more arguments in the thread about why their point of view is partial.
Also, you are likely downvoted because talking about downvotes is boring and does not bring anything, and also because what was downvoted when you posted might be upvoted now, leaving these complaints look a bit silly.
Yes, I agree that some public organizations in France are making progress with Open Source. For instance, free software is now common in universities (with local variations). And overall I think there's a central influence of the DiNum ("Direction Numérique", the Digital Department of the French State) in this direction. But I don't see how this UN charter makes any difference.
There's progress, though not related to this charter.
And so slow that I would bet against "Open Source" becoming widespread in French schools within the next decade.
> Facts (and code) are following.
I'm sorry, but the current situation and the past experience makes it really hard to believe that facts will follow from this charter. At least facts matching the claim that the French government will be "Open by default: Making Open Source the standard approach for projects" (quote from the first point of the charter).
If "France endorses UN Open Source principles", it shouldn't just mean that it will publish some code. It should means that it intends to respect these principles, and that proprietary software becomes the exception within the French administration.
I can't believe this post is more than symbolic, because the French law already promotes Open Source and forbids non-UE proprietary software in many public contexts. But these laws are usually not applied. Why would a non-prescriptive charter do any better?
> And so slow that I would bet against "Open Source" becoming widespread in French schools within the next decade.
It's not a risky bet: no organisation this large, private or public, would manage to replace its IT this fast, even with appropriate funding (which schools don't have).
There's a reason why people say change in a company only happens as fast as people retire. large scale change is long, hard and costly.
AFAIK, there are lots of contributions from developers in the French government to the Grist open source repository. We also deploy it, we have instances running in various government agencies.
For Docs, we bootstrapped the repository ourselves on top of Django, Next.js, BlockNote.js, Y.js and many others. We welcome contributions!
What led to the choice of using Blocknote over other editor packages? Would love to read about the decision making and comparisons between all the editors you considered. Also interested in any other write ups about choosing packages (ex: I see you using hocuspocus which I think is from another editor - TipTap) and why you landed on your particular tech stack.
Maintainer of BlockNote here (and contributor to HocusPocus). I can't speak for Docs as to why they chose BlockNote, but can answer some of your questions. BlockNote is actually built on top of Tiptap - but designed to take away the heavy lifting. As powerful as they are, to build a Notion-like editor on top of Tiptap (or Prosemirror) still requires quite some engineering firepower. We've built BlockNote to come "batteries-included" with common UI components and a simpler API to make it easy for you to add a modern, block-based editor to your app.
That's very cool, as a happy user of TipTap this is the first I've heard of BlockNote - excited to check it out. I've also built a few modest things on top of TipTap and felt a slight "tower of babel" unease, would you mind saying a bit about what BlockNote takes from TipTap which couldn't be accomplished with Prosemirror alone?
This comes from a place of pure curiosity, I don't actually believe this strata of editor packages is in any way inherently bad!
Hey! Not a developer but here are a couple pointers.
As Yousef says below, the text editing bit is hard. We wanted to be build fast and BlockNotejs makes it easy, you get the block stucture, the slash command, you can style your editor and extend with custom blocks. The BlockNotejs team researched the live editing space thoroughly so we could just follow the tracks: BlockNotejs, HocusPocus, Yjs. We "just" had to build the wrapper around with authentication, docs permissions and search and boom you have Docs!
Really cool to be able to test this directly, thanks for setting it up.
I found something I would qualify as a bug: if you click on the right of any text, the cursor is placed at the beginning of the line, where I would expect to have it at the end.
It's not only considered, it's a an actual goal to be 100% usable by everyone. It's already the case for some of La Suite projects. Not quite there yet right now for some others, but it will be.
And I agree, lots of popular, proprietary solutions should do better in terms of accessibility. I believe open-source helps in that regard, as in many others.
Here in La Suite we have some wcag-geeks in the team and regularly include some of our users with disabilities for feedback.
https://react-spectrum.adobe.com/react-aria is used in most La Suite projects. Also we have one frontend developer focused on accessibility and few auditors. We always prioritize accessibility
The Ulanzi TC001 is a great, cheap piece of hardware. I found a second-hand one for $20 and flashed it via USB with https://github.com/lubeda/EspHoMaTriXv2, a more practical firmware if you already have a bunch of ESPHome devices at home.
In 4 years, the author has raised 6 issues and zero PRs. The latest issue was raised last week to inflame this same argument and is 4x longer than any previous issue.
I don't know him but most of his GitHub activity seems to be contributing to the ClickHouse ecosystem, including popular projects like this one: https://github.com/Altinity/clickhouse-operator
My point is just that he doesn't appear to be someone complaining and not contributing.
