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://www.blocknotejs.org).
Docs specifically started as an international collaboration with Germany [2] to explore how different EU countries can collaborate in building sovereign workplace solutions (several other countries including NL have shown interest as well).
They're actively supporting us, and related projects like Yjs (https://yjs.dev) by sponsoring feature development.
I'm sure many of the team members will follow along here as well! Happy to answer any questions.
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
Cool. I'm already in touch with a handful of civil servants in both Germany and the Netherlands, so I'll do as you say and look for more government led initiatives, and I'll follow up with my existing contacts. Which countries do you think are the most interested in this sort of thing so far?
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.
Thanks. I think your vision is much more useful for most day-to-day work for most people. It's interesting that a new office suite would aim in that direction.
I almost never use word for exactly that reason. I don’t want to spend half an hour normalising my headings and fonts and margins. I want to focus on content and logical structure.
I much prefer Google Docs over word for this reason too.
I was writing a datasheet really and it’s really surprising how there isn’t ia straightforward solution. Confluence wasn’t expressive enough, while getting Word to apply consistent styles across tables, margins, headings etc is such a pain.
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.
> (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?
Not the OP, but I would think most people would expect to see a word processor, a spreadsheet, some kind of presentation tool, and maybe a simple database. That's not just comparing to MS Office, that's LibreOffice as well? La Suite seems to have more and better collaboration tools than LO, but it is also less document-focused, just looking through their repos.
> 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.
Spot on this is what we aimed for. Office tools were meant to be printed to be shared. Or at least exported. When you think of it it’s really bad for information security. On the plus side doing everything in the browser manipulating jsons is you get to do way better real time collab and can include a lot more interactive content.
Even when using google docs, I dropped the paper format, and at that point it's better to edit/read in a richer editor like Confluence which has better support for interactive widgets, expand zones, code blocks, etc. It's also been better at navigating a tree of documents.
Google docs is still great when you need to make something you mean to print, it just tends to not be that often anymore.
I even use markdown shortcuts to format in google docs nowadays.
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.
I guess I am a markdown hater, but I don't like it. Markdown feels too much like hand writing your own html, when you have to put in tags, but like html it suffers from lack of layout control, which is why they invented CSS, but you don't get CSS control in markdown. If you start adding that, you end up with LaTex, and I don't know anyone who actually enjoyed writing serious documents in Latex. It was fun in the beginning, but it quickly became tiresome and I found myself not being very productive.
Doing layout is not easy. Programming layouts well requires real expertise, which is why most layout engines expose a gui and let you deal with larger text components graphically. Maybe someone else will come up with a usability innovation here, but I'm not aware of it, and markdown certainly doesn't have that capability.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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."
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.
> 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 switched to Heinlein (the maker of OpenCloud) and Kiteworks isn't happy about this.
The welfare state can not exist in world where the government is against population growth. You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare. We need an exponential curve of population to maintain it, especialy when its at european levels. Mass immigration of uneducated people from low income countries doesnt cover the gap, especially when the government extends welfare to them.
With how many statements of fact you make, you are pretty wrong. There's not one of them being right. We have enough productivity that a minuscule part of the population can produce and distribute the basic needs for every human on earth. There's literally humans that can't find jobs to do because we don't educate them well enough to go and offer services that other humans need. Not only that, we try to say that they don't deserve enough pay to supply their basic needs.
And yes, I'm talking about teachers and medics. We don't have enough of either, because we don't pay them enough compared to their workload. Those things we will always need, in great quantities to support our population. Greater quantities than engineers, architects, researchers, etc. but guess where everyone flocks because it pays more?
A welfare state that was genuinely targeted to serving basic needs of the population would look vastly different from present-day France and other comparable countries. Take a look at Singapore; last I checked, it was not known as a place where people might be at risk of starving. The underlying problem is that people expect the welfare state to solve issues of social marginalization, which are actually the result of fraying social capital as opposed to a mere lack of resources. Welfare states make these issues actively worse, not better.
For instance, when every employer (including those that may be only marginally successful to begin with) is expected as a matter of law to extend onerous labor protections against firing and laying off to each and every worker,[0] this results in marginal workers (who may have been socially marginalized originally for reasons of ethnic heritage and the like) being completely excluded from the market, which makes their plight even worse. (Except for forms of "gig work" or informal employment, of course - which in practice function to sidestep the most onerous regulations to some extent.) A very relevant issue in present-day France.
[0] And to fund those costly welfare programs through payroll contributions that are levied on employees and employers alike - which is its own issue and often amounts to exploitive, confiscatory taxation for the most marginal workers.
Legalizing abortion, unneeded regulations that require car seats at later ages which disincentivize more children for lack of car space, zoning that removes green space and side walks in favor of car infrastructure, expensive education and health insurance (family premiums are insane compared to individual), incentivizing two worker house holds through tax policy.
Health insurance? Are you sure you are talking about welfare states and not America? Which welfare state has expensive education and health insurances?
The last sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a post that collapses if poked gently with a stick.
"The welfare state cannot exist without exponential population growth."
Sounds mathy, but is wrong. Welfare states do not require exponential population growth. They require a sufficient ratio of contributors to dependents, plus productivity. Those are not the same thing.
Exponential curves + limited resources = ecological faceplant. No serious economist argues that infinite demographic growth is a prerequisite for social insurance. What they talk about instead are levers: labor participation, productivity, retirement age, automation, taxation structure, and yes, migration.
"Government policy makes 4+ child families rare."
Prosperity itself lowers fertility. Governments can nudge at the margins, but they are not mind-controlling people out of large families. Most people stop at one or two kids because time, money, energy, housing, and sanity are finite.
"Mass immigration of uneducated people doesn’t cover the gap."
Ah, bundling multiple claims into a single blur. Efficient, but sloppy.
Refugees are not permanently "uneducated"; education and skills are state-dependent, not genetic properties. (Except if you are one of those right-wing grifters that think only white people are capable of intelligence, and maybe east asians. Those people get a hearty fuck you from me, that is not worth discussing at all).
Early years cost money; later years often don’t. But you know what, the same is true for children.
Fourth argument: "Extending welfare to immigrants makes it worse."
This assumes welfare is a static pot rather than a system designed to convert non-participants into participants. Welfare states don’t exist just to reward contributors; they exist to stabilize societies over time. Cutting people off doesn’t magically turn them into productive workers. Quite often it does the opposite.
Now, let's zoom out a bit for the real category error here.
Modern welfare system are intergenerational risk-sharing mechanisms, not growth cults.
But why import uneducated immigrants when you could import educated ones instead? The Canadian model has been a resounding success on that front and European countries should copy it. (And no, the "brain drain" argument doesn't really hold water. The successful migrants/expats tend to go back to their homelands after a while and become a much needed force for progress there, if there's even the slightest scope for actual improvement.)
You're mixing up refugees and economic migrants, which makes the argument collapse immediately.
Refugees are not "imported." They are people fleeing war, persecution, or state collapse under international law obligations that Europe helped write. You don't get to say "we'll take the engineers, but not the bombed-out schoolteachers." Treating asylum like a points-based talent visa is a category error, not a policy preference.
The brain drain argument absolutely does hold water. Systematically pulling scarce doctors, engineers, and academics out of low-income or fragile states weakens those societies. Some people return and contribute, yes, but many don't, and many return to systems too damaged to absorb their skills. That's not controversial. It's well documented in development economics.
What's being presented as "common sense" here is really a value judgement: that human worth should be ranked by immediate economic utility to the receiving country. That's not a fact, and it's not how real migration systems actually work.
If the goal is serious policy discussion, collapsing refugees, migrants, education, and prosperity into a single slogan doesn't get you there. It just makes the world simpler than it is.
One more point about the word "import," because language matters in how we think about policy.
Describing people as being "imported" frames migration as a centrally planned, top-down process, rather than as a response to war, persecution, economic collapse, or climate pressure. It shifts attention away from those underlying causes and toward the idea that governments are deliberately "bringing people in" as if they were interchangeable inputs.
That framing makes it easier to talk about migrants in abstract, instrumental terms, sorted by usefulness rather than understood as people reacting to circumstances, and it tends to oversimplify how migration actually works in practice, which is far more reactive and constrained than intentional or engineered.
Being precise about language helps keep the discussion grounded in reality rather than drifting into metaphors that flatten complex human movement into something it isn't.
Statistics differ, but refugees granted protection range from a single-digit percentage of recent immigration into France to about ~15% or so (other countries have a somewhat larger share, including other European countries). It's true that many people tend to conflate proper refugees and economic migrants to whom a points-system might apply, but this is a general problem with how migration policy is discussed on all sides of the political spectrum, not something that's original to my comment.
Want to admit more refugees without endangering social cohesion? Then you should make sure that you're also carefully selecting your economic migrants as best you can. It's not a matter of assigning different human worth to each, but of simultaneously abiding by legal obligations towards actual refugees that are binding for the country, and also trying to do the absolute best you can for the highest amount of people who might be wanting to expatriate to it for different but nonetheless valid reasons - without unduly burdening that country and society in the process.
This is not true. Women entering the workforce instead of having babies earlier in life lowers prosperity. In our society women working during those early years creates more prosperity (two incomes) but those who are very rich like Musk has no issue producing a big stable of kids.
I don't believe that there is a single case in world history where increased family income did NOT reduce the number of children per family. Likewise with improvements in child mortality.
It is a very abstract term. It is like ”democracy”. Yes, you can clearly say that North Korea is not a democracy. But US? Well, depends on who you ask.
Same with welfare state. Which countries do you count as non-welfare states? And when do they stop being a welfare state? Let’s take Poland as an example. When do they stop being a welfare state? If they lower the unemployment payments, will they stop being a welfare state?
And at what timescale do you think Poland will stop existing because of demographics?
> There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states
Okay? Let's get rid of that much more expensive type of welfare then!
As if we have "real capitalism" - not even on a scale of local bakeries any more. Even the small businesses often are just a shop owned by a corporation. Not that I'm against some level of concentration, a lot of economic activity requires it. A lot of products are too expensive and require a certain scale to be viable at all.
What is the goal of economic activity anyway? For the few to live well, while the majority struggles? By "struggle" I don't mean that the majority already lives in the streets, to me it is enough that they have to be afraid. Of getting sick, of losing the job, of anything bad happening. I saw myself how a single unfortunate event could spiral out of control, and a guy making a lot of money in enterprise sales ended up alone, broken, and sick in the streets. I count all those having to fear such a development as part of the "losers", even if they are still making money and living in their house now. That fear, suppressed or not, should not be necessary, and it influences stress levels and decisions, consciously or not.
I mean, you are also right with your message, and I actually agree.
The flow of money around and away from too many people should not be happening. Being part of the economy should be easy for the majority, and real "welfare" should only be necessary for the sick and otherwise temporarily or fully disabled.
If a lot of normal people need welfare, something is not right.
But then you need an economy that provides those easy options to participate and get enough of a share.
You also need a system where an unfortunate event (or some) does not put you into an unescapable downward spiral, and provide a way back into the economy.
The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 47% of the total gross wage (EDIT this was corrected, the original figure stated on Wikipedia is much higher and it's wrong).
The French state spends 57% of all French GDP [2]. For context, this is higher than what the Soviet Union spent in the years before the communist regimen felt (41% to 47% during the 1980s [3]).
How much taxes shall we pay to "support our independence"? Will I be allowed to keep at least 10% of what I earn, or am I supposed to give it all to the state to live in this wonderful Socialist utopia?
And here you are, asking to increase taxes even more. The only way out of this madness is a civil war. We are past any sanity left.
EDIT: The wikipedia page is indeed wrong: "The overall rate of social security and tax on the average wage in 2022 was 82% of gross salary". This was the tax wedge of these 2 contributions, not the average tax on wage as the Wikipedia page states. Average tax on gross wage in France is 47%. The worker then has to pay VAT and other fees/taxes from the remaining 53%.
Unfortunately you (and of course the wikipedia page) misunderstood the OECD document [1], which says:
"In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax
wedge, compared with 77% of the total OECD average tax wedge."
Note how it says "of the total tax wedge" not "of their salary.
The tax wedge itself is 47.2% in 2024 in France. This is indeed high by international standards but nowhere as high as you claimed.
Effective tax rate is what you should be looking at. The most efficient tax rate is one that describes a exponential saturation, where it starts growing faster once it reaches the point where you have too much wealth.
None of what you've just said can be verified by looking at any of the references you just posted. However having just read through that wikipedia page, I realised that there I'd be paying almost half the income tax I pay living in the UK.
So yeah, thanks I guess. Now I really really want to move to France.
That figure is pretty tired. In France, the pension scheme is counted as public spending. In neighbouring countries, the very similar, mandatory, pension schemes count as private.
The comparison makes little sense if you don't compare equivalent spending scopes, and equivalent service provided. If health care was to privatized, for instance, I'm pretty sure we would be worse off, but that number would go down.
> The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary
This figure, on the other hand, is straight up made-up bullshit. I dare you to find a salary that reaches 82% on URSSAF's salary simulator [1]. The OECD report quote is:
> In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax
wedge
82% of the State's tax base are from income tax and social security contributions. That doesn't mean peopole are taxed 82% of their income.
> That figure is pretty tired. In France, the pension scheme is counted as public spending. In neighbouring countries, the very similar, mandatory, pension schemes count as private.
That "very similar" does a lot of heavy lifting for you. Your neighboring Swiss pillars 2 and 3 and not similar at all - they are neither financial pyramids that depend on population growth, nor are they subject to some arbitrary "points adjustment" bullshit (a retiree takes out exactly what they put in without any shenanigans from politicians or "Agirc-Arrco board of directors").
> If health care was to privatized, for instance, I'm pretty sure we would be worse off, but that number would go down.
Care to elaborate why French middle class (we are on HN after all, not on Jacobin) would be worse off on Swiss health care model, for example?
> That "very similar" does a lot of heavy lifting for you.
The critical point if my claim is whether or not they are mandatory. Pillar 2 is mandatory for employees. Whether employees are forced to fork their cash to the state or to a private management company doesn't change the scheme or the benefits you get, but it changes OP's number.
There's plenty more to say about the way pension schemes are set up, their benefits and drawbacks, but that's unrelated to my point.
> Care to elaborate why French middle class (we are on HN after all, not on Jacobin) would be worse off on Swiss health care model, for example?
I'm going to talk about the French as a whole here. The key metric to me is the share of money collected that is paid back to beneficiaries. In private insurance systems, it is usually between 75% and 90%. The french assurance maladie is between 96% and 99% [1].
Man, life must be easy when you can't read and just get to make things up online. Especially when things such as the URSSAF's simulation tool is like, freely available online: https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-ne... giving you a copy of a pay slip with detailed amounts of where your money goes.
Someone making 2500€ gross will take home 1885€ per month after taxes and contributions. On which you can add a 20% VAT. Even should you want to operate in incredibly bad faith and add employer contributions, it would only amount to 3175 in total. For fun, I tried to figure out what would be needed for someone to have 82% of their salary going away into taxes. It is physically impossible to go anywhere above 55%, the math just stops scaling. Even taking employer costs into account, the max will be 65%. This all starts happening when you have the lowly gross salary of about 30 000€/month, something that I'm sure you're being paid right now to complain about to much about it.
Hell, even the damn link you're posting shows that you can't read:
> In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax wedge, compared with 77% of the total OECD average tax wedge
What the fuck do you think tax brackets cover, ponies ? And acting offended about it like it's some unacceptable thing when the OECD average is... 5 percentage point lower ?
> 82% of the average gross salary in France is indeed taken by the state,
You literally can't read.
> In other words, in France the take-home pay of an average single worker, after tax and benefits, was 71.9% of their gross wage
> his means that an average married worker with two children in
France had a take-home pay, after tax and family benefits, of 83.1% of their gross wage
Now, there are ways to solve these expenses, they involve cutting all pensions. I'm sure you'll be okay with letting your parents, and mine, die, right ?
> even should you want to operate in incredibly bad faith and add employer contributions,
How is that bad faith? It's basic common sense to count that together. Total cost is what matters to employers. You can't compare different countries either if you don't hacks like this that try to confuse the workers about how much they are paying.
> I don't particularly give a shit about employer's costs either
So you don't care about the size of your salary? Fair enough...
It's all the same to them, whether the social insurance contributions are shown on your payslip or not is just an accounting detail. It's still a tax on labour and no different that the share you are paying.
No, my employer's costs are not part of my salary. The proof of it being that employers have never raised salaries in response to their social contributions going down.
Well, life isn't that easy then, because you failed to comprehend URSSAF's simulation tool.
On a €2500 gross salary you take home €1651 (which is a very low salary in France very close to the minimum salary). But I guess you think the gross salary is what the company, by law, has to say they pay you, instead of what the total cost for the company of your salary.
See, in France, even if you are getting close to the minimum salary, the state is taking 33% of the cake for themselves. This is for people that earn very little. For people that earn average salaries of €2669 liquid (€5000 gross for the company), the French state takes 47% of the cake.
It's a normal mistake for people that don't actually have to support the costs themselves. Once people actually start a small business or pay more attention to their own wages and how much is being taken away, they figure out how it actually works.
>It's a normal mistake for people that don't actually have to support the costs themselves. Once people actually start a small business or pay more attention to their own wages and how much is being taken away, they figure out how it actually works.
No, thank you, I am quite well versed in the concept of superbrut, and actively pay more than a SMIC in taxes every year: you won't play that game with me. Va jouer, comme on dit.
They're employer _contributions_ to the system. They're the price you pay for a healthy, well educated working population.
You don't get to claim it as "it would be your salary", because we both damn well know you'd never pay that back into the salary should it go away. We've had the experience every time, with tax writeoffs on SMICs, VAT lowered to 5.5% which led to zero jobs created and no changes in employment conditions, etc. You might even be old enough to remember the MEDEF's "1 million jobs" pin, where they created... 20k. Cool. The reality of things is, you as an employer cannot be trusted to not fuck over employees, especially the weakest and most vulnerable of us all.
Once again, your own damn links prove that 1/ France isn't that far off the OECD average for taxation and 2/ actually does better in not slapping in a bunch of unrelated crap in taxes.
> Yes, and we assume a spherical cow in a vacuum, I know.
There are countries in Europe that have done exactly that recently.
Besides Denmark which doesn't have employee contributions in the same way and is transparent about the full amount of taxes you are actually paying. Are you claiming that showing that on the payslip is somehow depressing wages in Denmark?
Nice. Look, I had a great idea for 0% worker taxes in France. You just change all the taxes accounting to make the numbers look like you take them from the employee instead of the worker, and puff, magical 0% taxes! It's great, isn't it?
> Now, there are ways to solve these expenses, they involve cutting all pensions. I'm sure you'll be okay with letting your parents, and mine, die, right ?
Man, I don't know you, I value my morning coffee more than your parents getting their retirement at 61 and receiving more - after taxes - than people that actually work to pay for their fantastic retiree life. But, I thought that all the taxes you paid are supposed to provide for your retirement. Are you actually telling me this is all a Ponzi scheme mandated by the State? I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
> I value my morning coffee more than your parents getting their retirement at 61 and receiving more - after taxes - than people that actually work to pay for their fantastic retiree life.
Yep, that's probably why my parents are unable to retire before 65, because they'd otherwise be under the poverty line. Both of them retiring with rather high physical damage from their career.
Fucking hell, you keep reading headlines halfway, misunderstand them and then badly apply them broadly to a situation you don't understand
Considering the number of replies here saying "source does not contain claim" / "that is a misinterpretation of what it says"... LLMs are still autocomplete functions. Exceptionally good ones, but they don't reason. And they kiss your boots unprompted. Beware of whatever opinions this thing is justifying to you
How did you arrive at 82% of salary being taken by taxes and social security? I read the Wikipedia article but I don’t how the numbers would add up to 82%.
> What would be the equivalent number in, say, the US if you were to include all this?
Isn't it the point OP is making - France has much higher taxes compared to US because the state provides pensions, healthcare and higher education and US don't?
> "The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary"
This might be the most insane comment I've ever seen on this forum.
What in the hell are you talking about? Did you actually read that first link, completely fail to understand a single word of it, and then the number 82 just magically fell out of the sky?
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.
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.
No, more competition does obviously NOT solve oligarchies. It is what we see RIGHT NOW. It is OUT THERE NOW. Oligarchs buy up competition and either incorporate their ideas or make them disappear if they threaten their established business models.
Why are you keep repeating this myth?
The only relevant player who might break up oligarchies before they become to powerful is the state they operate in.
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.
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.
> 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.
Yes, but apparently the biggest players now abuse their comparative advantage positions. So, we are back to mercantilism to the detriment of all humanity.
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.
Python is slow, though, and so was java compared to other compiled languages of its time. Sure, it might not matter much if you're mostly doing database calls. If you're not, though, then yes, it's the languages fault if your app is slow. You can try to make it faster, but it's gonna be marginal gains. Or, you could just switch to another language and get a 100x speedup for free.
I also denounce the notion that trading language complexity for slowness is the case. Python is already complex, and there's some language and frameworks that are actually quite a bit easier to use for web backends. Like java, or dotnet. It just makes no sense to use python for this usecase, even if you ignore the slowness.
But that's not completely true, there is one very good reason to use python. Your devs know it. But, that doesnt say anything about the language itself.
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?
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.
> 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".
It seems like you have an unfalsifiable belief. If one side raises more money and wins, it because of the money. If one side raises more money and loses, it is still the money because the other side spend it more effectively.
And the fact that a 3rd party supports an opponent does not kill any politician's career. Biden retired by himself, following his own party's pressure. And Harris is still around, I believe.
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
I see, in your broad and experienced mind, document editors don't have users, permissions, and the whole document management itself, comments on lines/threads, reactions on comments
Seriously, theyre all as cookie cutter perfect usecase for Django as you can get, but I guess you haven't actually thought about the domain and just wanted to take a dumb on other devs with intern-to-junior level insights
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.
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.
That article is seemingly all about the perf of the complex frontend app with a custom renderer running in the browser, nothing to do with what’s happening on the server.
In my opinion one inherent property of languages is how large the largest program is that can be written in those languages. There's languages that work well for short programs. Bash, perl are examples on one end of the spectrum. Then you have things like lisp and Python where the largest programs are a lot larger already, but still hit obvious limits. And then you have the languages that support really large codebases. Java, C++ are ones currently in use.
There's new languages where it's a bit of an open question still where they lie on the spectrum. Go would be one of them. I'd guess somewhere between Python and Java. Javascript I would argue is between perl and python. And Rust ... well ... good question.
An office suite is a gigantic application, which will need feature upon feature upon feature upon feature. If you want it working on the web, I'd propose something like C++ and WASM.
Wt actually isn’t terrible, with the added benefit of being able to leverage the enormous c/c++ library ecosystem. Also, it can be quite fast if you care for it to be.
Edit: also appears to be based in the eu, how fitting for this thread.
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…
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" ?
- 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)
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.
After having the same experience negative some time before Covid, I was kindly invited late last year to a homeserver of a local hackerspace and I gave it another try.
I cannot send messages to people on another homeserver (such as the obscure matrix.org one) whereas other people can, as well as some other issues which I forgot by now. Not at all usable. It was a short-lived stint and I didn't even try to enable encryption this time :(
Element web and mobile have the same issue; server I'm not sure, where can I see this? I would assume the default/reference implementation but I don't know
Groups work btw, it's just private chats that cannot be initiated from either side (I have like five pending 'rooms' or something now), so it's not that one server banned the other. I just took it for typical matrix experience
it sounds like the hackspace server has been banned from inviting due to spam or something. can you share the name of the server so we can check? or mail abuse@matrix.org with the details.
This sounds very much along the lines of issues I had with it. It's been a while so I can't remember the exact details, but I do remember it being impossible to open a thread without the app just locking up and crashing, so people would ask important questions in a thread and nobody was ever able to reply or even read the question.
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.
I think you and other responders are missing the point. Yes GitHub gives visibility to the project and is easily replaceable. But putting projects on GitHub gives visibility to GitHub and reenforces the network effect and Microsoft leadership, making it harder for European alternative to emerge.
There's nothing ironic, as since the GP said there is no risk associated with GitHub. Git fundamentally prevents vendor lock-in and tampering, and the project is open, so the US have no leverage and pose no threat at all here.
its not about leverage or threat, same as the office products, the french owned their docs at the end of the day, i thought it was about sovereignty and using french alternatives?
It's the code that's hosted on GitHub, not the documents. Easier to move, easier to negotiate a move. You get visibility and easy distribution until they feel the need to bail.
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).
Also, I doubt solving Instagram-level scale issues is on the top ten list of concerns for this project. Just getting something out there and gaining users is way more important than solving far future scaling issues.
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.
They are full-stack but not complete frameworks like the other. Where is the ORMs, authentication, form handling, etc? Will your bespoke choices hold up in 10 years?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
This comment misses the point and argues against something unrelated. It's fundamentally a data sovereignty and security move, not a commercial one.
It's neither pro or anti business. This or "creating a more business friendly environment" policies is a false dichotomy. That could be done too via other means. It is unrelated. Speaking about this "business friendly" only is either misdirection or myopic.
You seem to be arguing for the sake of argument while avoiding the substance of my point by discarding it as "unrelated" while it is fundamentally on point.
If the aim is indeed sovereignty, data and software (and this is software not data), and in general, then they need an effective and comprehensive plan. I think taxpayer-funded state-developed open-source software brings very little at a high cost and can even be counter-productive. Frankly I think it is apolitical move internal to the French state to keep the gavy train coming to government agencies.
Rather I think the US, and also China that does it even more, are much more effective at this by throwing money at the marketplace to develop a whole ecosystem competitively that can also compete globally. An important thing to note here is that EU rules prevent a lot of state action (for instance they would not be allowed to buy only French cars or do things seen as direct subsidies, etc)
France will continue to fall further behind unless it really gets it act together, which is unlikely TBH.
You're just repeating your assumptions - "taxpayer-funded state-developed is bad", but "marketplace competitively" good. I'm not convinced.
You're not engaging with the sovereignty aspect - "compete globally" isn't the main goal at all as I said above, you're just restating you misconception. And so this part comes across as pure projection:
> You seem to be arguing for the sake of argument while avoiding the substance of my point
Yes in the most basic sense it does since they build their own tool instead of getting a foreign one. To be a little bit provocative I could say that Warsaw Pact countries used to do the same and built plenty of uncompetitive products themselves...
But beyond that it isn't a plan because it does not scale, it does not help the country develop its own industry and economy, it does not help competitiveness, and it is a huge cost for very little. Again, the sovereignty aspect means all of this must be addressed otherwise it is just a stunt and waste of taxpayers' money.
You've got to have a competitive industry to achieve and maintain 'sovereignty' in a broader and positive sense otherwise you end up like the Warsaw Pact or China before it realised that. You might survive but look more and more like North Korea (poor and obsolete but, yes, sovereign).
So yes, taxpayer-funded and state-developed internally in isolation for the sake of it is pretty much universally bad.
Taxpayer-funded is not bad per se, as already said in my previous comment, but here it is indeed more than that, it's the government building random stuff internally for frankly no good reason. Maybe next the government will manufacture its own 'sovereign' pencils as well?
They could have spent the same amount of money supporting small companies to develop similar products and that would have helped creating a competitive 'sovereign' ecosystem and commercial products to sell to everyone at home and also abroad. Much more bang for their buck and long term virtuous circle.
So, again have you got a point to discuss beyond just wanting to argue against me?
Edit:
An example of why competitiveness is important: Arianespace. It's great, Europe has the 'sovereign' ability to launch satelittes. That's useful for government agencies, a niche use-case. But everyone else in Europe who wants to launch a satelitte uses SpaceX because Arianespace is not competitive and is obsolete at this point.
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.
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?
Forking Firefox whenever the rug is pulled seems doable (with elbow grease), and in the meantime Europeans can invest on problems that don't have an already mature fully open-source solution.
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://www.blocknotejs.org).
Docs specifically started as an international collaboration with Germany [2] to explore how different EU countries can collaborate in building sovereign workplace solutions (several other countries including NL have shown interest as well).
They're actively supporting us, and related projects like Yjs (https://yjs.dev) by sponsoring feature development.
I'm sure many of the team members will follow along here as well! Happy to answer any questions.
[1] 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
> "Public Money, Public Code" policies
For those who want to know more: https://publiccode.eu
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
Cool. I'm already in touch with a handful of civil servants in both Germany and the Netherlands, so I'll do as you say and look for more government led initiatives, and I'll follow up with my existing contacts. Which countries do you think are the most interested in this sort of thing so far?
Check out this one:
https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/documenten/rapporten/2025/07/04...
https://vng.nl/nieuws/meer-regie-nodig-op-technologie-voor-d...
https://www.amsterdam.nl/nieuws/nieuwsoverzicht/stappenplan-...
Thank you!
Last week’s presentation on Docs, bloknotejs & Yjs https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/DC97FQ-building_digit...
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!
Very much appreciated! We put a lot of effort into it!
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, ...
Does getting these roles require French citizenship? Asking for a friend ;)
To work in French civil service (as a fonctionnaire) you need to be a EU/EEA citizen but not necessarily French.
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.
It's the name of a french-developed open video conferencing software[0]. See the 1st prize result in TFA...
[0] https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/visio
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.
Thanks. I think your vision is much more useful for most day-to-day work for most people. It's interesting that a new office suite would aim in that direction.
I almost never use word for exactly that reason. I don’t want to spend half an hour normalising my headings and fonts and margins. I want to focus on content and logical structure.
I much prefer Google Docs over word for this reason too.
I was writing a datasheet really and it’s really surprising how there isn’t ia straightforward solution. Confluence wasn’t expressive enough, while getting Word to apply consistent styles across tables, margins, headings etc is such a pain.
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?
Not the OP, but I would think most people would expect to see a word processor, a spreadsheet, some kind of presentation tool, and maybe a simple database. That's not just comparing to MS Office, that's LibreOffice as well? La Suite seems to have more and better collaboration tools than LO, but it is also less document-focused, just looking through their repos.
> 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.
Spot on this is what we aimed for. Office tools were meant to be printed to be shared. Or at least exported. When you think of it it’s really bad for information security. On the plus side doing everything in the browser manipulating jsons is you get to do way better real time collab and can include a lot more interactive content.
Even when using google docs, I dropped the paper format, and at that point it's better to edit/read in a richer editor like Confluence which has better support for interactive widgets, expand zones, code blocks, etc. It's also been better at navigating a tree of documents.
Google docs is still great when you need to make something you mean to print, it just tends to not be that often anymore.
I even use markdown shortcuts to format in google docs nowadays.
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.
I guess I am a markdown hater, but I don't like it. Markdown feels too much like hand writing your own html, when you have to put in tags, but like html it suffers from lack of layout control, which is why they invented CSS, but you don't get CSS control in markdown. If you start adding that, you end up with LaTex, and I don't know anyone who actually enjoyed writing serious documents in Latex. It was fun in the beginning, but it quickly became tiresome and I found myself not being very productive.
Doing layout is not easy. Programming layouts well requires real expertise, which is why most layout engines expose a gui and let you deal with larger text components graphically. Maybe someone else will come up with a usability innovation here, but I'm not aware of it, and markdown certainly doesn't have that capability.
You do know that you don't need to write markdown syntax right?
There are plenty of UI editors where they give you the basics for formatting and inserting stuff.
Markdown is fairly portable, and with AI it is easy to generate and share as well.
How do you do nested tables in markdown?
For the gaps they'll find, I'm sure they can use open source alternatives considering they're getting away from proprietary software.
If not, they can adapt.
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
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?
Maybe those those things may be more important, depending on the office, but IME, that isn't what people usually mean when they say "office suite".
For sure
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.
Honestly it's probably a good idea for governments to self host and self support anything that's important.
>Microsoft Used China-Based Engineers to Support Product Recently Hacked by China
https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-sharepoint-hack...
Open source alternatives, audited by international teams could be much more trust worthy than closed sourced black boxes.
That explains why Android was not affected by Pegasus and Apple was.
You forgot the /s
I suppose the assumption is that every HN reader follows headline hacking news, which is valid but still I did a double-take at the comment.
?
More like they don't even need Pegasus to get Androids.
?
Android has a higher bounty than Iphone. Anyway, sorry about your easily hackable phone. Hope you arent a VIP.
Being able to operate sovereignly is a core competency for governments.
>sovereignly
Minor powers still bend to the great powers.
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.
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...
Fuck the BND
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.
> 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
The welfare state can not exist in world where the government is against population growth. You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare. We need an exponential curve of population to maintain it, especialy when its at european levels. Mass immigration of uneducated people from low income countries doesnt cover the gap, especially when the government extends welfare to them.
This is all a fact.
With how many statements of fact you make, you are pretty wrong. There's not one of them being right. We have enough productivity that a minuscule part of the population can produce and distribute the basic needs for every human on earth. There's literally humans that can't find jobs to do because we don't educate them well enough to go and offer services that other humans need. Not only that, we try to say that they don't deserve enough pay to supply their basic needs.
And yes, I'm talking about teachers and medics. We don't have enough of either, because we don't pay them enough compared to their workload. Those things we will always need, in great quantities to support our population. Greater quantities than engineers, architects, researchers, etc. but guess where everyone flocks because it pays more?
- https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/250330/978924151...
- https://ipsnoticias.net/2022/10/el-mundo-necesita-69-millone...
A welfare state that was genuinely targeted to serving basic needs of the population would look vastly different from present-day France and other comparable countries. Take a look at Singapore; last I checked, it was not known as a place where people might be at risk of starving. The underlying problem is that people expect the welfare state to solve issues of social marginalization, which are actually the result of fraying social capital as opposed to a mere lack of resources. Welfare states make these issues actively worse, not better.
For instance, when every employer (including those that may be only marginally successful to begin with) is expected as a matter of law to extend onerous labor protections against firing and laying off to each and every worker,[0] this results in marginal workers (who may have been socially marginalized originally for reasons of ethnic heritage and the like) being completely excluded from the market, which makes their plight even worse. (Except for forms of "gig work" or informal employment, of course - which in practice function to sidestep the most onerous regulations to some extent.) A very relevant issue in present-day France.
[0] And to fund those costly welfare programs through payroll contributions that are levied on employees and employers alike - which is its own issue and often amounts to exploitive, confiscatory taxation for the most marginal workers.
> You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare.
I'm curios what do you mean by this. Could you provide some examples of such policies or propaganda campaigns?
Legalizing abortion, unneeded regulations that require car seats at later ages which disincentivize more children for lack of car space, zoning that removes green space and side walks in favor of car infrastructure, expensive education and health insurance (family premiums are insane compared to individual), incentivizing two worker house holds through tax policy.
Health insurance? Are you sure you are talking about welfare states and not America? Which welfare state has expensive education and health insurances?
cracks fingers
The last sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a post that collapses if poked gently with a stick.
"The welfare state cannot exist without exponential population growth."
Sounds mathy, but is wrong. Welfare states do not require exponential population growth. They require a sufficient ratio of contributors to dependents, plus productivity. Those are not the same thing.
Exponential curves + limited resources = ecological faceplant. No serious economist argues that infinite demographic growth is a prerequisite for social insurance. What they talk about instead are levers: labor participation, productivity, retirement age, automation, taxation structure, and yes, migration.
"Government policy makes 4+ child families rare."
Prosperity itself lowers fertility. Governments can nudge at the margins, but they are not mind-controlling people out of large families. Most people stop at one or two kids because time, money, energy, housing, and sanity are finite.
"Mass immigration of uneducated people doesn’t cover the gap."
Ah, bundling multiple claims into a single blur. Efficient, but sloppy. Refugees are not permanently "uneducated"; education and skills are state-dependent, not genetic properties. (Except if you are one of those right-wing grifters that think only white people are capable of intelligence, and maybe east asians. Those people get a hearty fuck you from me, that is not worth discussing at all). Early years cost money; later years often don’t. But you know what, the same is true for children.
Fourth argument: "Extending welfare to immigrants makes it worse."
This assumes welfare is a static pot rather than a system designed to convert non-participants into participants. Welfare states don’t exist just to reward contributors; they exist to stabilize societies over time. Cutting people off doesn’t magically turn them into productive workers. Quite often it does the opposite.
Now, let's zoom out a bit for the real category error here. Modern welfare system are intergenerational risk-sharing mechanisms, not growth cults.
"This is all a fact."
Sure thing buddy
> Refugees are not permanently "uneducated"
But why import uneducated immigrants when you could import educated ones instead? The Canadian model has been a resounding success on that front and European countries should copy it. (And no, the "brain drain" argument doesn't really hold water. The successful migrants/expats tend to go back to their homelands after a while and become a much needed force for progress there, if there's even the slightest scope for actual improvement.)
You're mixing up refugees and economic migrants, which makes the argument collapse immediately.
Refugees are not "imported." They are people fleeing war, persecution, or state collapse under international law obligations that Europe helped write. You don't get to say "we'll take the engineers, but not the bombed-out schoolteachers." Treating asylum like a points-based talent visa is a category error, not a policy preference.
The brain drain argument absolutely does hold water. Systematically pulling scarce doctors, engineers, and academics out of low-income or fragile states weakens those societies. Some people return and contribute, yes, but many don't, and many return to systems too damaged to absorb their skills. That's not controversial. It's well documented in development economics.
What's being presented as "common sense" here is really a value judgement: that human worth should be ranked by immediate economic utility to the receiving country. That's not a fact, and it's not how real migration systems actually work.
If the goal is serious policy discussion, collapsing refugees, migrants, education, and prosperity into a single slogan doesn't get you there. It just makes the world simpler than it is.
One more point about the word "import," because language matters in how we think about policy.
Describing people as being "imported" frames migration as a centrally planned, top-down process, rather than as a response to war, persecution, economic collapse, or climate pressure. It shifts attention away from those underlying causes and toward the idea that governments are deliberately "bringing people in" as if they were interchangeable inputs.
That framing makes it easier to talk about migrants in abstract, instrumental terms, sorted by usefulness rather than understood as people reacting to circumstances, and it tends to oversimplify how migration actually works in practice, which is far more reactive and constrained than intentional or engineered.
Being precise about language helps keep the discussion grounded in reality rather than drifting into metaphors that flatten complex human movement into something it isn't.
Statistics differ, but refugees granted protection range from a single-digit percentage of recent immigration into France to about ~15% or so (other countries have a somewhat larger share, including other European countries). It's true that many people tend to conflate proper refugees and economic migrants to whom a points-system might apply, but this is a general problem with how migration policy is discussed on all sides of the political spectrum, not something that's original to my comment.
Want to admit more refugees without endangering social cohesion? Then you should make sure that you're also carefully selecting your economic migrants as best you can. It's not a matter of assigning different human worth to each, but of simultaneously abiding by legal obligations towards actual refugees that are binding for the country, and also trying to do the absolute best you can for the highest amount of people who might be wanting to expatriate to it for different but nonetheless valid reasons - without unduly burdening that country and society in the process.
"Prosperity itself lowers fertility"
This is not true. Women entering the workforce instead of having babies earlier in life lowers prosperity. In our society women working during those early years creates more prosperity (two incomes) but those who are very rich like Musk has no issue producing a big stable of kids.
I don't believe that there is a single case in world history where increased family income did NOT reduce the number of children per family. Likewise with improvements in child mortality.
Hungary is a welfare state.
That is obviously not true. You don’t even define what a welfare state is or when a country stops being a welfare state.
Can you define it then? What point does it start and what point does it stop being a welfare state.
It is a very abstract term. It is like ”democracy”. Yes, you can clearly say that North Korea is not a democracy. But US? Well, depends on who you ask.
Same with welfare state. Which countries do you count as non-welfare states? And when do they stop being a welfare state? Let’s take Poland as an example. When do they stop being a welfare state? If they lower the unemployment payments, will they stop being a welfare state?
And at what timescale do you think Poland will stop existing because of demographics?
> Which it can’t.
The welfare state for corporate interests is alive and well though, and costs much more.
(2025) "Corporate Welfare in the Federal Budget" -- https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/corporate-welfare-feder...
(2024) https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2024/07/16/100-years-of-risi...
> There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states
Okay? Let's get rid of that much more expensive type of welfare then!
As if we have "real capitalism" - not even on a scale of local bakeries any more. Even the small businesses often are just a shop owned by a corporation. Not that I'm against some level of concentration, a lot of economic activity requires it. A lot of products are too expensive and require a certain scale to be viable at all.
What is the goal of economic activity anyway? For the few to live well, while the majority struggles? By "struggle" I don't mean that the majority already lives in the streets, to me it is enough that they have to be afraid. Of getting sick, of losing the job, of anything bad happening. I saw myself how a single unfortunate event could spiral out of control, and a guy making a lot of money in enterprise sales ended up alone, broken, and sick in the streets. I count all those having to fear such a development as part of the "losers", even if they are still making money and living in their house now. That fear, suppressed or not, should not be necessary, and it influences stress levels and decisions, consciously or not.
I mean, you are also right with your message, and I actually agree.
The flow of money around and away from too many people should not be happening. Being part of the economy should be easy for the majority, and real "welfare" should only be necessary for the sick and otherwise temporarily or fully disabled.
If a lot of normal people need welfare, something is not right.
But then you need an economy that provides those easy options to participate and get enough of a share.
You also need a system where an unfortunate event (or some) does not put you into an unescapable downward spiral, and provide a way back into the economy.
The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 47% of the total gross wage (EDIT this was corrected, the original figure stated on Wikipedia is much higher and it's wrong).
The French state spends 57% of all French GDP [2]. For context, this is higher than what the Soviet Union spent in the years before the communist regimen felt (41% to 47% during the 1980s [3]).
How much taxes shall we pay to "support our independence"? Will I be allowed to keep at least 10% of what I earn, or am I supposed to give it all to the state to live in this wonderful Socialist utopia?
And here you are, asking to increase taxes even more. The only way out of this madness is a civil war. We are past any sanity left.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_France
[2] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/government-at-a-glance-...
[3] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/display/book/9781557755186/ch05...
EDIT: The wikipedia page is indeed wrong: "The overall rate of social security and tax on the average wage in 2022 was 82% of gross salary". This was the tax wedge of these 2 contributions, not the average tax on wage as the Wikipedia page states. Average tax on gross wage in France is 47%. The worker then has to pay VAT and other fees/taxes from the remaining 53%.
Unfortunately you (and of course the wikipedia page) misunderstood the OECD document [1], which says:
"In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax wedge, compared with 77% of the total OECD average tax wedge."
Note how it says "of the total tax wedge" not "of their salary.
The tax wedge itself is 47.2% in 2024 in France. This is indeed high by international standards but nowhere as high as you claimed.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
82% tax wedge is not the same as taxes, or even the contribution of an individual.
Also nobody is talking about taxing income even more.
I do agree however with the sanity part, although I think of a whole different subset of people than you.
Effective tax rate is what you should be looking at. The most efficient tax rate is one that describes a exponential saturation, where it starts growing faster once it reaches the point where you have too much wealth.
None of what you've just said can be verified by looking at any of the references you just posted. However having just read through that wikipedia page, I realised that there I'd be paying almost half the income tax I pay living in the UK.
So yeah, thanks I guess. Now I really really want to move to France.
> The French state spends 57% of all French
That figure is pretty tired. In France, the pension scheme is counted as public spending. In neighbouring countries, the very similar, mandatory, pension schemes count as private.
The comparison makes little sense if you don't compare equivalent spending scopes, and equivalent service provided. If health care was to privatized, for instance, I'm pretty sure we would be worse off, but that number would go down.
> The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary
This figure, on the other hand, is straight up made-up bullshit. I dare you to find a salary that reaches 82% on URSSAF's salary simulator [1]. The OECD report quote is:
> In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax wedge
82% of the State's tax base are from income tax and social security contributions. That doesn't mean peopole are taxed 82% of their income.
[1]: https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-ne...
> That figure is pretty tired. In France, the pension scheme is counted as public spending. In neighbouring countries, the very similar, mandatory, pension schemes count as private.
That "very similar" does a lot of heavy lifting for you. Your neighboring Swiss pillars 2 and 3 and not similar at all - they are neither financial pyramids that depend on population growth, nor are they subject to some arbitrary "points adjustment" bullshit (a retiree takes out exactly what they put in without any shenanigans from politicians or "Agirc-Arrco board of directors").
> If health care was to privatized, for instance, I'm pretty sure we would be worse off, but that number would go down.
Care to elaborate why French middle class (we are on HN after all, not on Jacobin) would be worse off on Swiss health care model, for example?
> That "very similar" does a lot of heavy lifting for you.
The critical point if my claim is whether or not they are mandatory. Pillar 2 is mandatory for employees. Whether employees are forced to fork their cash to the state or to a private management company doesn't change the scheme or the benefits you get, but it changes OP's number.
There's plenty more to say about the way pension schemes are set up, their benefits and drawbacks, but that's unrelated to my point.
> Care to elaborate why French middle class (we are on HN after all, not on Jacobin) would be worse off on Swiss health care model, for example?
I'm going to talk about the French as a whole here. The key metric to me is the share of money collected that is paid back to beneficiaries. In private insurance systems, it is usually between 75% and 90%. The french assurance maladie is between 96% and 99% [1].
[1]: https://www.securite-sociale.fr/dossiers/quels-sont-les-cout...
Your wiki link contains only a single random reference to that number, and the page it links to justify it doesn’t exist.
Man, life must be easy when you can't read and just get to make things up online. Especially when things such as the URSSAF's simulation tool is like, freely available online: https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-ne... giving you a copy of a pay slip with detailed amounts of where your money goes.
Someone making 2500€ gross will take home 1885€ per month after taxes and contributions. On which you can add a 20% VAT. Even should you want to operate in incredibly bad faith and add employer contributions, it would only amount to 3175 in total. For fun, I tried to figure out what would be needed for someone to have 82% of their salary going away into taxes. It is physically impossible to go anywhere above 55%, the math just stops scaling. Even taking employer costs into account, the max will be 65%. This all starts happening when you have the lowly gross salary of about 30 000€/month, something that I'm sure you're being paid right now to complain about to much about it.
Hell, even the damn link you're posting shows that you can't read:
> In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax wedge, compared with 77% of the total OECD average tax wedge
What the fuck do you think tax brackets cover, ponies ? And acting offended about it like it's some unacceptable thing when the OECD average is... 5 percentage point lower ?
> 82% of the average gross salary in France is indeed taken by the state,
You literally can't read.
> In other words, in France the take-home pay of an average single worker, after tax and benefits, was 71.9% of their gross wage
> his means that an average married worker with two children in France had a take-home pay, after tax and family benefits, of 83.1% of their gross wage
Now, there are ways to solve these expenses, they involve cutting all pensions. I'm sure you'll be okay with letting your parents, and mine, die, right ?
> even should you want to operate in incredibly bad faith and add employer contributions,
How is that bad faith? It's basic common sense to count that together. Total cost is what matters to employers. You can't compare different countries either if you don't hacks like this that try to confuse the workers about how much they are paying.
e.g.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Payroll_...
taxes in Denmark are presumably several times higher than in France?
The subject is not employers, don't get sidetracked. I don't particularly give a shit about employer's costs either.
The initial claim is "82% of wages go to taxes", which is inaccurate, a lie and a bad faith argument.
> I don't particularly give a shit about employer's costs either
So you don't care about the size of your salary? Fair enough...
It's all the same to them, whether the social insurance contributions are shown on your payslip or not is just an accounting detail. It's still a tax on labour and no different that the share you are paying.
No, my employer's costs are not part of my salary. The proof of it being that employers have never raised salaries in response to their social contributions going down.
Please stop being so dense.
I must assume you are trolling at this point... Or lack a very basic understanding of the of finance and economics.
> never raised salaries in response to their social contributions going down.
Clearly fixable with a very simple law since some other countries somehow managed to achieve this.
Well, life isn't that easy then, because you failed to comprehend URSSAF's simulation tool.
On a €2500 gross salary you take home €1651 (which is a very low salary in France very close to the minimum salary). But I guess you think the gross salary is what the company, by law, has to say they pay you, instead of what the total cost for the company of your salary.
See, in France, even if you are getting close to the minimum salary, the state is taking 33% of the cake for themselves. This is for people that earn very little. For people that earn average salaries of €2669 liquid (€5000 gross for the company), the French state takes 47% of the cake.
It's a normal mistake for people that don't actually have to support the costs themselves. Once people actually start a small business or pay more attention to their own wages and how much is being taken away, they figure out how it actually works.
>It's a normal mistake for people that don't actually have to support the costs themselves. Once people actually start a small business or pay more attention to their own wages and how much is being taken away, they figure out how it actually works.
No, thank you, I am quite well versed in the concept of superbrut, and actively pay more than a SMIC in taxes every year: you won't play that game with me. Va jouer, comme on dit.
They're employer _contributions_ to the system. They're the price you pay for a healthy, well educated working population.
You don't get to claim it as "it would be your salary", because we both damn well know you'd never pay that back into the salary should it go away. We've had the experience every time, with tax writeoffs on SMICs, VAT lowered to 5.5% which led to zero jobs created and no changes in employment conditions, etc. You might even be old enough to remember the MEDEF's "1 million jobs" pin, where they created... 20k. Cool. The reality of things is, you as an employer cannot be trusted to not fuck over employees, especially the weakest and most vulnerable of us all.
Once again, your own damn links prove that 1/ France isn't that far off the OECD average for taxation and 2/ actually does better in not slapping in a bunch of unrelated crap in taxes.
> They're employer _contributions_ to the system
No, they are the taxes you pay that are not shown on your payslip.
> They're the price you pay for a healthy, well educated working population
Yes, you as a worker pay it.
> back into the salary should it go away
It would be trivial for the government to make sure it does.
No, they're not. As a proof, should my employer stop paying them, _my wages will not rise to match what they stopped paying_.
>It would be trivial for the government to make sure it does.
Yes, and we assume a spherical cow in a vacuum, I know.
> Yes, and we assume a spherical cow in a vacuum, I know.
There are countries in Europe that have done exactly that recently.
Besides Denmark which doesn't have employee contributions in the same way and is transparent about the full amount of taxes you are actually paying. Are you claiming that showing that on the payslip is somehow depressing wages in Denmark?
> They're employer _contributions_ to the system.
Nice. Look, I had a great idea for 0% worker taxes in France. You just change all the taxes accounting to make the numbers look like you take them from the employee instead of the worker, and puff, magical 0% taxes! It's great, isn't it?
> Now, there are ways to solve these expenses, they involve cutting all pensions. I'm sure you'll be okay with letting your parents, and mine, die, right ?
Man, I don't know you, I value my morning coffee more than your parents getting their retirement at 61 and receiving more - after taxes - than people that actually work to pay for their fantastic retiree life. But, I thought that all the taxes you paid are supposed to provide for your retirement. Are you actually telling me this is all a Ponzi scheme mandated by the State? I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
> I value my morning coffee more than your parents getting their retirement at 61 and receiving more - after taxes - than people that actually work to pay for their fantastic retiree life.
Yep, that's probably why my parents are unable to retire before 65, because they'd otherwise be under the poverty line. Both of them retiring with rather high physical damage from their career.
Fucking hell, you keep reading headlines halfway, misunderstand them and then badly apply them broadly to a situation you don't understand
> https:[...]?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Considering the number of replies here saying "source does not contain claim" / "that is a misinterpretation of what it says"... LLMs are still autocomplete functions. Exceptionally good ones, but they don't reason. And they kiss your boots unprompted. Beware of whatever opinions this thing is justifying to you
How did you arrive at 82% of salary being taken by taxes and social security? I read the Wikipedia article but I don’t how the numbers would add up to 82%.
[2] You include pension, healthcare and education in this number. What would be the equivalent number in, say, the US if you were to include all this?
> What would be the equivalent number in, say, the US if you were to include all this?
Isn't it the point OP is making - France has much higher taxes compared to US because the state provides pensions, healthcare and higher education and US don't?
> "The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary"
This might be the most insane comment I've ever seen on this forum.
What in the hell are you talking about? Did you actually read that first link, completely fail to understand a single word of it, and then the number 82 just magically fell out of the sky?
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.
You seems to mistake a corruption/grift problem for a wealth redistribution scheme issue.
They do not need to be linked, they generally aren't, in the EU at least.
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.
No, more competition does obviously NOT solve oligarchies. It is what we see RIGHT NOW. It is OUT THERE NOW. Oligarchs buy up competition and either incorporate their ideas or make them disappear if they threaten their established business models.
Why are you keep repeating this myth?
The only relevant player who might break up oligarchies before they become to powerful is the state they operate in.
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.
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.
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.
Shiny?
> 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.
Yes, but apparently the biggest players now abuse their comparative advantage positions. So, we are back to mercantilism to the detriment of all humanity.
> I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages.
Depends which ones. Python? Definitely a source of slowness.
> 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.
Python is slow, though, and so was java compared to other compiled languages of its time. Sure, it might not matter much if you're mostly doing database calls. If you're not, though, then yes, it's the languages fault if your app is slow. You can try to make it faster, but it's gonna be marginal gains. Or, you could just switch to another language and get a 100x speedup for free.
I also denounce the notion that trading language complexity for slowness is the case. Python is already complex, and there's some language and frameworks that are actually quite a bit easier to use for web backends. Like java, or dotnet. It just makes no sense to use python for this usecase, even if you ignore the slowness.
But that's not completely true, there is one very good reason to use python. Your devs know it. But, that doesnt say anything about the language itself.
Slow_er_. For all programs talked about in this thread it is fast enough. Especially if you don’t need to host it at Microsoft/Google scale.
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?
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.
> 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".
No a bad thing if you desire the corporate power to eventually become the main force shaping the world :)
> to make any attempt to enforce antitrust a carrier killer for a politician
Any example of a politician carrier killed by an attempt to enforce antitrust?
Biden.
Him putting Lisa Khan in charge of antitrust enraged the tech oligarchs, who then all went MAGA and bought Trump the election.
> went MAGA and bought Trump the election
Didn’t Harris actually raise and spend more than Trump on that election?
Yeah but the tech spend was way more effective. Elon took over Twitter.
It seems like you have an unfalsifiable belief. If one side raises more money and wins, it because of the money. If one side raises more money and loses, it is still the money because the other side spend it more effectively.
You almost got it. We all lose as long as money determines power in social relations.
So no, they didn't "bought Trump the election".
And the fact that a 3rd party supports an opponent does not kill any politician's career. Biden retired by himself, following his own party's pressure. And Harris is still around, I believe.
Of course they did. They used their capital to influence democracy. That's capitalism baby!
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
Does it really need explaining why Office 365/Google Docs cannot be written in Django?
Yes
This is very obvious.
What part of your document editor needs to be backed by a relational database?
Why use an MVT system if you don't need the Model part of it?
https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/blob/main/src/backend...
I see, in your broad and experienced mind, document editors don't have users, permissions, and the whole document management itself, comments on lines/threads, reactions on comments
Seriously, theyre all as cookie cutter perfect usecase for Django as you can get, but I guess you haven't actually thought about the domain and just wanted to take a dumb on other devs with intern-to-junior level insights
Would love to hear that explanation why it is IMPOSSIBLE (not that Rust would be faster or use less resources but why it can’t be written)
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?
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.
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.
That article is seemingly all about the perf of the complex frontend app with a custom renderer running in the browser, nothing to do with what’s happening on the server.
I’m my opinion, you have to be kinda masochist to choose C++ for this. Web development is hard in C++.
But thanks for answering honestly.
In my opinion one inherent property of languages is how large the largest program is that can be written in those languages. There's languages that work well for short programs. Bash, perl are examples on one end of the spectrum. Then you have things like lisp and Python where the largest programs are a lot larger already, but still hit obvious limits. And then you have the languages that support really large codebases. Java, C++ are ones currently in use.
There's new languages where it's a bit of an open question still where they lie on the spectrum. Go would be one of them. I'd guess somewhere between Python and Java. Javascript I would argue is between perl and python. And Rust ... well ... good question.
An office suite is a gigantic application, which will need feature upon feature upon feature upon feature. If you want it working on the web, I'd propose something like C++ and WASM.
Wt actually isn’t terrible, with the added benefit of being able to leverage the enormous c/c++ library ecosystem. Also, it can be quite fast if you care for it to be.
Edit: also appears to be based in the eu, how fitting for this thread.
https://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt
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.
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…
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
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
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.
After having the same experience negative some time before Covid, I was kindly invited late last year to a homeserver of a local hackerspace and I gave it another try.
I cannot send messages to people on another homeserver (such as the obscure matrix.org one) whereas other people can, as well as some other issues which I forgot by now. Not at all usable. It was a short-lived stint and I didn't even try to enable encryption this time :(
this sounds like something super weird about the setup - it really should just work. what client and server was it?
Element web and mobile have the same issue; server I'm not sure, where can I see this? I would assume the default/reference implementation but I don't know
Groups work btw, it's just private chats that cannot be initiated from either side (I have like five pending 'rooms' or something now), so it's not that one server banned the other. I just took it for typical matrix experience
it sounds like the hackspace server has been banned from inviting due to spam or something. can you share the name of the server so we can check? or mail abuse@matrix.org with the details.
This sounds very much along the lines of issues I had with it. It's been a while so I can't remember the exact details, but I do remember it being impossible to open a thread without the app just locking up and crashing, so people would ask important questions in a thread and nobody was ever able to reply or even read the question.
It both still has problems and has been improving for all of its existence. It's been working for my usecases for years
Makes sense, using an office suite hosted by a hostile power isn't a very smart longterm strategy.
Wondering what software are China/Russia using in their public administration?
Local LibreOffice forks. And MS Office, of course.
MS office is pretty secure and private once you put a "Great Firewall" that blocks most outgoing/incoming connections.
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.
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
I would strongly assume the primary place is on some French government server somewhere and this is just the public mirror.
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.
I think you and other responders are missing the point. Yes GitHub gives visibility to the project and is easily replaceable. But putting projects on GitHub gives visibility to GitHub and reenforces the network effect and Microsoft leadership, making it harder for European alternative to emerge.
But they still chose an American company, github, lol ironic
There's nothing ironic, as since the GP said there is no risk associated with GitHub. Git fundamentally prevents vendor lock-in and tampering, and the project is open, so the US have no leverage and pose no threat at all here.
You’re reasoning with a troll who doesn’t care about reason. Save your brainpower.
its not about leverage or threat, same as the office products, the french owned their docs at the end of the day, i thought it was about sovereignty and using french alternatives?
If you have the docs, but not the means to (legally) read and edit them, do you really own them?
When MS pulls services you are largely screwed.
When GitHub pulls services its a few hours downtime and a new provider.
With that argument we are discussing this on...errr US - the organization that perhaps grew those companies.
The word is not ironic it is pragmatic.
> Yet they still participate in GitHub. Ironic! Lol.
Literally the "gotcha" fool from the Matt Bors cartoon: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
It's the code that's hosted on GitHub, not the documents. Easier to move, easier to negotiate a move. You get visibility and easy distribution until they feel the need to bail.
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.
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.
Underrated point: Bldg #1 needs to be sovereign hub for initiatives, for which OP is providing a first tenant…
One step at a time. This is a long-term movement.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
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
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.
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
Shout out to Yjs, ProseMirror and BlockNote on which we relied to build LaSuite Docs
Good! I'll definitely give it a try!! we still need a good email server system in open source and simple to install / maintain ?
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.
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.
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.
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
It looks like the next release of Django will take seriious strides to solve a lot of the n+1 headaches, https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/6.1/#model-fi....
Also, I doubt solving Instagram-level scale issues is on the top ten list of concerns for this project. Just getting something out there and gaining users is way more important than solving far future scaling issues.
Oh I agree 100%. Use the right tool for the job. I'm just saying, the "<hyperscaler> uses <framework>" logic is rarely useful to justify anything.
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 :)
They are full-stack but not complete frameworks like the other. Where is the ORMs, authentication, form handling, etc? Will your bespoke choices hold up in 10 years?
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.
I came to bash on it but it looks nice, well done France!
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.
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)
Also QEmu and ffmpeg.
Also Docker.
Also Lichess.
Also Scikit Learn.
Two words: Fabrice Bellard
>would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence
You have not been paying attention.
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.
The reactivity model fits well in real-time applications; perhaps SolidJS is better alternative in this context, though.
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...
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.
This comment misses the point and argues against something unrelated. It's fundamentally a data sovereignty and security move, not a commercial one.
It's neither pro or anti business. This or "creating a more business friendly environment" policies is a false dichotomy. That could be done too via other means. It is unrelated. Speaking about this "business friendly" only is either misdirection or myopic.
You seem to be arguing for the sake of argument while avoiding the substance of my point by discarding it as "unrelated" while it is fundamentally on point.
If the aim is indeed sovereignty, data and software (and this is software not data), and in general, then they need an effective and comprehensive plan. I think taxpayer-funded state-developed open-source software brings very little at a high cost and can even be counter-productive. Frankly I think it is apolitical move internal to the French state to keep the gavy train coming to government agencies.
Rather I think the US, and also China that does it even more, are much more effective at this by throwing money at the marketplace to develop a whole ecosystem competitively that can also compete globally. An important thing to note here is that EU rules prevent a lot of state action (for instance they would not be allowed to buy only French cars or do things seen as direct subsidies, etc)
France will continue to fall further behind unless it really gets it act together, which is unlikely TBH.
You're just repeating your assumptions - "taxpayer-funded state-developed is bad", but "marketplace competitively" good. I'm not convinced.
You're not engaging with the sovereignty aspect - "compete globally" isn't the main goal at all as I said above, you're just restating you misconception. And so this part comes across as pure projection:
> You seem to be arguing for the sake of argument while avoiding the substance of my point
How does this help sovereignty?
Yes in the most basic sense it does since they build their own tool instead of getting a foreign one. To be a little bit provocative I could say that Warsaw Pact countries used to do the same and built plenty of uncompetitive products themselves...
But beyond that it isn't a plan because it does not scale, it does not help the country develop its own industry and economy, it does not help competitiveness, and it is a huge cost for very little. Again, the sovereignty aspect means all of this must be addressed otherwise it is just a stunt and waste of taxpayers' money.
You've got to have a competitive industry to achieve and maintain 'sovereignty' in a broader and positive sense otherwise you end up like the Warsaw Pact or China before it realised that. You might survive but look more and more like North Korea (poor and obsolete but, yes, sovereign).
So yes, taxpayer-funded and state-developed internally in isolation for the sake of it is pretty much universally bad.
Taxpayer-funded is not bad per se, as already said in my previous comment, but here it is indeed more than that, it's the government building random stuff internally for frankly no good reason. Maybe next the government will manufacture its own 'sovereign' pencils as well?
They could have spent the same amount of money supporting small companies to develop similar products and that would have helped creating a competitive 'sovereign' ecosystem and commercial products to sell to everyone at home and also abroad. Much more bang for their buck and long term virtuous circle.
So, again have you got a point to discuss beyond just wanting to argue against me?
Edit:
An example of why competitiveness is important: Arianespace. It's great, Europe has the 'sovereign' ability to launch satelittes. That's useful for government agencies, a niche use-case. But everyone else in Europe who wants to launch a satelitte uses SpaceX because Arianespace is not competitive and is obsolete at this point.
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.
obviously hosted on github what a joke.
Another one?
Previously:
This week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294
2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
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?
Forking Firefox whenever the rug is pulled seems doable (with elbow grease), and in the meantime Europeans can invest on problems that don't have an already mature fully open-source solution.
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