Home page for the entire suite (in French) with some screenshots: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
Code bases are on GitHub and they use English there: https://github.com/suitenumerique/
Dev handbook (in English): https://suitenumerique.gitbook.io/handbook
Not French and I can't say I personally tried deploying any of them, but I've been admiring their efforts from afar for a while now.
Grist https://www.getgrist.com/
A write-up of how the French gov uses it https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...
That being said, I should ask: to what extent do you see being US-based an advantage or a problem in the current state of things? For example, in regards to exports controls, or any other such thing that may potentially limit your business scope depending on $current_admin.
Does grist have forms?
As a Frenchman, this stings. I have been working since 2017 in creating an open source alternative to Dropbox (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash), the reality is out of 60 customers, only 2 are French and most contacts I've had with French entities only shown interest onto open source because they were not willing to spend a dime on anything.
Customers are mostly US entities and other countries in Europe. The gist is our technology is already working accross every possible storage technology and every identity provider, has a clean modern UI, has gateway capabilities to expose your data with open protocols like SFTP, FTP, S3, MCP, with virtual filesystem capabilities that enables a decentralized approach through federation and tons of other advanced setup, is deployed in production in places like US military, MIT, European Commission and many other othher high profile places.
We just launched https://www.filestash.eu a few days ago hoping to talk to people in France who are interested in translating the talk of data sovereignty onto actual actions. If anybody who is reading this is truly interested onto a sovereign Dropbox and is willing to put talks onto a concrete reality, reach out to me, I'd love to talk to you
It's really good. The typing experience "feels" right and the collaboration features work. I haven't played with the other solutions yet but I'm very excited if they are up to the same standard.
I deployed it with docker and it was relatively smooth. I had to play a bit with the OIDC but I'm pretty sure that was more a me issue than anything.
Visio does seem built from scratch but I wonder if it's a temporary thing until element is feature complete with their move away from Jitsi.
You can find more about la suite on their website and the opendesk one (German project using mostly the same software). Unfortunately I don't have the links to hand here.
Visio (aka meet) began in parallel with Element's work on MatrixRTC and Element Call. Hopefully the two can converge, given they are both built on LiveKit.
Not a very solid way to move away from American big tech :/
For open source code, there is no risk of confidential information being given to the US government (since there is no confidential information), and moving to another forge would be pretty simple if necessary.
Having private companies in the US becoming more involved with politics is fine for the US apperantly, but the EU just don't want to be involved.
It's time governments realize(d) that IT sector is as strategic as the Defense sector, which is usually/always given preferential treatment (e.g. Airbus, etc) and that they don;t have to be beholden to American tech behemoths. If this realization happened ~20 years ago, they might have stopped FB, Goog, Amazon, MSFT, etc. much earlier, and wouldn't be hand-wringing now trying to stop or delay the evil effects of social media.
I am pleased that AUS has banned social media for teens < 16yrs, and perhaps Finland is thinking the same route.
Already, China, Russia have their local tech companies supply their critical infra needs. Other governments should be wise enough to catch up, and not just to support + enhance local languages but to grow their critical ecosystem.
As a European, I agree. Zooming out a little, though, this whole decoupling process of entire economies (which has been well underway for a while) is going to increase the probability of armed conflict as the repercussions of military engagement will be lower.
To me a really significant signal that they’re serious will be when there’s an official Linux version of Solidworks.
It’s remarkable to me that France has control over one of the premiere CAD suites but theyre entirely dependent on an American OS to use it.
Weather or not they get Greenland, Trump and his supporters in the US administration have changed the world. Guy should definitely get Nobel prize for pushing decentralization.
1.5 year ago DINUM (La Suite) and OpenDesk (Germany) reached out and started sponsoring quite a bit of our work which has really helped us accelerate the project
And I believe BlockNote uses tiptap/prosemirror, no? Do they also contribute to those “primitives”? That would be a very nice gift to the OSS community
I did try a local installation of Docs when i first saw the project a few months ago (i do not remember if it was posted here or on Reddit, though i think one of the developers posted in the comments wherever i saw it), it seems fine though it did feel a bit sparse for all the docker containers it expected from me to setup. I guess for an organization this might be ok, but it did feel a bit overengineered, especially since the actual functionality doesn't seem to be much (and the core editor isn't even written by them).
- TChap - Group chat (looks like Slack / Discord)
- Visio - Video meetings
- FranceTransfert - File Transfer
- Messagerie - Email client
- Fichiers - Cloud file storage
- Docs
- Grist - Spreadsheet
Now they just need to change the name so it's not so obviously French, and invite collaboration from the other large EU countries. I wonder how many Dutch or German will think of "La Suite Numerique" as an EU-wide office suite.
German version is here, but unlike France they're mostly boosting already-existing German open source software (like Nextcloud and Open Xchange): https://opencode.de/en/home
I don't know how the Netherlands really fits into all of this, but I know they're one of the biggest funders of open source projects in general via NLnet. Seriously, their list of projects they've given money to is ridiculously comprehensive, you're going to struggle naming some that are not listed here: https://nlnet.nl/project/index.html
Where I live names that aren't so obviously American have an advantage.
Why not? Plenty of French people speak English at a native level.
There's a chance to unlock tremendous value for society here.
Imagine if you could fix all the awful bugs making video conferencing software shitty for you! It's perhaps the most bug-plagued software out there in the world, with the highest number of complaints I have ever seen.
We've had a large detour away from open-source running the core of the internet, at least outside of web pages, but this sort of software feels like we're getting back to the 90's and earlier.
Vive la France!
France does a few things right; scandinavian countries too (I include The Netherlands here, though they are not really scandiavians but in their decision-making, they are often a bit like a hybrid between France and Denmark or Sweden). Spain and Italy lag behind but sometimes, surprisingly, also do the right thing. The real troublemaker is ... Germany. For a reason nobody understands, Germany is like an US satellite in everything it does, but only ... half-hearted. Naturally, "the economy" is one reason (export centric country so it is readily blackmailable by the USA here) but even then you have to ask why german politicians have absolutely no pride at all. France has pride - that's good and bad but good in this context. (UK is more an US colony really after Brexit anyway, with Farage probably going to win - and cause more damage. Brits just don't learn from this.)
I don’t see what’s surprising about this. In the post-war period, most of Europe was hostile to German empowerment, from initial opposition to West Germany’s inclusion in NATO to later resistance to German reunification. The presence of tens of thousands of US troops in Germany also required more diplomatic communication and alignment to maintain status of forces agreements.
The status quo has only really changed in the last twenty years.
That includes:
Dependency on US-hosted digital services (emails, chat, calendars, ticket systems, online editors, file hosting, sync services, payment providers) — e.g., Gmail, Google Docs.
Dependency on third-party authentication providers — e.g., login via Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, and iCloud on iPhones.
Dependency on US cloud infrastructure providers — e.g., companies relying on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
Dependency through supply chain partners who rely on US tech — e.g., digitization partners using AWS/Azure impacting invoice processing.
Dependency on US-based business IT software and data services — e.g., banks using Microsoft LDAP, accountants using Dropbox, telecoms storing data in Oracle data lakes.
Dependency on US-controlled operating systems on user devices — e.g., Windows, macOS, iOS, Android.
Dependency on US-designed chips in most devices — e.g., Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Apple chip hardware.
They rely on the Germans (and to a point, Czechs) to supply their military these days.
Germany has quite a lot of defense companies that supply half the world I think.
More to this point, the article points out that one of the drivers of all this is when Microsoft killed one of the emails an ICC prosecutor's email because the US administration sanctioned them:
> A decisive moment came last year when the Trump administration sanctioned the International Criminal Court’s top prosecutor after the tribunal, based in The Hague, Netherlands, issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an ally of President Donald Trump.
> The sanctions led Microsoft to cancel Khan’s ICC email, a move that was first reported by The Associated Press and sparked fears of a “kill switch” that Big Tech companies can use to turn off service at will.
Everyone is responding with rationale for this, but it's not actually true it's it? It feels like every week we see another German state moving away from Microsoft etc.
The Bavarian state for example just signed a huge deal with MS.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Cloud-Row-in-Bavaria-over-billi...
Counterpoints: Deezer, Doctolib, Back Market, Tidal, Adopte, Mistral, Dassault Systemes (the company behind the two main CAD softwares out there), Thales, Qonto, Kyutai, Mirakl, BeReal, Klaxoon, ABTasty, etc etc. We can do this all day.
Oh, and there are ton of official government open source projects.
And no, "but they're not as big as a FAAG" does not mean that the software isn't good or innovative.
Where do you get your information from? This is just plainly false. Heck, it runs afoul of the Constitution, so even if the government were to try something, it'd be smacked down real fast.
Comment right above yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46877163
> even if the government were to try something, it'd be smacked down real fast.
One would hope, but evidently not!
Which means it's time to look for alternative clients. I ws hoping for something like WeeSlack:
https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack
But all I found was:
https://github.com/btp/teams-cli
https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams
Are there really no good Teams clients? Doesn't have to plug in to WeeChat or be a TUI... But something?
That's just a pure lesson in pain.
Webhooks work, but proper bots are borderline impossible; at least without giving you the feeling that you'd rather pull your own teeth out with pliers.
But the available APIs still suck. For example there is none to just get all recent notifications. I don't know if teams itself has access to more and better apis? If not that would explain a lot.
I'm not sure that's actually possible, you know...
Teams is supposed to be a professional workplace tool from one of the biggest software companies in the world, but it feels like something a high schooler coded up for fun. Weirdly Discord, a platform explicitly meant for gamers, is a more useful chat tool. I don't like Discord at all, but it's better than Teams.
Without threads, there is no breach of thread-etiquette.
When "channels" are so awkward, nobody uses them. Then there is no constant deluge of middle-age folks creating a Facebook out of work, needing to be reminded that the photos channel is for business-photos, not pictures of their kids.
When emoji support is limited, nobody has to police people pushing the boundaries of what emojis are appropriate.
The software is baffling. But I like it that way.
There are definitely still breaches of etiquette though, e.g. people frequently tagging a whole channel when they have a support question, even though it contains hundreds of people.
Teams isn't just mediocre, it's aggressively hostile to basic usability. The camera bar sits at the top of the window, directly blocking where you're supposed to position your camera for eye contact. Chat organisation is broken: you get duplicate groups because the order people were added matters somehow. Notifications phantom in and out. Reactions are buried in an activity feed. Search is useless. You can't reliably paste text without major formatting issues. The mobile app logs you out randomly and doesn’t tell you unless you manually check it. Desktop notifications don't sync with read state. Files uploaded to chat don't appear in the Files tab. The "new Teams" broke half the features that worked in classic Teams. Presence status is a coin flip. Audio settings reset themselves between calls. Screen sharing has a 50/50 chance of sharing the wrong window. The difference between a chat and a channel is arbitrary and confusing. You can't edit messages older than a few hours. Threading is bolted on and barely works.
Performance is inexcusable. Multiple gigabytes of RAM to display text messages and lag constantly on modern hardware. How do you make a chat application lag? It's rendering text, not computing fluid dynamics. Opening the application takes 30 seconds on an SSD. Switching between chats stutters. Typing has input delay.
The real problem isn't that Teams is terrible. It's that "it technically functions" has become an acceptable standard. When you've never experienced better, "it works" seems fine. But Teams is what happens when a monopoly position means you don't have to care about quality. Microsoft has unlimited resources and still ships this.
Even Skype for Business was more stable, and in Skype for Business you couldn't reliably select text. That's how low the bar is.
Likes to open new windows if you click a notification.
It is slow.
The search is not good at showing multiple results from the one chat. Why does it search all the other chats anyway...
Switching accounts constantly is a pain in the arse - I unfortunately have to use four accounts and one sub-account (member of some other org's team or something).
My favourite one ( still happens ) is having to mute then unmute at the beginning of the conversation otherwise nobody can hear me. It was so common, with people fiddling with their headset, calling again etc that I eventually asked everyone exhibiting audio issues to start with this
Another interesting one is that if you’re not connected properly , you send messages , but never get notified that they never left, and are never notified that you’re not connected.
It’s also a resource hog and will eat your machine for breakfast.
The list goes on and on, it’s very surprising.
And the UI is terrible, huge balloons around everything. I want density but even at the densest setting it sucks.
Oh and it also fails to update online status. Often I click on a colleague who seems green and only then it updates and it turns out they've been away for 3 hours. Grrr
The company is falling apart so quickly they are going to have to pay up again before the end of the month.
The new Outlook app is horrible though.
Once I worked in a company with two brands after a fusion, and all of us had to use both Exchange and Lotus Notes. And I was almost forgetting SharePoint.
No more Words? Introducing a worse software than Words...
Of course I would never choose Zoom or Teams if I had the power, but Chromium does work with both when those are the tools your client uses.
I've spent a full day attempting to send a webhook in. Teams used to work like slack (a channel admin can create an endpoint; you post to it.) Microsoft deprecated that because it worked. It's now a maze of permissions and it silently fails with no error messages at all.
Scrollback regularly fails and also requires app restart.
I cannot insert images into a channel w/ a customer via drag and drop, but I can paste them by opening them in preview, copying the image, and cmd+v into the channel. I wasted 4 hours w/ support trying to figure out why I can't drag images into the shared channel before giving up. This is typical of the Teams experience.
I could go on. Besides facebook's tools, it is the worst piece of software I've used and a demonstration of monopoly power to distribute total garbage. Slack has issues, but it does reliably do the core thing.
- opening Sharepoint pages in Teams' half-baked browser;
- opening Word or Excel in Teams' own half-baked editor;
- Exchange integration is the calendar, period. Nothing else. The only thing actually usable.
Am I missing anything?
A holy trinity if ever I have seen one.
Each one of these actions is a stepping stone the world is taking as a direct consequence of U.S. political negligence. And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.
EU citizens have elected ineffective leaders for decades -- leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies. They have elected leaders who were until very recently heavily dependent on Russian energy.
As a result, EU dependence on US tech is near-total. I remember hearing a few months ago that companies in the EU still have to use Dun & Bradstreet (a US company) for routine government filings!
Some minor headlines about civil servants stopping their usage of office sound impressive but isn't really making a dent in Microsoft's bottom line. If and when Microsoft's revenues from the EU start dropping by double digits or more, I am sure they will contribute large amounts of money to make the US government more civil and normal than it's being today.
> And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.
As a software consumer, if this takes off, I don't see any reason I would want the course to be reversed. More adoption and support of open software and standards is beneficial for consumers. It might even get Microsoft and the rest of US Big Tech to actively compete for a change rather than relying on their near-total monopoly.
Remarkable how it is the politicans who should have been doing this when it doesn't get done, and how everyone is quick to complain if politicians meddle in what the private sector should have been doing. This is a recurring theme in a lot of debates. And I think it has to do with our need to blame someone but ourselves.
Yes, one could solve this through procurement rules that favor domestic or regional products. And there are sometimes procurement rules that state that domestic vendors should be preferred. But I have seen that in practice and it doesn't actually work. One one project I worked on decades ago the military was sourcing a system for "local administration". A company that was effectively bankrupt, had the weirdest OS I have ever used, and the worst office support systems I've had the misfortune of trying to use, was the only domestic candidate. Yes, it did check the boxes in the procurement process, but everyone knew it was never going to happen.
Interoperability, product maturity, familiarity, feature completeness, quality etc tends to win out.
I think we have to realize that this has almost nothing to do with our political leaders and everything to do with our inability to create software businesses in Europe. We need to figure that bit out. And perhaps this is the kick in the behind we needed to get our act together.
Not that I disagree in principle with most of the tech regulations; it does make sense to protect privacy and combat monopolistic abuses and so on.
But you also need to support your own tech industry at the same time, and the efforts there have been like quarter-assed at most.
About 25% of EU parliament parties are against EU. Theyt are paid by the EU to tell how much they hate this institution.
There are no two countries in the EU who are aligned. Some of them are not completely out of synch (mostly the Nordics), some are in schizophrenia mode (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia mostly) where they eat most of the EU funds (relatively and in absolute terms) but hate it.
With such an institution, there is no real hope of having a strong position backed by competent people. Just look at ENISA and the disgrace this organization is in the era of cybersecurity.
We also had a EU-wide referendum about daylight saving. 5 M peopel responsed (a few percent of the population). It was the largest response in the history of the EU. And then it was trashed.
The mountains of EUR we burn is insane.
It's not like there are people out there on the campaign trail every election saying "if I'm elected, I'll ensure we build homegrown cloud alternatives". Nobody campaigns on issues like that. The reality is you have to choose between people who want to kick the immigrants out and people who don't, people who want to enact green policies and people who don't. People who want a European army and people who don't. These big issues are what people vote on, even if we care that there should be a homegrown cloud industry. I really do care, but it's not something I can do anything about at the ballot box
For example, they blame America for their own issue of lacking tech companies, despite Europe taking credit for having fewer work hours, more 'equitable' societies, etc.
They blame China for their own issue of lacking domestic manufacturing, despite their pride at having strong unions, supposedly good labor protections, and vacations.
They blame India for the bogey of 'buying Russian oil', instead of blaming themselves for being the LARGEST purchaser of refined oil products from India. As if India, one of the hottest countries on the planet, actually needs heating oil.
At this point, which country / region does Europe not blame? It's always someone else's fault. No one even thinks to look inside themselves.
Only to do business with US companies, or have a USD account with some payment providers such as Wise I think, not for anything else.
France has been doing this since De Gaulle. That's why they're able to do this now, as well as produce almost everything they use that is defense-related.
Could you name which European nation this was?
I would genuinely be interested in knowing.
Most US Citizens are not voting on what you think they're voting on. Most are worried about things that affect their day-to-day life like cost of eggs, the cost of gas, taxes going up, my 401K going in the dumpster.
I live and breathe tech everyday. I see the dangers of it all around me. Day in and day out. You try and talk to people about how dangerous some of this stuff is. Unless people feel it somehow like having their identity stolen and they spend three years trying to fix it all? Nothing will ever change.
People are 100% immune to this stuff now. Its the old frog in boiler water analogy.
Are they? It seems to me like they’re worried about things like women having access to too much healthcare, too many non white people, and too many women leaders. They voted for a guy that wants to make the most expensive purchase of most people’s lives even more expensive:
Not to mention the enormous tax increases by way of getting rid of the expanded ACA premium credits.
The US has spent tens of trillions defending Europe indirectly subsidizing social policies despite this the US has persistently been unpopular with Europeans because, obviously, they are a political target for domestic politicians (btw, you see this almost everywhere...if country A gives country B subsidies, you will almost always find that country A's people are virulently hated by a significant proportion of country B's population, the US was more unpopular than Russian before the Ukraine invasion in Germany...let me just repeat: a country which invaded Europe was more popular than a country which gave hundreds of billions a year in defence subsidies).
Acting as if xenophobia towards the US hasn't always been part of the European political climate is not based in reality. Europe has been trying to protect its own market for decades, unsuccessfully. What is more, there is very limited trade WITHIN Europe in certain industries because of the hurdle of national xenophobia and protectionism. Europe has made an industry out of failure and greivance...and, for some reason, part of this narrative is that no country contributes as much as Europe.
Reality? Iran...continued to break US sanctions for years so that failing European defence companies could sell their junk, investigations of Iranian politicians bribing EU parliamentarians. Russia...continued to break US sanctions after Ukraine invasion, had an extremely subservient relationship with Russia despite being repeatedly told by the US that NordStream 2 would lead to Ukraine invasion, former German president actually works for NordStream. On and on, the same mistakes being made all the time because there has never been any real strategy apart from extreme short-term political advantage to protect continued failure to generate social or economic gain in most of Europe (not all tbf, but the executive polling numbers that you see in some countries is incredible, you wouldn't think they have elections).
2) Continental Europe has shown a willingness to continue dependency on other countries in the face of far, far worse national behavior. NordStream 2 planned after the invasion of Georgia and was still under construction after Putin had invaded and annexed Crimea. Not "threatened" to do so, he had actually done it. There was a body count involved. So it's not too far off-base to think that despite all of the foolishness from the Trump administration, the US could seek some slack for its technology sector. It's not like you need Teams to keep your factories running and to avoid freezing to death in the winter, but that was the sort of integration with the Russians that Europeans were seeking to maintain while Putin was redrawing the map, at least until the Ukraine invasion, and even then, it took clandestine activity to permanently take NordStream offline.
People like Trump will almost certainly point at this and say that this shows Europeans to be allies of convenience, not true partners. People like him love to cry about double standards.
Almost as many people voted against the current US administration as voted for it, so although it is true that "so many US citizens do not see the ramifications", there almost as many who do (or some version of them).
And of course once you have gotten out of vendor lock in, you never go back. If you do go back to that vendor that locked you in before, because of some sweetheart deal, you make sure to set up all sorts of escape hatches so if you need to bounce quickly you can.
The vendor lock in of the EU to the US for so many things is being dismantled.
As a counter-example, you cannot expect an LGBT person to vote for a right-wing conservative who advocates against their own rights, even if that candidate makes the "right call" on every other issue.
It's a shame the Americans don't see the ramifications of their political decisions.
US will be Great like all Giants are - terrifying and alone ;-)
We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement. And economic damage really is the key to the heart of these United States of Three Corporations in a Trench Coat.
We’ve seen companies and CEOs paying millions in bribes to be close to the president. Now this aligns their financial interests with shifting our foreign policy. Not how it ought to work, but it’s the world we have.
How can you abandon something that never existed. While US was among the better superpowers it never for a moment engaged in good faith. Trump just makes it naked and brutish.
Everything America is doing right now is because America is precisely NOT taking corporate decisions. America is doing things to the international order that are directly fucking up American corporations. Only a committed social democrat can look at the populist right-wing chaos right now, and claim that's "Corporate" action. If anything, Corporations were more liberal than the population at large in America, and that's part of the reason why Trump's racist populism is so popular ... he's exploiting a backlash. Turns out America has far more nativists than you ever imagined.
But yeah, go ahead and call it "Corporations in a trenchcoat" because then you don't have to think about how Corporations have actually played the biggest role in promoting diversity in America. While government consistently goes sharply left and right based on whichever lunatic the American public elects next.
If anyone involved in this transition read this, please contact us, we already got open source technology to replace box / Dropbox / OneDrive and Gdrive
Fengkou fēng kǒu 风口
n. wind tunnel; an area or sector where, for a period of time, all investors want to invest in. Everyone stands a chance to fly when there is favorable wind blowing from behind.
https://www.newconceptmandarin.com/learn-chinese-blog/chines...
Time to start a Drupal consulting firm again.
I love that there is a lot more enthusiasm about OSS adoption within EU software devs, but at a population or government level there doesn't appear to be any coherent strategy to gradually replace US tech other than these knee-jerk headliner moves that don't move the needle much.
As a software consumer I would love it if there were open-first software standards adopted within this large of a population that would force US Big Tech to actually compete rather than rest on their monopoly power. But I am pretty skeptical and pessimistic about this actually being able to happen, given the historical failures of the EU.
I have to do my patriotic duty to remind you that SAP is the 6th/7th largest software company in the world by market cap. I know not as exiting as notepad with AI but they do exist.
That said US software giants are a disease for democratic societies. If Europe wants software sovereignty we don't need "significant large software companies" we need a hundred medium sized ones that reflect the diversity of the dozens of nations on the continent. We don't need gilded age robber barrons owning the largest communications network shaping politics. We need a democratic genuinely market respecting solution, we don't need to emulate the techno-feudalism of the US or China.
Europe needs in fact to be more ambitious than to build its own Microsoft. We need a genuinely open ecosystem which is not going to have as its goal to extract value out of its users.
Now compound that issue with conservative investors, a fractured "single" market and a strong preference for social equality over entrepreneurship.
I can only assume this is a comparison to the US
The world doesn't care about the US yard stick so much. Even less now than before. We in Europe don't care our economy is smaller than the US, that our cars are smaller etc.
Bigger is not always better
Slack is a delight compared to Teams. And I'm not even alone in this, everyone is still using slack until it gets pried off our hands. So help me God anyone mentions Copilot one more time...
If the gov really took an expansive view of antitrust, it would break up software bundling and require ala carte pricing per app, defined as a single primary use case.
This will become all the more important as OpenAI/Anthropic start bundling all of their products together and putting existing SaaS out of business for no reason other than to get some crucial model or capability, companies have to buy the whole bundle.
Their recent update removed the paywall from SSO (and unfortunately the Gitlab SSO workaround) for social logins up to 100 seats, afterwards there's an absurd per seat cost similar to its non-open source brethren. One day if needed, I plan to drop-in an SSO middleman allowing anyone to leverage their own SSO layer (which will map to the login form with username/password) to avoid the SSO limits altogether. Though good enough for my needs, and likely yours too. Especially if you're open to paying for their seats.
Anyway, I have been dealing with Zoom for over five years (like most folks). I don’t especially like it, but there’s really no viable alternative. Its video quality is light years ahead of anyone else, and its UI, though still klunky, has become a de facto standard. Everyone knows the UX, and is afraid to use anything else. Classic “the devil you know” conundrum.
I’ve found it really difficult to get non-technical people to use anything else. At one time, I could get folks to use BlueJeans, but that’s gone the way of the Dodo.
It’s a pretty common issue, when adopting FOSS alternatives. The UI is often optimized for FOSS lovers (tech people), not regular mensch. The tech may be great, but the UI is inscrutable. Tech folks just can’t seem to grok how important good UX is.
It’s actually a bit depressing, seeing this type of thing happening. It’s like a slow-motion trainwreck. Inevitable, unstoppable, and we can’t look away.
We've seen the US sanction the ICC, they have the Cloud Act and the Patriot Act. The US has shown both a willingness and a capability to weaponize your tech against you.
It should profoundly worry the world that three companies — whose heads all have frequent dinners at the White House — control virtually every phone, tablet, and computer in the world. If you expand that to data centres and clouds, email addresses, services and software it's far worse.
It should be considered a matter of national defence for basically all nations to ensure digital sovereignty.
(It doesn't matter who is in the White House, my point is it's a massive security nightmare to give this much control to one group)
Growing up in Iceland where we had a state monopoly on telecommunications until the late 90s, I don‘t remember a single telecommunication outage. In fact, after moving to America where I have a private internet provider, I have experience quite a few internet blackouts actually.
Meanwhile... Micro$lop: Aha! Sharpen your lawyers, mes amis!
I think one question, which we might be seeing a bit here and there, is if the Americans decide that no, you can’t also do that. You must accept the intolerable terms or be punished.
There's already an extremely well known program called "Visio", namely Microsoft Visio, and it is included in many of the same Microsoft commercial office products that include Microsoft Teams. If you tell someone to switch from Microsoft Teams to Visio a lot of people will assume you mean Microsoft Visio and get rather confused.
The EU has a tendency to regulate business before they ever get started. They might want to look at their regulatory structure so companies like Zoom start in the EU, and not in United States.
Tact and diplomacy meant that previously the USA was seen as, yes being all about itself, but not threateningly so when it came to its allies/friends. As soon as that veneer was removed the reaction was always going to be, "we'll look after ourselves then" - using the same tools China has (see: China having its own linux distribution)
The thing is, there has been a lot of announcement like that in the past, but when the dust settles, you find out that every other ministry just signed another contract with Microsoft, so yeah.
The DINUM (the state agency behind these tools) just try very hard to be relevant, but in the end, the ministries are relatively autonomous in their choices.
Thats why the aggressively integrate every AI tool where they can - like copilot to make large companies and government stick to their solutions. I wish government will find am even better way to embed LLM to their tools…
I don't think the main thing stopping an EU Zooms or Teams from capturing the market is not enough help from the French government.
France wants to really really reallllllyyyy believe they do.
Poland and Germany lets France say such fanciful words, but they keep their actual thoughts for themselves. They know France has an Adler inferiority complex, so they let them pretend.
There are decades-old standards for VoIP and teleconferencing, which even the proprietary solutions will often let you interoperate with (at additional cost). Now would be a good time to actually promote them.
The substantial point is that they don't want freedom, they only want to steal like others steal, to do business like others do business, instead of doing something different.
Hopefully the EU as a whole can rally behind this.
The reality is that chat apps nowadays have little moat, blocking the worst offenders for sovereignty's sake it perfectly logical.
I’ll still buy France’s wine.
But the reality is that the US benefits immensely from free democracies with rules-based open markets and international order. Again, do we break that when it suits us? Absolutely. But America being selfish has been a positive outcome compared to, for example, more war in Europe.
Polls consistently show that people recognize the benefits of US hegemony while acknowledging that the US does it purely from self-interest.
If you are hosting webinars there's also bigbluebutton
Unlike the alternatives at the time from Google, Apple, etc., it didn't require an account for participants — I could just give them the meeting room URL. So although it wasn't open source, it at least didn't lock you into a network.
(Unlike you, I wasn't up for self-hosting.)
One analogy to our current moment in software is to think of skyscrapers in cities. In the early days of skyscraper construction, most knowledge needed to build one was concentrated in Chicago and New York, so those were the only places really building serious skyscrapers. It took a while but eventually the knowledge diffused out into the industry and the world.
Now we take for granted that high quality skyscrapers are in every city, with the tremendous space efficiency they give.
So is the same diffusion happening to software? It really looks like it! Knowledge of building and operating large-scale software seems to have reached a point where countries and companies no longer need to rely on Silicon Valley companies (and Microsoft) for software. (Note this is less about location and more about capability level, the skyscrapers/cities analogy breaks a little there)
Anyway every country and company can now build its own complex software. It’s been like this for a bit, but current US circumstances did the world a favor when it nudged Europe to get serious.
Software is headed for an exciting and multi-color future and I’m so here for it.
I'm looking for examples here - Israel has a very specific relationship with the tech sector, as does Taiwan, China, South Korea, etc. Even within the US, North Virginia, Huntsville, and Manhattan have specific relationships with Silicon Valley.
Is the idea to copy Silicon Valley's stuff into government sponsored, "to committed to fail" operations? Create complementary tech ecosystems? Recruit Silicon Valley veterans and put them in charge, or just fire them after they get their tech?
Just look at how hard it is to come to a decision on something like allow Huawei to build a telephone network. Is it a good idea? Smart people say, Huawei should be allowed to provide the dumb pipes of the system, but not the high level stuff. Anything sensitive needs to be reviewed by domestic security services.
Is that the approach to America?
It seems like the article saying: "copy America's SaaS offerings." Not clear how that makes you digitally sovereign.
All of these tools cover the basics (being able to video call others, screen sharing, doing calls with multiple/many participants, chat, etc.). You can get most/all of that with free and OSS options. You might struggle a bit with larger meetings or some corporate networking situations.
UX wise, all of these tools are a bit challenged. It seems Google at least embraces the whole "it's just a browser app and that's fine" more than others that insist standalone applications are the way to go. And since these applications are effectively electron applications that run mostly fine in a browser, it is a bit of a smoke and mirrors thing in any case. Bloated is a word that is used frequently in relation to these apps.
It would be nice if tools like this could rally around federated solutions and open protocols. Actually, the smart thing for France (and other countries that care about ending the miserable status quo) would be to dictate usage of open protocols, identity, and security standards. You are welcome to connect with zoom, teams, meets and whatever as long as people not paying for those tools can still participate in a call using whatever compatible tool they prefer. Give these tools a chance to adapt and compete on features. The solution maybe isn't another app but just forcing this market out of the stone age of moats, "owning" user identities, etc.
Email is the one that got away before Silicon Valley got its act together. MS, Novel, America Online, and others completely failed to get their grubby fingers on the space before email was so widely used that not supporting full interoperability with non proprietary email servers was economical suicide. And they tried really hard. Video calls should be the same. And calendars. And word processors (a space that hasn't had any meaningful innovation in decades), spreadsheets, and all the rest. Most of MS Office is a commodity at this point. Not particularly good at anything it does actually. MS has been moving deck chairs around on the deck of that sinking ship for a few decades now.
Do you want to do any business at all there? Do you have any vendors there? Do your owners own anything else that does business there? Do you have any investors that live there? Do your kids go to college there? Do you have to fly over or through it, ever?
It's leverage against leverage.
Then you'll need to pay for a VPN.
The end of globalism also marks the end of the global internet and the transition to regional internets.
[Teams more than zoom. I just got switched to Teams at work and now I understand why no one ever chats on it.]
Tourism, Tech, Tesla, Chlorinated Chickens (lol), ICE ... practically anything American sounds toxic overseas now.
Apologies to the good people of America. You didn't deserve this but your "democracy" has spoken.
Make Europe great again. Bring back creativity. Bring back jobs. Build a talented workforce that stays local instead of migrating to the US. Be independent. Stand tall. Do all of these things and preferrably do them now.
America and China's rise shouldnt be zero sum. It should lift the world. Europe forged the path we all follow. Come back to it.
Europe is already great. It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025.
As for being a vassal: Trump was warned of the consequences of invading Greenland and he backed down immediately. Some vassal.
What are they gonna switch to? I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams. It's all just theater.
Just among my circle of friends there were two startups that made video conferencing systems. One generic, and one for uses that required a higher degree of security. If we move one stratum out, there are about half a dozen startups where friends of friends take part in developing smart cameras for video conferencing as well as industrial uses.
And then there was the Tandberg video conferencing platform which was acquired by Cisco in 2010. (That entire stack was designed and engineered in Norway. From low level DSPs to software).
There are dozens of companies that could make a video conferencing system in Europe today that would be no worse than what you find in Zoom, Teams etc. But since it is a crowded field, they haven't had the muscle to compete.
I’m guessing they will probably use something built on top of Matrix which is an open protocol maintained by a Community Interest Corporation (CIC) in the UK.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/30/france_matrix/
I’m less sure what they will use for video conferencing, but they could do worse then something built on top of WebRTC, which is also an open protocol maintained by W3C, an international standards organization with location in 4 countries (including France and USA).
Aynthing that doesn't terminate in USA where it will be used for industrial espionage by Trump, and cut off as soon as USA's regime finds it useful to do so -- like to prevent reporting of the invasion of Greenland, say. European governments are using Microsoft, that's just not safe with MS paying fealty (and literally paying in $dollars) to a fascist regime.
It is unconscionable to maintain the status quo of using USA-based service companies.
