France's homegrown open source online office suite (opens in new tab)

- 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

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

“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

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.

Anyone think what they might about La Suite, but blocknote is a solid product!

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, ...

- a word processor - a spreadsheet application - presentation software

This doesn't look like it has any of these

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.

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.

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.

People always want more and it will never be finished.

https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/

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.

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

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.

Depends which ones. Python? Definitely a source of slowness.

Yes it is. It's the same reason desktop GUI apps are now slower than Windows 95-era apps that were written in C.

Shhh, don't tell them.

(Kidding, of course.)

The best solution is skin-in-the-game, for-profit enterprise coupled with rigorous antitrust enforcement.

Companies will go a million times faster than open source. They're greedy and will tear the skin off of inefficiencies and eat them for lunch. That's what they do. Let the system of capitalism work for you. It's an optimization algorithm. One of the very best.

But when companies get too big and start starving off competition, that's when you need to declaw them and restore evolutionary pressure. Even lions should have to work hard to hunt, and they should starve and die with old age to keep the ecosystem thriving.

This is not a situation where you'll have thousands of people editing the same document, that'd be insane with Django for sure - but at general collaboration tooling with <100 (random number I made up) editing, Django is unlikely gonna be the bottleneck

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.

On the other, we shouldn’t take the opinions of the sort of fan who hangs around on a corporation’s subreddit too seriously.

*Lieu de Rencontre Français Pour le Contrôle de Version

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Colmerauer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Institute_for_Research_... (INRIA)

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.

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’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 has always been a Ruby-heavy company.

I’m afraid i am one of those people :)

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.

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