- you won't see angry letters in the news about services sticking to open source after they chose to move in
- the reason the CNLL can point the finger at Poytechnique is because there are explicit directives. Not even having those would be way worse.
- "Most of the public money" : Open Source contracts won't be in billions of euros most of the time, especially as a lot of the money will go to internal hiring and only a slice to external contractors.
France is all fanfare and rhetoric. Its fun stuff to play with in our imagination, but the ground reality of the world is different.
US is all fanfare and rhetoric. Its fun stuff to play with in our imagination, but the ground reality of the world is different.
-- A French
and its coming on the back of US and Trumps tarif shittalk..
there's also talk about moving away from american software giants, among government sections in my country. Recently one such section moved from AWS to Hetzner (saving money in the process)
i've also heard talk about making EU-based alternatives to the office suite, etc.
The turmoil caused by the two contracts you mention also prove that the new normal has already shifted towards open source. It's a slow process, but it's undeniable that we are making progress.
Also, you are likely downvoted because talking about downvotes is boring and does not bring anything, and also because what was downvoted when you posted might be upvoted now, leaving these complaints look a bit silly.
And honestly, OS stuff still often sucks quite a bit.
It's just that MS software has degraded to the point of utter shittiness (see: Teams) that now it's just plain worse than their own software from 15 years ago.
I sometimes feel like I live in a parallele universe reading the comments here on Office.
The addition of collaboration and how it seemlessly integrated with sharepoints while easing the sharing of documents make Office365 a blessing in most office environment. There is no way people are going back to sharing files like before after having worked this way.
And 15 years ago, we just used Office files in a Dropbox folder. It solved all of our collaboration issues.
No, it did not.
I worked through that. Someone had to be in charge of the master version of all documents and ensure modifications were properly merged and not done simultaneously. Getting to the final version of anything was deeply annoying.
Now everyone can just work on the shared document. You see modifications as they happen. Office intelligently locks what needs to be locked. It just works. I can't tell you how much time this feature alone saves me.
But I don't think the open-source initiatives are "just for show" because nobody cares, and so there is no one to show it to.
They are more wishful thinking, random initiatives. "Let's do open-source!" and throw a couple million euros here and a couple thousand there, and we have the illusion of doing something.
What is made in that manner is also of incredible low quality; most of the time it doesn't work; I recently tried to do a "téléconsultation" with a hospital, which uses state-sponsored software. It was impossible to connect (and the login and password are sent in the same email! why bother with a password then??)
Data sources are not maintained or are incomplete. Data about road accidents don't mention the brand of the car because French car companies lobbied against it! (Which tells a lot about car quality in the first place). Etc.
I work from one of the biggest French companies and this is definitely untrue.
Everyone starting from the very top is concerned about the issue of sovereignty surrounding the cloud. This was true before and is even more true nowadays.
Obviously, everyone still use Office because, well, there is no alternative to Office. The only serious competitor is Google and it's a poor one on top of still begin an American company.
Still, you have some very successful initiative at the state level. Messaging is a good exemple. So is all the work done around GED and open data.
Do you realise how funny it is to see you complain that you can't see the car brands in a data base about road accidents while not realising how awesome it is that you have access to such a database?
> Obviously, everyone still use Office because, well, there is no alternative to Office
So it is, indeed, true. Can you clarify what your point is, exactly? (Also: there is an alternative to MS Office, which is LibreOffice. It works ok. It's not as powerful, maybe (maybe!) but it's fine.)
> Do you realise how funny it is to see you complain that you can't see the car companies in a data base about road accidents while not realising how awesome it is that you have access to such a database?
No, I really don't. It's not "awesome" to have access to that data. This is public information. Citizens don't have to be grateful of what the state does. THE STATE WORKS FOR US, not the other way around.
And as it is, it's not very useful, since the most important data is withheld.
Office is a fairly unsignificant part of our cloud usage. I'm fairly sure we could come to an agreement with Microsoft if we needed to self-host.
> there is an alternative to MS Office, which is LibreOffice
People don't use Office like it's the 90s anymore. Everything which doesn't have seemless collaboration and document sharing is dead on arrival.
> No, I really don't. It's not "awesome" to have access to that data. This is public information. Citizens don't have to be grateful of what the state does. THE STATE WORKS FOR US, not the other way around.
The state doesn't owe you anything apart from safety and law enforment. Of course, you should be grateful that people fought for, put in place and maintain all the services you receive on top. They don't come by magic. That's actual people working.
The fact that you can easily and freely access this database is something to be celebrated. In most places, people who don't work for the state have to pay to access this or go through a public library and that's honestly perfectly fine.
It's baffling to me how the French seemingly fail to realise how incredible the breadth of services their government provides is and somehow manage to make themselves miserable rather than actually doing something of what they are gifted with.
The parent was a bit whiny, but this is most definitely not true. The people are not entities subject to the state, it is a democratic and social republic, not a soviet. The people are the state and as such, the role of the state is to do whatever the people want it to do. In France, the state is supposed to guarantee the rights of Man, which is more fundamental than the constitution and also broader than safety and law enforcement.
> It's baffling to me how the French seemingly fail to realise how incredible the breadth of services their government provides is and somehow manage to make themselves miserable rather than actually doing something of what they are gifted with.
This I can agree with :) These threads are baffling, particularly considering what the people at INRIA are doing about trusted and transparent administration, and the massive effort put into sovereign software. It’s like everything is bad because they saw people using Windows at their city hall.
No. French state companies (including military schools! and the Department of Education!!) use Windows, MS Office, and US-based cloud providers en masse. Good for them, I guess. I don't really care.
But pretending to do the opposite is what gets me.
Or when the Head of the BPI (Banque Publique d'Investissement) goes on TV to say that France should only buy French tech, and you learn that the same BPI that he leads, just signed a huge contract with AWS, then that's upsetting. (He's also very concerned with China because the Chinese State finances some of its private industry; never mind that it's the whole purpose and mission of the BPI.)
We should recognize this sentiment as actively fascist. Safety from who? Law enforcement targeting who?
That's the core regalian powers at the heart of the state. Basically, a state is there to ensure laws can be voted, that they are fairly enforced and that things can stay that way. This notably means that people are safe in the broadest sense. They are not going to be mugged, murdered or dispossessed. That also means that the state has the mean to stay a state without becoming part of the next door state, which is to say, has an army to defend itself. A state which can't guarantee that is a failed state (or a former state if it was invaded).
Anything else is the cherry on the cake. Most states do a lot more because their citizen decided through laws this was a good thing - things like social security or education. If your state does these things for you, well, you should be grateful because they are in no way owed to you. You get them through the good will of the citizen who preceded you, the care of the civil servants that provide them to you and the continuously renewed commitment of your fellow citizen. If the French felt a bit less entitled and a bit more grateful, the country wouldn't be in the sorry state it's currently in.
> If the French felt a bit less entitled and a bit more grateful, the country wouldn't be in the sorry state it's currently in.
Oh please. The French are doing far better than we (the US) are. Precisely because their electorate has made their aristocracy rightly fearful of them. Chopping off their heads tends to do that.
I’m French.
The French hasn’t chopped the head of their aristocracy. Despite going through five republics, two monarchies and two empires in the last two hundred years, the country has very much de facto recreated an aristocracy. It’s one of the most unequal when it comes to social mobility in the whole OECD. Ever heard of Bourdieu?
What France has is a lot of redistribution so its Gini coefficient is quite low and a very generous through currently financially unsustainable safety net. Public services are also working fairly well even if it used to be better. That’s why I hate how ungrateful most French are. People have no interest in maintaining and protecting what they have. They prefer whining constantly while waiting for other people to do the work. That’s how you end up with the far right and the far left at 30% despite them only peddling non sense.
I’m not really interested in commenting further on your weird fascist obsession. I think it would be good for the discussion if you brushed up on what is both fascism and a state however.
That said, you are incredibly lucky to be living in a fascism-proof society and you should be thanking your fellow countrymen, all the way back to the French Revolution, for this fact. You don't have women in your hospitals dying of perfectly treatable conditions because the idiots in power have decided women don't deserve bodily autonomy.
You don't have nazis holding chainsaws tearing through your federal government. You don't have students disappearing off the streets into offshore concentration camps. You don't have tyrants arresting judges. None of these things are happening, or could happen, in France because heads would roll, again.
So color me unimpressed by your naive notions about what fascism is and isn't.
cryptpad do exist as well as collabora office and anyoffice running in a nextcloud.
My observation however is that despite the sharing capabilities of office365, a lot of people even in fortune500 companies still email .docx files to work collaboratively instead of using he sharing capabilities.
The problem is not software capability. The problem is training staff to use new software, planning the transition, and make it happen smoothly. You cannot just end your contract and get a new provider when you’re talking about 100,000 licenses. In fact, Office is likely going to go last, because it is easier to update the backend and centralised infrastructure than the client software used by hundreds of thousands of people in something like 500 different agencies.
Hell, we regularly have glitches going from one version of Office to the next. When it’s a university administration that’s out of operation for 2 months it’s bad enough, but survivable. When it’s all of public-facing civil servants it’s a different matter.
> No, I really don't. It's not "awesome" to have access to that data. This is public information. Citizens don't have to be grateful of what the state does. THE STATE WORKS FOR US, not the other way around.
Right. The fact is that it used to be inaccessible, and now it is. We should demand more, of course, but bitching about it is short-sighted and counter-productive. More and more data is accessible, leading to more and more transparency and new uses. It could be better (and it is the citizens’ responsibility to vote to make it get better), but you have to start somewhere.
I’m probably failing to see the difference between Peugeot 208 or Renault 5 being involved in an accident. What insights could one expect from this info?
Sure, but that's an information that is difficult to create; it will result from a police investigation (and even then, may or may not be accurate).
Mark, model and age of the vehicle is 1/ incredibly easy to get and 2/ 100% reliable.
It's not the end-all be-all of road safety, but it's interesting; and the fact that all it took to not publish it was some lobbying effort from car makers is incredible.
Or maybe a specific maker has a problem with a specific part shared across models
We're looking for patterns, not rules, extra shared data is generally better
The Office365 subscriptions are probably going to go last, because the effort to deploy alternatives and retrain the 200,000 people using them is enormous. It is a very visible aspect that won’t change anytime soon, but it does not mean that there is nothing else happening.
For example, the Renater tools are getting more and more use from all the research and higher education institutions. It’s not going to happen overnight, but it is shifting.
Yes, I agree that some public organizations in France are making progress with Open Source. For instance, free software is now common in universities (with local variations). And overall I think there's a central influence of the DiNum ("Direction Numérique", the Digital Department of the French State) in this direction. But I don't see how this UN charter makes any difference.
There's progress, though not related to this charter. And so slow that I would bet against "Open Source" becoming widespread in French schools within the next decade.
> Facts (and code) are following.
I'm sorry, but the current situation and the past experience makes it really hard to believe that facts will follow from this charter. At least facts matching the claim that the French government will be "Open by default: Making Open Source the standard approach for projects" (quote from the first point of the charter).
If "France endorses UN Open Source principles", it shouldn't just mean that it will publish some code. It should means that it intends to respect these principles, and that proprietary software becomes the exception within the French administration.
I can't believe this post is more than symbolic, because the French law already promotes Open Source and forbids non-UE proprietary software in many public contexts. But these laws are usually not applied. Why would a non-prescriptive charter do any better?
It's not a risky bet: no organisation this large, private or public, would manage to replace its IT this fast, even with appropriate funding (which schools don't have).
There's a reason why people say change in a company only happens as fast as people retire. large scale change is long, hard and costly.
Governments just move really slowly. Best we can do is cheer for the efforts we think will improve things, even if it'll take years, and protest about efforts we think are harmful.
Everytime someone actually does something nice in this country, there will be a dozen nay-sayers complaining uselessly that it is not perfect while doing nothing of value themselves.
It always saddens me to see a country with so much too succeed being so impaired by its own citizens.
I totally agree with it. The EU could do something non-performative by it and its governments stopping issuing documents in proprietary Microsoft formats and use OSS only.
They would get hairy quickly, because the Office formats are actually open standards.
It’s also a tall order. How they run their administration is fundamentally the member-states’ prerogative, I don’t really see what lever the commission would have to bend the council on that subject.
They are technically open standards in that they've been ratified, but I'm not sure they're fully independently implementable.
People are basically constantly dragging everyone down including themselves while doing absolutely nothing.
I mean technically I guess they sometimes vocally protest in the street that they don't understand why someone else is not solving their own problem or that they would prefer we just pretended the problem never existed which is pretty much equivalent to doing nothing if not worse.
No. You need to say how it's impairing the process of this specific adoption to make the claim. It's not self-evident.
It doesn't mean that nothing gets done (and when it doesn't, it is not usually the reason). We are just not overly enthusiastic about it like Americans tend to be.
A way to see things is that in America, a 5/5 comment is great, 4/5 is acceptable, and anything less is crap. In France, 1/5 is crap, 2/5 is acceptable, and anything more is great. You just have to adjust your scale.
Then again, if your employees still need PowerPoint, I say let them have it for now. You cannot switch a single company to FOSS overnight, let alone the entire public sector of an industrial nation.
That is simply wrong.
The reality is that millions of people work for the government, directly or indirectly, and that not all of these people have aligned incentives, the same constraints, etc.
The people pushing open source initiatives in the french public sector are very serious about it. It is also true that there is a lot of inertia. The consequence is that, while most of the large administrations, including those that don't have that much wiggle room for initiatives, still use big-name proprietary solutions, more and more open-source and open-data gardens spring around, and that they provide a strong base for new initatives, both public and private.
Two examples I personally used are dvf [1], a database and application showing real estate sales, which I used to check market prices when I bought my home, and publi.codes [2], a simulator and an open-source law-as-code repository, which is one of the cornerstones of a friend's private company.
Would I like more of France's administration to move to open-souce? Sure, but it's not going to happen overnight. In the meantime, I'm grateful for the core of people dedicated to push the case, bits by bits, and I know their effort is certainly not just for show.
[1]: https://app.dvf.etalab.gouv.fr/ [2]: https://publi.codes/
Two months ago, the French government signed an "open bar" contract with Microsoft for the "Éducation Nationale" department. 152 M€, not for Open Source. Source (fr) https://www.april.org/nouvel-open-bar-microsoft-le-ministere...
A few days after that, a major state-owned institution (Polytechnique) announced it was migrating (including the email system) to MS Office 365. Even if it violates several laws and official decrees (it's a semi-military school). Source (fr) https://cnll.fr/news/polytechnique-men-office-365/