Worth pointing out: France is not adopting existing open source software, they're building their own software and releasing it under the MIT licence. Most of it (or all of it?) is Django backend + React frontend (using a custom-built UI kit).

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.

Makes sense. This software dependency that Europe has on the USA is very, very bad - no just with regards to Zoom, but literally anything. The US corporations are forced by law to always prioritize whoever represents the current US government, and the current US government will remain hostile as long as it is in charge; but even afterwards it is quite logical to assume that any follow-up government will prioritize US interests over European interests. So it makes no sense to pay for outsiders who would work against you.

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.)

Refreshing. No more Teams? Sounds like a dream... Of all the crapware I am forced to work with, Teams really pushes the envelope in every single negative way conceivable. I think I have more love for SharePoint than Teams, and that is a massive concession.

Such a shame that so many U.S. citizens do not see the ramifications of their political decisions.

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.

As an American, this is awesome to see.

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.

There seems to be a huge business opportunity in Europe right now, to sell support and customization of open source software to government players. Has anyone heard about a European company that’s been successful in this area?

This needs to go much, much further before it is even mildly effective. The EU has a population of ~450 million (more than the US) and no significant large technology companies. They are largely dependent on US Big Tech as a population.

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.

After an acquisition, we are transitioning from google meet and slack, to Teams. I used to hate slack so much with their random features popping left and right and menus moving around. Oh I didn't know how good we had it.

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...

Isn’t Zoom Chinese?

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.

Good for France.

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)

I would not have predicted that my country's government going bad would have such a positive side-effect on the world of software and network services.

Conversation a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668

It's all fun and games until there's an outage, nothing screams efficient like a state-owned tech company

> The French government… announced last week that 2.5 million civil servants would stop using video conference tools from U.S. providers — including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex and GoTo Meeting — by 2027 and switch to Visio, a homegrown service.

Note that this is only about European governments choosing to not use US software.

They named their video conference tool "Visio" ? lol

Meanwhile... Micro$lop: Aha! Sharpen your lawyers, mes amis!

I think this is one of the silver linings to this new era. By trying to renegotiate intolerable terms, the Americans are forcing the rest of the world to figure out how to make it all work without them. This will inevitably be a rough transition but it results in more worldwide resiliency and product/service options.

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.

How did they decide to name their Zoom/Teams replacement "Visio"?

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 countries of the EU need to ask themselves why these software unicorns are not starting in their countries. Why do so many European entrepeneurs come to the United States to start their businesses?

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.

Maybe it's just a PR stunt, maybe not, we'll find out in due time.

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.

Just today, a citizens' initiative started collecting signatures in Finland to stop recent projects that aim to transfer hosting of election, taxation, and social security data on services provided by US-run companies.[1]

[1] https://digitaalinenitsenaisyys.fi/

Reminds me of the Zuckerberg quote from the film: "If you could have build Facebook, you would have built Facebook."

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.

This suggests governments need to commission infrastructure level dependencies directly rather than relying solely on the market and consumer behaviour, particularly given the poor outcomes in areas where there is little to no competition

Good for them! As a US citizen, I am trying to do the same. Closing my gmail account and moving to ProtonMail.

Actually its now worth it to be building software in EU. It will have its market for sure

Why not Jitsi - genuinely curious

Ctrl+F "SIP" - 0 results before this comment.

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.

Working for a large business in Europe- I think MSFT and Google co know exactly about the threat to their business.

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…

While I like the move, I think it could have come a few decades earlier and I'm stunned by the fact that this is Franc-only. When will Europe ever wake up?

Digital autonomy aside, I like the concept of something like "Microsoft apps, but without copilot".

Great. There’s no reason why all countries don’t start preferring locally or regionally developed software. Of course interoperability is always a thing but there needs to be another option between “one company” and “everyone host your own instance”.

Good. Open source solutions exist and need investment.

Hopefully the EU as a whole can rally behind this.

In favor of what? I’m all for economic nationalism, but you have to have competitive home grown alternatives. Does Europe have them? Or are they going to shoot themselves in the foot productivity-wise by boycotting the best products?

Is this gonna go as well as when they built their own search engine?

Almost all businesses need email, contacts, calendars, live chat, video calls, docs, sheets, and presentations. Ideally all linked. Where is the open source foundation for this package that everyone needs?

I couldn't tell from the article but any reason they wouldn't just adopt Matrix? I thought some European governments (especially in France) were already adopting Matrix.

Honest to god, everything that Trump is doing might actually end up being that the world becomes a better place. The US hegemony really ran its course.

This is AI enhanced workflows eating SaaS. I’d be scared if I ran a SaaS

This is SO exciting to see!

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.

What does Europe imagine their relationship with Silicon Valley looking like?

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.

Too bad it doesn't have zooms echo cancelation / isolation

How many times are we going to see this same exact topic posted?

Zoom and teams are low hanging fruit in terms of replacability. I use both with various customers. Internally we use teams. Occasionally somebody insists on webex or other tools. Meets isn't actually horrible now that Google seems to have stopped the internal battles to replace it every six months. But in the end it is very replaceable as well.

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.

RIP: Zoom Public Sector AE, EMEA

it’s gotta be too good to be true, but at least one major economy taking the lead, imagine

If they also make US copyright not enforceable then they can have office clones and then it’s game over.

does Zoom still dump an unkillable web server into the bowels of your OS?

During covid I was studying in France. The school deliberately chose not to use zoom. It was software called BigBlueButton. I was happy with it. I appreciated them for having their own opinions instead of just following what others do.

... and here I was thinking they're dropping them because they're annoyances ...

[Teams more than zoom. I just got switched to Teams at work and now I understand why no one ever chats on it.]

wonder why they didn't use jitsi

How refreshing.

Are those US software firms still obligated to comply with EU restrictions and legal demands if they are banned/barred/fascisticly_denied_the_option_to_compete by one or more EU territories?

France speaks for Europe? Heh heh heh...

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.

This was always going to happen as soon as the USA decided to be overtly all about itself.

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)

Cool. It won’t even be a blip on the earnings report. I guess a sales rep in Europe isn’t getting their preferred vacation this year. But other than that this is of no consequence.

I’ll still buy France’s wine.

Long time overdue. It is so stupid to rely on a single country in so many areas

[dupe] Discussion from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668

so is there any open source alternative to these meeting apps? (selfhostable)

EU governments don't want to learn one thing: you don't replace one dictator with another. The specific case says little, France has been developing "La Suite" for YEARS, Italy had experimented with Jitsi Meet and Big Blue Button at GARR during the COVID era, but what the EU wants is to create EU GAFAMs, whereas what we need, and not just in the EU, is FLOSS, self-hosting, desktop computing. This, however, is not welcome, starting with eIDAS 2.0 which pushes for a "super-sovereign" app-wallet for the notoriously sovereign Android and iOS instead of smart cards and USB readers that we've had for years and that various countries have used for years to log into online banking and, more recently, to sign documents.

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.

It would take less than one day for every European government, business, or individual to ditch Zoom and Teams without loosing any benefits: It's called a fucking telephone.

Imo this was inevitable even without Trump. He just massively accelerated it.

The end of globalism also marks the end of the global internet and the transition to regional internets.

Well done, Trump and Musk ! ... Your people are proud of you.

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.

As an American, I will echo Trump's speech at Davos. We want strong allies, not vassals. Be capable of building your own EVs, your own rockets, your own fighter jets, your own subway systems, your own zoom alternatives, your own search engines, your own operating systems, etc etc.

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.

If only they'd taken the same approach with Russian natural gas in 2008.

lol, "Europe" isn't seeking anything of the sort. France maybe, and a couple other countries, but very, very far from the whole of Europe. And even then, only a handful of people relative to the whole country. This won't even cause a blip on a balance sheet.

What are they gonna switch to? I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams. It's all just theater.