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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Grist https://www.getgrist.com/
A write-up of how the French gov uses it https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...
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
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!
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.
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.
Why not? Plenty of French people speak English at a native level.
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.
Does grist have forms?
There is always a connection between the military industrial complex of a nation and the state.
If France feels that it is an existential threat they will not let the design and maintence of their weapons be dependent on an operating system produced by a company based out of a country that has threatened them.
I'm not saying that this will happen. I'm saying that should this happen you know France is serious about eliminating dependencies on unreliable and threatening countries.
How much better could open source alternatives to Teams be in this moment if only 1% of what Europe paid Microsoft for Teams went to investing in open alternatives?
In understand it's also the French word for Videoconferencing, but even still...
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.
* You have a huge Excel document that's basically a DB. (What Access kinda was)
* You want users to interact with said data document, i.e add record, find/query record(s), edit records
* You add a "form" for users to do just that. You can also add a "login" form to give some users more permissions.
For what it's worth, which isn't much because this is probably outdated: I remember trying grist a few years ago and leaving mildly unimpressed with form support (I think because I was hoping to have image upload in the forms and that wasn't supported yet).
Same with Teams, the video calls work fine on a browser. You just can't use any background pictures or effects.
So for example, I can't trademark "Apple" for my apple orchard. But I can trademark it for my computer company. Similarly, MS likely has chart visualization tools covered by "Visio" in France, but not telecommunications software.
Trademarks aren't granted to a company for unrestricted use. They're granted for specific use. Like I can't found a computer company, get Apple trademarked, and then buy an orchard, use Apple for the orchard, and then sue every apple orchard for saying "XYZ Apples" in their name. It remains restricted to a specific use that was included in the initial application for TM.
JET Blue aka ESE is currently used by products like Active Directory and Exchange.
Actual calling works well enough, I would say it is more stable than the native Windows client ever was.
However, this doesn't help support the folks improving & maintaining Element (either its clients or servers), which is the actual upstream product that Tchap is dependent on. Just like donating to the W3C doesn't help improve Firefox, if you were operationally dependent on a Firefox fork.
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.
It’s super cool they exist, if they’re not used… I mean, it’s still super cool they exist?
Since it is relevant here: support for uploads was code written by a French contributor, and reviewed by a developer working for the French gov (ANCT/DINUM) and a developer working for Grist Labs. Grist Labs has since maintained and improved on it. The forms feature itself was inspired by an integration built by Camille Legeron at ANCT.
Thanksfully it is fairly easy to present a virtual webcam that is a composition of what your real physical webcam is showing and whatever background you want.
Everything you see in our standard docker image is open source. Yes, you can enable and pay for enterprise features too.
- TChap - Group chat (looks like Slack / Discord)
- Visio - Video meetings
- FranceTransfert - File Transfer
- Messagerie - Email client
- Fichiers - Cloud file storage
- Docs
- Grist - Spreadsheet
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.
Would you elaborate how this "in fact" is "protecting their citizens' rights"? Very curious to know.
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
Where I live names that aren't so obviously American have an advantage.
Take this idea one step further. Microsoft, Google, et al also snoop on what foreign governments do with their software and report back to USGov.
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).
Isn't perfect, but it's getting better and it's a work in progress.
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
> Microsoft, for example, cancelled Khan’s email address, forcing the prosecutor to move to Proton Mail, a Swiss email provider, ICC staffers said. His bank accounts in his home country of the U.K. have been blocked.
So to give an example, is as if English speaking peoples would use a service named “Davedick”.
Every government can and will compel companies within their jurisdiction to hand over data for legal cases.
Don’t think that this is a uniquely American property. If your data sits on servers within the control of any company that operates in a country, that country can and will apply legal pressure upon those companies to extract the data.
We’re just stating facts: DINUM stopped funding upstream development at Element in 2022/2023 when their post-COVID funding evaporated, and this then directly contributed to the licensing changes at Element at the end of 2023 (https://element.io/blog/element-to-adopt-agplv3/) as we tried to figure out a way to survive (which, thankfully, worked).
But we also know that the Tchap team is very budget constrained internally themselves to keep it running, despite the growing criticality and huge visibility of the service, and are trying to find ways to fix the situation at every level.
This is not a challenge limited to France: the question of how to support the upstream when heavily using open source was one of the top topics of last week’s Open Source Week in Brussels, involving folks at every level in European government.
I don't think it's just that. It's also the increasingly plausible idea that the US government could pressure the EU by actually or threatening to control, throttle or tax EU access to online platforms such as Zoom, Teams, MS Office, Google docs, Azure or AWS.
I'm not sure of your point. This is an excellent argument as to why the French government should run their government videoconferencing and chat on infrastructure in France, as they plan to do, isn't it? Using software that they have vetted. Regardless of if this is a "uniquely American" thing or not.
In case of failure, just copy-over the old file from yesterday - such simple solutions are pure gold for SME without any big IT department
The point was in response to the above comment. All governments can and will compel companies to turn over data. It’s often framed on HN as a feature of only American companies but it’s actually universal.
Github had enough mindshare that for a small dev operation it was a form of social networking on top of actual code revision control, and one could get the occasional PR worth looking at; this consideration has essentially gone away as the amount of unreviewed vibecoded slop has skyrocketed
I know I'm biased but I'd run my own git server
but you're right that security is of no object here if you're code is OSS in the first place
Does anyone know if the German govt has mandated the use of OPenDesk (and its like) across its internal use? I faintly recall there being a Linux distro (?) that was supported by German fed?
Yes, that is my own opinion too... that the EU states start with good intentions, but end up with bickering on all sides, with the end result of vastly neutering their own actions :-/
Would like to see how far this French initiative goes...
But, in addition, the US government has recently become more pushy and less friendly than it was before, which is prompting many other nations to re-assess their dependence on the tech of what was until recently a close ally. The headline is an example.
It seems to me more about "this foreign government is most relevant" than "only this foreign government is like that".
That said, the Dutch government is collaborating with La Suite (fr) and OpenDesk (de): https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau/
For any code you are sharing, I think you are underselling the hosting + sharing convenience. Everyone looks for projects on github, it is what people expect. Hosting it yourself requires managing user signups/accounts/permissions/etc.
We're discussing how to work best with downstream dependencies as well. So far they're actively sponsoring Yjs, but not prosemirror/tt.
fyi, here are some early thoughts by the PM of Docs on how to collaborate between public sector and OSS (companies): https://github.com/virgile-dev/playbook-work-with-oss-librar... (we surely don't check all the boxes yet, but it's good to have the discussion!). Feel free to jump in!
https://obsproject.com/kb/virtual-camera-guide
https://usercomp.com/news/1413136/ffmpeg-virtual-camera-guid...
I used that back in the days in 2019 / early 2020 when it was not yet possible to share your screen on msteams under wayland in chrome and firefox.