You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence, but they do. Over the years I have heard of many good Open Source Projects coming out of France.
I sometimes wonder if it is because of French vs English Language were you hardly hear of their projects in English speaking Countries.
For those unaware, this is likely in response to the current US political crisis in which the US might decide at any point spike the prices or stop offering licenses on Microsoft etc products.
Okay this is nowhere near an "Office suite". It is a cloud collaboration suite with a glorified markdown editor and with some extra utilities around. Almost nobody buys stuff like Google Docs and Microsoft Office for this reason.
From my experience using open-source collaboration groupware like Nextcloud, their solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow. Only thing that got somewhere near of the commercial offering is OwnCloud's Infinity Scale (OCIS) which is written in Go. It is no surprise since OwnCloud is indeed running an open-core business and you cannot use their binaries in businesses. OpenCloud is the "open-source" fork but they are already in legal trouble with OwnCloud due to industrial espionage claims.
If European governments are serious, the amount of money they _guarantee_ should be in the degree of tens of billions of Euros. Not fun 10k hackaton projects. The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it. And yes it will probably cause whatever current party to lose elections, independence has a price. It is high.
I always laugh my ass off when people cry about Microsoft and Office.
Well, the thing is that there are no real competitors, and we can't blame them if everyone else is more incompetent than they are.
Apple has been pretending to work on an alternative for years, and it is still nowhere near as powerful/good.
But we live in a feminized world, where it is profitable to virtue signal by siding with the pretend victims even though they are not any better than the winners and, in fact, just as bad, as Apple routinely demonstrates.
Why is Django so popular among open-source projects like these, especially government funded? I’ve never happened to see a commercial project use it in my twenty years in the field. Ruby/Go or even bun or node would be much more approachable and performant options today.
Of course, it is not forcing to use any whatng cartel web engines namely has noscript/basic (x)html interop support (aka classic web) and/or with public and as simple as possible network protocols anyone can implement a rich GUI client for.
Of course its SDK has components choosen with care to maximize alternative (present and future) availability and its code is not stored on microsoft github.com.
It is interesting to see yjs with hoccuspocus being used. I am currently considering our options for real time document editing + full text search.
Seems like a common approach is something like using yjs for sync with a temporary LSM storage like rocksdb for updates and then periodically snapshot to postgres for full text search and compaction.
Great to see this on HN. fyi, La Suite is an umbrella project built by DINUM in France that started several years ago, mainly to enable people in the public administration to use more independent tools. It's built in-house, often on top of other open source technologies. E.g.: Matrix powers chat and LiveKit powers Visio (which was recently featured on HN as well when they announced it's rolled out to replace Zoom / Teams, etc [1])
I'm fortunate to be collaborating with them as their Docs product is built on top of our open source BlockNote text editor (https://www.blocknotejs.org).
Docs specifically started as an international collaboration with Germany [2] to explore how different EU countries can collaborate in building sovereign workplace solutions (several other countries including NL have shown interest as well).
They're actively supporting us, and related projects like Yjs (https://yjs.dev) by sponsoring feature development.
I'm sure many of the team members will follow along here as well! Happy to answer any questions.
On this topic, I think it is worth mentioning Framasoft [1]
It is a French organization that offers plenty of alternatives to Google and other big tech products. A lot of them are just rebranded and hosted open source software, but they also develop their own, such as PeerTube and Framaprout (the last one is a joke, but PeerTube isn't).
The big problem EUs continuous big talk on digital sovereignty,
which is a good and vital concept, is that funding is ridiculously
lacking.
Terms used like;
“European hyperscale cloud”
“Sovereign infrastructure”
“Strategic autonomy”
“European data centers for critical workloads”
Which ended up in various efforts and projects
Digital Europe Programme,
Recovery and Resilience Facility,
IPCE
(I am not deeply familiar with EU projects)
I believe funding was around low hundreds
of millions (€) total
To build one hyperscaler region might cost around €10 billion.
The second problem is that systems that were suggested
out of it still relied on US software stack, US computers,
etc.
It is not like the EU member states could not fund it,
some estimates say aggregated EU and member states have
spent €350 billion in Ukraine.
That is not to say they should not do that,
nor to suggest you have to chose one or the other
but it is demonstration
that EU+Member states can fund massive efforts,
If deemed important enough.
and EU+Memberstates so far have not felt an urgency or will
to really invest in digital sovereignty.
53 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 65.5 ms ] threadYou (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence, but they do. Over the years I have heard of many good Open Source Projects coming out of France.
I sometimes wonder if it is because of French vs English Language were you hardly hear of their projects in English speaking Countries.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Though they also seem to be on github https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad
From my experience using open-source collaboration groupware like Nextcloud, their solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow. Only thing that got somewhere near of the commercial offering is OwnCloud's Infinity Scale (OCIS) which is written in Go. It is no surprise since OwnCloud is indeed running an open-core business and you cannot use their binaries in businesses. OpenCloud is the "open-source" fork but they are already in legal trouble with OwnCloud due to industrial espionage claims.
If European governments are serious, the amount of money they _guarantee_ should be in the degree of tens of billions of Euros. Not fun 10k hackaton projects. The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it. And yes it will probably cause whatever current party to lose elections, independence has a price. It is high.
?? this is not true, please provide a source
I always laugh my ass off when people cry about Microsoft and Office. Well, the thing is that there are no real competitors, and we can't blame them if everyone else is more incompetent than they are.
Apple has been pretending to work on an alternative for years, and it is still nowhere near as powerful/good.
But we live in a feminized world, where it is profitable to virtue signal by siding with the pretend victims even though they are not any better than the winners and, in fact, just as bad, as Apple routinely demonstrates.
Of course its SDK has components choosen with care to maximize alternative (present and future) availability and its code is not stored on microsoft github.com.
Seems like a common approach is something like using yjs for sync with a temporary LSM storage like rocksdb for updates and then periodically snapshot to postgres for full text search and compaction.
The title should be changed.
I'm fortunate to be collaborating with them as their Docs product is built on top of our open source BlockNote text editor (https://www.blocknotejs.org).
Docs specifically started as an international collaboration with Germany [2] to explore how different EU countries can collaborate in building sovereign workplace solutions (several other countries including NL have shown interest as well).
They're actively supporting us, and related projects like Yjs (https://yjs.dev) by sponsoring feature development.
I'm sure many of the team members will follow along here as well! Happy to answer any questions.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294 [2] https://www.zendis.de/en
It is a French organization that offers plenty of alternatives to Google and other big tech products. A lot of them are just rebranded and hosted open source software, but they also develop their own, such as PeerTube and Framaprout (the last one is a joke, but PeerTube isn't).
[1] https://framasoft.org/
- Germany‘s OpenDesk: https://www.opendesk.eu/en
- Netherland‘s MijnBureau: https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau-infra/
Previously:
This week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294
2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
Terms used like; “European hyperscale cloud” “Sovereign infrastructure” “Strategic autonomy” “European data centers for critical workloads”
Which ended up in various efforts and projects
Digital Europe Programme, Recovery and Resilience Facility, IPCE
(I am not deeply familiar with EU projects)
I believe funding was around low hundreds of millions (€) total
To build one hyperscaler region might cost around €10 billion.
The second problem is that systems that were suggested out of it still relied on US software stack, US computers, etc.
It is not like the EU member states could not fund it, some estimates say aggregated EU and member states have spent €350 billion in Ukraine.
That is not to say they should not do that, nor to suggest you have to chose one or the other but it is demonstration that EU+Member states can fund massive efforts, If deemed important enough.
and EU+Memberstates so far have not felt an urgency or will to really invest in digital sovereignty.