Good on them, but I Wonder why they can’t just build on top of something open source like Nextcloud.
It already has the majority of the Office-365 suite
I don’t know on what it’s based on, but it’s open source and audited.
Can’t they invest in standardized SIP solutions? Linphone is already French.
Visio and W…
They need to open up naming to public vote.
Cally McCallface
I still don’t understand why half of the US still support a president that is doing a long term damage
@DarkSideOfTheMoon In a word? Marketing
Shows the importance of having a proper primary process. Biden fucked up and dropped out of the race way too late for any democratic candidate to have time to build up hype and momentum. Just being the VP shouldn’t make one an automatic default candidate. Harris did pretty bad during the Primary back in 2020, she just was not popular and didn’t inspire enough people to go vote.
Harris did pretty bad during the Primary back in 2020
Harris actually dropped out months before the primaries in 2020. She was something like 16th most popular candidate at the time she withdrew. She was a pretty unpopular AG in California at the time and likely would not have even won her own state primary.
Why *less than half
Nice, replace Microslop Windows too pls.
Anything to ANYTHING to get away from MicrSlop, Google etc. is huge. HUGE!
I’ve called them Gooplesoft now.
Check out Mistral if you want a good nonUS AI.
That’s great. I wish Visio/Vizio were not such common names for software and hardware. We done did those already. Do something else.
Francio?
Franctario!
Cornholio
Lol, replacing one o365 product with one named identically to another o365 product, classic.
Came to comment this. I know there are only so many letters, and so many combinations of 4-8 of them, but can we quit naming new things with the name of an old thing?
Finding any details about France’s Visio is going to be a cluster.
Visio is [the shorthand of] what the french call a video call
visioconférence
Nah, you can always come up with new combos. They could have named it ‘squonchy’ or ‘flurgled’, for example.
Once these countries leave, they’ll never go back. And then the rest of us get better alternatives to this enshitification model.
While I would love to see them never going back, here in Germany, all it takes is some corrupt politician taking a huge bribe from a lobbyist and swoosh, they are back to Microslop.
Edit: Knowing our little corrupt fuckers in charge in German politics, the bribe probably doesn’t even have to be mediocre.
Seriously, enshitification is the only thing US companies do well these days. They just dig deeper moats around their walled gardens because they’re too greedy to make decent products that people actually want.
Enshittification, AI slop and fascism are America’s greatest exports. And that’s not even a joke.
We grow pretty good weed too, that isn’t nothing.
Not exported overseas though.
I think enshitification is a product of public traded companies promising infinite growth, not necessarily a problem of US only companies.
It’s also a consequence of low taxes on capital gains and corporate profits.
When those taxes were higher it made more sense to reinvest the profits back into your own company. You’d build a reputation and a structure that would pay out you and your family for a hundred years.
Now the dream is to build up a company just enough to sell it to some megacorp and cash out asap, with you and your family living off of investment money that only increases over time.
Once these countries leave, they’ll never go back.
Look up LiMux and the massive Microsoft deal that followed.
No, please stop with this garbage misinformation. Microsoft made a (suspected) under the table deal with the Munich government at the time to setup a Microsoft office in Munich if they switched back to Windows.
That’s what the news reported on endlessly. That’s the narrative that keeps getting falsely repeated over and over, and no one ever checks the BS stories they spread.
The rest of the story didn’t make headlines, where the new incoming Munich government said “hell no!” (prob in German) and continued the Linux rollout.
Today the environment is a mix of Linux and Windows, but they already have a large focus on FOSS software.
Despite the astonishingly stupid decision to roll their own in-house distro (LiMux), the program was massively successful, with Linux users filling only 40% the number of tickets the Windows users did.
Im not an expert on this, but it seems like Ms was worried that success of Limux would be the drip that starts the trickle so to speak. It made sense for them to do whatever it took to patch that leak.
Things have really changed since then though. Valve has been very successful in a Linux end user environment, and Eu is becoming disenfranchised from the US rather than Microsoft specifically.
I think Munich’s motivations were financial, but Frances will be ideological.
With these things in mind, the calculus has changed. That doesn’t necessarily mean France won’t fail, but id be surprised if Microsoft pursues them in the same way.
Don’t listen to that other commenter. They’re wrong about the Munich LiMux story. It keeps getting repeated but it’s not correct.
That deal that totally had nothing to do with Microsoft relocating their headquarters closer to Munich
The Bavarian state government is still entirely in Microslop’s pocket
Not surprised. From what I’ve heard from pretty much every German person I’ve talked to, Bavaria is basically their Texas (read UP if you’re Indian, not sure about analogies for other countries).
Kind of funny considering that Visio is the name of another Microsoft product.
ETA: I’m not defending Microsoft’s usage of the term ‘Visio’ here. The French use of that term makes a lot of sense, and Microsoft has an annoying tendency of using and copyrighting very common terms like ‘Word’ or ‘SQL Server’. And France (or the French government) should be allowed to use it for their video conferencing software. I’m just smiling at the idea of some people opening Microsoft Visio by mistake and trying to figure out how to make a call through a diagramming app.
Microslop can cry about it.
I doubt they will care that much. But it will create a bit of confusion, at least for since in the short-term.
And because of that confusion they will have a trademark complaint
It’s also a French word that means video conference (as a shortened form of visioconférence).
Gosh, someone should tell the Microsoft teams team that Microsoft teams for business and Microsoft teams for personal and Microsoft teams for students are also using the same names and make communication difficult. They should get a copilot team on it
In that case we’ll call it Frisio, French Visio.
Now replace Windows with Linux, and fucking invest into not needing to use American-controlled CPUs as every single one of them contains a backdoor.
I don’t understand why governments trust official matters in the hands of closed source software and suspicious hardware. Even China uses a special version of Windows 11 in public computers, this is nuts.
… Pretty much every CPU contains backdoors, not just american ones. The Chinese government does the exact same thing as the American government. They are two sides of the same coin but the Chinese government seems more competent and efficient unlike the US government.
Even if the hardware doesn’t have backdoors, the firmware often will, which you also can’t get around with software.
The tier after that is software which also has a lot of back doors, luckily, you can run Linux and open source software. That is the best you can do. Really the only thing you can “trust” not to have backdoors is MCUs because those backdoors are much more likely to need physical access.
Sadly, our entire tech world is built on backdoors and intentional security flaws to enable easier debugging, recovery, and compliance with government law enforcement after the sale.
and fucking invest into not needing to use American-controlled CPUs as every single one of them contains a backdoor.
China has been working intensely for at least 2 decades to catch up, and they are still about a decade behind!
Netherlands has ASML which is a huge advantage for European independent manufacturing, but even with that it’s an insanely expensive investment to make a realistic competitor to AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom etc. because they have loads of patents that are hard to avoid, and they have decades of know how. This is not even accounting for the software infra structure that would have to be built almost from scratch.
Chip production is a global enterprise, and even USA isn’t independent anymore. They depend on ASML and TSMC for their most popular products in AI, Smartphones, servers, laptops and desktops. And more and more Arm is taking over from Intel/AMD.What we may be able to do would be using Arm and have TSMC help us with manufacturing. But to make such a project succeed is not an easy thing, we had European computer companies in the 70’s and 80’s that were heavily subsidized by governments that dominated home markets for several European countries, and they essentially all failed against international competition.
So what we risk if we were required to use a European product funded by EU/European governments would be to have to use an overpriced under-performing technology, that would be a millstone around the neck of all of Europe, making Europe not catch up, but instead fall further behind.they have loads of patents that are hard to avoid
China doesn’t care about patents of outsiders.
Seems to me that it’s time for the rest of the world to invalidate US IP and go from there.
And the rules based international order has been exposed as the wink during a handshake deal. Who cares about patent law?
He is talking about software. A fucking video conferencing tool not controlled by American tech is no ASML level investment.
We could at least start with this
American-controlled CPUs
matters in the hands of closed source software and suspicious hardware
Ignorance, mostly. It’s sad but Chinese leaders seem to listen to their experts, while EU leaders listen to CEOs, and of large companies only.
Here’s my guess, and I could be completely wrong.
All the governments use 2 sets of computers. The first, is a closed network used only internally. Open source, connected as a network, but NOT connected to outside neteorks. This uses closed source OS that they themselves develop. No backdoors. Highly secured.
The second set is what you know. Windows 11, backdoors, easily spied on. Intentionally left open, because that’s their way to spy on the other countries.
They leave this open, to let themselves be spied on, so that they can spy on the other side. Neither side realizing they’re both doing the same thing, and both sides just getting mostly useless info.
Then, to throw off the trail of it being useless info, they occasionally allow a juicy bit of info into their windows computer. Just so it’s not obvious that this isn’t the real info.
I have zero evidence, and came up with this theory after reading your comment. So I could be very wrong.
Why not jitsi meet? Isn’t better to use an already “established” opensource conferencing tool?
They could just selfhost their instance.
They’ve been building an entire open source suite of software tailored to their needs. If I had to guess, Jitsi isn’t performant enough for large (100+) user meetings in a way they can scale easily. It’s a great tool, but it seems better geared towards smaller loads. Video conferencing at scale is a pretty big challenge.
Between this, their new Docs platform and some Matrix-based chat platforms, I think this is something they’ve put a fair bit of thought into how they want to build. Overall, it’s a cool initiative, but I think it’s pretty clear that it’s open source as a means to be transparent as a government organization rather than to form a platform for broad use by everyone. They do have some self-hosting instructions on their GitHub though.
I was wondering the same, but this does make sense.
At the same time, it might also make sense to build on top of existing FOSS tooling rather than building new, but I suppose that depends on where the bottlenecks are and if stuff like proprietary codecs might be involved
Jitsi is owned by a Campbell, California based firm called 8x8. Source: I worked for them during the acquisition.
Though admittedly avoiding US origin open source is unlikely to be possible. The thing they are using seems to be based on another package with a similar issue.
Why not open source solutions for most of those?
Yea Nextcloud already has a replacement for most of Microsoft. 365 and is Open Source.
No need to reinvent the wheel
If is. It’s free (orI guess libre makes more sense since they are French) under Apache-2.0
Visio? Don’t they have to pay for copyright on the name “Visio” to Microsoft?
Visio is also a common French word for videoconference.
That would be like making a phone app called Phone, and Samsung trying to claim copyright because they call their app Phone, too.
Why should they?
Visio is a Microsoft product name.
Microsoft doesn’t hold a copyright worldwide for product names.
Microsoft is American
It’s actually not. The official product name is “Microsoft Visio”.
And that’s not going to stop them from suing
Suing a govt body? Outside their basecamp? Good luck with that!
This is only a part of france’s “LaSuite” (very original name guys), that seemingly will replace every equivalent american service.
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
They generally work pretty well (demo on the site) and are a mix of homegrown solutions and rebrands of existing projects like matrix. All of them are open source.
And all their videos are on Peertube!
!lasuite@tube.numerique.gouv.fr
Unfortunately source code is still hosted on GitHub…
Sadly they don’t allow anyone to follow their instance, so finding their videos and interacting isn’t possible. But at least it’s a step.
You can follow from PieFed 🙂
They should have called it “du coup” for that authentic frenchness.
I’d also accept Honhon
