5 ms·

I think that this move isn't so much about privacy. I think that French government is beginning to realize that these types of products and services constitute

I think that this move isn't so much about privacy. I think that French government is beginning to realize that these types of products and services constitute critical IT infrastructure for the country. As such, these products can not be offered by a foreign country, no matter how friendly. I suspect the government offices will be next. I am not actually sure, what alternatives are out there for MS Office and Google Docs?

zahma 4y ago
Libre Office. Not so sure that it integrates very well with cloud services, though I’ve not tried. It’s a bit of a step back from collaboration on a Google Doc. However, for basic functionality, I’m quite fine with word processing on Libre Office.
- judge2020 4y ago
  Microsoft Office isn't banned, just Workspace / M365 / Azure Active Directory as users' IDP.
thwayunion 4y ago
You can still just buy Office and not use the 365 offering [1]. The ban on Office 365 doesn't look like it's relevant to Office 2021. Aside, both LibreOffice and Apple's office suite are perfectly serviceable for K12 education and most public administration. [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-the-difference-between-microsoft-365-and-office-2021-ed447ebf-6060-46f9-9e90-a239bd27eb96 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-the-differ...
- JamesianP 4y ago
  I can't read the article (but gazing at the words, I almost feel like I can...) but I'd guess that all of their software needs are covered by other software systems licensed by the govt. And that this ban is more to make people stop using free cloud services instead of them.
- westcort 4y ago
  Microsoft made by offline office program too slow to use when I updated to 11. It was a shakedown and I am not a happy customer.
- PenguinCoder 4y ago
  > You can still just buy Office and not use the 365 offering Until MS stops offering that and you're SOL, subscription model only going forward.
  - smileybarry 4y ago
    That’s been “any day now” for years, but they keep releasing standalone versions. They just keep some (usually server-powered anyway) features exclusive to 365.
    - goosedragons 4y ago
      The fact that they've recently rebranded Office to actually be Microsoft 365 but didn't bother doing so for the standalone Office 2021 product tells me it's probably on the way out. I doubt we'll see a Microsoft 365 2023 but maybe MS really just is that bad with brand names. https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/23402155/microsoft-office-microsoft-365-rename-branding-changes https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/23402155/microsoft-offic...
      - SanjayMehta 4y ago
        They've also been offering deep discounts on Office 2021 for months now via the stackcommerce network which might indicate that 2021 is the last standalone release.
        smileybarry 4y ago
        You mean those sketchy Office 2021 Professional Plus deep discounts, right? That's an (expensive) edition available in MSDN-like subscriptions, I'm almost sure they're either "cheap region" keys or MSDN-generated ones. Some of the worst offenders even tell you you'll get a username and password in an email (rather than product key), confirming it's just a user in their 365 tenant. (Of course I'll hand my documents off to CheapOfficeDotCom)
        4y ago
blihp 4y ago
LibreOffice for a desktop version of office productivity applications... would be more than enough for most users. Not sure what the options are for web-based office applications though.
- mickael-kerjean 4y ago
  10 years ago the police stations (the "gendarmerie" to be precise) in France moved away from windows / word to Linux / openoffice. source: my did who is now a retired officer. I remember him asking me some cool tips on Linux so he could show off his colleagues who were lost by the transition.
  - kakwa_ 4y ago
    The Gendarmerie also contributes to OSS quite significantly. Lemonldap (SSO solution) for example.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
Anecdotally, I think you may be right. Granted, historically there are reasons to think the French want to protect language and so on, but privacy protections are not something immediately associated with France ( whether it is true or not is another story altogether ). Personally, I have the same problem with O365 as I do with with social media. That is: it is your stuff on somebody else's PC. It is almost a given that there will be a conflict over 'who's stuff is it anyway'.
codetrotter 4y ago
> what alternatives are out there for MS Office and Google Docs? Probably Collabora. “Collabora Online. Your Private Office Suite In The Cloud” https://www.collaboraoffice.com/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/libreoffice-from-collabora-2/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/libreoffice-from-collabora-2... From what I understand, Collabora is LibreOffice in your browser, with cloud functionality
- judge2020 4y ago
  Does this include hosted email? https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online-3/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online-3/ shows that it has a user directory, but I can't find any direct mention of a web email interface.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    https://www.open-xchange.com/ https://www.open-xchange.com/ does email, office, and solves many enterprise management problems already. It can be cloud hosted or deployed online and is mostly open source (https://gitlab.open-xchange.com/frontend https://gitlab.open-xchange.com/frontend, pretty sure they've got everything but the "pro" stuff licensed under GPL). It's based on OpenStack, though, so hobby deployments may pose a challenge. It's the most complete European office product I've seen so far.
- e12e 4y ago
  > From what I understand, Collabora is LibreOffice in your browser Indeed: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/
therealmarv 4y ago
https://cryptpad.fr https://cryptpad.fr It's an underdog but pretty good. If you want to use something in the cloud which respects privacy more. Does not even need an email for registering and there is a premium plan too. But I think the more practical solution is LibreOffice/OpenOffice. I think it's encouraged (or even enforced?) to use that office suites for public service/government institutions in France.
- GauntletWizard 4y ago
  Cryptpad failed my early example of spreadsheet functionality: I typed in a series of numbers in column B, and typed at the top of the column "=B3:B".
rodgerd 4y ago
> I think that this move isn't so much about privacy. I think that French government is beginning to realize that these types of products and services constitute critical IT infrastructure for the country. It can be both; as surveillance capitalism becomes even more and more pervasively intrusive we can see the risks against both individuals and institutions. There's also plenty of history of major governments (including the US and French) using their intelligence services to help in commercial endeavours. But the war in Ukraine has also demonstrated how quickly the US can cripple an economy.
lmm 4y ago
I think it would and should be possible to use products run by a foreign country if that country respects the rule of law and has decent oversight in place (both on paper and in practice). But the US with its National Security Letters and secret FISA courts is not that kind of country.
- rosywoozlechan 4y ago
  Can you explain how "National Security Letters and secret FISA courts" violate US laws? If they don't violate US laws can you explain how they're examples of how the US doesn't' respect the rule of law? If you mean that the US doesn't respect the laws of other separate sovereign nations, isn't that how the system works?
  - lmm 4y ago
    > If they don't violate US laws can you explain how they're examples of how the US doesn't' respect the rule of law? They are special exceptions to the normal process of law that favour particular actors. Rule of law means that the processes of law must be consistent and public, and fair to all sides; people need to be able to tell their stories publicly in order to be able to find relevant witnesses, for example.
lrvick 4y ago
Nextcloud is pretty much a drop-in replacement for Google Apps and Office365 these days for most use cases.
- Hnrobert42 4y ago
  Maybe it has improved in the last 3 years, but that certainly was not the case when I tried it for my company. Fist, it was self-hosted, which adds monitoring, security, and tech support. Second, its concurrent document editing was absolute shite.
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    It's more than enough to build on. If a government simply decided that it was important to have ownership of their code and interoperability & future-proofing of their data & documents, then relatively over night any rough edges and weaknesses could be cleaned up. It's like saying a house is unusable shite because the sink has dirty dishes in it.
    - Hnrobert42 4y ago
      But this is a government. Their operations, and the impairment thereof, affects millions of people. Further, they should be in the business of governing, not cobbling together solutions based on stackoverflow posts. Collaborative, concurrent document editing is a must-have feature, especially now with so much remote work. So it’s not just dirty dishes. A more apt metaphor would be a house where 10% of the time when two people enter a room together, they both lose their phones in the room, can never find them, and have to get new phones. I mean, I guess you could decide that outcome is better than a house in which 0.0001% of the time, the US government looks at the contents of the phone, but I don’t see why you would.
      - Brian_K_White 4y ago
        They can be exactly as in the business of governing while paying one set of programmers as while paying another. Try again. bonus try agains: And they have an obligation not to waste taxes on rent. And they have an obligation to transparency even if currently all fail to meet.
AmericanChopper 4y ago
> As such, these products can not be offered by a foreign country, no matter how friendly. I think this is a rather naive perspective. I’ve worked in national security jobs, and the idea that services from foreign companies should not be allowed is a completely infeasible dream.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
tenebrisalietum 4y ago
A self hostable version is OnlyOffice and then I guess you could also just have a plain old on-prem licensed non-cloud Sharepoint farm.
Gustomaximus 4y ago
Some years back I used open office on a personal PC. https://www.openoffice.org/ https://www.openoffice.org/ Word was fine. Excel, you felt it was more clunky and lost productivity. Never used the other formats. Was good enough if you didn't want to pay and were using these infrequently.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  I have been using LibreOffice for many years. Its doc editor Writer is better than newer versions of MS Word (better style management, better footer/header system, better font options), and its spreadsheet program Calc is pretty good for general purposes, although it lacks some of the advanced Excel features.
- jtvjan 4y ago
  OpenOffice has largely been replaced by LibreOffice. It's a perfectly fine office suite, but the draw of Office 365 and Google Docs aren't the document editors themselves, it's that you get E-Mail, chat, file storage and PIM in the cloud with it. The alternative isn't just LibreOffice, it's LibreOffice + Postfix + ejabberd + Samba + Apache + Radicale, which you all have to put on a server somewhere and set up individually.
  - orwin 4y ago
    For a 11 year-old? I mean, even at uni i worked locally.
edgyquant 4y ago
Just like with Twitter, we need to replace these monolithic services with international standards that any country or business can implement
lewisjoe 4y ago
Well, there's Zoho's office suite: https://workplace.zoho.com https://workplace.zoho.com
ymolodtsov 4y ago
That's a pretty stupid case of autarky. First, where do you stop? Second, when your actions are indistinguishable from China or Russia, you probably have to think a bit more about it.
npteljes 4y ago
There's a website that exist to answer this specific question: https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/microsoft-office https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/microsoft-of... Of these alternatives, I'm using Onlyoffice for some years now, specifically their Personal tier, which is free of charge. I think it works well, and it's also clear that they are constantly working on it.

zahma 4y ago

Libre Office. Not so sure that it integrates very well with cloud services, though I’ve not tried. It’s a bit of a step back from collaboration on a Google Doc. However, for basic functionality, I’m quite fine with word processing on Libre Office.

judge2020 4y ago
Microsoft Office isn't banned, just Workspace / M365 / Azure Active Directory as users' IDP.

thwayunion 4y ago

You can still just buy Office and not use the 365 offering [1]. The ban on Office 365 doesn't look like it's relevant to Office 2021. Aside, both LibreOffice and Apple's office suite are perfectly serviceable for K12 education and most public administration. [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-the-difference-between-microsoft-365-and-office-2021-ed447ebf-6060-46f9-9e90-a239bd27eb96 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-the-differ...

JamesianP 4y ago
I can't read the article (but gazing at the words, I almost feel like I can...) but I'd guess that all of their software needs are covered by other software systems licensed by the govt. And that this ban is more to make people stop using free cloud services instead of them.
westcort 4y ago
Microsoft made by offline office program too slow to use when I updated to 11. It was a shakedown and I am not a happy customer.
PenguinCoder 4y ago
> You can still just buy Office and not use the 365 offering Until MS stops offering that and you're SOL, subscription model only going forward.
- smileybarry 4y ago
  That’s been “any day now” for years, but they keep releasing standalone versions. They just keep some (usually server-powered anyway) features exclusive to 365.
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    The fact that they've recently rebranded Office to actually be Microsoft 365 but didn't bother doing so for the standalone Office 2021 product tells me it's probably on the way out. I doubt we'll see a Microsoft 365 2023 but maybe MS really just is that bad with brand names. https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/23402155/microsoft-office-microsoft-365-rename-branding-changes https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/23402155/microsoft-offic...
    - SanjayMehta 4y ago
      They've also been offering deep discounts on Office 2021 for months now via the stackcommerce network which might indicate that 2021 is the last standalone release.
      - smileybarry 4y ago
        You mean those sketchy Office 2021 Professional Plus deep discounts, right? That's an (expensive) edition available in MSDN-like subscriptions, I'm almost sure they're either "cheap region" keys or MSDN-generated ones. Some of the worst offenders even tell you you'll get a username and password in an email (rather than product key), confirming it's just a user in their 365 tenant. (Of course I'll hand my documents off to CheapOfficeDotCom)
        4y ago

blihp 4y ago

LibreOffice for a desktop version of office productivity applications... would be more than enough for most users. Not sure what the options are for web-based office applications though.

mickael-kerjean 4y ago
10 years ago the police stations (the "gendarmerie" to be precise) in France moved away from windows / word to Linux / openoffice. source: my did who is now a retired officer. I remember him asking me some cool tips on Linux so he could show off his colleagues who were lost by the transition.
- kakwa_ 4y ago
  The Gendarmerie also contributes to OSS quite significantly. Lemonldap (SSO solution) for example.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

Anecdotally, I think you may be right. Granted, historically there are reasons to think the French want to protect language and so on, but privacy protections are not something immediately associated with France ( whether it is true or not is another story altogether ). Personally, I have the same problem with O365 as I do with with social media. That is: it is your stuff on somebody else's PC. It is almost a given that there will be a conflict over 'who's stuff is it anyway'.

codetrotter 4y ago

> what alternatives are out there for MS Office and Google Docs? Probably Collabora. “Collabora Online. Your Private Office Suite In The Cloud” https://www.collaboraoffice.com/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/libreoffice-from-collabora-2/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/libreoffice-from-collabora-2... From what I understand, Collabora is LibreOffice in your browser, with cloud functionality

judge2020 4y ago
Does this include hosted email? https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online-3/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online-3/ shows that it has a user directory, but I can't find any direct mention of a web email interface.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  https://www.open-xchange.com/ https://www.open-xchange.com/ does email, office, and solves many enterprise management problems already. It can be cloud hosted or deployed online and is mostly open source (https://gitlab.open-xchange.com/frontend https://gitlab.open-xchange.com/frontend, pretty sure they've got everything but the "pro" stuff licensed under GPL). It's based on OpenStack, though, so hobby deployments may pose a challenge. It's the most complete European office product I've seen so far.
e12e 4y ago
> From what I understand, Collabora is LibreOffice in your browser Indeed: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/

therealmarv 4y ago

https://cryptpad.fr https://cryptpad.fr It's an underdog but pretty good. If you want to use something in the cloud which respects privacy more. Does not even need an email for registering and there is a premium plan too. But I think the more practical solution is LibreOffice/OpenOffice. I think it's encouraged (or even enforced?) to use that office suites for public service/government institutions in France.

GauntletWizard 4y ago
Cryptpad failed my early example of spreadsheet functionality: I typed in a series of numbers in column B, and typed at the top of the column "=B3:B".

rodgerd 4y ago

> I think that this move isn't so much about privacy. I think that French government is beginning to realize that these types of products and services constitute critical IT infrastructure for the country. It can be both; as surveillance capitalism becomes even more and more pervasively intrusive we can see the risks against both individuals and institutions. There's also plenty of history of major governments (including the US and French) using their intelligence services to help in commercial endeavours. But the war in Ukraine has also demonstrated how quickly the US can cripple an economy.

lmm 4y ago

I think it would and should be possible to use products run by a foreign country if that country respects the rule of law and has decent oversight in place (both on paper and in practice). But the US with its National Security Letters and secret FISA courts is not that kind of country.

rosywoozlechan 4y ago
Can you explain how "National Security Letters and secret FISA courts" violate US laws? If they don't violate US laws can you explain how they're examples of how the US doesn't' respect the rule of law? If you mean that the US doesn't respect the laws of other separate sovereign nations, isn't that how the system works?
- lmm 4y ago
  > If they don't violate US laws can you explain how they're examples of how the US doesn't' respect the rule of law? They are special exceptions to the normal process of law that favour particular actors. Rule of law means that the processes of law must be consistent and public, and fair to all sides; people need to be able to tell their stories publicly in order to be able to find relevant witnesses, for example.

lrvick 4y ago

Nextcloud is pretty much a drop-in replacement for Google Apps and Office365 these days for most use cases.

Hnrobert42 4y ago
Maybe it has improved in the last 3 years, but that certainly was not the case when I tried it for my company. Fist, it was self-hosted, which adds monitoring, security, and tech support. Second, its concurrent document editing was absolute shite.
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  It's more than enough to build on. If a government simply decided that it was important to have ownership of their code and interoperability & future-proofing of their data & documents, then relatively over night any rough edges and weaknesses could be cleaned up. It's like saying a house is unusable shite because the sink has dirty dishes in it.
  - Hnrobert42 4y ago
    But this is a government. Their operations, and the impairment thereof, affects millions of people. Further, they should be in the business of governing, not cobbling together solutions based on stackoverflow posts. Collaborative, concurrent document editing is a must-have feature, especially now with so much remote work. So it’s not just dirty dishes. A more apt metaphor would be a house where 10% of the time when two people enter a room together, they both lose their phones in the room, can never find them, and have to get new phones. I mean, I guess you could decide that outcome is better than a house in which 0.0001% of the time, the US government looks at the contents of the phone, but I don’t see why you would.
    - Brian_K_White 4y ago
      They can be exactly as in the business of governing while paying one set of programmers as while paying another. Try again. bonus try agains: And they have an obligation not to waste taxes on rent. And they have an obligation to transparency even if currently all fail to meet.

AmericanChopper 4y ago

> As such, these products can not be offered by a foreign country, no matter how friendly. I think this is a rather naive perspective. I’ve worked in national security jobs, and the idea that services from foreign companies should not be allowed is a completely infeasible dream.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

tenebrisalietum 4y ago

A self hostable version is OnlyOffice and then I guess you could also just have a plain old on-prem licensed non-cloud Sharepoint farm.

Gustomaximus 4y ago

Some years back I used open office on a personal PC. https://www.openoffice.org/ https://www.openoffice.org/ Word was fine. Excel, you felt it was more clunky and lost productivity. Never used the other formats. Was good enough if you didn't want to pay and were using these infrequently.

nerdponx 4y ago
I have been using LibreOffice for many years. Its doc editor Writer is better than newer versions of MS Word (better style management, better footer/header system, better font options), and its spreadsheet program Calc is pretty good for general purposes, although it lacks some of the advanced Excel features.
jtvjan 4y ago
OpenOffice has largely been replaced by LibreOffice. It's a perfectly fine office suite, but the draw of Office 365 and Google Docs aren't the document editors themselves, it's that you get E-Mail, chat, file storage and PIM in the cloud with it. The alternative isn't just LibreOffice, it's LibreOffice + Postfix + ejabberd + Samba + Apache + Radicale, which you all have to put on a server somewhere and set up individually.
- orwin 4y ago
  For a 11 year-old? I mean, even at uni i worked locally.

edgyquant 4y ago

Just like with Twitter, we need to replace these monolithic services with international standards that any country or business can implement

lewisjoe 4y ago

Well, there's Zoho's office suite: https://workplace.zoho.com https://workplace.zoho.com

ymolodtsov 4y ago

That's a pretty stupid case of autarky. First, where do you stop? Second, when your actions are indistinguishable from China or Russia, you probably have to think a bit more about it.

npteljes 4y ago

There's a website that exist to answer this specific question: https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/microsoft-office https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/microsoft-of... Of these alternatives, I'm using Onlyoffice for some years now, specifically their Personal tier, which is free of charge. I think it works well, and it's also clear that they are constantly working on it.