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This is just for show, and facts won't follow. It's not the first time a French government vows to stick to Open Source. Yet most of the public money goes to pr

This is just for show, and facts won't follow. It's not the first time a French government vows to stick to Open Source. Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception. Two months ago, the French government signed an "open bar" contract with Microsoft for the "Éducation Nationale" department. 152 M€, not for Open Source. Source (fr) https://www.april.org/nouvel-open-bar-microsoft-le-ministere-de-l-education-nationale-va-t-il-enfin-commencer-sa-cure-de-d https://www.april.org/nouvel-open-bar-microsoft-le-ministere... A few days after that, a major state-owned institution (Polytechnique) announced it was migrating (including the email system) to MS Office 365. Even if it violates several laws and official decrees (it's a semi-military school). Source (fr) https://cnll.fr/news/polytechnique-men-office-365/ https://cnll.fr/news/polytechnique-men-office-365/

ErrorNoBrain 1y ago
it's still a step in the right direction and its coming on the back of US and Trumps tarif shittalk.. there's also talk about moving away from american software giants, among government sections in my country. Recently one such section moved from AWS to Hetzner (saving money in the process) i've also heard talk about making EU-based alternatives to the office suite, etc.
gerdesj 1y ago
Let's see what happens but I get that prior, demonstrable, actions are not conducive.
makeitdouble 1y ago
There's some aspects that make it a more nuanced situation: - you won't see angry letters in the news about services sticking to open source after they chose to move in - the reason the CNLL can point the finger at Poytechnique is because there are explicit directives. Not even having those would be way worse. - "Most of the public money" : Open Source contracts won't be in billions of euros most of the time, especially as a lot of the money will go to internal hiring and only a slice to external contractors.
resource_waste 1y ago
[flagged]
- jeandejean 1y ago
  What's the ground for this? Where's grandeur in this declaration? Your comment tell us more about your disdain for France than anything else.
- edhelas 1y ago
  I have some quotes about US sentiment, and it basically revolves around their need to have national grandeur despite being a lesser power. US is all fanfare and rhetoric. Its fun stuff to play with in our imagination, but the ground reality of the world is different. -- A French
  - cjfd 1y ago
    Just switching country names does not really work. The US is the very curious case of a super power that attempts to become a third world country.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
fermigier 1y ago
"Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception." → I've asked, twice, for the CNLL, the French Court of Auditors (Cour des Comptes) to work towards giving precise figures. This was rejected, but may reappear in a different form (given that the Court is currently running an enquiry on digital sovereignty - I hope, but I doubt, that they will be able to pull precise figures).
sylvinus 1y ago
Facts (and code) are following. We're building a fully open source workspace (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en) among other ambitious initiatives (https://beta.gouv.fr/ https://beta.gouv.fr/). The turmoil caused by the two contracts you mention also prove that the new normal has already shifted towards open source. It's a slow process, but it's undeniable that we are making progress.
- jeynec 1y ago
  These initiatives are only for show. I work in one of the biggest French goverment entity and no one uses this. We still very much use Microsoft products for virtually everything, and everything "sovereign" (Resana, Pline...) just doesn't work or isn't as convenient
  - cyberax 1y ago
    Hah. It used to be that Microsoft products were sleek, fast, and just plain more convenient than Open Source products. E.g. OpenOffice vs MS Office. And honestly, OS stuff still often sucks quite a bit. It's just that MS software has degraded to the point of utter shittiness (see: Teams) that now it's just plain worse than their own software from 15 years ago.
    - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
      > It's just that MS software has degraded to the point of utter shittiness (see: Teams) that now it's just plain worse than their own software from 15 years ago. I sometimes feel like I live in a parallele universe reading the comments here on Office. The addition of collaboration and how it seemlessly integrated with sharepoints while easing the sharing of documents make Office365 a blessing in most office environment. There is no way people are going back to sharing files like before after having worked this way.
      - cyberax 1y ago
        Now look at Outlook. Or Skype. And 15 years ago, we just used Office files in a Dropbox folder. It solved all of our collaboration issues.
Bayart 1y ago
I'm extremely tired of this attitude among French people that amounts to systematically shoot down any attempt at improvement with cynicism.
- bambax 1y ago
  It doesn't come from nowhere, though. It results in having had to tolerate the French bureaucracy, French lies, empty promises, and French way of (not) doing things for decades.
  - diggan 1y ago
    That's just governments being governments. I've spent 50% of my life in Sweden and 50% of my life in Spain, and everywhere it's the same. "had to tolerate the $NATION bureaucracy, $NATION lies, empty promises, and $NATION way of (not) doing things for decades" probably applies to most countries in the world, I know it applies for the countries I've lived in at least, and seemingly France too. Heard the same about every home country of my friends also. Governments just move really slowly. Best we can do is cheer for the efforts we think will improve things, even if it'll take years, and protest about efforts we think are harmful.
agumonkey 1y ago
There's a slight increase in open source efforts. They recently released a react component framework for govt apps. They use keycloak very often.
StopDisinfo910 1y ago
Typical French reaction to anything positive. Everytime someone actually does something nice in this country, there will be a dozen nay-sayers complaining uselessly that it is not perfect while doing nothing of value themselves. It always saddens me to see a country with so much too succeed being so impaired by its own citizens.
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  This comment didn't impair anything being done, though. I totally agree with it. The EU could do something non-performative by it and its governments stopping issuing documents in proprietary Microsoft formats and use OSS only.
  - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
    The constant criticism of people actually trying to do something by people who prefer sitting on their hands is impairing in itself. People are basically constantly dragging everyone down including themselves while doing absolutely nothing. I mean technically I guess they sometimes vocally protest in the street that they don't understand why someone else is not solving their own problem or that they would prefer we just pretended the problem never existed which is pretty much equivalent to doing nothing if not worse.
    - robertlagrant 1y ago
      > The constant criticism of people actually trying to do something by people who prefer sitting on their hands is impairing in itself. No. You need to say how it's impairing the process of this specific adoption to make the claim. It's not self-evident.
  - kergonath 1y ago
    > The EU could do something non-performative by it and its governments stopping issuing documents in proprietary Microsoft formats and use OSS only. They would get hairy quickly, because the Office formats are actually open standards. It’s also a tall order. How they run their administration is fundamentally the member-states’ prerogative, I don’t really see what lever the commission would have to bend the council on that subject.
rapestinians 1y ago
[flagged]
lou1306 1y ago
Uh, I know n=1, but I used to work in a public research lab in France for almost a couple years, and already back then (4-5 years ago) they used tons of FOSS. Zimbra, Mattermost, Gitlab, the works. So I don't think it's all just theater. Then again, if your employees still need PowerPoint, I say let them have it for now. You cannot switch a single company to FOSS overnight, let alone the entire public sector of an industrial nation.
pyrale 1y ago
> This is just for show That is simply wrong. The reality is that millions of people work for the government, directly or indirectly, and that not all of these people have aligned incentives, the same constraints, etc. The people pushing open source initiatives in the french public sector are very serious about it. It is also true that there is a lot of inertia. The consequence is that, while most of the large administrations, including those that don't have that much wiggle room for initiatives, still use big-name proprietary solutions, more and more open-source and open-data gardens spring around, and that they provide a strong base for new initatives, both public and private. Two examples I personally used are dvf [1], a database and application showing real estate sales, which I used to check market prices when I bought my home, and publi.codes [2], a simulator and an open-source law-as-code repository, which is one of the cornerstones of a friend's private company. Would I like more of France's administration to move to open-souce? Sure, but it's not going to happen overnight. In the meantime, I'm grateful for the core of people dedicated to push the case, bits by bits, and I know their effort is certainly not just for show. [1]: https://app.dvf.etalab.gouv.fr/ https://app.dvf.etalab.gouv.fr/ [2]: https://publi.codes/ https://publi.codes/
timeon 1y ago
Those are just two cases of corruption. Time will tell if this trend will continue or end.

ErrorNoBrain 1y ago

it's still a step in the right direction and its coming on the back of US and Trumps tarif shittalk.. there's also talk about moving away from american software giants, among government sections in my country. Recently one such section moved from AWS to Hetzner (saving money in the process) i've also heard talk about making EU-based alternatives to the office suite, etc.

gerdesj 1y ago

Let's see what happens but I get that prior, demonstrable, actions are not conducive.

makeitdouble 1y ago

There's some aspects that make it a more nuanced situation: - you won't see angry letters in the news about services sticking to open source after they chose to move in - the reason the CNLL can point the finger at Poytechnique is because there are explicit directives. Not even having those would be way worse. - "Most of the public money" : Open Source contracts won't be in billions of euros most of the time, especially as a lot of the money will go to internal hiring and only a slice to external contractors.

resource_waste 1y ago

[flagged]

jeandejean 1y ago
What's the ground for this? Where's grandeur in this declaration? Your comment tell us more about your disdain for France than anything else.
edhelas 1y ago
I have some quotes about US sentiment, and it basically revolves around their need to have national grandeur despite being a lesser power. US is all fanfare and rhetoric. Its fun stuff to play with in our imagination, but the ground reality of the world is different. -- A French
- cjfd 1y ago
  Just switching country names does not really work. The US is the very curious case of a super power that attempts to become a third world country.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

fermigier 1y ago

"Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception." → I've asked, twice, for the CNLL, the French Court of Auditors (Cour des Comptes) to work towards giving precise figures. This was rejected, but may reappear in a different form (given that the Court is currently running an enquiry on digital sovereignty - I hope, but I doubt, that they will be able to pull precise figures).

sylvinus 1y ago

Facts (and code) are following. We're building a fully open source workspace (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en) among other ambitious initiatives (https://beta.gouv.fr/ https://beta.gouv.fr/). The turmoil caused by the two contracts you mention also prove that the new normal has already shifted towards open source. It's a slow process, but it's undeniable that we are making progress.

jeynec 1y ago
These initiatives are only for show. I work in one of the biggest French goverment entity and no one uses this. We still very much use Microsoft products for virtually everything, and everything "sovereign" (Resana, Pline...) just doesn't work or isn't as convenient
- cyberax 1y ago
  Hah. It used to be that Microsoft products were sleek, fast, and just plain more convenient than Open Source products. E.g. OpenOffice vs MS Office. And honestly, OS stuff still often sucks quite a bit. It's just that MS software has degraded to the point of utter shittiness (see: Teams) that now it's just plain worse than their own software from 15 years ago.
  - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
    > It's just that MS software has degraded to the point of utter shittiness (see: Teams) that now it's just plain worse than their own software from 15 years ago. I sometimes feel like I live in a parallele universe reading the comments here on Office. The addition of collaboration and how it seemlessly integrated with sharepoints while easing the sharing of documents make Office365 a blessing in most office environment. There is no way people are going back to sharing files like before after having worked this way.
    - cyberax 1y ago
      Now look at Outlook. Or Skype. And 15 years ago, we just used Office files in a Dropbox folder. It solved all of our collaboration issues.

Bayart 1y ago

I'm extremely tired of this attitude among French people that amounts to systematically shoot down any attempt at improvement with cynicism.

bambax 1y ago
It doesn't come from nowhere, though. It results in having had to tolerate the French bureaucracy, French lies, empty promises, and French way of (not) doing things for decades.
- diggan 1y ago
  That's just governments being governments. I've spent 50% of my life in Sweden and 50% of my life in Spain, and everywhere it's the same. "had to tolerate the $NATION bureaucracy, $NATION lies, empty promises, and $NATION way of (not) doing things for decades" probably applies to most countries in the world, I know it applies for the countries I've lived in at least, and seemingly France too. Heard the same about every home country of my friends also. Governments just move really slowly. Best we can do is cheer for the efforts we think will improve things, even if it'll take years, and protest about efforts we think are harmful.

agumonkey 1y ago

There's a slight increase in open source efforts. They recently released a react component framework for govt apps. They use keycloak very often.

StopDisinfo910 1y ago

Typical French reaction to anything positive. Everytime someone actually does something nice in this country, there will be a dozen nay-sayers complaining uselessly that it is not perfect while doing nothing of value themselves. It always saddens me to see a country with so much too succeed being so impaired by its own citizens.

robertlagrant 1y ago
This comment didn't impair anything being done, though. I totally agree with it. The EU could do something non-performative by it and its governments stopping issuing documents in proprietary Microsoft formats and use OSS only.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  The constant criticism of people actually trying to do something by people who prefer sitting on their hands is impairing in itself. People are basically constantly dragging everyone down including themselves while doing absolutely nothing. I mean technically I guess they sometimes vocally protest in the street that they don't understand why someone else is not solving their own problem or that they would prefer we just pretended the problem never existed which is pretty much equivalent to doing nothing if not worse.
  - robertlagrant 1y ago
    > The constant criticism of people actually trying to do something by people who prefer sitting on their hands is impairing in itself. No. You need to say how it's impairing the process of this specific adoption to make the claim. It's not self-evident.
- kergonath 1y ago
  > The EU could do something non-performative by it and its governments stopping issuing documents in proprietary Microsoft formats and use OSS only. They would get hairy quickly, because the Office formats are actually open standards. It’s also a tall order. How they run their administration is fundamentally the member-states’ prerogative, I don’t really see what lever the commission would have to bend the council on that subject.

rapestinians 1y ago

[flagged]

lou1306 1y ago

Uh, I know n=1, but I used to work in a public research lab in France for almost a couple years, and already back then (4-5 years ago) they used tons of FOSS. Zimbra, Mattermost, Gitlab, the works. So I don't think it's all just theater. Then again, if your employees still need PowerPoint, I say let them have it for now. You cannot switch a single company to FOSS overnight, let alone the entire public sector of an industrial nation.

pyrale 1y ago

> This is just for show That is simply wrong. The reality is that millions of people work for the government, directly or indirectly, and that not all of these people have aligned incentives, the same constraints, etc. The people pushing open source initiatives in the french public sector are very serious about it. It is also true that there is a lot of inertia. The consequence is that, while most of the large administrations, including those that don't have that much wiggle room for initiatives, still use big-name proprietary solutions, more and more open-source and open-data gardens spring around, and that they provide a strong base for new initatives, both public and private. Two examples I personally used are dvf [1], a database and application showing real estate sales, which I used to check market prices when I bought my home, and publi.codes [2], a simulator and an open-source law-as-code repository, which is one of the cornerstones of a friend's private company. Would I like more of France's administration to move to open-souce? Sure, but it's not going to happen overnight. In the meantime, I'm grateful for the core of people dedicated to push the case, bits by bits, and I know their effort is certainly not just for show. [1]: https://app.dvf.etalab.gouv.fr/ https://app.dvf.etalab.gouv.fr/ [2]: https://publi.codes/ https://publi.codes/

timeon 1y ago

Those are just two cases of corruption. Time will tell if this trend will continue or end.