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France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- jleyank 9mo agoAnd they can strike back at corporate America by licensing the stuff under gnu licenses. Software that’s reasonably small, reasonably effective and portable. What a concept. If only the EU or UK had 5-10 hackers…
- trelane 9mo agoEven something already available off the shelf! https://www.fsf.org/blogs/membership/jitsi-meet-an-often-overlooked-member-benefit https://www.fsf.org/blogs/membership/jitsi-meet-an-often-ove...
- iso1631 9mo agoVisio is more than just the software, it's a French run tool where the entire stack is provided at an enterprise/governmental level with various guarentees about availability, confidentiality etc.
- Moldoteck 9mo agoDe Gaulle strikes back)
- caboteria 9mo agoIt's difficult to take an announcement like this seriously when it's posted on Twitter.
- iso1631 9mo agoThis is just some account from a tech journalist This is the press release: https://presse.economie.gouv.fr/souverainete-numerique-letat-generalise-visio-sa-solution-de-visioconference-securisee-et-souveraine-a-destination-des-agents-publics/ https://presse.economie.gouv.fr/souverainete-numerique-letat...
- ChrisArchitect 9mo agoEarlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 9mo agoFor a fraction of what these products cost France could fund open source alternatives. Edit: I'm not saying they don't.
- well_ackshually 9mo ago[dead]
- 0xADD1E 9mo agoYou mean something like LiveKit, with a basic implementation of user management etc such as https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet ?
- _ache_ 9mo agoThey do. « we are committed to contributing back to the LiveKit community whenever feasible ».
- saubeidl 9mo agoThe tool they're building is open source: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
- RankingMember 9mo agotranslation (and without twitter): https://www-numerama-com.translate.goog/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-remplacer-microsoft-teams-et-google-meet-par-visio-un-outil-souverain-pour-les-appels-video.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-numerama-com.translate.goog/cyberguerre/2167301-...
- Synaesthesia 9mo agoWe need more like this. Europe is totally dependent on US companies for cloud computing.
- rconti 9mo agoAs a dual US/EU national who would love to move to Europe, I, for one, welcome the increase in tech demand on that side of the pond.
- eb0la 9mo agoUntil now nobody thought it was a problem. At least not a big one. The EU made some moves to define a "cloud computing" platform for Europe, and very little people paid attention because business-wise it was very difficult to compete with US corporations that have vast amounts of money in cash and find easy to get funding. But now there are some (small) alternatives. LIDL has its own cloud for retail. And I believe T-Systems sells some cloud computing for goverments based on OpenStack... Small steps, but steps.
- drstewart 8mo ago>Until now nobody thought it was a problem. I've seen these "EU digital sovereignty is around the corner!!" articles weekly for the past 10 years
- nunez 9mo agoI don't think a cloud provider that is _just_ a cloud provider exists. All of the cloud providers I can think of (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, Baidu, etc) are subsidiaries of larger corporations whose profit centers are elsewhere. The capital requirements needed to spin up a public cloud and the services that come with that are absolutely massive. It makes me think that cloud computing, despite the gigantic profits it brings in, is not sustainable on its own.
- davkan 8mo agoFor what it’s worth, Amazon’s largest profit center is AWS. Likewise for Microsoft and Azure.
- idontwantthis 9mo agoI wonder if the EU will begin trying to recruit American software engineers. I’d love to move to France.
- captain_coffee 9mo agoI doubt Americans will even pick up the phone or respond to LinkedIn messages / emails when they will se the budgets for the software Engineering roles in the EU. I am saying that as an European, just to be clear.
- toomuchtodo 9mo agoNot everyone is optimizing for total comp. Some are optimizing for better lives. It's not a wild concept considering how many people get pulled into startups, 90% of which fail, under the guide of "mission" and lower market comp. Do you pick a mostly assured better quality of life? Or an equity payout lottery ticket/fairy tale? Certainly, there is a minority of folks making wild comp at FAANG, but that is a privileged minority of total tech and IT workers.
- baal80spam 9mo ago> Some are optimizing for better lives Of course. I just hope these people know that for example healthcare in Europe is by no means free.
- toomuchtodo 9mo agoMy health insurance for a family of four in Spain is $2k/year. In the US, it was exceeding $25k/year with premiums, copays, deductibles, etc. While not free, it is accessible. There was a time in my life we had to decide in the middle of the night if we could afford to take one of our children to the ER in the US when they were a newborn. I will never have that feeling in Europe, and that is priceless. Tax me more, I will happily contribute to a functioning governance system. I like taxes, with them I contribute to civilization. As an American, I am all in on Europe. It's not perfect, but the bar is in hell. We Asked 300 People About Health Care Costs. The Numbers Are Shocking. - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/opinion/health-insurance-obamacare-subsidies-america.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/opinion/health-insurance-... | https://archive.today/MnYz9 https://archive.today/MnYz9 - January 22nd, 2026
- kylecazar 9mo agoI don't see the dependency on these productivity and communication tools as that difficult of a problem to solve. They are going to have a much harder time weaning off American cloud infrastructure and on to something purely domestic.
- bryanlarsen 9mo agoThey need to do both the hard things and the easy things, and do them in parallel. Which they are.
- causalscience 9mo agoStop being reasonable!
- fcarraldo 9mo agoScaleWay and OVH are already filling this gap.
- simonebrunozzi 9mo agoGood luck with OVH. Most EU companies, including this one, offer subpar services compared to their American counterparts.
- I_am_tiberius 9mo agoI agree with Scaleway (I would more compare it to Digital Ocean) but OVH is really good and comparable.
- antonkochubey 9mo agoDigitalOcean is fantastic in my experience, way better than The Big Three, especially Azure.
- 9mo ago
- causalscience 9mo agoI like CryptPad.fr. End-to-end encrypted google docs.
- direwolf20 9mo agoDeleted tweet?
- _ache_ 9mo agoCan access X because it's X and locally blocked, "ironic" to use Twitter to post about sovereignty. It's ongoing for a will with La suite numérique (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/). - Tchap is a message app for officials, - Visio, based on LiveKit - FranceTransfert, I don't know what is it. - Fichiers => Drive - Messagerie => Email - Docs => A better Google Docs - Grist => Excel version of Google docs. It aimed at "public worker", people working for the government. Github: https://github.com/suitenumerique https://github.com/suitenumerique
- well_ackshually 9mo ago[dead]
- jasoncartwright 9mo agoBuilt using Django!
- sam_lowry_ 9mo agoIronic to use Github to post about sovereignty )
- bananasandrice 9mo ago[dead]
- _ache_ 9mo agoI'm trying to not use it myself but yes, la suite numérique should get out of GitHub. They already did it for the Ministry of Education with [La Forge](https://docs.forge.apps.education.fr/ https://docs.forge.apps.education.fr/). Used to be forgejo, now a GitLab instance.
- sam_lowry_ 9mo agoGitLab, a YC and by extension an American company ) This can go as far as we want )
- junglistguy 9mo ago[dead]
- jonathaneunice 9mo agoSwitching to sovereignty-protecting, locally-hosted collaboration, compute, and storage is by no means impossible. FOSS advocates have been eagerly beating this drum and providing options for 25+ years. The missing ingredient has always been the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change, and the friction of choosing something other than the standard, go-to, often at least apparently free (or at least bundled) tools. The current U.S. threats against NATO and allies creates a rift in the previously-accepted international order that may finally motivate material change. Often such change is chaotic and discontinuous—it feels well nigh impossible, right up to the moment it feels necessary and inevitable.
- clownpenis_fart 9mo ago[dead]
- ehnto 8mo agoI fail to imagine a single bit of business software that cannot be achieved with open source software, outside of specific proprietary processes. But your average office technology work, I see being very plausible to move to open source. There is definitely going to be a breadth of quality across the tools, but the outputs can all be the same I believe. Even on a personal level, it's worth cultivating self-reliance on tools you control. But at a national scale it feels perhaps existential, worth what learning pains there may be. You also cultivate local software industries.
- geek_at 8mo ago> the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change it's simple economics. When US services have to increase their pricese because of trumps tarrifs and these increases are higher than the cost of change, they'll do it. we're almost there
- drstewart 8mo agoHow much have the "tarrifs" (sic) increased the cost of "US services" by to EU providers?
- nasretdinov 9mo agoMy hope is that all this push towards tech independence (not just from EU) will make the most "basic" tools open-source and they wouldn't suck as much as they do now. What I mean by this is e.g. you can already use Linux on a desktop and it's generally okay (or even good sometimes), however things like LibreOffice are absolutely unusable in terms of performance, functionality and user friendliness compared to e.g. Keynote or even Pages on macOS. Multiple governments having to solve essentially the same issue on a global scale is a unique opportunity to save costs by working on open source together, and get funding and direction that's never been available to OSS before.
- mhitza 9mo agoIt also doesn't feel like the mid 2000s anymore, where offline word/excel are essential for most day to day work. Most of the time I deal with csv downloads for data, or the shit PDFs that I can only fill in with the Adobe reader on windows. I can't recall the last time I fired up OnlyOffice (better MS garbage compatibility) for anything related to work. This doesn't mean that those tools are irrelevant, but significantly less needed, and less of a migration hurdle for many companies.
- leoedin 9mo agoYeah, I’ve been able to use desktop Linux without many issues in a corporate environment. The main issue was the web version of office being incomplete. If corporate IT teams embraced it, I bet most companies could be free of Windows without too much issue. The bigger problem seems to be the cloud services - teams, OneDrive, sharepoint and all the account management stuff.
- jbombadil 9mo agoI hope so too, but don't believe that's the ultimate intent here. The problem is that the tech independence is being pushed by government who want more control - not less. (Not speaking specifically of France and this instance, but looking at the anti-encryption rules that the UK and Ireland are pushing) From that standpoint, I imagine the "solution" here won't be to push an open source alternative, but a closed one that they to control.
- xutopia 9mo agoDon't believe this has anything other than to do with the USA's recent attacks on NATO countries.
- me551ah 9mo agoReplicating features from existing software has become extremely easy due to AI. I won’t be surprised if open source is able to easily catch up with the bigger products.
- this_user 9mo agoReplicating the software is easy, running the services at AWS-scale is hard.
- DrScientist 9mo agoWould you need to though? If an organisation ran it's own instance, it would only need to scale for that organisation ( including any external attends over a bridge ). That does of course assume companies have the expertise/appetite to run things themselves.
- concinds 9mo agoNot so much "aiming" as doing it. The alternative already exists, is open-source, and used by 40,000 government users. By 2027 all government agencies will use it exclusively.
- duxup 9mo agoWhat is that option?
- cocoflunchy 9mo agoVisio from https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
- bsimpson 9mo agoIt's funny that it's such a blatant knock-off of Google Workspace - the repos even have the same names: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet I wonder if the emoji will grow into its own set: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet/blob/main/src/frontend/public/assets/reactions/clapping-hands.png https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet/blob/main/src/fronten...
- omnimus 9mo agoIt doesn't matter. Office suites are a commodity. Google suite is knockoff of MS Office at certain point in time. That's just the nature of digital - information want's to be free.
- duxup 9mo agoI feel like we would see a lot more movement if we’ve reached the commodity point…
- omnimus 9mo agoIt's network effects / lock-in. There is a reason why people still use Microsoft Office and that is that surprising amount of industries have everything build around it. In my country anything law related is submitted in Microsoft Word. Academic texts? Microsoft Word. Communication with government? Microsoft Word. The reason why Google Docs somewhat managed to break this was 1. free, 2. multiplayer/easy to share. One law about requiring the state documents to be submitted in open formats, editable in libre software... and the lock instantly breaks.
- gizajob 9mo agoThis is the kind of thing France often wants to do yet never implements.
- jddj 9mo agoThe inertia (or actively maintained status quo) in Europe towards the US platforms is massive. Anecdotally, I recently found myself in the local government building of a small European town. They run several free digitalisation classes for small businesses. The options? Introductory classes to: - LinkedIn - WhatsApp business - Facebook and Instagram ads - Gsuite
- XorNot 9mo agoIt might be worth considering that if those are intro classes, then it's not like they can't be easily replaced: it's not like the audience is wedded to any of those at an introductory level.
- cmiles8 9mo agoI wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale. The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
- alecco 9mo agoBetter is not enough make people change, sadly. This is why VCs burn so much money to establish products.
- watwut 9mo agoThe big difference is that USA was nor perceived as a threat before. It is acutely dangerours now and there is no perspective of it changing.
- blibble 9mo ago> while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale. fortunately, legislation can help here start with critical national infrastructure to build the market, and work your way out from there the US regime cannot be permitted to have an off button for our infrastructure
- graemep 9mo agoThis is the biggest step any country (other than China and those subject to US sanctions) has made to reducing their dependence on American big tech. Its still a small step, but its a start. > The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide You can push people to do this. The government can switch as a matter of policy. It can require companies bigging for government contracts to only use systems based in approved countries. It can make it a requirement for regulated industries (e.g. infrastructure, critical financial services, etc.)
- i_love_retros 9mo agoIt's only recently that the united states has become an enemy of the EU though. I'd say there's much more motivation to move to other software and platforms now.
- lateforwork 9mo agoI really hope Marc Andreessen is happy. https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/andreessen-horowitz-co-founders-explain-why-theyre-supporting-trump/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/andreessen-horowitz-co-fou...
- Sebguer 9mo agoHe's helping with a fascist takeover of the country, why wouldn't they be happy?
- bananasandrice 9mo ago[flagged]
- i_love_retros 9mo ago>The reason he is choosing Trump over President Joe Biden boils down primarily to one major issue — he believes Trump’s policies are much more favorable for tech
- energy123 9mo agoCarried interest loophole
- ginko 9mo agoGee, if only there had been a European market leader in instant messaging, voice over IP and video chat in the 2000s already. Then we could just use that instead of Microsoft Teams.
- nasretdinov 9mo agoSkype wasn't _that_ great at chat especially to be completely fair. But it definitely was okay for everything, that's for sure...
- atomtamadas 9mo agoInstead of these politics driven projects that usually fail at least partially what tends to succeed is if an angry nerd starts a project to replace something with free alternative, such as Linux, VLC, ffmpeg, ...
- bananasandrice 9mo ago[dead]
- somat 9mo agoFor what it's worth, if you want a self hosted replacement for Zoom Galene has worked great for me, The server requirements are remarkably low, especially if you are like me and just need a personal video chat to a few people. I run it on an old apu-2 with openbsd(which is just about the worst combination and it still works great) As a bonus there is no client, that is, the client is just a web page so very low friction to get people to use it. https://galene.org/ https://galene.org/
- RockstarSprain 9mo ago+1. I am running a Galene instance via the YunoHost self-hosting package on a small dedicated server (2 cores, 4gb of RAM). So far it’s much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality. Feels better than Jitsi and even a FaceTime / WhatsApp call.
- jech 9mo ago> So far [Galene is] much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality Latency is better, since Galene uses an unordered buffer instead of a jitter buffer. Lipsynch should also be slightly better, as Galene carefully computes audio/video offsets and forwards the result to the receiver so it can compensate. Audio and video quality, on the other hand, should be roughly the same, unless Jitsi is doing something wrong.
- pengaru 9mo agoWhat happened to Jitsi?
- prmoustache 9mo agoIt is still a thing. I used it 2 days ago actually.
- mixmastamyk 8mo agoThey switched to requiring google/microsoft accounts, and now dead to me. Looking at jami now.
- i_love_retros 9mo agoSeriously, why are people still using twitter? It's owned by a Nazi supporter, is full of white nationalist racist posters, and seems a strange place to announce you are moving off of American tech.
- i_love_retros 9mo agoNot to mention JD Vance uses it so it's like sharing a room with a massive dog turd
- weirdmantis69 9mo ago[flagged]
- Nextgrid 9mo agoBecause for better or worse it still has significance and popularity. Nothing else really comes close.
- eb0la 9mo agoPoliticians use it a lot. Because media and journalist started using it.
- tick_tock_tick 9mo agoBecause they EU still can't make software and most people in America don't care.
- qznc 9mo agoWe’re talking about Twitter. Mastodon exists. It is not about making software. Maybe about selling it or marketing.
- ChrisArchitect 9mo agoLink to the actual article: https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-remplacer-microsoft-teams-et-google-meet-par-visio-un-outil-souverain-pour-les-appels-video.html https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-... Earlier repo submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004
- softwaredoug 9mo agoAmericans fail to appreciate a few things about our economy 1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans 2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market 3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with English + technology When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada. Theres not an easy market to expand to without much deeper focus on that specific market and its needs, for much fewer returns.
- bestouff 9mo ago... and Canada doesn't seem very keen on going on like this.
- eigenspace 9mo agoYeah, assuming Canada is just going to keep going along buying American software and services seems pretty naive. There's less capacity to build alternatives in Canada than there is in Europe, but as Europe builds out alternative ecosystems, Canadians will likely be just as eager customers as Europeans (if not more eager). The beauty of so many of these solutions being open source solutions also means that it creates avenues for cooperation between organizations that have no official cooperation agreement. E.g. The Austrian federal Military, the state of Schleswig-Holstein, and the city of Leon have no direct forum for cooperating on software projects, yet all three are contributing to the development and rapid adoption of Nextcloud. Canada can easily get in on this too.
- kylehotchkiss 9mo agoCanada has roughly the population of California, and Aus/NZ combined have populations less than California. For these types of market analyses, these countries are closer to US states in market potential.
- iso1631 9mo ago
- foobarian 9mo agoFinally the year of Minitel on the desktop!
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- _pdp_ 9mo agoMany EU members impose regulatory requirements for software in some sectors. If you want to get certified you need to go through some of them and while they are arcane they are also required. EU could easily force the hand - not in the next month or so but over a period of time. No need to discriminate against US companies but EU companies might be preferred and might have better access to EU services. We already have customers asking for this. They are not the majority but given the recent events this could quickly become a valuable chunk of the business - perhaps even overnight. We as a business are already thinking about it. And it is not just about moving the data to an EU data center. This is of course acceptable in many cases but still subject to the CLOUD Act. We are talking about a clean cut situation. It is true that good alternatives are not available, yet. But I would not underestimate EU tech companies either. There are plenty of great engineers and great companies in EU so strong competitors can spun up in short order. Now with AI coding assistants, it is even more doable then before. It is also potentially a great opportunity especially now.
- eb0la 9mo agoIn Spain you need to be ENS-certified (esquema nacional de seguridad) in order to provide services to the goverment. Nowadays it is similar / aligned to NIS2 certification. But you need to certify more than just apps. Processes are more important than apps.
- MORPHOICES 9mo ago[dead]
- lenerdenator 9mo agoIf only they'd taken their reliance on Russian natural gas so seriously.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- drnick1 9mo agoIt's baffling that the E.U. and others (corporations anywhere really) keep using and paying for Zoom when Jitsi and Nextcloud Talk are free and work very well. This is not a political issue, but one of data sovereignty.
- ThePowerOfFuet 9mo agohttps://xcancel.com/lellouchenico/status/2015775970330882319 https://xcancel.com/lellouchenico/status/2015775970330882319 Which itself links to: https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-remplacer-microsoft-teams-et-google-meet-par-visio-un-outil-souverain-pour-les-appels-video.html https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-...
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- aiauthoritydev 9mo agoIndians are doing the same too.
- yodsanklai 9mo agoThe French Gendarmerie has been running Linux for a while now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu. I don't know the details but it seems like a good first step.
- gsky 9mo agoEvery country should ban American social networks and messaging tools ASAP
- aerhardt 9mo agoI've been recently researching if I could replace American cloud providers with something like OVH or Hetzner (the latter I occasionally use for VPS) and there is no fucking chance. It's great that 37signals and DHH can do it, and I have no trouble believing they have saved money, but for situations in which I operate, both startup and enterprise environments but where devs are scarce and teams small, it's simply not realistic.
- earthnail 9mo agoI moved my stuff to Hetzner. Obv I have no idea about your situation, but I found it fairly trivial for my stuff. But I can't figure out how to replace GSuite.
- aerhardt 9mo agoWell for one thing, call me a sell-out or accuse me of lacking craftsmanship, but I like my databases managed. Then also storage buckets, IAM, general cloud security and other niceties. And I don't think it's for a lack of skills, I know my way around a Linux box - it's just that I save so much time. I'll occasionally build small projects in a VPS (sometimes cramming the db in there too!) but I don't feel I can do it for other more serious work projects. Hetzner has basic load-balancing and security around the VPS and that's it, OVH has a bit more but it all looks quite green.
- earthnail 9mo agoOh, I wasn't trying to say you're wrong. Just wanted to share that for me, the bottleneck has been elsewhere, and that I personally found GSuite harder than the compute cloud.
- everfrustrated 8mo agoYou're not wrong. Europe has no clouds only hosting & vps providers. Nothing has changed in 20 years. Really sad actually.
- LunaSea 8mo ago
- mytailorisrich 9mo agoThis is the French government aiming to have all the government agencies use videoconferencing software that was developed internally by themselves. So a huge waste of taxpayers money... This is a pure ongoing cost to develop and maintain (more so than using an market product) while not getting any traction externally. The productive way to do this is to encourage private companies to develop these products and to support them with government contracts. There are not going to conpete with Silicon Valley if they don't create actual private competitors. Absolutely ridiculous approach but unfortunately typical of the industrial scale waste of the French government...
- veqq 9mo agoJami is read for the big time!
- mistercheph 9mo agoLet's hope the alternatives they build are open source
- tonymet 9mo agoI’ve worked at a couple monster corporations who spent a lot of time and money to move off of Google and Amazon, because they were paranoid about espionage, only to return a couple years later at even greater expense. I doubt the French government will fare any better. They will end up spending hundreds of millions of Euros , maybe a couple billion, and have to return in a couple years. Especially with AI moats being built. AI is far too competitive. Every company will need to employ AI as a Goon ( see David Graber) to defend against all of the AI Goons going after them.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- BenoitEssiambre 9mo agoCountries are waking up to the danger of having the US in a position to take control of most of their computers and phones via software updates. Open source solutions like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu could become more prominent. There's even interesting non us hardware options like https://starlabs.systems/ https://starlabs.systems/ The US has had an unfair advantage in tech, defense, science and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With the newfound isolationism, tariffs, threats etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere, especially if governments can help bootstrap these sectors with efforts like these.
- weinzierl 9mo agoI live and work in Germany and know many people across Europe. Admittedly more in Western Europe, and admittedly my bubble leans toward traditional industries. I see a lot of talk about "sovereignty" and "European software". What I don’t see is action. Does anyone working in Europe actually see signs that people are taking this seriously?
- 202508042147 9mo agoWell, my company is! I just migrated this weekend our database from AWS RDS to a Hetzner VPS with Volumes. It's a small step, but it works for us and it is way cheaper!
- Einenlum 9mo agoSame. French here. I can't stand hearing these words anymore, when at the same time I read that the French intelligence services closed a 5-year deal with Palantir.
- jopsen 9mo ago> What I don’t see is action. Building serious products and services in this space is easily 5 year investment, by that time there will be a new US administration. Hope is not a strategy, but it's certainly cheaper in the short run. ---- But have you divested from US assets? Maybe one should, considering we just deployed armed troops with live ammunition to scare of America. I fear we don't know how close this was. Maybe, we'll know in 50 years.
- astrolx 9mo agoI work at a French research institute and our Zoom contract ends soon so we get to switch to Visio. It's not too bad but quite tier below Zoom. Noise cancellation is not great, being browser based also comes with limitations, in half my meetings people don't manage to find the permissions to allow mic and/or webcam ...
- palata 8mo ago> in half my meetings people don't manage to find the permissions to allow mic and/or webcam They will learn :-)
- learingsci 9mo agoThis would be a great thing for humanity as a whole, but not for France. So I doubt it will happen. Hope strings eternal.
- sharyphil 9mo ago"You know what they call Zoom in Paris?" "What do they call it?" "Le Zoom"
- 202508042147 9mo agoThis is great and definitely doable. It's the initial bit that's hard, people hate switching but then when they get used to it, they won't switch back. What I'd really like to see is a pan-european payment processor, a European alternative to Visa/Mastercard.
- BitwiseFool 9mo agoI would love to switch away from Teams. Sadly the organizations I belong to do not want to pay for anything else.
- avh02 9mo agowas talking to a friend about this, there's wero but i haven't really seen it around (Germany).
- severino 9mo agoThe problem I've seen with this is that Wero works with banking applications that require either Google Play or App Store. Which means that you may not need an American company for the payment itself, but you now need an American company in the device you have to use for the payment.
- tpxl 8mo agoWhat's wrong with SEPA instant? A payment flow of 'scan code, confirm in banking app' is hard to beat and we're 95% there. And all you need is your own banking app, no shady payment processors required. You lose some stuff like the credit part of the credit card (although virtually no one I know actually uses credit, only debit cards) and consumer protections (chargebacks), but I don't think those outweigh the extra costs at all.
- 202508042147 8mo agoI'm totally sold on scan to pay apps, would be great to pay anywhere in Europe with my banking app. I still need a credit card when I rent cars and sometimes for online payments. That is an issue.
- Fanofilm 9mo agoIf they did it by growing open source competitors, it would be brilliant. Linux-equivalents for all major categories.
- xracy 9mo agoIt's wild to me that the first Trump Administration didn't teach this lesson. The "Just Trust me Bro" Foreign policy that has existed clearly only works if the person in power is trustworthy, and you have to carefully investigate any policy that is enforced by "trust". One of the most disappointing failures of the Biden Administration was that they didn't realize this. The greatest failure of every other country was to get lulled into a false sense of security when the US Gov't shifted back to an at-all trustworthy foreign policy.
- BLKNSLVR 9mo agoSemi-related thought bubble: I wonder what would happen if EU countries started encouraging ad blocking via their ISP DNS servers?
- rawgabbit 9mo agoIsn't that what "LaSuite" is? I know this particular instance is for the French government; but isn't it open source? https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr
- rawgabbit 9mo agoI found the answer in the FAQ. Anyone can deploy it in their own instance. https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#:~:text=LaSuite%20étant%20une%20suite%20d'outils%20libre%2C%20toute%20organisation%20ou%20personne%20non%20éligible%20à%20l’offre%20mutualisée%20de%20l’État%20peut%20:%20déployer%20sa%20propre%20instance%2C%20et%20l’exploiter%20sous%20sa%20responsabilité. https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#:~:text=LaSuite%20étant%2...
- jl6 9mo agoThe software part of this would be easy. People will literally write it for free, out of the sheer joy of building Free & open source software. The part the state needs to do is bootstrap a network effect that leads to people actually using it. I guess they’ll need to employ a few engineers to add enough lines of code to rocket.chat to make it competitive with Teams levels of slowness.
- mrtksn 9mo agoFixing network effect is easy for hegemonies, just ban the competition. You can use national security or save the children pretext in democratic countries. US took over TikTok forcefully, Europeans are looking into forcing their contenders into domination but if it doesn't look like working they can just use the US tactics.
- ttoinou 9mo agoNon-french might not realize that we have a huge free software community of france, made up in large part of communist state-funded scientists / researchers. They do a lot of cool stuff, you can see a few projects for example on Framasoft who has the explicit goal of un-Googling yourself : https://framasoft.org/en/ https://framasoft.org/en/ https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/ https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/ That said, having technical solutions isn't enough to replace USA / private solutions. The answer has to take into account the economical, social and political situation
- tsoukase 9mo ago"Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying Microsoft". Same for Oracle and AWS, until a year ago. Before the current insanity, Europe whould become independent like never. Now, it will take about a decade, IF the insanity continues in the next presidential terms.
- michaelsshaw 8mo agoI think it's a bit of a Pandora's box issue. Their eyes are now open to the very real, no longer hypothetical, threat. There's no going back.
- mkcg 9mo ago@see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004
- esperent 9mo agoFor those who don't want to use Twitter: https://xcancel.com/lellouchenico/status/2015775970330882319 https://xcancel.com/lellouchenico/status/2015775970330882319 Or here's the linked article: https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-remplacer-microsoft-teams-et-google-meet-par-visio-un-outil-souverain-pour-les-appels-video.html https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-... And here's the app, Visio: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/visio https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/visio
- alias_neo 8mo ago> And here's the app, Visio That UI looks suspiciously similar to Jitsi Meet. I wonder if it's based on it.
- edwcross 8mo agoIt says "powered by LiveKit": https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
- alias_neo 8mo agoIt's not really clear to me what livekit is, but it appears to be some sort of agentic coding tool. Perhaps the similarity to Jitsi Meet is due to it regurgitating the source that an AI has ingested. The code base looks very different but a lot of the same terminology is used and the UI layout, navigation, menu options etc look very similar.
- Signez 8mo agoNah, it's just a basic case of a pivot from a company that previously offered a great open source (MIT licensed) product written in Go that offer WebRTC-based backbone to build audio and video sharing products upon: https://github.com/livekit/livekit https://github.com/livekit/livekit The AI stuff that the original LiveKit company put on top of it (to pivot to more investor-friendly endeavours) is not that relevant in this case, in my humble opinion.
- vinni2 9mo agoSilicon Valley type of companies grew to be giants by exploiting personal data of users without any regard for privacy and lax regulations. European companies can’t match them because of the regulations and privacy laws. It’s not the lack of talent or investment that is holding EU back.
- aucisson_masque 9mo agoHonestly the greatest thing trump did is help us, French, and maybe Europeans, to get back our sovereignty. I’m fed up of having to use Americans tech for everything and people getting along with it. Chinese managed to separate almost completely from the American tech market, eu can do it too. Maybe get stronger relations with China too, this 70 year old consensus where we must follow the USA whatever the case is finally ending. For instance, i bet there would a be lot to win if we diplomatically supported China annexion of Taiwan. Cheaper microprocessors, unrestricted access to newly annexed Taiwanese factories.
- yodsanklai 9mo ago> i bet there would a be lot to win if we diplomatically supported China annexion of Taiwan Sure, and let's give Ukraine to Russia while we're here so we can get their gas. The problem with the bullies is that they'll keep taking.
- aucisson_masque 9mo agoUkraine is European problem. Taiwan, Who cares in Europe ? As long as we have access to microprocessors… Trump v2 is the greatest change in world policy, adapt or die trying.
- simgt 8mo agoIt's fairly obvious that France won't do much if China were to invade Taiwan, but we can at the very least pretend that we care about their fate. It's a much better functioning democracy than ours. There was never a scenario in which Russian tanks were to get into Paris.
- fsckboy 8mo agothe Europeans have only ever purchased American products because they were cheaper by the feature, and there wasn't a political constituency to placate (see the [wine lake|wikipedia]). and the US in return. as it was, so shall it always be. any appetite to flush money down the drain because Greenland feels insulted will dull very very quickly. However as defense treaties have always been more fleeting than NATO has been, we can be sure the Europeans will quickly find better, more reliable partners than they've had in the US, no doubt at lower cost for all concerned.
- tensor 8mo agoThis is great. With more users alterantives will improve. The one place I would LOVE to see more effort at an international standard is in operating systems. And no just adopting Linux is not enough. It needs to ecompass the full breadth of Windows and MacOS and be as turn-key and good at integration as MacOS. The Linux ecosystem is just too fragmented and still caters too strongly to developers. A full stack international standard, including being able to deploy packaged priorietary software and drivers, would provide potentially real competition to Microsoft and Apple.
- LelouBil 8mo agoThe actual website listing all the tools of this office suite (in French) https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#products https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#products
- sylware 8mo ago... probably using whatng cartel web engines, and that would be ridiculous for sure.
- aussiegreenie 8mo agoJit.si supports the EU privacy rules
- Xmd5a 8mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLODO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLODO A Front for clandestine Operations? (Speculative Timeline) - April 6 & 8, 1980: Sabotage and arson against Philips Data Systems and CII-Honeywell-Bull in Toulouse. Speculation: French State Operation. A move to protect national technological sovereignty during the "Plan Calcul" era. - May 19, 1980: Arson attack on the archives of ICL (International Computers Limited) in Toulouse. Speculation: Continuation of the French State's "cleansing" of foreign influence. - September 11, 1980 & December 2, 1980: Attacks against a computing firm in Toulouse and the UAP (Union des Assurances de Paris) in Paris. Speculation: American Operation? Possible retaliation or disruption of French administrative networks. - January 28, 1983: Bombing of the new computer center at the Haute-Garonne Prefecture in Toulouse. Speculation: American Revenge. A direct hit against the French State's local administrative brain. - October 26, 1983: Total destruction by fire of the Sperry Univac offices (a US multinational) in Toulouse. Speculation: French Revenge. A final "tit-for-tat" response targeting a key asset of the US military-industrial complex on French soil.
- throwawayk7h 8mo agoThey've already invested in Matrix. Why not use that?
- kinow 8mo agoYeah, I remember reading about an article on France govt adopting element/matrix. Surprised it didn´t go mainstream in other departments/companies/people.
- tcfhgj 8mo agothough it's interesting it's using livekit which Element adopted as well for Element Call
- Arathorn 8mo agoYou can see uptake at https://stats.tchap.incubateur.net/public/dashboard/8c6560e3-c27a-487b-b242-eb1636912f1a https://stats.tchap.incubateur.net/public/dashboard/8c6560e3... - looks pretty mainstream. Visio could also use Matrix for E2EE & decentralisation by implementing MatrixRTC - we're talking to them about doing so.
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- another-account 8mo agoOught to add X to that list as well!
- cranberryturkey 8mo agoThey should just fund pairux
- submeta 8mo agoThe US has already employed its technology and financial instruments, including sanctions, to coerce and control its partners. Sanctioning an ICC prosecutor and subsequently restricting Microsoft’s access to his emails and documents are just a few instances of this. They have demonstrated their willingness to use their technology, financial instruments, and sanctions against their partners. It seems almost too late for Europe to achieve its independence in both technological and financial spheres.
- grougnax 8mo agoThey won’t be able to make products as great as here in the US
- tjomk 8mo agoThey don't need to. They need just good enough. Don't underestimate "Made in Europe", just like "Made in America"
- mg794613 8mo agoWe're not replacing services. We're replacing our dependence on the USA. Every choice comes with a cost. With allies like the USA, you don't need enemies.
- nbardy 8mo agoThey should probably fund their military first. It’s petulant the way the EU is throwing a hissy fit after we’ve had lop-sided trade deals for years and funding the entire NATO alliance ourselves. They act like we’re going to war with them when we’re asking for parity and for their self reliance to increase.
- perlgeek 8mo ago> They should probably fund their military first. They should do both. Resilience must be achieved in depth. > It’s petulant the way the EU is throwing a hissy fit after we’ve had lop-sided trade deals for years and funding the entire NATO alliance ourselves. Most of the outrage in the EU right now is about Trump's threats against another NATO country (Denmark / Greenland). The funding of the NATO has been slowly shifting for a few years already.
- varispeed 8mo agoComrade, what is the weather in St. Petersburg?
- michaelsshaw 8mo ago>They act like we’re going to war with them when we’re asking for parity and for their self reliance to increase. The US is literally threatening to invade an EU overseas territory.
- sambuccid 8mo agoThat's because not everyone thinks that the trade deals were lop-sided, and it's difficult to objectively determine if they are, given that trade deals are just another lever in the relationship between 2 countries, one lever among millions of levers, one that is constantly calibrated and moved depending on the other ones. In a system like this I think it's pretty difficult to say who's getting more and who's getting less. But Trump doesn't care what is true of false, so for him it's easy to just say what suits him best. Regarding the war, I can assure you that Trump not excluding to take Greenland my force has been seen by the EU as threat of starting a war, giving that Greenland is part of the EU. Also applying tariffs when European NATO countries sent some troops in Greenland has been perceived as: "Trump wanted to invade Greenland, he felt like EU countries wanted to defend it, so he imposed tariffs because he wanted to invade". I'm not saying everyone in EU is thinking this, but I think a lot of people did, and this is some context for you to try and understand europe's point of view.
- frostworx 8mo agon1, should drop X as well
- natas 8mo ago> France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc. The odds that France will provide a competing offering is pretty high, because, in this day and age, and with AI, it's fairly straightforward to do so. The problem is adoption, do you think people in the USA or elsewhere will install it? Does that mean that only French companies and the French will be able to talk to eachother? Seems somewhat limiting and will limit business expansion. Will the French government embed spyware in it, they can, since they'll be sponsoring this initiative, they've been intending to do with whatsapp and all the other messengers for years. Worrisome for the end user. I'm all for competition, and I hope France succeeds in building a good product, because competition is great for everyone and creates jobs, and I hope it's going to take off soon, we'll see, bonne chance!
- ares623 8mo agoFrance’s govt can probably mandate adoption in the guise of national security (which would be true tbh) and with the current rhetoric their people will be welcoming of it. It’ll probably suck but the tradeoffs could be worth it, not too unlike rationing during WW2 times. And I’m sure there are a lot of engineers and companies looking forward to getting that sweet govt contracts.
- k_bx 8mo agoSo I've opened their AWS replacement website (Outscale), Computing page. No dedicated servers (VM only). Ok let's check VM price https://en.outscale.com/customized-virtual-machines/ https://en.outscale.com/customized-virtual-machines/ Press the "Do you have a Cloud Project?" which is the only button? Oops! Something went wrong here. Is this supposed to be an AWS replacement?
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- tuetuopay 8mo agoOutscale is kind of the stereotypical bureaucratic French thing. It's made by Dassault, that's better known for industrial stuff (like SolidWorks), not for modern-ish software. For a more of an AWS replacement, look at Scaleway. It really is more what we think about when talking "public cloud": self-serve compute, with lots of managed services, actual API and Terraform, actual K8s, etc. (managed services is why I don't mention OVH, which is often touted as a "cloud provider", yet lacks a large managed services offering).
- skc 8mo agoThe irony of building 'sovereign' software on top of Windows and MacOS. Without a hardware or OS pivot, this feels less like independence and more like empty posturing.
- michaelsshaw 8mo agoThe French government has its own version of Ubuntu, used by law enforcent, and is supposedly slated to be used by all agencies in 2027.
- tsoukase 8mo agoThe reflex to bind Europe's IT with OSS is due to several factors, like Linus Torvalds being Finnish, Arch and SUSE having a European leadership, NEXT and OpenCloud started by German hands and an absence of a unicorn IT company in EU. Relying on OSS in continental level is a blessing and a curse. It can scale very well to an homogenous basis but it might not be organised well in national and regional level due to poor economic motivation. The good scenario is a development of a modified Linux kernel, named like Europix, with a userland consisting of a full packet of OS apps, interoperable and secure in public and private level. The private companies can earn public contracts for support.
- spiderfarmer 8mo agoI pulled all my servers from the US months ago. Everyone I talk to is doing the same. Tech giants are going to feel this, especially when the AI bubble is going to burst. I wish I could cancel my Office subscription but my kids still need it for school. I wrote them to take a hard look at that requirement.
- 627467 8mo agoIt will mean little if the infrastructure is still dependent on volatile partners (and I'm bundling allies and adversaries in this). The core problem is Europe has been very successful betting and building upon though choices made by others (eg. Cheap manufacture in China, cheap energy in Russia, cheap defense/capital from US, cheap manpower/migrants from developing countries...). Europe from its high ground flaunts this model to the whole world ("look at our development metrics! Our social spending") while completely ignoring the sustainability and the costs bore by others and neglecting its own responsibilities. And now everything is crashing down simultaneously.
- MrDresden 8mo agoYou say this like you are unaware of how the US has utilizied cheap manufacturing in China, relied on imported manpower from both developed and developing countries as well as, until recently, been a net importer of energy from other nations.
- Beretta_Vexee 8mo agoFrench report: The project presented is not new; it is a continuation of the Tixeo project (https://www.tixeo.com/en/secure-video-conferencing-solutions-tixeo/ https://www.tixeo.com/en/secure-video-conferencing-solutions... video-conferencing-service-tixeocloud/trial-tixeocloud/), which was already the recommended solution for French government officials, public companies and all large companies required to process confidential or classified data via video conferencing. Tixeo was fairly limited in its use and imposed on critical businesses (defence, nuclear, transport, energy, etc.). The aim is to extend the service to more areas, such as SMEs, universities, NGOs, etc., for all sensitive communications. I don't think the project is intended to replace Zoom and Teams for the general public. Most public ministries use Teams and the Office suite. French industries have been the target of quite a few cases of espionage by ‘advanced North American actors’. They have therefore been trying to distance themselves from US services for some time now (Google Tchap and Olvide).
- kuon 8mo agoAs a FOSS advocate, I am quite astonished that this space has no FOSS "product." I mean PBX has things like asterix. We have good servers like ejabberd and prosody for XMPP. There are excellent voice chats like mumble. Basically, Discord, but based on an open protocol to enable better interoperability. With a meeting functionality where you can send links that works directly in browser with no account. Also the discord video chat UI is garbage. I know there are things like revolt chat. But my point is, I'm surprised that this is not more "filled".
- trilogic 8mo agoEurope must have their own tools created from scratch. Replacing how, with which infrastructure? If you use existing libraries, don´t expect full ownership nor full privacy, same applies to hardware and cables. It is though a big step finally. It is a start, Viva la France :)
- freakynit 8mo agoI summarized all comments using LLM for better reading: https://hn-discussions.top/france-replace-video-conferencing-tools/ https://hn-discussions.top/france-replace-video-conferencing...
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