14 ms·

France's homegrown open source online office suite

818 points by nar001 8mo ago

Cynnabar 8mo ago
[flagged]
- nar001 8mo ago
  Exactly what it says on the tin, France's gov made an office suite, online based, and video calling as an alternative/sovereign version of GSuite/Office 365
- nixass 8mo ago
  Somewhat related, more overall context France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294
jmclnx 8mo ago
Very nice. You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence, but they do. Over the years I have heard of many good Open Source Projects coming out of France. I sometimes wonder if it is because of French vs English Language were you hardly hear of their projects in English speaking Countries.
- akdev1l 8mo ago
  Isn’t VLC French also?
  - jodrellblank 8mo ago
    OCaml and early Prolog are from France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Colmerauer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Colmerauer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Institute_for_Research_in_Computer_Science_and_Automation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Institute_for_Research_... (INRIA)
    - Galanwe 8mo ago
      Also QEmu and ffmpeg. Also Docker. Also Lichess. Also Scikit Learn.
- astrolx 8mo ago
  I think an unsung hero in making open source broadly known and adopted in France is Framasoft [https://framasoft.org/en/ https://framasoft.org/en/], a non-profit association. They have since many many years an initiative to de-google internet and provide free and hosted alternatives and resources.
  - BiteCode_dev 8mo ago
    +1 on this, they had an amazing presence in the French community for 20 years and many of us own them our passion for FOSS.
  - culi 8mo ago
    More people on HN seem to know of PeerTube than know of FramaSoft, the group that's building PeerTube
- caned 8mo ago
  Two words: Fabrice Bellard
- bsenftner 8mo ago
  The French have amazing technologists, I worked with many stunningly brilliant French men and women across 3D gaming, film and media production. However, culturally they end up in a little "French pod" when not working in France because they know how to and really enjoy vigorous debate. If one cannot hold their own in their free wheeling intellectualized conversation and debate style, one might end up feeling insulted and stop hanging out with the frogs. There also seems to be a deep cultural understanding of design that is not present in people, generally, from other nations. That creates some interesting perspectives in software interactive design.
- guerrilla 8mo ago
  > You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence France has always been super heavy on open source. They even used to host Les Trophées du Libre, international open-source software competition. FramaSoft (i.e. PeerTube) and VLC are also French.
- tokai 8mo ago
  >would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence You have not been paying attention.
ginko 8mo ago
What's the value of it being online? Surely being able to run it as a native application would be preferable?
- LunaSea 8mo ago
  It means that it is de-facto compatible with all operating systems. Also means that the tooling to make collaborative work in this suite possible already exists because it's a common use case on the web and less so on native software (see Microsoft Office vs. Microsoft 365 online).
  - mimasama 8mo ago
    Sure, "all" operating systems. "All" that is OSes that have a web browser built for it that at least supports [TransformStream](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/TransformStream https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/TransformSt...)... And the browser and spec written and maintained mostly by people outside of France. Kinda compromises the point of being "sovereign" doesn't it?
    - touisteur 8mo ago
      Forking Firefox whenever the rug is pulled seems doable (with elbow grease), and in the meantime Europeans can invest on problems that don't have an already mature fully open-source solution.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- ddulaney 8mo ago
  There are definitely some benefits! Installation and updates become trivial. Also, collaboration is generally easier, because all you have to do is send a link. These are the same reasons Google Docs took off, and they are real advantages.
- vman81 8mo ago
  Managing documents on the back end can be very sensible, depending on your work context. Not having to deal with installations is also a real advantage in a heterogeneous environment with a mix of US-controlled operating systems and unencumbered OSes. It also makes migration between them easier, since you only need a common browser to be supported.
goodmythical 8mo ago
For those unaware, this is likely in response to the current US political crisis in which the US might decide at any point spike the prices or stop offering licenses on Microsoft etc products.
- weberer 8mo ago
  Its part of La Suite which began planning in 2023. This is clearly marked in the linked README. Don't bring /r/politics level misinfo and speculation here.
- sejje 8mo ago
  The first version for the "docs" program was released in May 2024
- simion314 8mo ago
  This already happened when USA sanctioned ICC judge, blocking them from american services. With such special leadership I will not surprised USA to block politicians or citizens with influence from EU that do not align with extreme right views,
  - Muromec 8mo ago
    I posted about Amsterdam municipality digital strategy for next 10 years (tldr dont use azure clown for important stuff) yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46917768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46917768 That one explivitly cites the ICC judge incident as one of the reasons, even zo the motion to reduce dependence on American big tech was voted before that happened
  - 80696527890 8mo ago
    [flagged]
padjo 8mo ago
Makes sense, using an office suite hosted by a hostile power isn't a very smart longterm strategy.
- trolleski 8mo ago
  Politicians in the EU are complicit to say the least. And I hope they'll prove me wrong.
- Winblows11 8mo ago
  Yes I remember when UK regulator blocked Microsoft from buying Activision there were posts on r/Microsoft regarding their ability to send update to brick all Windows installs in UK and delete all Azure data of UK companies, how UK was a small insignificant market compared to BRICs so it wouldn't hurt MSFT stock price. Given JD Vance obviously hates UK/EU way more than Trump, and he may be next US president, he may in fact threaten Microsoft to do it against UK and EU.
  - bee_rider 8mo ago
    On one hand the dependence on Microsoft is generally bad. On the other, we shouldn’t take the opinions of the sort of fan who hangs around on a corporation’s subreddit too seriously.
- shermantanktop 8mo ago
  The trend up until the 2010s was that global companies were so big and ubiquitous that they could dictate the economic actions of nations, not the other way around. International military conflicts were influenced by the likes of Halliburton. Corporations were the new nation-states, countries were mere speed bumps in the flow of global capital. That was seen by some as a great thing, aligning everyone’s interests together and encouraging peace. In that world, France betting on Microsoft is not only benign, it’s a positive. That’s also the world of Davos and Jeffrey Epstein. We’re experiencing a global shift toward nationalism which has pushed back hard on that trend. There’s things to like about that and things to dislike, but those things differ wildly depending on your politics.
forty 8mo ago
Great, but why on GitHub? That doesn't seem very souverain to me
- progx 8mo ago
  I wait for frenchhub, in french only, no english translation, nothing. Typical french. Greetings from you EU neighbor.
  - bee_rider 8mo ago
    A lot of the documentation in La Suite seems to be available in English.
  - jodrellblank 8mo ago
    > frenchhub *Lieu de Rencontre Français Pour le Contrôle de Version
- Normal_gaussian 8mo ago
  The project benefits from the visibilityband community of GitHub and GitHub is completely replaceable with European hosted or self-hostable options should something untoward happen.
  - michelsedgh 8mo ago
    But they still chose an American company, github, lol ironic
    - nolroz 8mo ago
      It's the code that's hosted on GitHub, not the documents. Easier to move, easier to negotiate a move. You get visibility and easy distribution until they feel the need to bail.
    - seszett 8mo ago
      There's nothing ironic, as since the GP said there is no risk associated with GitHub. Git fundamentally prevents vendor lock-in and tampering, and the project is open, so the US have no leverage and pose no threat at all here.
dv_dt 8mo ago
Hmm, and what of https://cryptpad.fr/ https://cryptpad.fr/ Though they also seem to be on github https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad
- nickthesick 8mo ago
  Made X-Wiki unrelated just happen to be the same country
- jraph 8mo ago
  CryptPad is: - an office suite, where La Suite is at least partly a coherent package bundling existing software which has documents, chat, video calls, etc but wouldn't really play the role of an office suite IIUC - they serve different purposes mostly - E2EE, which comes with its unique set of benefits and drawbacks (and yes, sadly at XWiki SAS we host our code on GitHub too, I wish it wasn't like this)
okanat 8mo ago
Okay this is nowhere near an "Office suite". It is a cloud collaboration suite with a glorified markdown editor and with some extra utilities around. Almost nobody buys stuff like Google Docs and Microsoft Office for this reason. From my experience using open-source collaboration groupware like Nextcloud, their solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow. Only thing that got somewhere near of the commercial offering is OwnCloud's Infinity Scale (OCIS) which is written in Go. It is no surprise since OwnCloud is indeed running an open-core business and you cannot use their binaries in businesses. OpenCloud is the "open-source" fork but they are already in legal trouble with OwnCloud due to industrial espionage claims. If European governments are serious, the amount of money they _guarantee_ should be in the degree of tens of billions of Euros. Not fun 10k hackaton projects. The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it. And yes it will probably cause whatever current party to lose elections, independence has a price. It is high.
- admissionsguy 8mo ago
  > solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow True as it may be that they are slow, I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages. > The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it. You do you, but increasing taxes to build products to replace products built by private enterprise sounds like a 180 degree opposite of what Europe needs to prosper.
  - xedrac 8mo ago
    > I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages. Depends which ones. Python? Definitely a source of slowness.
    - admissionsguy 8mo ago
      Hard imagining well designed web app bottlenecked by server-side processing that is not offloaded to database, or done via bindings to libraries written in compiled languages.
matt-p 8mo ago
Office suite, cool! Looks Inside It's a Django app.
- mosselman 8mo ago
  And it isn't an office suite at all
bsenftner 8mo ago
I would not be surprised if American PACs adopted this out of concern that US based office suites are politically compromised.
ricardobeat 8mo ago
Why is Django so popular among open-source projects like these, especially government funded? I’ve never happened to see a commercial project use it in my twenty years in the field. Ruby/Go or even bun or node would be much more approachable and performant options today.
- LunaSea 8mo ago
  Bun is a very recent and thus unstable and immature project. It has also been acquired by Anthropic recently. Does not look like a great choice.
- dingi 8mo ago
  Django is boring in a best possible way. Rather than spending six months setting up a bunch of microservices, you spend couple weeks on Django and ship a working product. Built in admin dashboard for example is a godsend at small scale.
  - js4ever 8mo ago
    or now you spend couple of hours/days with AI and produce a Rust implementation that will smoke Django 100X
- petcat 8mo ago
  > I’ve never seen a commercial project use it in my twenty years in the field. This is very surprising to me considering some of the largest sites in the world are built on Django. Instagram, Pinterest, for instance. Large parts of stripe and Robinhood are implemented with Django. Eventbrite, bitbucket. I believe even Sentry is. All commercial products.
  - hobofan 8mo ago
    > stripe Stripe has always been a Ruby-heavy company.
  - macNchz 8mo ago
    Sentry is indeed, and is open source and self-hostable: https://github.com/getsentry/sentry https://github.com/getsentry/sentry It’s a pretty large app (I think >1M lines of Python). I ran a self hosted version for several years and found it performant and pretty easy to keep running and updated.
deleted 8mo ago
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sylware 8mo ago
Of course, it is not forcing to use any whatng cartel web engines namely has noscript/basic (x)html interop support (aka classic web) and/or with public and as simple as possible network protocols anyone can implement a rich GUI client for. Of course its SDK has components choosen with care to maximize alternative (present and future) availability and its code is not stored on microsoft github.com.
bsimpson 8mo ago
This has been on HN a lot recently. For instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
Sytten 8mo ago
It is interesting to see yjs with hoccuspocus being used. I am currently considering our options for real time document editing + full text search. Seems like a common approach is something like using yjs for sync with a temporary LSM storage like rocksdb for updates and then periodically snapshot to postgres for full text search and compaction.
- nickthesick 8mo ago
  Take a look at my Y.js sync server at https://teleportal.tools https://teleportal.tools if you are already using JS on your backend
ninalanyon 8mo ago
It's not an office suite and the linked page doesn't claim it is. The title should be changed.
YousefED 8mo ago
Great to see this on HN. fyi, La Suite is an umbrella project built by DINUM in France that started several years ago, mainly to enable people in the public administration to use more independent tools. It's built in-house, often on top of other open source technologies. E.g.: Matrix powers chat and LiveKit powers Visio (which was recently featured on HN as well when they announced it's rolled out to replace Zoom / Teams, etc [1]) I'm fortunate to be collaborating with them as their Docs product is built on top of our open source BlockNote text editor (https://www.blocknotejs.org https://www.blocknotejs.org). Docs specifically started as an international collaboration with Germany [2] to explore how different EU countries can collaborate in building sovereign workplace solutions (several other countries including NL have shown interest as well). They're actively supporting us, and related projects like Yjs (https://yjs.dev https://yjs.dev) by sponsoring feature development. I'm sure many of the team members will follow along here as well! Happy to answer any questions. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294 [2] https://www.zendis.de/en https://www.zendis.de/en
- nickthesick 8mo ago
  Glad to be working as part of this initiative too!
  - nhatcher 8mo ago
    Hi! Congratulations to you and Yousef. And I am lucky enough to be in a position from learning from both of you. Anyone think what they might about La Suite, but blocknote is a solid product!
    - nickthesick 8mo ago
      Very much appreciated! We put a lot of effort into it!
- drstewart 8mo ago
  [flagged]
GuB-42 8mo ago
On this topic, I think it is worth mentioning Framasoft [1] It is a French organization that offers plenty of alternatives to Google and other big tech products. A lot of them are just rebranded and hosted open source software, but they also develop their own, such as PeerTube and Framaprout (the last one is a joke, but PeerTube isn't). [1] https://framasoft.org/ https://framasoft.org/
- jonathanstrange 8mo ago
  I hate to say it because it's cute but that website is not going to win over large companies to use these tools.
  - GuB-42 8mo ago
    I don't think they can win over large company, they are just a small nonprofit organization, large companies want to work with other large companies. Where they can make a difference is for fellow organizations and maybe small companies. A lot of them go to Google because that's the most convenient, even if it sometimes against their principles, they are proposing an alternative. One minor criticism I have is that while they are not hiding the fact that they are rebranding off-the-shelf free software, they could give them a bit more visibility, should users want to self host at some point.
  - Kailhus 8mo ago
    The arts look a lot like Ankama work https://www.ankama.com https://www.ankama.com
- culi 8mo ago
  Yup, I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned earlier but they're the ones behind PeerTube (which I see posted on HN a lot) and many other tools. They've been building google alternatives for over two decades now and many of their tools are quite mature https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/ https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/
tjwebbnorfolk 8mo ago
This is a toy. It really makes it look like they aren't that serious.
- halapro 8mo ago
  It's typical of non-technical people to ask for "like Facebook, but x y z." They just don't know the magnitude of effort required behind these projects.
klaustopher 8mo ago
Also worth looking at: - Germany‘s OpenDesk: https://www.opendesk.eu/en https://www.opendesk.eu/en - Netherland‘s MijnBureau: https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau-infra/ https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau-infra/
- drcongo 8mo ago
  I'm intrigued as to why both these, and the Suite Numerique have chose Element / Matrix as the chat component. Every time I've tried to use Element / Matrix it has failed dismally for me and everyone else in whatever community is trialling it. Element itself was so buggy as to be unusable.
  - codethief 8mo ago
    I don't use Element myself but there was a recent HN discussion where people said it had improved significantly in last year or two.
    - ptman 8mo ago
      It both still has problems and has been improving for all of its existence. It's been working for my usecases for years
    - lucb1e 8mo ago
      After having the same experience negative some time before Covid, I was kindly invited late last year to a homeserver of a local hackerspace and I gave it another try. I cannot send messages to people on another homeserver (such as the obscure matrix.org one) whereas other people can, as well as some other issues which I forgot by now. Not at all usable. It was a short-lived stint and I didn't even try to enable encryption this time :(
      - Arathorn 8mo ago
        this sounds like something super weird about the setup - it really should just work. what client and server was it?
znort_ 8mo ago
bonjour, je suis clippy ...
ChrisArchitect 8mo ago
Another one? Previously: This week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294 2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
ThinkBeat 8mo ago
The big problem EUs continuous big talk on digital sovereignty, which is a good and vital concept, is that funding is ridiculously lacking. Terms used like; “European hyperscale cloud” “Sovereign infrastructure” “Strategic autonomy” “European data centers for critical workloads” Which ended up in various efforts and projects Digital Europe Programme, Recovery and Resilience Facility, IPCE (I am not deeply familiar with EU projects) I believe funding was around low hundreds of millions (€) total To build one hyperscaler region might cost around €10 billion. The second problem is that systems that were suggested out of it still relied on US software stack, US computers, etc. It is not like the EU member states could not fund it, some estimates say aggregated EU and member states have spent €350 billion in Ukraine. That is not to say they should not do that, nor to suggest you have to chose one or the other but it is demonstration that EU+Member states can fund massive efforts, If deemed important enough. and EU+Memberstates so far have not felt an urgency or will to really invest in digital sovereignty.
- Certhas 8mo ago
  The EU doesn't really fund many things directly. It's total annual budget is just 170 billion euros. It can fund research and coordination projects but at the end of the day the EU is mostly a coordination mechanism for sovereign states. Looking purely at EU projects is not really a useful lense to get an idea of what is happening...
guerrilla 8mo ago
What's wrong with libreoffice and collabra?
- celsoazevedo 8mo ago
  > What's wrong with libreoffice I'm a very light user and only moved to onlyoffice because it was freezing[0] on my then new laptop, but at least on mac, I feel like it needs a UI refresh, icons that are not blurry, a look at the performance when doing basic tasks, etc. It's free and opensource, which is good, but it's not as polished as other paid alternatives. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43038942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43038942
johnjames87 8mo ago
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deleted 8mo ago
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highpost 8mo ago
I wish them the very best, but I don't understand why it doesn't handle OpenDocument Format (ODF) natively.
julianozen 8mo ago
This is something we must be angry with our tech leaders for They thought they could support trump because they were upset with the democrats policies on crypto and AI cautiousness But instead they got someone willing to break the world order and our alliances which will harm tech growth
Insensitivity 8mo ago
I was looking at the Meet repository as an example, people literally don't know how to write React, without drowning in `useEffect`, `eslint-disable`, `any`. React has it's issues (and a ton of them), but writing code like this, I expect it to end up exactly like Microsoft Teams quality wise. Honestly, at that point, it's indistinguishable from LLM slop
- shepherdjerred 8mo ago
  I have met very few devs who know how to avoid useEffect
- moffkalast 8mo ago
  Why would one decide to even go with React in recent years anyway? Strangely I've seen it happen a lot too. I'd have thought that Vue or Svelte would be a slam dunk choice. Do project managers love bloat and lag or something?
  - Insensitivity 8mo ago
    I personally don't mind React, but I do acknowledge, after using it for a couple of years, that it seems to be a magnet for issues. It's the kind of framework, where if you're not writing properly, mostly like [Thinking in React](https://react.dev/learn/thinking-in-react https://react.dev/learn/thinking-in-react) (with some caveat for niche performance optimizations), you're going to have a rough time, and you're going to make life miserable for anyone that does know what they're doing It has a weird learning curve, where you can ship something somewhat working, fairly fast, but to write it properly, with no bugs, you need to understand a lot of niche React-specific things, and their solutions (and those solutions are never useEffect https://react.dev/learn/you-might-not-need-an-effect https://react.dev/learn/you-might-not-need-an-effect). At that point, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't already experienced with React. It's been an uphill battle, trying to work with anyone that is using React, without understanding how to write properly.
  - vldx 8mo ago
    The reactivity model fits well in real-time applications; perhaps SolidJS is better alternative in this context, though.
deleted 8mo ago
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defraudbah 8mo ago
I came to bash on it but it looks nice, well done France!
iambateman 8mo ago
Honest question…given how developed our sensibilities are around docs, file storage, and spreadsheets, what is the hard part to this? Don’t get me wrong…something is hard…I still use Microsoft Word because I feel like I have to. But what is keeping the industry from building a word processor that doesn’t suck and is capable of interfacing with .docx files?
- 3eb7988a1663 8mo ago
  Word has a billion features you did not know that exist. Getting something Word shaped is probably straight-forward enough (how long did it take to make Google Docs), but getting those dangling features and quirks would be a long haul. Mimicking Excel - woof. This one is used by so many people in different ways, that unless you offer 1:1 bug compatibility, it would be challenging to get 100% of people to meet everyone's current use case.
Steelclearance 8mo ago
Nice to see this kind of initiative, but looks like too little too late IMO. Reminds me of Nextcloud, which is great but quite slow.
jayde2767 8mo ago
Nice to see the "true spirit" of OpenSource being practiced and growing in Europe...I hope other countries jump into this as well, with support and resources.
assaddayinh 8mo ago
The french can make mountains move for very little money. There army capabilities compared to the us relative to the investment is outstanding. Wouldn't wonder if they dethroned Microsoft office by strategically supporting open source.
karel-3d 8mo ago
It's very on-brand for France that the website is in French only, no English
- jrcplus 8mo ago
  +1. I got excited but https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ doesn't seem to be in English or any other European language. If you guys are hoping for Europe-wide adoption, start there.
virdev 8mo ago
Lasuite Docs PM here. Awesome to see we’ve made it top the first page again! Thanks for the interest :) I’ve compiled a bunch of answers in an FAQ on this doc https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-c58481dc8374/ https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-... Cheers!
- gusfoo 8mo ago
  Love the fact that you use USA date format, not rest-of-world. Love the fact that your AI customer service bot takes a question and then asks for an email address for a reply. Love your incoherently bolded statements: "The Docs app is a note taking and knowledge management software. Love how the vast amount of emojis really clarify things and help the reader. s/love/hate/g
- lucb1e 8mo ago
  Thanks for posting an actual link to a demo, even if read-only. I tried some of the buttons on the site with rudimentary understanding of french, but all I found was login pages
- w4yai 8mo ago
  Vive la France !
- phtrivier 8mo ago
  Honest question, though I suspect you won't be able to give a complete answer : how shielded are you from political changes ? When the next president takes office, and they're more aligned with Trump than the current administration, will it also cause a backlash ? Or do you feel shielded by the "we're cheaper than MS licenses" ?
IlikeMadison 8mo ago
Python and TypeScript... hard pass. Mediocre software made by mediocre web developers. Imagine a car manufacturer using wood instead of steel because they can only afford to pay cheap lumberjacks.
- gavmor 8mo ago
  Ouch, harsh words! But, what would be your stack of choice? Or, what stack gives you the most confidence?
virdev 8mo ago
Shout out to Yjs, ProseMirror and BlockNote on which we relied to build LaSuite Docs
fleroviumna 8mo ago
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mytailorisrich 8mo ago
The problem is that open-source projects funded by the taxpayer bring nothing long term to create companies that can compete or generate economic growth or develop future industries. They would be much better off creating a more business friendly environment and supporting private businesses through grants, procurements, etc the way the US are good at.
- SideburnsOfDoom 8mo ago
  This comment misses the point and argues against something unrelated. It's fundamentally a data sovereignty and security move, not a commercial one. It's neither pro or anti business. This or "creating a more business friendly environment" policies is a false dichotomy. That could be done too via other means. It is unrelated. Speaking about this "business friendly" only is either misdirection or myopic.
  - mytailorisrich 8mo ago
    You seem to be arguing for the sake of argument while avoiding the substance of my point by discarding it as "unrelated" while it is fundamentally on point. If the aim is indeed sovereignty, data and software (and this is software not data), and in general, then they need an effective and comprehensive plan. I think taxpayer-funded state-developed open-source software brings very little at a high cost and can even be counter-productive. Frankly I think it is apolitical move internal to the French state to keep the gavy train coming to government agencies. Rather I think the US, and also China that does it even more, are much more effective at this by throwing money at the marketplace to develop a whole ecosystem competitively that can also compete globally. An important thing to note here is that EU rules prevent a lot of state action (for instance they would not be allowed to buy only French cars or do things seen as direct subsidies, etc) France will continue to fall further behind unless it really gets it act together, which is unlikely TBH.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 8mo ago
      You're just repeating your assumptions - "taxpayer-funded state-developed is bad", but "marketplace competitively" good. I'm not convinced. You're not engaging with the sovereignty aspect - "compete globally" isn't the main goal at all as I said above, you're just restating you misconception. And so this part comes across as pure projection: > You seem to be arguing for the sake of argument while avoiding the substance of my point
johnea 8mo ago
And somehow, during the effort to achieve digital sovereigncy, they still manage to host the source on the Microsoft property of github 8-/ Given that the only step necessary to host git on the internet is making port 22 publicly accessible, I fail to see why so many projects are hosted on this malware site...
patrick4urcloud 8mo ago
Good! I'll definitely give it a try!! we still need a good email server system in open source and simple to install / maintain ?
hollow-moe 8mo ago
obviously hosted on github what a joke.
tomik99 8mo ago
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vikkymelani 8mo ago
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aeuropean12 8mo ago
So I read up on this, and it would be great to learn more. Such as.. API & Third-party Integrations: Does La Suite expose APIs that allow integration with external tools and services? What's the current roadmap for pre-built connectors or integrations with commonly-used government systems? Cross-Tool Workflows: Beyond the "same interface" access, how seamlessly can users automate workflows across different La Suite tools? For example, can a Visio meeting recording automatically trigger document creation in Docs, or data collection in Grist? Does La Suite support webhooks, automation rules, or workflow orchestration (IFTTT-style logic) to reduce manual repetitive tasks? Identity & Access Management Integration: Beyond ProConnect, can La Suite integrate with existing government LDAP/Active Directory systems for organizations with different identity providers? Data Synchronization: Are there automated sync capabilities between Grist databases and other data sources, or between Fichiers and external file storage systems? Export Format Coverage: The site mentions reversibility in standard formats (.ppt, .xls, .odt). Does this apply equally to all tools? Specifically, what export formats are supported from Docs, Grist, and other collaborative tools? Import Capabilities: Can users import content from competing tools? For instance, can users migrate Grist tables from Excel with full formula preservation, or import documents from other collaborative platforms? When collaborating in Docs or Grist, can users work with non-native file formats (e.g., editing .docx files directly without conversion loss)? Metadata Preservation: Does La Suite preserve document metadata, formatting, comments, and revision history when exporting and re-importing files? Interoperability with Open Standards: Beyond exporting to common formats, does La Suite use open file standards internally (e.g., ODF for documents, OpenDocument Spreadsheet for Grist)? Lock-in Prevention: Are there documented procedures and guarantees for bulk data export in case an organization decides to migrate away from La Suite?

818 points by nar001 8mo ago

Cynnabar 8mo ago

[flagged]

nar001 8mo ago
Exactly what it says on the tin, France's gov made an office suite, online based, and video calling as an alternative/sovereign version of GSuite/Office 365
nixass 8mo ago
Somewhat related, more overall context France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294

jmclnx 8mo ago

Very nice. You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence, but they do. Over the years I have heard of many good Open Source Projects coming out of France. I sometimes wonder if it is because of French vs English Language were you hardly hear of their projects in English speaking Countries.

akdev1l 8mo ago
Isn’t VLC French also?
- jodrellblank 8mo ago
  OCaml and early Prolog are from France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Colmerauer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Colmerauer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Institute_for_Research_in_Computer_Science_and_Automation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Institute_for_Research_... (INRIA)
  - Galanwe 8mo ago
    Also QEmu and ffmpeg. Also Docker. Also Lichess. Also Scikit Learn.
astrolx 8mo ago
I think an unsung hero in making open source broadly known and adopted in France is Framasoft [https://framasoft.org/en/ https://framasoft.org/en/], a non-profit association. They have since many many years an initiative to de-google internet and provide free and hosted alternatives and resources.
- BiteCode_dev 8mo ago
  +1 on this, they had an amazing presence in the French community for 20 years and many of us own them our passion for FOSS.
- culi 8mo ago
  More people on HN seem to know of PeerTube than know of FramaSoft, the group that's building PeerTube
caned 8mo ago
Two words: Fabrice Bellard
bsenftner 8mo ago
The French have amazing technologists, I worked with many stunningly brilliant French men and women across 3D gaming, film and media production. However, culturally they end up in a little "French pod" when not working in France because they know how to and really enjoy vigorous debate. If one cannot hold their own in their free wheeling intellectualized conversation and debate style, one might end up feeling insulted and stop hanging out with the frogs. There also seems to be a deep cultural understanding of design that is not present in people, generally, from other nations. That creates some interesting perspectives in software interactive design.
guerrilla 8mo ago
> You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence France has always been super heavy on open source. They even used to host Les Trophées du Libre, international open-source software competition. FramaSoft (i.e. PeerTube) and VLC are also French.
tokai 8mo ago
>would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence You have not been paying attention.

ginko 8mo ago

What's the value of it being online? Surely being able to run it as a native application would be preferable?

LunaSea 8mo ago
It means that it is de-facto compatible with all operating systems. Also means that the tooling to make collaborative work in this suite possible already exists because it's a common use case on the web and less so on native software (see Microsoft Office vs. Microsoft 365 online).
- mimasama 8mo ago
  Sure, "all" operating systems. "All" that is OSes that have a web browser built for it that at least supports [TransformStream](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/TransformStream https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/TransformSt...)... And the browser and spec written and maintained mostly by people outside of France. Kinda compromises the point of being "sovereign" doesn't it?
  - touisteur 8mo ago
    Forking Firefox whenever the rug is pulled seems doable (with elbow grease), and in the meantime Europeans can invest on problems that don't have an already mature fully open-source solution.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
ddulaney 8mo ago
There are definitely some benefits! Installation and updates become trivial. Also, collaboration is generally easier, because all you have to do is send a link. These are the same reasons Google Docs took off, and they are real advantages.
vman81 8mo ago
Managing documents on the back end can be very sensible, depending on your work context. Not having to deal with installations is also a real advantage in a heterogeneous environment with a mix of US-controlled operating systems and unencumbered OSes. It also makes migration between them easier, since you only need a common browser to be supported.

goodmythical 8mo ago

For those unaware, this is likely in response to the current US political crisis in which the US might decide at any point spike the prices or stop offering licenses on Microsoft etc products.

weberer 8mo ago
Its part of La Suite which began planning in 2023. This is clearly marked in the linked README. Don't bring /r/politics level misinfo and speculation here.
sejje 8mo ago
The first version for the "docs" program was released in May 2024
simion314 8mo ago
This already happened when USA sanctioned ICC judge, blocking them from american services. With such special leadership I will not surprised USA to block politicians or citizens with influence from EU that do not align with extreme right views,
- Muromec 8mo ago
  I posted about Amsterdam municipality digital strategy for next 10 years (tldr dont use azure clown for important stuff) yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46917768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46917768 That one explivitly cites the ICC judge incident as one of the reasons, even zo the motion to reduce dependence on American big tech was voted before that happened
- 80696527890 8mo ago
  [flagged]

padjo 8mo ago

Makes sense, using an office suite hosted by a hostile power isn't a very smart longterm strategy.

trolleski 8mo ago
Politicians in the EU are complicit to say the least. And I hope they'll prove me wrong.
Winblows11 8mo ago
Yes I remember when UK regulator blocked Microsoft from buying Activision there were posts on r/Microsoft regarding their ability to send update to brick all Windows installs in UK and delete all Azure data of UK companies, how UK was a small insignificant market compared to BRICs so it wouldn't hurt MSFT stock price. Given JD Vance obviously hates UK/EU way more than Trump, and he may be next US president, he may in fact threaten Microsoft to do it against UK and EU.
- bee_rider 8mo ago
  On one hand the dependence on Microsoft is generally bad. On the other, we shouldn’t take the opinions of the sort of fan who hangs around on a corporation’s subreddit too seriously.
shermantanktop 8mo ago
The trend up until the 2010s was that global companies were so big and ubiquitous that they could dictate the economic actions of nations, not the other way around. International military conflicts were influenced by the likes of Halliburton. Corporations were the new nation-states, countries were mere speed bumps in the flow of global capital. That was seen by some as a great thing, aligning everyone’s interests together and encouraging peace. In that world, France betting on Microsoft is not only benign, it’s a positive. That’s also the world of Davos and Jeffrey Epstein. We’re experiencing a global shift toward nationalism which has pushed back hard on that trend. There’s things to like about that and things to dislike, but those things differ wildly depending on your politics.

forty 8mo ago

Great, but why on GitHub? That doesn't seem very souverain to me

progx 8mo ago
I wait for frenchhub, in french only, no english translation, nothing. Typical french. Greetings from you EU neighbor.
- bee_rider 8mo ago
  A lot of the documentation in La Suite seems to be available in English.
- jodrellblank 8mo ago
  > frenchhub *Lieu de Rencontre Français Pour le Contrôle de Version
Normal_gaussian 8mo ago
The project benefits from the visibilityband community of GitHub and GitHub is completely replaceable with European hosted or self-hostable options should something untoward happen.
- michelsedgh 8mo ago
  But they still chose an American company, github, lol ironic
  - nolroz 8mo ago
    It's the code that's hosted on GitHub, not the documents. Easier to move, easier to negotiate a move. You get visibility and easy distribution until they feel the need to bail.
  - seszett 8mo ago
    There's nothing ironic, as since the GP said there is no risk associated with GitHub. Git fundamentally prevents vendor lock-in and tampering, and the project is open, so the US have no leverage and pose no threat at all here.

dv_dt 8mo ago

Hmm, and what of https://cryptpad.fr/ https://cryptpad.fr/ Though they also seem to be on github https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad

nickthesick 8mo ago
Made X-Wiki unrelated just happen to be the same country
jraph 8mo ago
CryptPad is: - an office suite, where La Suite is at least partly a coherent package bundling existing software which has documents, chat, video calls, etc but wouldn't really play the role of an office suite IIUC - they serve different purposes mostly - E2EE, which comes with its unique set of benefits and drawbacks (and yes, sadly at XWiki SAS we host our code on GitHub too, I wish it wasn't like this)

okanat 8mo ago

Okay this is nowhere near an "Office suite". It is a cloud collaboration suite with a glorified markdown editor and with some extra utilities around. Almost nobody buys stuff like Google Docs and Microsoft Office for this reason. From my experience using open-source collaboration groupware like Nextcloud, their solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow. Only thing that got somewhere near of the commercial offering is OwnCloud's Infinity Scale (OCIS) which is written in Go. It is no surprise since OwnCloud is indeed running an open-core business and you cannot use their binaries in businesses. OpenCloud is the "open-source" fork but they are already in legal trouble with OwnCloud due to industrial espionage claims. If European governments are serious, the amount of money they _guarantee_ should be in the degree of tens of billions of Euros. Not fun 10k hackaton projects. The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it. And yes it will probably cause whatever current party to lose elections, independence has a price. It is high.

admissionsguy 8mo ago
> solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow True as it may be that they are slow, I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages. > The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it. You do you, but increasing taxes to build products to replace products built by private enterprise sounds like a 180 degree opposite of what Europe needs to prosper.
- xedrac 8mo ago
  > I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages. Depends which ones. Python? Definitely a source of slowness.
  - admissionsguy 8mo ago
    Hard imagining well designed web app bottlenecked by server-side processing that is not offloaded to database, or done via bindings to libraries written in compiled languages.

matt-p 8mo ago

Office suite, cool! Looks Inside It's a Django app.

mosselman 8mo ago
And it isn't an office suite at all

bsenftner 8mo ago

I would not be surprised if American PACs adopted this out of concern that US based office suites are politically compromised.

ricardobeat 8mo ago

Why is Django so popular among open-source projects like these, especially government funded? I’ve never happened to see a commercial project use it in my twenty years in the field. Ruby/Go or even bun or node would be much more approachable and performant options today.

LunaSea 8mo ago
Bun is a very recent and thus unstable and immature project. It has also been acquired by Anthropic recently. Does not look like a great choice.
dingi 8mo ago
Django is boring in a best possible way. Rather than spending six months setting up a bunch of microservices, you spend couple weeks on Django and ship a working product. Built in admin dashboard for example is a godsend at small scale.
- js4ever 8mo ago
  or now you spend couple of hours/days with AI and produce a Rust implementation that will smoke Django 100X
petcat 8mo ago
> I’ve never seen a commercial project use it in my twenty years in the field. This is very surprising to me considering some of the largest sites in the world are built on Django. Instagram, Pinterest, for instance. Large parts of stripe and Robinhood are implemented with Django. Eventbrite, bitbucket. I believe even Sentry is. All commercial products.
- hobofan 8mo ago
  > stripe Stripe has always been a Ruby-heavy company.
- macNchz 8mo ago
  Sentry is indeed, and is open source and self-hostable: https://github.com/getsentry/sentry https://github.com/getsentry/sentry It’s a pretty large app (I think >1M lines of Python). I ran a self hosted version for several years and found it performant and pretty easy to keep running and updated.

deleted 8mo ago

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sylware 8mo ago

Of course, it is not forcing to use any whatng cartel web engines namely has noscript/basic (x)html interop support (aka classic web) and/or with public and as simple as possible network protocols anyone can implement a rich GUI client for. Of course its SDK has components choosen with care to maximize alternative (present and future) availability and its code is not stored on microsoft github.com.

bsimpson 8mo ago

This has been on HN a lot recently. For instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668

Sytten 8mo ago

It is interesting to see yjs with hoccuspocus being used. I am currently considering our options for real time document editing + full text search. Seems like a common approach is something like using yjs for sync with a temporary LSM storage like rocksdb for updates and then periodically snapshot to postgres for full text search and compaction.

nickthesick 8mo ago
Take a look at my Y.js sync server at https://teleportal.tools https://teleportal.tools if you are already using JS on your backend

ninalanyon 8mo ago

It's not an office suite and the linked page doesn't claim it is. The title should be changed.

YousefED 8mo ago

Great to see this on HN. fyi, La Suite is an umbrella project built by DINUM in France that started several years ago, mainly to enable people in the public administration to use more independent tools. It's built in-house, often on top of other open source technologies. E.g.: Matrix powers chat and LiveKit powers Visio (which was recently featured on HN as well when they announced it's rolled out to replace Zoom / Teams, etc [1]) I'm fortunate to be collaborating with them as their Docs product is built on top of our open source BlockNote text editor (https://www.blocknotejs.org https://www.blocknotejs.org). Docs specifically started as an international collaboration with Germany [2] to explore how different EU countries can collaborate in building sovereign workplace solutions (several other countries including NL have shown interest as well). They're actively supporting us, and related projects like Yjs (https://yjs.dev https://yjs.dev) by sponsoring feature development. I'm sure many of the team members will follow along here as well! Happy to answer any questions. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294 [2] https://www.zendis.de/en https://www.zendis.de/en

nickthesick 8mo ago
Glad to be working as part of this initiative too!
- nhatcher 8mo ago
  Hi! Congratulations to you and Yousef. And I am lucky enough to be in a position from learning from both of you. Anyone think what they might about La Suite, but blocknote is a solid product!
  - nickthesick 8mo ago
    Very much appreciated! We put a lot of effort into it!
drstewart 8mo ago
[flagged]

GuB-42 8mo ago

On this topic, I think it is worth mentioning Framasoft [1] It is a French organization that offers plenty of alternatives to Google and other big tech products. A lot of them are just rebranded and hosted open source software, but they also develop their own, such as PeerTube and Framaprout (the last one is a joke, but PeerTube isn't). [1] https://framasoft.org/ https://framasoft.org/

jonathanstrange 8mo ago
I hate to say it because it's cute but that website is not going to win over large companies to use these tools.
- GuB-42 8mo ago
  I don't think they can win over large company, they are just a small nonprofit organization, large companies want to work with other large companies. Where they can make a difference is for fellow organizations and maybe small companies. A lot of them go to Google because that's the most convenient, even if it sometimes against their principles, they are proposing an alternative. One minor criticism I have is that while they are not hiding the fact that they are rebranding off-the-shelf free software, they could give them a bit more visibility, should users want to self host at some point.
- Kailhus 8mo ago
  The arts look a lot like Ankama work https://www.ankama.com https://www.ankama.com
culi 8mo ago
Yup, I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned earlier but they're the ones behind PeerTube (which I see posted on HN a lot) and many other tools. They've been building google alternatives for over two decades now and many of their tools are quite mature https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/ https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/

tjwebbnorfolk 8mo ago

This is a toy. It really makes it look like they aren't that serious.

halapro 8mo ago
It's typical of non-technical people to ask for "like Facebook, but x y z." They just don't know the magnitude of effort required behind these projects.

klaustopher 8mo ago

Also worth looking at: - Germany‘s OpenDesk: https://www.opendesk.eu/en https://www.opendesk.eu/en - Netherland‘s MijnBureau: https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau-infra/ https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau-infra/

drcongo 8mo ago
I'm intrigued as to why both these, and the Suite Numerique have chose Element / Matrix as the chat component. Every time I've tried to use Element / Matrix it has failed dismally for me and everyone else in whatever community is trialling it. Element itself was so buggy as to be unusable.
- codethief 8mo ago
  I don't use Element myself but there was a recent HN discussion where people said it had improved significantly in last year or two.
  - ptman 8mo ago
    It both still has problems and has been improving for all of its existence. It's been working for my usecases for years
  - lucb1e 8mo ago
    After having the same experience negative some time before Covid, I was kindly invited late last year to a homeserver of a local hackerspace and I gave it another try. I cannot send messages to people on another homeserver (such as the obscure matrix.org one) whereas other people can, as well as some other issues which I forgot by now. Not at all usable. It was a short-lived stint and I didn't even try to enable encryption this time :(
    - Arathorn 8mo ago
      this sounds like something super weird about the setup - it really should just work. what client and server was it?

znort_ 8mo ago

bonjour, je suis clippy ...

ChrisArchitect 8mo ago

Another one? Previously: This week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294 2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668

ThinkBeat 8mo ago

The big problem EUs continuous big talk on digital sovereignty, which is a good and vital concept, is that funding is ridiculously lacking. Terms used like; “European hyperscale cloud” “Sovereign infrastructure” “Strategic autonomy” “European data centers for critical workloads” Which ended up in various efforts and projects Digital Europe Programme, Recovery and Resilience Facility, IPCE (I am not deeply familiar with EU projects) I believe funding was around low hundreds of millions (€) total To build one hyperscaler region might cost around €10 billion. The second problem is that systems that were suggested out of it still relied on US software stack, US computers, etc. It is not like the EU member states could not fund it, some estimates say aggregated EU and member states have spent €350 billion in Ukraine. That is not to say they should not do that, nor to suggest you have to chose one or the other but it is demonstration that EU+Member states can fund massive efforts, If deemed important enough. and EU+Memberstates so far have not felt an urgency or will to really invest in digital sovereignty.

Certhas 8mo ago
The EU doesn't really fund many things directly. It's total annual budget is just 170 billion euros. It can fund research and coordination projects but at the end of the day the EU is mostly a coordination mechanism for sovereign states. Looking purely at EU projects is not really a useful lense to get an idea of what is happening...

guerrilla 8mo ago

What's wrong with libreoffice and collabra?

celsoazevedo 8mo ago
> What's wrong with libreoffice I'm a very light user and only moved to onlyoffice because it was freezing[0] on my then new laptop, but at least on mac, I feel like it needs a UI refresh, icons that are not blurry, a look at the performance when doing basic tasks, etc. It's free and opensource, which is good, but it's not as polished as other paid alternatives. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43038942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43038942

johnjames87 8mo ago

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deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

highpost 8mo ago

I wish them the very best, but I don't understand why it doesn't handle OpenDocument Format (ODF) natively.

julianozen 8mo ago

This is something we must be angry with our tech leaders for They thought they could support trump because they were upset with the democrats policies on crypto and AI cautiousness But instead they got someone willing to break the world order and our alliances which will harm tech growth

Insensitivity 8mo ago

I was looking at the Meet repository as an example, people literally don't know how to write React, without drowning in `useEffect`, `eslint-disable`, `any`. React has it's issues (and a ton of them), but writing code like this, I expect it to end up exactly like Microsoft Teams quality wise. Honestly, at that point, it's indistinguishable from LLM slop

shepherdjerred 8mo ago
I have met very few devs who know how to avoid useEffect
moffkalast 8mo ago
Why would one decide to even go with React in recent years anyway? Strangely I've seen it happen a lot too. I'd have thought that Vue or Svelte would be a slam dunk choice. Do project managers love bloat and lag or something?
- Insensitivity 8mo ago
  I personally don't mind React, but I do acknowledge, after using it for a couple of years, that it seems to be a magnet for issues. It's the kind of framework, where if you're not writing properly, mostly like [Thinking in React](https://react.dev/learn/thinking-in-react https://react.dev/learn/thinking-in-react) (with some caveat for niche performance optimizations), you're going to have a rough time, and you're going to make life miserable for anyone that does know what they're doing It has a weird learning curve, where you can ship something somewhat working, fairly fast, but to write it properly, with no bugs, you need to understand a lot of niche React-specific things, and their solutions (and those solutions are never useEffect https://react.dev/learn/you-might-not-need-an-effect https://react.dev/learn/you-might-not-need-an-effect). At that point, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't already experienced with React. It's been an uphill battle, trying to work with anyone that is using React, without understanding how to write properly.
- vldx 8mo ago
  The reactivity model fits well in real-time applications; perhaps SolidJS is better alternative in this context, though.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

defraudbah 8mo ago

I came to bash on it but it looks nice, well done France!

iambateman 8mo ago

Honest question…given how developed our sensibilities are around docs, file storage, and spreadsheets, what is the hard part to this? Don’t get me wrong…something is hard…I still use Microsoft Word because I feel like I have to. But what is keeping the industry from building a word processor that doesn’t suck and is capable of interfacing with .docx files?

3eb7988a1663 8mo ago
Word has a billion features you did not know that exist. Getting something Word shaped is probably straight-forward enough (how long did it take to make Google Docs), but getting those dangling features and quirks would be a long haul. Mimicking Excel - woof. This one is used by so many people in different ways, that unless you offer 1:1 bug compatibility, it would be challenging to get 100% of people to meet everyone's current use case.

Steelclearance 8mo ago

Nice to see this kind of initiative, but looks like too little too late IMO. Reminds me of Nextcloud, which is great but quite slow.

jayde2767 8mo ago

Nice to see the "true spirit" of OpenSource being practiced and growing in Europe...I hope other countries jump into this as well, with support and resources.

assaddayinh 8mo ago

The french can make mountains move for very little money. There army capabilities compared to the us relative to the investment is outstanding. Wouldn't wonder if they dethroned Microsoft office by strategically supporting open source.

karel-3d 8mo ago

It's very on-brand for France that the website is in French only, no English

jrcplus 8mo ago
+1. I got excited but https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ doesn't seem to be in English or any other European language. If you guys are hoping for Europe-wide adoption, start there.

virdev 8mo ago

Lasuite Docs PM here. Awesome to see we’ve made it top the first page again! Thanks for the interest :) I’ve compiled a bunch of answers in an FAQ on this doc https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-c58481dc8374/ https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-... Cheers!

gusfoo 8mo ago
Love the fact that you use USA date format, not rest-of-world. Love the fact that your AI customer service bot takes a question and then asks for an email address for a reply. Love your incoherently bolded statements: "The Docs app is a note taking and knowledge management software. Love how the vast amount of emojis really clarify things and help the reader. s/love/hate/g
lucb1e 8mo ago
Thanks for posting an actual link to a demo, even if read-only. I tried some of the buttons on the site with rudimentary understanding of french, but all I found was login pages
w4yai 8mo ago
Vive la France !
phtrivier 8mo ago
Honest question, though I suspect you won't be able to give a complete answer : how shielded are you from political changes ? When the next president takes office, and they're more aligned with Trump than the current administration, will it also cause a backlash ? Or do you feel shielded by the "we're cheaper than MS licenses" ?

IlikeMadison 8mo ago

Python and TypeScript... hard pass. Mediocre software made by mediocre web developers. Imagine a car manufacturer using wood instead of steel because they can only afford to pay cheap lumberjacks.

gavmor 8mo ago
Ouch, harsh words! But, what would be your stack of choice? Or, what stack gives you the most confidence?

virdev 8mo ago

Shout out to Yjs, ProseMirror and BlockNote on which we relied to build LaSuite Docs

fleroviumna 8mo ago

[dead]

mytailorisrich 8mo ago

The problem is that open-source projects funded by the taxpayer bring nothing long term to create companies that can compete or generate economic growth or develop future industries. They would be much better off creating a more business friendly environment and supporting private businesses through grants, procurements, etc the way the US are good at.

SideburnsOfDoom 8mo ago
This comment misses the point and argues against something unrelated. It's fundamentally a data sovereignty and security move, not a commercial one. It's neither pro or anti business. This or "creating a more business friendly environment" policies is a false dichotomy. That could be done too via other means. It is unrelated. Speaking about this "business friendly" only is either misdirection or myopic.
- mytailorisrich 8mo ago
  You seem to be arguing for the sake of argument while avoiding the substance of my point by discarding it as "unrelated" while it is fundamentally on point. If the aim is indeed sovereignty, data and software (and this is software not data), and in general, then they need an effective and comprehensive plan. I think taxpayer-funded state-developed open-source software brings very little at a high cost and can even be counter-productive. Frankly I think it is apolitical move internal to the French state to keep the gavy train coming to government agencies. Rather I think the US, and also China that does it even more, are much more effective at this by throwing money at the marketplace to develop a whole ecosystem competitively that can also compete globally. An important thing to note here is that EU rules prevent a lot of state action (for instance they would not be allowed to buy only French cars or do things seen as direct subsidies, etc) France will continue to fall further behind unless it really gets it act together, which is unlikely TBH.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 8mo ago
    You're just repeating your assumptions - "taxpayer-funded state-developed is bad", but "marketplace competitively" good. I'm not convinced. You're not engaging with the sovereignty aspect - "compete globally" isn't the main goal at all as I said above, you're just restating you misconception. And so this part comes across as pure projection: > You seem to be arguing for the sake of argument while avoiding the substance of my point

johnea 8mo ago

And somehow, during the effort to achieve digital sovereigncy, they still manage to host the source on the Microsoft property of github 8-/ Given that the only step necessary to host git on the internet is making port 22 publicly accessible, I fail to see why so many projects are hosted on this malware site...

patrick4urcloud 8mo ago

Good! I'll definitely give it a try!! we still need a good email server system in open source and simple to install / maintain ?

hollow-moe 8mo ago

obviously hosted on github what a joke.

tomik99 8mo ago

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vikkymelani 8mo ago

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aeuropean12 8mo ago

So I read up on this, and it would be great to learn more. Such as.. API & Third-party Integrations: Does La Suite expose APIs that allow integration with external tools and services? What's the current roadmap for pre-built connectors or integrations with commonly-used government systems? Cross-Tool Workflows: Beyond the "same interface" access, how seamlessly can users automate workflows across different La Suite tools? For example, can a Visio meeting recording automatically trigger document creation in Docs, or data collection in Grist? Does La Suite support webhooks, automation rules, or workflow orchestration (IFTTT-style logic) to reduce manual repetitive tasks? Identity & Access Management Integration: Beyond ProConnect, can La Suite integrate with existing government LDAP/Active Directory systems for organizations with different identity providers? Data Synchronization: Are there automated sync capabilities between Grist databases and other data sources, or between Fichiers and external file storage systems? Export Format Coverage: The site mentions reversibility in standard formats (.ppt, .xls, .odt). Does this apply equally to all tools? Specifically, what export formats are supported from Docs, Grist, and other collaborative tools? Import Capabilities: Can users import content from competing tools? For instance, can users migrate Grist tables from Excel with full formula preservation, or import documents from other collaborative platforms? When collaborating in Docs or Grist, can users work with non-native file formats (e.g., editing .docx files directly without conversion loss)? Metadata Preservation: Does La Suite preserve document metadata, formatting, comments, and revision history when exporting and re-importing files? Interoperability with Open Standards: Beyond exporting to common formats, does La Suite use open file standards internally (e.g., ODF for documents, OpenDocument Spreadsheet for Grist)? Lock-in Prevention: Are there documented procedures and guarantees for bulk data export in case an organization decides to migrate away from La Suite?