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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 no

by okanat 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo ago
  > I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages. Depends which ones. Python? Definitely a source of slowness.
  - admissionsguy 9mo 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.
  - consp 9mo ago
    > Definitely a source of slowness. I would first blame the programmers, the design and lack of specialty offloading before blaming any programming language. Well designed web calls scale nearly linearly with usage and usually poor design or programming is the source of slowness. You can always trade language complexity for speed but assuming it is the cause of all perceived slowness is a poor man's view. It is the same story every time again, first it was java, which has so many large scale projects most people won't even know it's running things they use, now it's apparently python who is to blame for all slowness on the web. When the next JIT or scripted language comes along which is not someone's favourite pet that will get the blame.
    - array_key_first 9mo ago
      Python is slow, though, and so was java compared to other compiled languages of its time. Sure, it might not matter much if you're mostly doing database calls. If you're not, though, then yes, it's the languages fault if your app is slow. You can try to make it faster, but it's gonna be marginal gains. Or, you could just switch to another language and get a 100x speedup for free. I also denounce the notion that trading language complexity for slowness is the case. Python is already complex, and there's some language and frameworks that are actually quite a bit easier to use for web backends. Like java, or dotnet. It just makes no sense to use python for this usecase, even if you ignore the slowness. But that's not completely true, there is one very good reason to use python. Your devs know it. But, that doesnt say anything about the language itself.
      - tinodb 9mo ago
        Slow_er_. For all programs talked about in this thread it is fast enough. Especially if you don’t need to host it at Microsoft/Google scale.
- echelon 9mo ago
  > 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. Shhh, don't tell them. (Kidding, of course.) The best solution is skin-in-the-game, for-profit enterprise coupled with rigorous antitrust enforcement. Companies will go a million times faster than open source. They're greedy and will tear the skin off of inefficiencies and eat them for lunch. That's what they do. Let the system of capitalism work for you. It's an optimization algorithm. One of the very best. But when companies get too big and start starving off competition, that's when you need to declaw them and restore evolutionary pressure. Even lions should have to work hard to hunt, and they should starve and die with old age to keep the ecosystem thriving.
  - roblabla 9mo ago
    > The best solution is skin-in-the-game, for-profit enterprise coupled with rigorous antitrust enforcement. Don't we have enough examples showing that this simply cannot work long-term, because the for-profit enterprises will _inevitably_ grow larger than the government can handle through antitrust? And once they reach that size, they become impossible to rein in. Just look at all the stupid large american corporations who can't be broken up anymore because the corporation has the lobbying power and media budget to make any attempt to enforce antitrust a carrier killer for a politician. I think it's very myopic to say that corporate structure is the "best solution".
    - nickpp 9mo ago
      > to make any attempt to enforce antitrust a carrier killer for a politician Any example of a politician carrier killed by an attempt to enforce antitrust?
      - saubeidl 9mo ago
        Biden. Him putting Lisa Khan in charge of antitrust enraged the tech oligarchs, who then all went MAGA and bought Trump the election.
- ericd 9mo ago
  It’s building infrastructure, which should lower costs in the long term. Seems like a good use of money from where I’m sitting.
- bigfudge 9mo ago
  This is pre MAGA thinking. Investing in strategic industries that otherwise pose systemic risk to European economies wouldn’t be our first choice, but it’s now necessary.
  - abtinf 9mo ago
    It’s called mercantilism. It was thoroughly refuted hundreds of years ago.
    - braiamp 9mo ago
      Yes, but apparently the biggest players now abuse their comparative advantage positions. So, we are back to mercantilism to the detriment of all humanity.
- drnick1 9mo ago
  > True as it may be that they are slow, I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages. Yes it is. It's the same reason desktop GUI apps are now slower than Windows 95-era apps that were written in C.
superze 9mo ago
To make matters worse, they are using Django. I can't take the EU serious any more.
- ffsm8 9mo ago
  What issue do you have with Django? This is not a situation where you'll have thousands of people editing the same document, that'd be insane with Django for sure - but at general collaboration tooling with <100 (random number I made up) editing, Django is unlikely gonna be the bottleneck
  - spwa4 9mo ago
    Does it really need explaining why Office 365/Google Docs cannot be written in Django?
    - cromka 9mo ago
      Yes
      - busterarm 9mo ago
        This is very obvious. What part of your document editor needs to be backed by a relational database? Why use an MVT system if you don't need the Model part of it?
        ffsm8 9mo ago
        https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/blob/main/src/backend/core/models.py https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/blob/main/src/backend... I see, in your broad and experienced mind, document editors don't have users, permissions, and the whole document management itself, comments on lines/threads, reactions on comments Seriously, theyre all as cookie cutter perfect usecase for Django as you can get, but I guess you haven't actually thought about the domain and just wanted to take a dumb on other devs with intern-to-junior level insights
whoamii 9mo ago
Or maybe the solution must be one rooted in reducing taxes. Make investing extremely attractively, and stop relying on taxes to solve everything.
- coredev_ 9mo ago
  I do not agree, I don't want EU to turn to US. Taxes should be on a level to support the welfare state.
  - Nesco 9mo ago
    Which it can’t. There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states
    - ecshafer 9mo ago
      The welfare state can not exist in world where the government is against population growth. You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare. We need an exponential curve of population to maintain it, especialy when its at european levels. Mass immigration of uneducated people from low income countries doesnt cover the gap, especially when the government extends welfare to them. This is all a fact.
      - braiamp 9mo ago
        With how many statements of fact you make, you are pretty wrong. There's not one of them being right. We have enough productivity that a minuscule part of the population can produce and distribute the basic needs for every human on earth. There's literally humans that can't find jobs to do because we don't educate them well enough to go and offer services that other humans need. Not only that, we try to say that they don't deserve enough pay to supply their basic needs. And yes, I'm talking about teachers and medics. We don't have enough of either, because we don't pay them enough compared to their workload. Those things we will always need, in great quantities to support our population. Greater quantities than engineers, architects, researchers, etc. but guess where everyone flocks because it pays more? - https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/250330/9789241511407-?sequence=1 https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/250330/978924151... - https://ipsnoticias.net/2022/10/el-mundo-necesita-69-millones-de-nuevos-docentes/ https://ipsnoticias.net/2022/10/el-mundo-necesita-69-millone...
maxloh 9mo ago
Scaling horizontally is significantly cheaper than the additional engineering cost required to build these applications in statically typed languages, especially in developed nations like France. The real bottleneck lies on the database side, but it is rare for an average organization to actually hit its limits. Don't think at Microsoft scale if you aren't them.
- ethanpailes 9mo ago
  Server costs actually matter quite a bit at the scales of the incumbents in this space. Also, speed can be an important part of UX. Scaling horizontally won’t help if the engine itself is slow enough that there is noticeable lag even with just a single document getting edited by a dozen people.
999900000999 9mo ago
You don't need to raise taxes for this, literally just stop wasting money on licensees once the open source projects are ready. It's not a "let do it in 3 months" thing, this will take at least a decade.
- gryn 9mo ago
  > once the open source projects are ready. so likely a decade or more of double spending in the meanwhile. that's 2 election terms in France for context. Good luck making the political parties agree to this.
  - gtirloni 9mo ago
    This likely won't need billions of Euros to implement and will be an earmark in the budget. My point being it's not such a grandious project, from a continental perspective.
- xp84 9mo ago
  “Once ready” they’ll save (somewhat) on licenses, what about paying for it during the years it will take to build it, while it’s not ready? When any random company makes a Build vs. Buy decision the question is “is this a core competency?” Most companies use a package from MS or GOOG because it’s unlikely that they’ll be so good at productivity software that it’s (A) worth distracting themselves from their actual job and (B) good enough. The same caveats apply here.
  - parchley 9mo ago
    No, suggestion those caveats show that you are out of touch with what is at stake. This is about digital sovereignty, not saving money. It’s about not relying on the US. The US is literally forcing our hands here.
    - 999900000999 9mo ago
      Honestly it's probably a good idea for governments to self host and self support anything that's important. >Microsoft Used China-Based Engineers to Support Product Recently Hacked by China https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-sharepoint-hack-china-cybersecurity https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-sharepoint-hack... Open source alternatives, audited by international teams could be much more trust worthy than closed sourced black boxes.
kkfx 9mo ago
A small note: in 2026, classic office suites shouldn't even exist in my opinion, so if the EU were to create a glorified R/Quarto, essentially a LaTeX wrapper with some basic calculation capabilities added, it would be infinitely better than any office suite. My personal setup is Emacs/org-mode, using babel for the rest; I use Python with Polars, Plotly, and very occasionally SymPy just to avoid using Maxima if I'm already in Python. I see no reason at all to use LibreOffice, MS Office, or anything similar. This is what's actually needed. Billions should be invested in IT training, not in copies of software from another era designed to let untrained secretarial staff use a desktop.
- bee_rider 9mo ago
  It’s like you aren’t even interested in reinforcing Microsoft’s moat at all!
- harvey9 9mo ago
  You use emacs so why should anyone else need MS Word? A large number of people use word processor software because it has advantages over typewriters or handwriting for their purposes rather than because they lack training in something more esoteric.
  - pydry 9mo ago
    To be fair ms word is rooted in a world paper once ruled and the paper/document metaphor is becoming increasingly less relevant. I used to use it all day every day and now i use it once a year maybe (often for government related things, coz theyre often the only ones still asking me to fill out and sign PDF forms). Most office functions are better supplanted with a decent cms, spreadsheet, email and something to let you create forms for people to fill in.
- plagiarist 9mo ago
  Sometimes I really like a spreadsheet. I found out at work that spreadsheets all have map / reduce now. That's fun. If there were a spreadsheet interface that was secretly R under the hood and tricked me into understanding R that would be neat.
savant2 9mo ago
Genuine question: why do you consider it to be nowhere near an "Office suite"? It seems to me it fits the definition given by Wikipedia [1]. I guess it is less advanced than Google Workspace or Microsoft Office but it would cover all of my needs at work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_software#Office_suite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_software#Office_s...
- carefree-bob 9mo ago
  For a traditional office suite, you'd want a word processor with somewhat of a decent layout engine in it, a spreadsheet, something for slide presentations, something for rudimentary databases/datasources, and some sort of diagram drawing capability, and all of these integrated together. By a "decent layout" engine, you'd like the ability to change fonts, add spacing between paragraphs, segment the page into regions, e.g. by changing the number of columns on a page, insert images and diagrams and choose how text wraps around them, create captions for embedded media, set page numbering policies (or navigational policies for web generation), generate table of contents, set table headers, make more complex tables with merged cells and different types of boundaries, generate table of references, generate tabs, then export to a web page, to a pdf, or to whatever other format you want, hopefully all from the same source. Then when you send it out for review, people can attach their comments to portions of the document, you can accept or reject their changes, there is a document revision history, etc. So for example, you could write up a quarterly report by importing summary financial data into your spreadsheet, doing some basic analysis, export tables to your word processor, generate some bar charts or graphs, draw some boxes and arrows with your drawing program, stick that into your word processor, add some footnotes and hyperlinks, put the same info into a slide presentation. Then if you want, you could save that as a pdf or turn into a webpage, etc. One time I had to write up documentation for various security certifications, and that was my introduction to the world of Microsoft office. Learning office made the project more fun, I had never used it before and was impressed with the functionality. That said, I don't think most people who have office suites actually need a full powered office suite. Probably markdown + slack is enough for a lot of people, but I always like a good drawing or diagram. Most people I know have shifted to google suite, it really has everything you need and is OS independent. But apart from the convenience of being browser-based, it is just another MS Office clone. The google drawing functionality is very basic, I often wish you could integrate something like excalidraw into it. I am not suggesting this project needs to keep adding clones of MS Office functionality until it turns into Libre Office, but funded by the French government. That would be a waste. Instead, why not make it better? Reimagine it? Look, for example, at excalidraw. It's fantastic. It was really a fresh take on the stuff people were doing with visio. I think there is lots of room to make a truly modern office suite instead of another MS Office rehash, so I would encourage this project to go its own way and do something interesting if they intend to be a replacement for proprietary office suites like google suite or MS Office.
nmstoker 9mo ago
Interestingly neither their GitHub nor the La Suite front page (translated) actually mention "office" - that's what the OP titled it.
zdc1 9mo ago
My initial thought was: why not fork LibreOffice and spend the extra dev time closing the gap between what it is and what they need? But after some thought, I feel a cloud collaboration suite makes more sense as big orgs often run on online-first solutions like Sharepoint. So they can tick the essential boxes by being an online collaboration suite, and fill in formatting features later. Though your points on speed and architecture do make me wonder if Python was their best choice...
- lucb1e 9mo ago
  > why not fork LibreOffice [...] But after some thought, I feel a cloud collaboration suite makes more sense LibreOffice has a cloud version :). From what they presented at T-Dose like 10 years ago, it's basically an instance of the software running on the server, cut up into tiles and displayed on a webpage as zoomable image using Leafletjs, the same way that google maps worked before switching to vector graphics 15 years ago. Clicks and other input events are presumably emulated on the server and the resulting display update is sent back to the client, a bit like VNC but using a map library
mhkgjkhn 9mo ago
you know le suite is a success, when random americans complain about it :) good for the french, they made the right choice.
- okanat 8mo ago
  I'm a German resident on a track to be a citizen though. I am complaining because all these "EU independence efforts" are just posturing. I am all for European independence. However I am also aware that it takes quite a bit money and effort to make that happen.
gib444 9mo ago
Europe is a little bit busy bleeding money for defence if you hadn't noticed. There's only so many 50bn EUR it can conjure up for something
- wolvoleo 9mo ago
  It's fine, we don't need it all tomorrow. There's no credible threat right now, Russia's got their hands full with Ukraine.
  - petre 9mo ago
    A BND (German intel) analysis shows otherwise. "The BND stated that these expenditures are being used not only to sustain the ongoing war in Ukraine but also to expand Russia’s sub-threshold operations against countries on NATO’s eastern flank." https://defence24.com/armed-forces/half-of-the-defence-budget-russia-hides-billions https://defence24.com/armed-forces/half-of-the-defence-budge...
    - superze 9mo ago
      Fuck the BND
- deaux 9mo ago
  Digital sovereignty is realistically part of defence.
WarmWash 9mo ago
Let young people get fantastically wealthy in a low friction business environment and you'll get all the enterprise grade homegrown software you need.
thibaut_barrere 9mo ago
From the FAQ: > With Docs our job is not to replace Microsoft Office https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-c58481dc8374/ https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-... Also: like when switching from AWS to EU provider, the goal is not feature parity. Not only it is costly to implement, but also a reason why so many features are in AWS or Office is to ensure vendor lock-in due to feature comparisons. Learning to do more with less is a feature, not a bug.
throwaway89201 9mo ago
> OpenCloud is the "open-source" fork but they are already in legal trouble with OwnCloud due to industrial espionage claims. Can you expand on this or source this? I'm quite interested in OpenCloud, and haven't heard anything about this. I searched for a few keywords (espionage, legal, lawsuit), which only lands your comment on top.
- okanat 9mo ago
  Sure. I didn't say exactly lawsuit because my source only says a threat from Kiteworks (parent company of OwnCloud): https://github.com/orgs/opencloud-eu/discussions/262#discussioncomment-13958383 https://github.com/orgs/opencloud-eu/discussions/262#discuss... They seem to avoid openly discussing and comparing products to avoid further action. Apparently some of the former members of OwnCloud have switched to Heinlein (the maker of OpenCloud) and Kiteworks isn't happy about this.
_el1s7 9mo ago
I mean, let's face the reality, do you really think anything worthwhile in regards to tech projects will ever come out of government initiatives? I doubt it, especially in the EU. The closest thing to an alternative office suite from an European company is Proton, and even that is barely a replacement.
pkd249 9mo ago
> industrial espionage claims ?? this is not true, please provide a source
- okanat 8mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929781
seec 8mo ago
Couldn't agree more. I always laugh my ass off when people cry about Microsoft and Office. Well, the thing is that there are no real competitors, and we can't blame them if everyone else is more incompetent than they are. Apple has been pretending to work on an alternative for years, and it is still nowhere near as powerful/good. But we live in a feminized world, where it is profitable to virtue signal by siding with the pretend victims even though they are not any better than the winners and, in fact, just as bad, as Apple routinely demonstrates.

by okanat 9mo ago

admissionsguy 9mo 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 9mo ago
> I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages. Depends which ones. Python? Definitely a source of slowness.
- admissionsguy 9mo 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.
- consp 9mo ago
  > Definitely a source of slowness. I would first blame the programmers, the design and lack of specialty offloading before blaming any programming language. Well designed web calls scale nearly linearly with usage and usually poor design or programming is the source of slowness. You can always trade language complexity for speed but assuming it is the cause of all perceived slowness is a poor man's view. It is the same story every time again, first it was java, which has so many large scale projects most people won't even know it's running things they use, now it's apparently python who is to blame for all slowness on the web. When the next JIT or scripted language comes along which is not someone's favourite pet that will get the blame.
  - array_key_first 9mo ago
    Python is slow, though, and so was java compared to other compiled languages of its time. Sure, it might not matter much if you're mostly doing database calls. If you're not, though, then yes, it's the languages fault if your app is slow. You can try to make it faster, but it's gonna be marginal gains. Or, you could just switch to another language and get a 100x speedup for free. I also denounce the notion that trading language complexity for slowness is the case. Python is already complex, and there's some language and frameworks that are actually quite a bit easier to use for web backends. Like java, or dotnet. It just makes no sense to use python for this usecase, even if you ignore the slowness. But that's not completely true, there is one very good reason to use python. Your devs know it. But, that doesnt say anything about the language itself.
    - tinodb 9mo ago
      Slow_er_. For all programs talked about in this thread it is fast enough. Especially if you don’t need to host it at Microsoft/Google scale.
echelon 9mo ago
> 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. Shhh, don't tell them. (Kidding, of course.) The best solution is skin-in-the-game, for-profit enterprise coupled with rigorous antitrust enforcement. Companies will go a million times faster than open source. They're greedy and will tear the skin off of inefficiencies and eat them for lunch. That's what they do. Let the system of capitalism work for you. It's an optimization algorithm. One of the very best. But when companies get too big and start starving off competition, that's when you need to declaw them and restore evolutionary pressure. Even lions should have to work hard to hunt, and they should starve and die with old age to keep the ecosystem thriving.
- roblabla 9mo ago
  > The best solution is skin-in-the-game, for-profit enterprise coupled with rigorous antitrust enforcement. Don't we have enough examples showing that this simply cannot work long-term, because the for-profit enterprises will _inevitably_ grow larger than the government can handle through antitrust? And once they reach that size, they become impossible to rein in. Just look at all the stupid large american corporations who can't be broken up anymore because the corporation has the lobbying power and media budget to make any attempt to enforce antitrust a carrier killer for a politician. I think it's very myopic to say that corporate structure is the "best solution".
  - nickpp 9mo ago
    > to make any attempt to enforce antitrust a carrier killer for a politician Any example of a politician carrier killed by an attempt to enforce antitrust?
    - saubeidl 9mo ago
      Biden. Him putting Lisa Khan in charge of antitrust enraged the tech oligarchs, who then all went MAGA and bought Trump the election.
ericd 9mo ago
It’s building infrastructure, which should lower costs in the long term. Seems like a good use of money from where I’m sitting.
bigfudge 9mo ago
This is pre MAGA thinking. Investing in strategic industries that otherwise pose systemic risk to European economies wouldn’t be our first choice, but it’s now necessary.
- abtinf 9mo ago
  It’s called mercantilism. It was thoroughly refuted hundreds of years ago.
  - braiamp 9mo ago
    Yes, but apparently the biggest players now abuse their comparative advantage positions. So, we are back to mercantilism to the detriment of all humanity.
drnick1 9mo ago
> True as it may be that they are slow, I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages. Yes it is. It's the same reason desktop GUI apps are now slower than Windows 95-era apps that were written in C.

superze 9mo ago

To make matters worse, they are using Django. I can't take the EU serious any more.

ffsm8 9mo ago
What issue do you have with Django? This is not a situation where you'll have thousands of people editing the same document, that'd be insane with Django for sure - but at general collaboration tooling with <100 (random number I made up) editing, Django is unlikely gonna be the bottleneck
- spwa4 9mo ago
  Does it really need explaining why Office 365/Google Docs cannot be written in Django?
  - cromka 9mo ago
    Yes
    - busterarm 9mo ago
      This is very obvious. What part of your document editor needs to be backed by a relational database? Why use an MVT system if you don't need the Model part of it?
      - ffsm8 9mo ago
        https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/blob/main/src/backend/core/models.py https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/blob/main/src/backend... I see, in your broad and experienced mind, document editors don't have users, permissions, and the whole document management itself, comments on lines/threads, reactions on comments Seriously, theyre all as cookie cutter perfect usecase for Django as you can get, but I guess you haven't actually thought about the domain and just wanted to take a dumb on other devs with intern-to-junior level insights

whoamii 9mo ago

Or maybe the solution must be one rooted in reducing taxes. Make investing extremely attractively, and stop relying on taxes to solve everything.

coredev_ 9mo ago
I do not agree, I don't want EU to turn to US. Taxes should be on a level to support the welfare state.
- Nesco 9mo ago
  Which it can’t. There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states
  - ecshafer 9mo ago
    The welfare state can not exist in world where the government is against population growth. You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare. We need an exponential curve of population to maintain it, especialy when its at european levels. Mass immigration of uneducated people from low income countries doesnt cover the gap, especially when the government extends welfare to them. This is all a fact.
    - braiamp 9mo ago
      With how many statements of fact you make, you are pretty wrong. There's not one of them being right. We have enough productivity that a minuscule part of the population can produce and distribute the basic needs for every human on earth. There's literally humans that can't find jobs to do because we don't educate them well enough to go and offer services that other humans need. Not only that, we try to say that they don't deserve enough pay to supply their basic needs. And yes, I'm talking about teachers and medics. We don't have enough of either, because we don't pay them enough compared to their workload. Those things we will always need, in great quantities to support our population. Greater quantities than engineers, architects, researchers, etc. but guess where everyone flocks because it pays more? - https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/250330/9789241511407-?sequence=1 https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/250330/978924151... - https://ipsnoticias.net/2022/10/el-mundo-necesita-69-millones-de-nuevos-docentes/ https://ipsnoticias.net/2022/10/el-mundo-necesita-69-millone...

maxloh 9mo ago

Scaling horizontally is significantly cheaper than the additional engineering cost required to build these applications in statically typed languages, especially in developed nations like France. The real bottleneck lies on the database side, but it is rare for an average organization to actually hit its limits. Don't think at Microsoft scale if you aren't them.

ethanpailes 9mo ago
Server costs actually matter quite a bit at the scales of the incumbents in this space. Also, speed can be an important part of UX. Scaling horizontally won’t help if the engine itself is slow enough that there is noticeable lag even with just a single document getting edited by a dozen people.

999900000999 9mo ago

You don't need to raise taxes for this, literally just stop wasting money on licensees once the open source projects are ready. It's not a "let do it in 3 months" thing, this will take at least a decade.

gryn 9mo ago
> once the open source projects are ready. so likely a decade or more of double spending in the meanwhile. that's 2 election terms in France for context. Good luck making the political parties agree to this.
- gtirloni 9mo ago
  This likely won't need billions of Euros to implement and will be an earmark in the budget. My point being it's not such a grandious project, from a continental perspective.
xp84 9mo ago
“Once ready” they’ll save (somewhat) on licenses, what about paying for it during the years it will take to build it, while it’s not ready? When any random company makes a Build vs. Buy decision the question is “is this a core competency?” Most companies use a package from MS or GOOG because it’s unlikely that they’ll be so good at productivity software that it’s (A) worth distracting themselves from their actual job and (B) good enough. The same caveats apply here.
- parchley 9mo ago
  No, suggestion those caveats show that you are out of touch with what is at stake. This is about digital sovereignty, not saving money. It’s about not relying on the US. The US is literally forcing our hands here.
  - 999900000999 9mo ago
    Honestly it's probably a good idea for governments to self host and self support anything that's important. >Microsoft Used China-Based Engineers to Support Product Recently Hacked by China https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-sharepoint-hack-china-cybersecurity https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-sharepoint-hack... Open source alternatives, audited by international teams could be much more trust worthy than closed sourced black boxes.

kkfx 9mo ago

A small note: in 2026, classic office suites shouldn't even exist in my opinion, so if the EU were to create a glorified R/Quarto, essentially a LaTeX wrapper with some basic calculation capabilities added, it would be infinitely better than any office suite. My personal setup is Emacs/org-mode, using babel for the rest; I use Python with Polars, Plotly, and very occasionally SymPy just to avoid using Maxima if I'm already in Python. I see no reason at all to use LibreOffice, MS Office, or anything similar. This is what's actually needed. Billions should be invested in IT training, not in copies of software from another era designed to let untrained secretarial staff use a desktop.

bee_rider 9mo ago
It’s like you aren’t even interested in reinforcing Microsoft’s moat at all!
harvey9 9mo ago
You use emacs so why should anyone else need MS Word? A large number of people use word processor software because it has advantages over typewriters or handwriting for their purposes rather than because they lack training in something more esoteric.
- pydry 9mo ago
  To be fair ms word is rooted in a world paper once ruled and the paper/document metaphor is becoming increasingly less relevant. I used to use it all day every day and now i use it once a year maybe (often for government related things, coz theyre often the only ones still asking me to fill out and sign PDF forms). Most office functions are better supplanted with a decent cms, spreadsheet, email and something to let you create forms for people to fill in.
plagiarist 9mo ago
Sometimes I really like a spreadsheet. I found out at work that spreadsheets all have map / reduce now. That's fun. If there were a spreadsheet interface that was secretly R under the hood and tricked me into understanding R that would be neat.

savant2 9mo ago

Genuine question: why do you consider it to be nowhere near an "Office suite"? It seems to me it fits the definition given by Wikipedia [1]. I guess it is less advanced than Google Workspace or Microsoft Office but it would cover all of my needs at work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_software#Office_suite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_software#Office_s...

carefree-bob 9mo ago
For a traditional office suite, you'd want a word processor with somewhat of a decent layout engine in it, a spreadsheet, something for slide presentations, something for rudimentary databases/datasources, and some sort of diagram drawing capability, and all of these integrated together. By a "decent layout" engine, you'd like the ability to change fonts, add spacing between paragraphs, segment the page into regions, e.g. by changing the number of columns on a page, insert images and diagrams and choose how text wraps around them, create captions for embedded media, set page numbering policies (or navigational policies for web generation), generate table of contents, set table headers, make more complex tables with merged cells and different types of boundaries, generate table of references, generate tabs, then export to a web page, to a pdf, or to whatever other format you want, hopefully all from the same source. Then when you send it out for review, people can attach their comments to portions of the document, you can accept or reject their changes, there is a document revision history, etc. So for example, you could write up a quarterly report by importing summary financial data into your spreadsheet, doing some basic analysis, export tables to your word processor, generate some bar charts or graphs, draw some boxes and arrows with your drawing program, stick that into your word processor, add some footnotes and hyperlinks, put the same info into a slide presentation. Then if you want, you could save that as a pdf or turn into a webpage, etc. One time I had to write up documentation for various security certifications, and that was my introduction to the world of Microsoft office. Learning office made the project more fun, I had never used it before and was impressed with the functionality. That said, I don't think most people who have office suites actually need a full powered office suite. Probably markdown + slack is enough for a lot of people, but I always like a good drawing or diagram. Most people I know have shifted to google suite, it really has everything you need and is OS independent. But apart from the convenience of being browser-based, it is just another MS Office clone. The google drawing functionality is very basic, I often wish you could integrate something like excalidraw into it. I am not suggesting this project needs to keep adding clones of MS Office functionality until it turns into Libre Office, but funded by the French government. That would be a waste. Instead, why not make it better? Reimagine it? Look, for example, at excalidraw. It's fantastic. It was really a fresh take on the stuff people were doing with visio. I think there is lots of room to make a truly modern office suite instead of another MS Office rehash, so I would encourage this project to go its own way and do something interesting if they intend to be a replacement for proprietary office suites like google suite or MS Office.

nmstoker 9mo ago

Interestingly neither their GitHub nor the La Suite front page (translated) actually mention "office" - that's what the OP titled it.

zdc1 9mo ago

My initial thought was: why not fork LibreOffice and spend the extra dev time closing the gap between what it is and what they need? But after some thought, I feel a cloud collaboration suite makes more sense as big orgs often run on online-first solutions like Sharepoint. So they can tick the essential boxes by being an online collaboration suite, and fill in formatting features later. Though your points on speed and architecture do make me wonder if Python was their best choice...

lucb1e 9mo ago
> why not fork LibreOffice [...] But after some thought, I feel a cloud collaboration suite makes more sense LibreOffice has a cloud version :). From what they presented at T-Dose like 10 years ago, it's basically an instance of the software running on the server, cut up into tiles and displayed on a webpage as zoomable image using Leafletjs, the same way that google maps worked before switching to vector graphics 15 years ago. Clicks and other input events are presumably emulated on the server and the resulting display update is sent back to the client, a bit like VNC but using a map library

mhkgjkhn 9mo ago

you know le suite is a success, when random americans complain about it :) good for the french, they made the right choice.

okanat 8mo ago
I'm a German resident on a track to be a citizen though. I am complaining because all these "EU independence efforts" are just posturing. I am all for European independence. However I am also aware that it takes quite a bit money and effort to make that happen.

gib444 9mo ago

Europe is a little bit busy bleeding money for defence if you hadn't noticed. There's only so many 50bn EUR it can conjure up for something

wolvoleo 9mo ago
It's fine, we don't need it all tomorrow. There's no credible threat right now, Russia's got their hands full with Ukraine.
- petre 9mo ago
  A BND (German intel) analysis shows otherwise. "The BND stated that these expenditures are being used not only to sustain the ongoing war in Ukraine but also to expand Russia’s sub-threshold operations against countries on NATO’s eastern flank." https://defence24.com/armed-forces/half-of-the-defence-budget-russia-hides-billions https://defence24.com/armed-forces/half-of-the-defence-budge...
  - superze 9mo ago
    Fuck the BND
deaux 9mo ago
Digital sovereignty is realistically part of defence.

WarmWash 9mo ago

Let young people get fantastically wealthy in a low friction business environment and you'll get all the enterprise grade homegrown software you need.

thibaut_barrere 9mo ago

From the FAQ: > With Docs our job is not to replace Microsoft Office https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-c58481dc8374/ https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-... Also: like when switching from AWS to EU provider, the goal is not feature parity. Not only it is costly to implement, but also a reason why so many features are in AWS or Office is to ensure vendor lock-in due to feature comparisons. Learning to do more with less is a feature, not a bug.

throwaway89201 9mo ago

> OpenCloud is the "open-source" fork but they are already in legal trouble with OwnCloud due to industrial espionage claims. Can you expand on this or source this? I'm quite interested in OpenCloud, and haven't heard anything about this. I searched for a few keywords (espionage, legal, lawsuit), which only lands your comment on top.

okanat 9mo ago
Sure. I didn't say exactly lawsuit because my source only says a threat from Kiteworks (parent company of OwnCloud): https://github.com/orgs/opencloud-eu/discussions/262#discussioncomment-13958383 https://github.com/orgs/opencloud-eu/discussions/262#discuss... They seem to avoid openly discussing and comparing products to avoid further action. Apparently some of the former members of OwnCloud have switched to Heinlein (the maker of OpenCloud) and Kiteworks isn't happy about this.

_el1s7 9mo ago

I mean, let's face the reality, do you really think anything worthwhile in regards to tech projects will ever come out of government initiatives? I doubt it, especially in the EU. The closest thing to an alternative office suite from an European company is Proton, and even that is barely a replacement.

pkd249 9mo ago

> industrial espionage claims ?? this is not true, please provide a source

okanat 8mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929781

seec 8mo ago

Couldn't agree more. I always laugh my ass off when people cry about Microsoft and Office. Well, the thing is that there are no real competitors, and we can't blame them if everyone else is more incompetent than they are. Apple has been pretending to work on an alternative for years, and it is still nowhere near as powerful/good. But we live in a feminized world, where it is profitable to virtue signal by siding with the pretend victims even though they are not any better than the winners and, in fact, just as bad, as Apple routinely demonstrates.