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France's homegrown open source online office suite

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Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#61

Post by speedgoose »

superze wrote: post #53
okanat wrote: post #26

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…

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

What would you use instead?

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#62

Post by nickpp »

roblabla wrote: post #51
echelon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 corporatio…

> 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?

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#63

Post by js4ever »

dingi wrote: post #47
ricardobeat wrote: post #40

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.

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.

or now you spend couple of hours/days with AI and produce a Rust implementation that will smoke Django 100X

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#65

Post by faust201 »

michelsedgh wrote: post #32
Normal_gaussian wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But they still chose an American company, github, lol ironic

With that argument we are discussing this on...errr US - the organization that perhaps grew those companies.

The word is not ironic it is pragmatic.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#66

Post by maxloh »

okanat wrote: post #26

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…

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.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#67

Post by coredev_ »

whoamii wrote: post #58
okanat wrote: post #26

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…

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

I do not agree, I don't want EU to turn to US. Taxes should be on a level to support the welfare state.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#68

Post by spwa4 »

ffsm8 wrote: post #57
superze wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Does it really need explaining why Office 365/Google Docs cannot be written in Django?

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#69

Post by mimasama »

LunaSea wrote: post #8
ginko wrote: post #6

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

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).

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/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?

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#70

Post by YousefED »

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).

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) 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 [2] https://www.zendis.de/en

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