Another one?
Previously:
This week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294
2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
France's homegrown open source online office suite
131–140 of 367 posts
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
But they still chose an American company, github, lol ironic
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.
its not about leverage or threat, same as the office products, the french owned their docs at the end of the day, i thought it was about sovereignty and using french alternatives?
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It’s called mercantilism. It was thoroughly refuted hundreds of years 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.
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#134Great, but why on GitHub? That doesn't seem very souverain to me
GitHub is using Git which was developed by Linus Thorvald, a Finish and thus EU citizen. That does not sound very sovereign by the US to me.
GitHub is literally Microsoft. US company with servers in the US. What you're talking about is the underlying technology.
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#135Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#136Great, but why on GitHub? That doesn't seem very souverain to me
GitHub is using Git which was developed by Linus Thorvald, a Finish and thus EU citizen. That does not sound very sovereign by the US to me.
There's a huge difference between the origin of some open source software, where a service is hosted and where the company providing it is from.
You can take some open source software made in some other country and use it or fork it no strings attached to its country of origin. No leader from that country can decide to abruptly cut you off your usage of the software because they feel like it.
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not agree, I don't want EU to turn to US. Taxes should be on a level to support the welfare state.
[flagged]
Unfortunately you (and of course the wikipedia page) misunderstood the OECD document [1], which says:
"In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax wedge, compared with 77% of the total OECD average tax wedge."
Note how it says "of the total tax wedge" not "of their salary.
The tax wedge itself is 47.2% in 2024 in France. This is indeed high by international standards but nowhere as high as you claimed.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#138This is a toy. It really makes it look like they aren't that serious.
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.
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#139Okay 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…
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...
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not agree, I don't want EU to turn to US. Taxes should be on a level to support the welfare state.
Which it can’t. There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states
That is obviously not true. You don’t even define what a welfare state is or when a country stops being a welfare state.