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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

#101
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…

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_s...

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#102
post #48

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.

> 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.

> stripe

Stripe has always been a Ruby-heavy company.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#103
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

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.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#104
post #86
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…

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 a…

It’s like you aren’t even interested in reinforcing Microsoft’s moat at all!

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#105
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#106

Earlier 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]

> "The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary"

This might be the most insane comment I've ever seen on this forum.

What in the hell are you talking about? Did you actually read that first link, completely fail to understand a single word of it, and then the number 82 just magically fell out of the sky?

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#109
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…

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