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France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

social.numerique.gouv.fr

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Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#111

Post by immibis »

dgfitz wrote: post #81
hx8 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> differentiate dictatorships from democracies At first glance I thought this was hyperbole, but after reflection I'm not sure it's even an exaggeration. Too much critical infrastructure of power (voting, census, taxation, reporting, compliance) runs of software for us to accept anything less than full transparency from our governments.

There’s always holes. How can we know for sure the binaries running on the voting machines are compiled from the open source repo? It’s turtles all the way down.

That's not really a "hole" - rather it's the idea not covering every possible form of corruption.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#112

Post by pauletienney »

As an illustration of it: I have been working for two years on a new national project for the french state. Le Référentiel National des Bâtiments (for National Buildings Registry) which aim at creating and distributing a id key to every building in the country.

The goal is to make databases about buildings much more interoperable.

One key aspect is to have a precise list of all buildings includings recent constructions and demolition. It gets interesting because we recognize nobody in the country has the perfect list of buildings so we radically open the data to let governement agencies, cities, companies, citizens write directly in the registry. Think OSM or Wikipédia but for an official dataset.

This approach is very experimental for the french state and we are encouraged to test it and disseminate our learnings in other state branches.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#113

Post by immibis »

gbear605 wrote: post #86
throw10920 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bad faith. You are not obligated to contribute any sort of code to point out problems in an open source project. When I go to a restaurant and order a steak, and it arrives and tastes awful, the waiter does not have the right to say to me "if you don't like it, cook it yourself". The chef does not have the right to say to me "tell me exactly what I did wrong, since you're claiming you're an expert on steaks".…

The difference is that at a restaurant you’re paying for it. If you show up at a soup kitchen and complain that it wasn’t seasoned just right, that’s fully on you.

Complaining is allowed, as long as you're not obnoxious about it and you acknowledge you're in no position to make demands.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#114

Post by [deleted] »

resource_waste wrote: post #60
idoubtit wrote: post #34

This is just for show, and facts won't follow. It's not the first time a French government vows to stick to Open Source. Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception. Two months ago, the French government signed an "open bar" contract with Microsoft for the "Éducation Nationale" department. 152 M€, not for Open Source. Source (fr) https://www.april.org/nouvel-open-bar-mi…

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#115

Post by immibis »

sunshine-o wrote: post #103

At this point Open Source doesn't mean anything anymore. It is like everybody putting a "fat free" logo on highly processed junk food a few decades ago. Yes but what is fat exactly? What really make me suspicious is there is now a very dense web of fake, captured foundations and non profits with a lot of money flowing through them. Most of them do not write any code of course and it is very hard to understand they pu…

The poster child for this is the OSI rejecting the SSPL.

For anyone unfamiliar, the SSPL is a modification of the AGPL. It expands which source code you have to release, under certain circumstances. More specifically, if you resell the software as a cloud service, you have to make the entire service open source and not just the original software. (It has not yet been tested in court what constitutes the entire service.) This is awfully bad for the business models of several OSI members, which make money by reselling free software as a cloud service surrounded by proprietary stuff like management and load balancing.

In response, the OSI put out this official blog post seething with anger but not a single rational argument: https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l...

In response to that, I don't trust the OSI and neither should you.

(There are reasons the SSPL is bad - mostly GPL/AGPL incompatibility. Not being open source isn't one. The OSI's rant applies just as well to AGPL as it does to SSPL, yet they recognize AGPL.)

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#116

Post by Bayart »

idoubtit wrote: post #34

This is just for show, and facts won't follow. It's not the first time a French government vows to stick to Open Source. Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception. Two months ago, the French government signed an "open bar" contract with Microsoft for the "Éducation Nationale" department. 152 M€, not for Open Source. Source (fr) https://www.april.org/nouvel-open-bar-mi…

I'm extremely tired of this attitude among French people that amounts to systematically shoot down any attempt at improvement with cynicism.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#117

Post by immibis »

jart wrote: post #74
otagekki wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? It is up to them if they want to use what I wrote. Why would I get fined or jailed for not writing documentation? Good luck trying to prove any wrongdoing. If you want support feel free to hire me to do that, or just do it yourself, pretty much like big tech is doing right now with open source

Read "Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front" by Joel Salatin to learn about what the government did to farmers. The simple truth is you won't even have the ability to ask to be hired, because it will be illegal to demonstrate your skills in the first place.

This book is now on my reading list, but I expect it to be a crackpot book along the same lines of people who think COVID vaccine mandates are the same thing as Nazi Germany.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#118

Post by jraph »

pauletienney wrote: post #112

As an illustration of it: I have been working for two years on a new national project for the french state. Le Référentiel National des Bâtiments (for National Buildings Registry) which aim at creating and distributing a id key to every building in the country. The goal is to make databases about buildings much more interoperable. One key aspect is to have a precise list of all buildings includings recent constructio…

Nice!

Since OSM is, among other things, a list of building, will there be exchanges between the two projects? Are the licenses of the two projects compatible?

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#119

Post by bambax »

jeynec wrote: post #104
sylvinus wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facts (and code) are following. We're building a fully open source workspace ( https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en ) among other ambitious initiatives ( https://beta.gouv.fr/ ). The turmoil caused by the two contracts you mention also prove that the new normal has already shifted towards open source. It's a slow process, but it's undeniable that we are making progress.

These initiatives are only for show. I work in one of the biggest French goverment entity and no one uses this. We still very much use Microsoft products for virtually everything, and everything "sovereign" (Resana, Pline...) just doesn't work or isn't as convenient

It's absolutely true that nobody in the French govt, French semi-public companies (so-called "SEMs") or French large private companies uses anything but Microsoft and the big US cloud providers.

But I don't think the open-source initiatives are "just for show" because nobody cares, and so there is no one to show it to.

They are more wishful thinking, random initiatives. "Let's do open-source!" and throw a couple million euros here and a couple thousand there, and we have the illusion of doing something.

What is made in that manner is also of incredible low quality; most of the time it doesn't work; I recently tried to do a "téléconsultation" with a hospital, which uses state-sponsored software. It was impossible to connect (and the login and password are sent in the same email! why bother with a password then??)

Data sources are not maintained or are incomplete. Data about road accidents don't mention the brand of the car because French car companies lobbied against it! (Which tells a lot about car quality in the first place). Etc.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#120

Post by jacques_morin »

jeynec wrote: post #104
sylvinus wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facts (and code) are following. We're building a fully open source workspace ( https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en ) among other ambitious initiatives ( https://beta.gouv.fr/ ). The turmoil caused by the two contracts you mention also prove that the new normal has already shifted towards open source. It's a slow process, but it's undeniable that we are making progress.

These initiatives are only for show. I work in one of the biggest French goverment entity and no one uses this. We still very much use Microsoft products for virtually everything, and everything "sovereign" (Resana, Pline...) just doesn't work or isn't as convenient

I disagree. I currently work as a phd student in a french lab and we're slowly but surely adopting these french government tools, and they work really well. It will take years, but the migration process is probably going to happen.
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