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France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

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Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#131

Post by quadrifoliate »

antirez wrote: post #120
anon291 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSS software is also mostly owned by the US. This entire thing of 'replacing' American software with American software under a different commercial model is so silly.

That's not true. For instance in the field of video pipelines ffmpeg is the standard, and was started by an European (French) person. Runs on Linux of course, that ..., and so forth. Do you really believe in Europe there is no the tech capability to recreate the tech stack? This is an extremely naive way to put it. US tech is much more developed because of money infusion even on companies that take 10/20 years to get…

> This is an extremely naive way to put it. US tech is much more developed because of money infusion even on companies that take 10/20 years to get productive.

Not sure if this is aimed at the immediate parent comment or mine, but I agree completely. US tech is developed due to the unique VC ecosystem, but in my opinion EU governments have lagged behind on setting up their own ecosystem (VC or otherwise) that would create equivalently sized and capable companies.

I also don't understand what the parent means by OSS being "owned" by the US. That ownership is not meaningful due to many/all of the licenses; and there are many meaningful EU OSS contributions.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#132

Post by Arathorn »

runarberg wrote: post #117
stronglikedan wrote: post #72

lol, "Europe" isn't seeking anything of the sort. France maybe, and a couple other countries, but very, very far from the whole of Europe. And even then, only a handful of people relative to the whole country. This won't even cause a blip on a balance sheet. What are they gonna switch to? I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams. It's all just theater.

Zoom and Teams are both proprietary software, I doubt any available forks exist, or could exist, for use outside of corporation where they are developed. I’m guessing they will probably use something built on top of Matrix which is an open protocol maintained by a Community Interest Corporation (CIC) in the UK. https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/30/france_matrix/ I’m less sure what they will use for video conferenci…

The French video conferencing tool is called Visio, and is here: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet. It uses LiveKit for video, but doesn't yet use Matrix - the hope is to make it speak MatrixRTC so it can interop nicely with Tchap (the French fork of Element).

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#133

Post by meinersbur »

anon291 wrote: post #118
quadrifoliate wrote: post #111

This needs to go much, much further before it is even mildly effective. The EU has a population of ~450 million (more than the US) and no significant large technology companies. They are largely dependent on US Big Tech as a population. I love that there is a lot more enthusiasm about OSS adoption within EU software devs, but at a population or government level there doesn't appear to be any coherent strategy to grad…

OSS software is also mostly owned by the US. This entire thing of 'replacing' American software with American software under a different commercial model is so silly.

It doesn't matter whether OSS is American (in whatever sense) -- anything that is America-specific (e.g. server addresses) can be patched for a localized European version. The different commercial model does matter: American law does not apply (Cloud Act, National Security Letters, ...)

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#134

Post by blitzar »

Banditoz wrote: post #6
pelagicAustral wrote: post #2

Refreshing. No more Teams? Sounds like a dream... Of all the crapware I am forced to work with, Teams really pushes the envelope in every single negative way conceivable. I think I have more love for SharePoint than Teams, and that is a massive concession.

Every Teams team is backed by SharePoint, unfortunately.

I knew I could smell a poo in the room, I didn't know what or who was responsible but it all makes sense now.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#135

Post by mgbmtl »

runarberg wrote: post #117
stronglikedan wrote: post #72

lol, "Europe" isn't seeking anything of the sort. France maybe, and a couple other countries, but very, very far from the whole of Europe. And even then, only a handful of people relative to the whole country. This won't even cause a blip on a balance sheet. What are they gonna switch to? I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams. It's all just theater.

Zoom and Teams are both proprietary software, I doubt any available forks exist, or could exist, for use outside of corporation where they are developed. I’m guessing they will probably use something built on top of Matrix which is an open protocol maintained by a Community Interest Corporation (CIC) in the UK. https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/30/france_matrix/ I’m less sure what they will use for video conferenci…

We have EU clients that now force us to use BBB (big blue button) for security reasons. It's not perfect, but good enough, and Zoom/Hangouts/Teams all have their quirks. We decided to adopt it where I work, and cut a few paid Zoom accounts.

Some clients use Jitsi, but I find it more complicated to run Jitsi in-house. BBB was really easy to setup.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#136

Post by skippyboxedhero »

spicyusername wrote: post #3

Such a shame that so many U.S. citizens do not see the ramifications of their political decisions. Each one of these actions is a stepping stone the world is taking as a direct consequence of U.S. political negligence. And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.

Failing to make xenophobic choices when it comes to...enterprise software, is the issue?

The US has spent tens of trillions defending Europe indirectly subsidizing social policies despite this the US has persistently been unpopular with Europeans because, obviously, they are a political target for domestic politicians (btw, you see this almost everywhere...if country A gives country B subsidies, you will almost always find that country A's people are virulently hated by a significant proportion of country B's population, the US was more unpopular than Russian before the Ukraine invasion in Germany...let me just repeat: a country which invaded Europe was more popular than a country which gave hundreds of billions a year in defence subsidies).

Acting as if xenophobia towards the US hasn't always been part of the European political climate is not based in reality. Europe has been trying to protect its own market for decades, unsuccessfully. What is more, there is very limited trade WITHIN Europe in certain industries because of the hurdle of national xenophobia and protectionism. Europe has made an industry out of failure and greivance...and, for some reason, part of this narrative is that no country contributes as much as Europe.

Reality? Iran...continued to break US sanctions for years so that failing European defence companies could sell their junk, investigations of Iranian politicians bribing EU parliamentarians. Russia...continued to break US sanctions after Ukraine invasion, had an extremely subservient relationship with Russia despite being repeatedly told by the US that NordStream 2 would lead to Ukraine invasion, former German president actually works for NordStream. On and on, the same mistakes being made all the time because there has never been any real strategy apart from extreme short-term political advantage to protect continued failure to generate social or economic gain in most of Europe (not all tbf, but the executive polling numbers that you see in some countries is incredible, you wouldn't think they have elections).

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#137

Post by TulliusCicero »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #2

Refreshing. No more Teams? Sounds like a dream... Of all the crapware I am forced to work with, Teams really pushes the envelope in every single negative way conceivable. I think I have more love for SharePoint than Teams, and that is a massive concession.

The risk is of course that the new thing might be worse than Teams somehow.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#138

Post by PeterStuer »

spicyusername wrote: post #3

Such a shame that so many U.S. citizens do not see the ramifications of their political decisions. Each one of these actions is a stepping stone the world is taking as a direct consequence of U.S. political negligence. And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.

I do not think many U.S. citizens were consulted on the decision to blow up Nordstream.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#139

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

tyre wrote: post #23

As an American, this is awesome to see. We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement. And economic damage really is the key to the heart of these United States of Three Corporations in a Trench Coat. We’ve seen companies and CEOs paying millions in bribes to be close to the president. Now this aligns their financial interests with shifting our foreign policy. Not how it ought to work, b…

Yes. We are at our best when we compete and have grown too fat and lazy IMO.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#140

Post by blitzar »

macspoofing wrote: post #31
pelagicAustral wrote: post #2

Refreshing. No more Teams? Sounds like a dream... Of all the crapware I am forced to work with, Teams really pushes the envelope in every single negative way conceivable. I think I have more love for SharePoint than Teams, and that is a massive concession.

It's not that bad. It's well integrated into Sharepoint, Exchange, and Office, and does the job. I've used both Slack and Teams and if you're using MS365, then Teams is absolutely the better option.

> Sharepoint, Exchange, and Office

A holy trinity if ever I have seen one.

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