Live data from Hacker News

France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

social.numerique.gouv.fr

141–150 of 232 posts

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#141

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…

Typical French reaction to anything positive. Everytime someone actually does something nice in this country, there will be a dozen nay-sayers complaining uselessly that it is not perfect while doing nothing of value themselves. It always saddens me to see a country with so much too succeed being so impaired by its own citizens.

This comment didn't impair anything being done, though.

I totally agree with it. The EU could do something non-performative by it and its governments stopping issuing documents in proprietary Microsoft formats and use OSS only.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#142
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> How can we know for sure the binaries running on the voting machines [..] As far as elections are concerned, give me paper ballots every day, and make sure you count them by hand with plenty of Mk I human observers present.

You happen to be a moderator on Stack Overflow by any chance?

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#143
post #119
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mill…

> 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.

I work from one of the biggest French companies and this is definitely untrue.

Everyone starting from the very top is concerned about the issue of sovereignty surrounding the cloud. This was true before and is even more true nowadays.

Obviously, everyone still use Office because, well, there is no alternative to Office. The only serious competitor is Google and it's a poor one on top of still begin an American company.

Still, you have some very successful initiative at the state level. Messaging is a good exemple. So is all the work done around GED and open data.

Do you realise how funny it is to see you complain that you can't see the car brands in a data base about road accidents while not realising how awesome it is that you have access to such a database?

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#144
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LibreOffice UI is so awful I'm 90% convinced there is a Microsoft plant that actively disrupts progress. I don't lurk the github, so I'm just assuming there are a few accounts that disagree with UI improvements just to kill time and fake debate. But yeah that UI is just awful. Further, you mention any UI issue on the subreddit and you get banned. Yeah... Really a shame, Fedora + Google's Office Suite has been a near…

> But yeah that UI is just awful. As far as I can see, awful UI never stops people from using software that is "mandated" or "default". I mean have you seen Windows? MS Office? Web sites? Mobile apps??

I get it, but LibreOffice is awful in a much worse way than Office. On MacOS, the fonts and images just look low res and blurry. There's no polish, even though that is probably quite an easy fix.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#145
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hah. It used to be that Microsoft products were sleek, fast, and just plain more convenient than Open Source products. E.g. OpenOffice vs MS Office. And honestly, OS stuff still often sucks quite a bit. It's just that MS software has degraded to the point of utter shittiness (see: Teams) that now it's just plain worse than their own software from 15 years ago.

> It's just that MS software has degraded to the point of utter shittiness (see: Teams) that now it's just plain worse than their own software from 15 years ago.

I sometimes feel like I live in a parallele universe reading the comments here on Office.

The addition of collaboration and how it seemlessly integrated with sharepoints while easing the sharing of documents make Office365 a blessing in most office environment. There is no way people are going back to sharing files like before after having worked this way.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#146
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hah. It used to be that Microsoft products were sleek, fast, and just plain more convenient than Open Source products. E.g. OpenOffice vs MS Office. And honestly, OS stuff still often sucks quite a bit. It's just that MS software has degraded to the point of utter shittiness (see: Teams) that now it's just plain worse than their own software from 15 years ago.

this! this is so true for every big corporation product. Iphone is a shitty version of iphones from 10 years ago but with better cameras…. and windows is spamming me hard with their services

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typical French reaction to anything positive. Everytime someone actually does something nice in this country, there will be a dozen nay-sayers complaining uselessly that it is not perfect while doing nothing of value themselves. It always saddens me to see a country with so much too succeed being so impaired by its own citizens.

This comment didn't impair anything being done, though. I totally agree with it. The EU could do something non-performative by it and its governments stopping issuing documents in proprietary Microsoft formats and use OSS only.

The constant criticism of people actually trying to do something by people who prefer sitting on their hands is impairing in itself.

People are basically constantly dragging everyone down including themselves while doing absolutely nothing.

I mean technically I guess they sometimes vocally protest in the street that they don't understand why someone else is not solving their own problem or that they would prefer we just pretended the problem never existed which is pretty much equivalent to doing nothing if not worse.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#149
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mill…

> 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. I work from one of the biggest French companies and this is definitely untrue. Everyone starting from the very top is concerned about the issue of sovereignty surrounding the cloud. This was true before and is even more tru…

> this is definitely untrue

> Obviously, everyone still use Office because, well, there is no alternative to Office

So it is, indeed, true. Can you clarify what your point is, exactly? (Also: there is an alternative to MS Office, which is LibreOffice. It works ok. It's not as powerful, maybe (maybe!) but it's fine.)

> Do you realise how funny it is to see you complain that you can't see the car companies in a data base about road accidents while not realising how awesome it is that you have access to such a database?

No, I really don't. It's not "awesome" to have access to that data. This is public information. Citizens don't have to be grateful of what the state does. THE STATE WORKS FOR US, not the other way around.

And as it is, it's not very useful, since the most important data is withheld.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#150
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]
Post reply on HN