Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

social.numerique.gouv.fr

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 232 posts

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#151

Post by wvh »

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…

That's a lovely idea. I have been working for large open data projects and secretive private data collections and they both fail in their own ways. Maybe the open-source gathering with a proper authority to lock down and shepherd data in case of dispute or vandalism is the golden middle way. Sort of like the BDFL concept: open for all, ultimately vetoed by a benevolent entity.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#152

Post by Sammi »

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.

Yeah this is why you shouldn't use voting machines. Paper voting is already great. Whoever is trying to sell you a voting machine does not have your best interests in mind.

Very few people have any change of understanding machine voting systems. With paper voting we get much better transparency of the voting procedures. Any form of machine voting is terrible for transparency and democracy compared to just plain old paper voting.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#153

Post by rasmus-kirk »

fsflover wrote: post #109
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.

If you agree, here's a petition: https://publiccode.eu

Thanks, I just signed.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#154

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

bambax wrote: post #127
fdefitte wrote: post #19

France has an undeserved bad reputation for this stuff. As a french citizen, I'm amazed to see how easy it has become to do anything administrative online, with great tools such as France Connect that allows a single login method for any administrative tool.

Most things don't work, and "France Connect" is really bad (it doesn't even accept non-ascii letters for your name or surname! which is insane coming from an official initiative of the French Government; they should at least know how to use the French language). Anything from the department of education is also abysmal, mostly broken, and needlessly convoluted. The one amazing thing that works is the taxes collection…

> Most things don't work

Sure, apart from paying your taxes with entirely pre-filled forms, accessing all your medical bills, upcoming reimbursments, communication with the public medical insurance and your full medical history from a single place, doing everything that needs to be done with the French equivalent of the DMV, paying fines, changing your address everywhere with one form when you move, getting a digital copy of your ids and driving licences with the same value as the official one in a couple of minutes, requesting official documents like your criminal record or birth certificate and getting them mailed to you and all of that with the same unique login, absolutely nothing works.

I mean, what have the Roman ever done for us?

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#155

Post by idoubtit »

sylvinus wrote: post #98
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…

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.

> it's undeniable that we are making progress.

Yes, I agree that some public organizations in France are making progress with Open Source. For instance, free software is now common in universities (with local variations). And overall I think there's a central influence of the DiNum ("Direction Numérique", the Digital Department of the French State) in this direction. But I don't see how this UN charter makes any difference.

There's progress, though not related to this charter. And so slow that I would bet against "Open Source" becoming widespread in French schools within the next decade.

> Facts (and code) are following.

I'm sorry, but the current situation and the past experience makes it really hard to believe that facts will follow from this charter. At least facts matching the claim that the French government will be "Open by default: Making Open Source the standard approach for projects" (quote from the first point of the charter).

If "France endorses UN Open Source principles", it shouldn't just mean that it will publish some code. It should means that it intends to respect these principles, and that proprietary software becomes the exception within the French administration.

I can't believe this post is more than symbolic, because the French law already promotes Open Source and forbids non-UE proprietary software in many public contexts. But these laws are usually not applied. Why would a non-prescriptive charter do any better?

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#156

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

bambax wrote: post #149
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #143

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. 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 ba…

> So it is, indeed, true.

Office is a fairly unsignificant part of our cloud usage. I'm fairly sure we could come to an agreement with Microsoft if we needed to self-host.

> there is an alternative to MS Office, which is LibreOffice

People don't use Office like it's the 90s anymore. Everything which doesn't have seemless collaboration and document sharing is dead on arrival.

> 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.

The state doesn't owe you anything apart from safety and law enforment. Of course, you should be grateful that people fought for, put in place and maintain all the services you receive on top. They don't come by magic. That's actual people working.

The fact that you can easily and freely access this database is something to be celebrated. In most places, people who don't work for the state have to pay to access this or go through a public library and that's honestly perfectly fine.

It's baffling to me how the French seemingly fail to realise how incredible the breadth of services their government provides is and somehow manage to make themselves miserable rather than actually doing something of what they are gifted with.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#157

Post by bambax »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #154
bambax wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most things don't work, and "France Connect" is really bad (it doesn't even accept non-ascii letters for your name or surname! which is insane coming from an official initiative of the French Government; they should at least know how to use the French language). Anything from the department of education is also abysmal, mostly broken, and needlessly convoluted. The one amazing thing that works is the taxes collection…

> Most things don't work Sure, apart from paying your taxes with entirely pre-filled forms, accessing all your medical bills, upcoming reimbursments, communication with the public medical insurance and your full medical history from a single place, doing everything that needs to be done with the French equivalent of the DMV, paying fines, changing your address everywhere with one form when you move, getting a digital…

Most of what you mention either does not exist, or doesn't work, or is a completely unnecessary bureaucratic burden created for no reason, that we are expected to marvel about. Why do we need birth certificates in addition to IDs, exactly?

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#158

Post by FergusArgyll »

jart wrote: post #150
immibis wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

I'm not sure if this is satire, but if it isn't you can look over for some history you may have never heard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#159

Post by immibis »

sunshine-o wrote: post #137
jart wrote: post #65

The government getting interested in open source should terrify us all. The UN formally defining principles for what it means is a soft form of regulation that's only going to get more authoritarian over time. Traveling down this road, we're going to find ourselves living in a world where you're only allowed to share software if (1) you're working for a corporation, or (2) you're working for the government. Because (…

Yep you are basically describing the EU Cybersecurity Act if anybody care to read it and try to understand how things work in reality.

The CRA literally excludes free software developers from the obligations. Because if you're doing something for free you should have no obligations either. Instead, the obligations fall on commercial users of free software. Turns out regulations are sensible sometimes. Who knew.

However, this only happened because free software developers made an uproar about the act while it was a bill and was missing this provision. In a previous proposed version of the act, free software developers would have been liable for security vulnerabilities. So stay connected with politics!

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#160

Post by immibis »

throw__away7391 wrote: post #70
jart wrote: post #65

The government getting interested in open source should terrify us all. The UN formally defining principles for what it means is a soft form of regulation that's only going to get more authoritarian over time. Traveling down this road, we're going to find ourselves living in a world where you're only allowed to share software if (1) you're working for a corporation, or (2) you're working for the government. Because (…

This comes across as more than a little bit fanciful, nevertheless I agree with the sentiment. There's an awful lot of people on the sidelines with their eyes on gaining control over software with intentions that are not at all reflected by what they state publicly. We do not need some political body to come "help", they have no understanding of what makes this work in the first place and nothing of value to contribu…

All free (as in beer) work on software is voluntary. You do not need, and should not have, someone breathing down your neck to make you do it the way they want. However, that person is free to decide to allocate additional effort to work on the software themselves - even forking yours. They're also free to decide how much open source software they want to use, and which.

This is something I used to misunderstand too. That open source was something where there were a fixed set of projects available, one or two for each purpose, and if you wanted a change, you contributed that change and they take it. In reality, it's where everyone has their own project that does the thing they want. Most are written by one person or by tight-knit groups. Drive-by contributions often cost as much for the developers to process as just doing the contribution themselves. If you don't like how some software works, you have the right to write your own software using the existing software as a starting point - you do not have a right to edit the existing project. These are the same rights the UN has.

Post reply on HN