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France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

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Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#151
post #94
post #70

I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale. The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.

Products don't necessarily win on merit. Microsoft Teams "won" entirely because it was given away free with Office. Even though it is acceptable these days, it was horrible when it started. There is no way it could have won without unlimited backing from a bigger force. You have to see EU trying these things in the same light.

It wasn't seen as a priority national security measure before.

Now we have a US leader who may wake up tomorrow and put 100% tariffs on cloud services to EU corps or have the NSA demand chat logs.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#152

Americans fail to appreciate a few things about our economy 1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans 2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market 3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with Englis…

From a world domination point of view fragmentation is bad. On the other hand heterogeneity is good for choice and freedom as at least on paper if one platform kicks you off due to whatever curbs on freedom, you have alternative choices.

Heterogeneity/fragmentation also makes it harder for companies and countries to impose their mores on others. From that PoV Africa also should develop its own tools so as not to be subject to either North American or European values but their own values.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visio from https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/

It's funny that it's such a blatant knock-off of Google Workspace - the repos even have the same names: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet I wonder if the emoji will grow into its own set: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet/blob/main/src/fronten...

> blatant knock-off of Google Workspace - the repos even have the same names

That's exactly what we need though, so I see that as a plus.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#154
post #5
post #3

And they can strike back at corporate America by licensing the stuff under gnu licenses. Software that’s reasonably small, reasonably effective and portable. What a concept. If only the EU or UK had 5-10 hackers…

Even something already available off the shelf! https://www.fsf.org/blogs/membership/jitsi-meet-an-often-ove...

It's pretty awful to setup compared to the Livekit-based solution.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#155
post #70

I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale. The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.

> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking

Governments have many levers to pull that are only loosely part of "the market".

Want in on those juicy government contracts? Work in a regulated industry (defence contractor, healthcare, banking)? Sell products into the state-funded education system?

Congratulations, you now use the government-mandated messaging infrastructure.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#156
post #134

Many EU members impose regulatory requirements for software in some sectors. If you want to get certified you need to go through some of them and while they are arcane they are also required. EU could easily force the hand - not in the next month or so but over a period of time. No need to discriminate against US companies but EU companies might be preferred and might have better access to EU services. We already hav…

In Spain you need to be ENS-certified (esquema nacional de seguridad) in order to provide services to the goverment. Nowadays it is similar / aligned to NIS2 certification.

But you need to certify more than just apps. Processes are more important than apps.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#158

Americans fail to appreciate a few things about our economy 1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans 2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market 3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with Englis…

India, but many companies aren't willing to price for the market nor respect corporate norms there.

Weird, because software has probably the lowest marginal cost of goods sold of any product or service. You can make money selling at almost any price.

Yes, there is some cost to provisioning and running a cloud account. It's pretty small though. Some disk space and electricity.

By "corporate norms" I presume you mean bribes paid to the person making the purchasing decision?

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#159
post #95

For what it's worth, if you want a self hosted replacement for Zoom Galene has worked great for me, The server requirements are remarkably low, especially if you are like me and just need a personal video chat to a few people. I run it on an old apu-2 with openbsd(which is just about the worst combination and it still works great) As a bonus there is no client, that is, the client is just a web page so very low frict…

+1. I am running a Galene instance via the YunoHost self-hosting package on a small dedicated server (2 cores, 4gb of RAM). So far it’s much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality. Feels better than Jitsi and even a FaceTime / WhatsApp call.

> So far [Galene is] much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality

Latency is better, since Galene uses an unordered buffer instead of a jitter buffer. Lipsynch should also be slightly better, as Galene carefully computes audio/video offsets and forwards the result to the receiver so it can compensate.

Audio and video quality, on the other hand, should be roughly the same, unless Jitsi is doing something wrong.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#160
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only recently that the united states has become an enemy of the EU though. I'd say there's much more motivation to move to other software and platforms now.

Even during president Obama. the US spied on Merkel's mobile phone.

> Even during president Obama. the US spied on Merkel's mobile phone.

There is a huge gap between spying on someone phone and calling openly to invade a territory.

Every country spies on each other for various reasons (industrial, geopolitics) even between allies.

But I think we can agree that an ally by definition is not suppose to ring your door bell and say he wants to take your land against your will.

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