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France's homegrown open source online office suite

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Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#151

Post by wtcactus »

well_ackshually wrote: post #129
wtcactus wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Man, life must be easy when you can't read and just get to make things up online. Especially when things such as the URSSAF's simulation tool is like, freely available online: https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-ne... giving you a copy of a pay slip with detailed amounts of where your money goes. Someone making 2500€ gross will take home 1885€ per month after taxes and contributions. On which yo…

Well, life isn't that easy then, because you failed to comprehend URSSAF's simulation tool.

On a €2500 gross salary you take home €1651 (which is a very low salary in France very close to the minimum salary). But I guess you think the gross salary is what the company, by law, has to say they pay you, instead of what the total cost for the company of your salary.

See, in France, even if you are getting close to the minimum salary, the state is taking 33% of the cake for themselves. This is for people that earn very little. For people that earn average salaries of €2669 liquid (€5000 gross for the company), the French state takes 47% of the cake.

It's a normal mistake for people that don't actually have to support the costs themselves. Once people actually start a small business or pay more attention to their own wages and how much is being taken away, they figure out how it actually works.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#152

Post by ThinkBeat »

The big problem EUs continuous big talk on digital sovereignty, which is a good and vital concept, is that funding is ridiculously lacking.

Terms used like; “European hyperscale cloud” “Sovereign infrastructure” “Strategic autonomy” “European data centers for critical workloads”

Which ended up in various efforts and projects

Digital Europe Programme, Recovery and Resilience Facility, IPCE

(I am not deeply familiar with EU projects)

I believe funding was around low hundreds of millions (€) total

To build one hyperscaler region might cost around €10 billion.

The second problem is that systems that were suggested out of it still relied on US software stack, US computers, etc.

It is not like the EU member states could not fund it, some estimates say aggregated EU and member states have spent €350 billion in Ukraine.

That is not to say they should not do that, nor to suggest you have to chose one or the other but it is demonstration that EU+Member states can fund massive efforts, If deemed important enough.

and EU+Memberstates so far have not felt an urgency or will to really invest in digital sovereignty.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#154

Post by ethanpailes »

maxloh wrote: post #66
okanat wrote: post #26

Okay this is nowhere near an "Office suite". It is a cloud collaboration suite with a glorified markdown editor and with some extra utilities around. Almost nobody buys stuff like Google Docs and Microsoft Office for this reason. From my experience using open-source collaboration groupware like Nextcloud, their solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow. Only thing…

Scaling horizontally is significantly cheaper than the additional engineering cost required to build these applications in statically typed languages, especially in developed nations like France. The real bottleneck lies on the database side, but it is rare for an average organization to actually hit its limits. Don't think at Microsoft scale if you aren't them.

Server costs actually matter quite a bit at the scales of the incumbents in this space. Also, speed can be an important part of UX. Scaling horizontally won’t help if the engine itself is slow enough that there is noticeable lag even with just a single document getting edited by a dozen people.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#155

Post by pydry »

harvey9 wrote: post #120
kkfx wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small note: in 2026, classic office suites shouldn't even exist in my opinion, so if the EU were to create a glorified R/Quarto, essentially a LaTeX wrapper with some basic calculation capabilities added, it would be infinitely better than any office suite. My personal setup is Emacs/org-mode, using babel for the rest; I use Python with Polars, Plotly, and very occasionally SymPy just to avoid using Maxima if I'm a…

You use emacs so why should anyone else need MS Word? A large number of people use word processor software because it has advantages over typewriters or handwriting for their purposes rather than because they lack training in something more esoteric.

To be fair ms word is rooted in a world paper once ruled and the paper/document metaphor is becoming increasingly less relevant.

I used to use it all day every day and now i use it once a year maybe (often for government related things, coz theyre often the only ones still asking me to fill out and sign PDF forms).

Most office functions are better supplanted with a decent cms, spreadsheet, email and something to let you create forms for people to fill in.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#156

Post by nhatcher »

nickthesick wrote: post #79
YousefED wrote: post #70

Great to see this on HN. fyi, La Suite is an umbrella project built by DINUM in France that started several years ago, mainly to enable people in the public administration to use more independent tools. It's built in-house, often on top of other open source technologies. E.g.: Matrix powers chat and LiveKit powers Visio (which was recently featured on HN as well when they announced it's rolled out to replace Zoom / T…

Glad to be working as part of this initiative too!

Hi! Congratulations to you and Yousef. And I am lucky enough to be in a position from learning from both of you.

Anyone think what they might about La Suite, but blocknote is a solid product!

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#157

Post by parchley »

xp84 wrote: post #150
999900000999 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to raise taxes for this, literally just stop wasting money on licensees once the open source projects are ready. It's not a "let do it in 3 months" thing, this will take at least a decade.

“Once ready” they’ll save (somewhat) on licenses, what about paying for it during the years it will take to build it, while it’s not ready? When any random company makes a Build vs. Buy decision the question is “is this a core competency?” Most companies use a package from MS or GOOG because it’s unlikely that they’ll be so good at productivity software that it’s (A) worth distracting themselves from their actual job…

No, suggestion those caveats show that you are out of touch with what is at stake. This is about digital sovereignty, not saving money. It’s about not relying on the US. The US is literally forcing our hands here.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#158

Post by guerrilla »

jmclnx wrote: post #5

Very nice. You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence, but they do. Over the years I have heard of many good Open Source Projects coming out of France. I sometimes wonder if it is because of French vs English Language were you hardly hear of their projects in English speaking Countries.

> You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence

France has always been super heavy on open source. They even used to host Les Trophées du Libre, international open-source software competition. FramaSoft (i.e. PeerTube) and VLC are also French.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#159

Post by seabrookmx »

petcat wrote: post #48
ricardobeat wrote: post #40

Why is Django so popular among open-source projects like these, especially government funded? I’ve never happened to see a commercial project use it in my twenty years in the field. Ruby/Go or even bun or node would be much more approachable and performant options today.

> I’ve never seen a commercial project use it in my twenty years in the field. This is very surprising to me considering some of the largest sites in the world are built on Django. Instagram, Pinterest, for instance. Large parts of stripe and Robinhood are implemented with Django. Eventbrite, bitbucket. I believe even Sentry is. All commercial products.

In Instagram's case, they do not use the ORM or Admin, and have an internal fork of the request handling/middleware stack that is 100% async (before the recent async bits were added to Django)[1].

It's great that Django's API design allowed them to move this way easily, but they aren't actually using Django in the traditional sense because it can't handle their scale.

I've found that with the Django ORM and DRF especially, it's very easy to create a poorly performing app by following the established patterns (N+1 queries being a huge problem created by DRF serializers). You need to be extremely diligent to create something performant in this ecosystem. Not every dev team has Armin Ronacher :P

Where I work we found this exhausting, and moved on to FastAPI and ASP.NET. We make our queries much more explicit using tools like Dapper, and now a senior engineer can have a much better idea how a particular route will perform just by reading the code (obviously, we still do some profiling).

[1]: https://djangochat.com/episodes/django-instagram-carl-meyer

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