161–170 of 232 posts
As a citizen, if only the first rule could become true for new and existing online public services such as « URSSAF », « Les Impôts » and « AMELI », that would be a great step forward (but I guess that will never happened as the hugh consulting firms developing these won’t have the same view on the matter)
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…
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> 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?
> Why do we need birth certificates in addition to IDs, exactly?
Because it’s the official record of your actual birth which gives you right and is therefore useful when you need for exemple to get said ids or prove to anyone that it is indeed where you were born?
Birth certificates are in no way unique to France. What’s remarkable however is how easy to get a copy of yours if you are French.
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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.
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
The Office365 subscriptions are probably going to go last, because the effort to deploy alternatives and retrain the 200,000 people using them is enormous. It is a very visible aspect that won’t change anytime soon, but it does not mean that there is nothing else happening.
For example, the Renater tools are getting more and more use from all the research and higher education institutions. It’s not going to happen overnight, but it is shifting.
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> 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…
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> 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…
The problem is not software capability. The problem is training staff to use new software, planning the transition, and make it happen smoothly. You cannot just end your contract and get a new provider when you’re talking about 100,000 licenses. In fact, Office is likely going to go last, because it is easier to update the backend and centralised infrastructure than the client software used by hundreds of thousands of people in something like 500 different agencies.
Hell, we regularly have glitches going from one version of Office to the next. When it’s a university administration that’s out of operation for 2 months it’s bad enough, but survivable. When it’s all of public-facing civil servants it’s a different matter.
> 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.
Right. The fact is that it used to be inaccessible, and now it is. We should demand more, of course, but bitching about it is short-sighted and counter-productive. More and more data is accessible, leading to more and more transparency and new uses. It could be better (and it is the citizens’ responsibility to vote to make it get better), but you have to start somewhere.
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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…
But here is the problem: if you now have a small business selling service around free software you are now facing the full wrath of the regulation and legal risk. In the end only IBM, RedHat, Microsoft and big companies have the strength and the resources to monetize open source it but smaller actors don't. And it is becoming very difficult and risky even for most ~100 employees companies.
So you still have the right to develop and use free software but you can't really make a living out of it anymore unless you work for RedHat or others.
And yes it makes no sense. The EU is doing to the software industry what they did to agriculture a few decades ago.
I cany see anywhere how they define open source? Because I am sensing it is pretty much GPL or even AGPL only.
Wonder when there will be a French equivalent of or funding for the Sovereign Tech Agency. https://www.sovereign.tech/