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France's homegrown open source online office suite
171–180 of 367 posts
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#172Great 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…
The description of the Docs project, at least on the OP page, is interesting: "A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales. Built with Django and React." An office suite's 'docs' component is usually a word processor and people sometimes try to (mis)use it for the functions you actually list - i.e., you can try to use Word as a wiki, linking pages somehow, but it's not nearly as efficient…
I think that the point of the project is more:
“Content over form” so you don’t really need all the formatting options of something like Word when you are just trying to write meeting notes.
They are definitely trending more towards a wiki, but it is still early days for this whole experiment. Though, many of the municipalities in the French gov are using it for their day to day work so it is clearly useful in some capacity. I don’t have numbers, but it’s definitely respectable
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#173Okay 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…
Europe is a little bit busy bleeding money for defence if you hadn't noticed. There's only so many 50bn EUR it can conjure up for something
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#174Great 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…
I had a question since there's growing interest in open source adoption for digital sovereignty purposes in Europe; I produce open source software for civil servants as well (for mass appraisal/property tax valuation specifically), and I was wondering if you could offer any advice about how to best meet the needs of/approach European governments (both local and national) about open source collaboration? Do they prefer to develop their own things in house, or do they like to work with community projects?
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#175[deleted]
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
“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.
Honestly it's probably a good idea for governments to self host and self support anything that's important.
>Microsoft Used China-Based Engineers to Support Product Recently Hacked by China
https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-sharepoint-hack...
Open source alternatives, audited by international teams could be much more trust worthy than closed sourced black boxes.
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow True as it may be that they are slow, I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages. > The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it. You do you, but increasing tax…
> I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages. Depends which ones. Python? Definitely a source of slowness.
> Definitely a source of slowness.
I would first blame the programmers, the design and lack of specialty offloading before blaming any programming language. Well designed web calls scale nearly linearly with usage and usually poor design or programming is the source of slowness. You can always trade language complexity for speed but assuming it is the cause of all perceived slowness is a poor man's view.
It is the same story every time again, first it was java, which has so many large scale projects most people won't even know it's running things they use, now it's apparently python who is to blame for all slowness on the web. When the next JIT or scripted language comes along which is not someone's favourite pet that will get the blame.
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#178I wish them the very best, but I don't understand why it doesn't handle OpenDocument Format (ODF) natively.
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#179Okay 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…
you know le suite is a success, when random americans complain about it :)
good for the french, they made the right choice.
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
The description of the Docs project, at least on the OP page, is interesting: "A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales. Built with Django and React." An office suite's 'docs' component is usually a word processor and people sometimes try to (mis)use it for the functions you actually list - i.e., you can try to use Word as a wiki, linking pages somehow, but it's not nearly as efficient…
Think of Docs more of a modern, kind of Notion-style collaboration tool. It's not meant to be a Word replacement for full-scale document authoring (I believe La Suite will work with LibreOffice for that, but might be wrong here). The product vision is that Docs should focus on "Content over Form"; i.e.: make it easy to create well-structured documents (content), as opposed to Word which makes it easy to change every…
Thanks. I think your vision is much more useful for most day-to-day work for most people. It's interesting that a new office suite would aim in that direction.