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France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

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Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#181

Post by BrandoElFollito »

wickedwiesel wrote: post #74
larsnystrom wrote: post #38

There seems to be a huge business opportunity in Europe right now, to sell support and customization of open source software to government players. Has anyone heard about a European company that’s been successful in this area?

Sure. Nextcloud GmbH seems to be one of the winners. It sells a customized version aimed at government agencies. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nextcloud

If what they sell is the open source Nextcloud, it is a horrendous product.

Its architecture is weird, with a proxy inside you can harden only by editing data inside a container that is volatyile by design (and has to be). There are numerous issues opened on that topic, Nextcloud response is "live with it".

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#182

Post by wolvoleo »

input_sh wrote: post #167

Worth pointing out: France is not adopting existing open source software, they're building their own software and releasing it under the MIT licence. Most of it (or all of it?) is Django backend + React frontend (using a custom-built UI kit). Home page for the entire suite (in French) with some screenshots: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ Code bases are on GitHub and they use English there: https://github.com/suit…

Hmmm not entirely true. The text chat of their suite is simply element.io (matrix) and they're paying them for development.

Visio does seem built from scratch but I wonder if it's a temporary thing until element is feature complete with their move away from Jitsi.

You can find more about la suite on their website and the opendesk one (German project using mostly the same software). Unfortunately I don't have the links to hand here.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#183

Post by Ylpertnodi »

badc0ffee wrote: post #80
emsign wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because they believe it will lead to economic prosperity and good jobs returning to their community. Maybe they say that but it's justification for their racist believes, which they still don't want to talk openly about. It just sounds better when someone invents some "benefits" of it. Like wild claims in an ad is helping the buyer justify their impulse shopping.

70 million Americans voted for him. His biggest demographic win compared to the last election was non-white men. Immediately dismissing this as racism isn't going to help you understand it, or help the Democrats beat the Republicans.

The dems are just as corrupt, just wiith a nicer smile. Eu citizen, here - all politicians are bent. Anecdata: Anyone who votes for a politician should stfu, stop complaining and live with it. Why should i suffer alone? Disenfranchised? Not me - idgaf. I just hope the eu gets its act together and actually does something, but it will be difficult; language alone, being one of them, and "my pie", another.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#184

Post by pembrook »

bborud wrote: post #125
quadrifoliate wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shame that so many EU citizens do not see the ramifications of theirs . EU citizens have elected ineffective leaders for decades -- leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies. They have elected leaders who were until very recently heavily dependent on Russian energy. As a result, EU dependence on US tech is near-total. I remember hearing a few months ago…

leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies Remarkable how it is the politicans who should have been doing this when it doesn't get done, and how everyone is quick to complain if politicians meddle in what the private sector should have been doing. This is a recurring theme in a lot of debates. And I think it has to do with our need to blame someone but ou…

I don't think anybody expected EU politicians to create the software companies

When we speak of the failure of EU politicians, it has been in removing the barriers in their own market to even develop successful technology companies given all the highly educated local talent (they have a larger population than the US!).

The lack of a single capital market, no single regulatory market, no single language market, hilariously wide variance in taxation/labor/corporate law, etc. is why the EU can never compete in each tech wave (from the transistor to mainframes to the PC to the internet to ecommerce to social media to smartphones to AI etc. etc.)

Trillions in tax revenue is missing from the successful companies that were never built and the income tax from high-paid employees that don't exist. The last 60 years of growth in the digital realm could be funding the EU's various rotting social welfare systems and instead be providing countries across the region with a higher standard of living. Instead they are stuck living off the tax receipts thrown off by dying industrial-age giants. Which China will soon kill.

This is absolutely a policy failure, and regardless of the historical reasons why we ended up here, to paint it as anything other than a policy failure is to not live in reality.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#185

Post by CapricornNoble »

melesian wrote: post #76
lefstathiou wrote: post #46

As an American, I will echo Trump's speech at Davos. We want strong allies, not vassals. Be capable of building your own EVs, your own rockets, your own fighter jets, your own subway systems, your own zoom alternatives, your own search engines, your own operating systems, etc etc. Make Europe great again. Bring back creativity. Bring back jobs. Build a talented workforce that stays local instead of migrating to the U…

Patronizing rubbish. The EU builds plenty of EVs, rockets and fighter jets and has far more subway systems and public transport than the US. Europe is already great. It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025. As for being a vassal: Trump was warned of the consequences of invading Greenland and he backed down immediately. Some vassal.

Re: fighter jets, the US and China are each producing about 4x as many jets as all of Europe combined. Europe's deliveries (41) barely exceed Russia's (33-39) despite Europe having 3x the population, supposedly superior industrial tech, not being the most sanctioned economy on Earth, etc...

https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/2025-fighter-jet-delive...

Re: rockets.....well we don't want to judge by tonnage lifted, where SpaceX dwarfs the entire planet's efforts. Still it appears Europe struggles to put even a handful of new rockets up, so I'm not sure why you are characterizing that as "plenty" either:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/20/1113582/europe-i...

> Europe is already great. It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025.

HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS? Citation needed please. A migration of that scale would have journalists writing about it. Accurate data seems hard to come by but one expert puts TOTAL US expat numbers in Europe around 1.1 million.

https://aaro.org/living-abroad/how-many-americans-live-abroa...

> As for being a vassal: Trump was warned of the consequences of invading Greenland and he backed down immediately. Some vassal.

Yes sometimes vassals oppose their suzerain's most egregious overreaches of power successfully. King John of England's barons pressured him to create the Magna Carta. Afterwards...they were still his vassals, as they were before it.

Just ask Mark Rutte: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/01/29/rutte-is-right...

A relevant opinion piece from a European: https://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/columns/nothing-more-than...

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#186

Post by wolvoleo »

tedggh wrote: post #176
pelagicAustral wrote: post #2

Refreshing. No more Teams? Sounds like a dream... Of all the crapware I am forced to work with, Teams really pushes the envelope in every single negative way conceivable. I think I have more love for SharePoint than Teams, and that is a massive concession.

What’s so bad about Teams that makes it so hated? I used it lately and often to work with a customer and I don’t find anything terrible about it, other than some minor usability annoyances like phantom chat notifications once in a while. But overall it does what it’s supposed to do, get on a video call, share your screen and share files over channels. The transcript feature seems to work well too. I’m not amazed by i…

It's a resource hog, crashes, it's constantly littering files all over SharePoint which becomes even more than a garbage bin than it already is.

And the UI is terrible, huge balloons around everything. I want density but even at the densest setting it sucks.

Oh and it also fails to update online status. Often I click on a colleague who seems green and only then it updates and it turns out they've been away for 3 hours. Grrr

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#187

Post by tartoran »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #161
tartoran wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams is the bane of my existence. Oh well, one of them at least and am forced to use it for the time being. Europeans may get lucky with some sane software or get something even worse than Teams. It remains to be seen how they do. If their software is starting to get better, perhaps US software will get better too because they can no longer justify the junk they're pumping out on us.

> get something even worse than Teams I'm not sure that's actually possible, you know...

I hope for the best for Europeans but until I see results I'm not sure what they're capable of.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#188

Post by dijit »

tedggh wrote: post #176
pelagicAustral wrote: post #2

Refreshing. No more Teams? Sounds like a dream... Of all the crapware I am forced to work with, Teams really pushes the envelope in every single negative way conceivable. I think I have more love for SharePoint than Teams, and that is a massive concession.

What’s so bad about Teams that makes it so hated? I used it lately and often to work with a customer and I don’t find anything terrible about it, other than some minor usability annoyances like phantom chat notifications once in a while. But overall it does what it’s supposed to do, get on a video call, share your screen and share files over channels. The transcript feature seems to work well too. I’m not amazed by i…

"I don't have an issue with it" tells me you've never used anything else. Have you tried Slack? Zulip? Mattermost? Fucking... IRC from 1988?

Teams isn't just mediocre, it's aggressively hostile to basic usability. The camera bar sits at the top of the window, directly blocking where you're supposed to position your camera for eye contact. Chat organisation is broken: you get duplicate groups because the order people were added matters somehow. Notifications phantom in and out. Reactions are buried in an activity feed. Search is useless. You can't reliably paste text without major formatting issues. The mobile app logs you out randomly and doesn’t tell you unless you manually check it. Desktop notifications don't sync with read state. Files uploaded to chat don't appear in the Files tab. The "new Teams" broke half the features that worked in classic Teams. Presence status is a coin flip. Audio settings reset themselves between calls. Screen sharing has a 50/50 chance of sharing the wrong window. The difference between a chat and a channel is arbitrary and confusing. You can't edit messages older than a few hours. Threading is bolted on and barely works.

Performance is inexcusable. Multiple gigabytes of RAM to display text messages and lag constantly on modern hardware. How do you make a chat application lag? It's rendering text, not computing fluid dynamics. Opening the application takes 30 seconds on an SSD. Switching between chats stutters. Typing has input delay.

The real problem isn't that Teams is terrible. It's that "it technically functions" has become an acceptable standard. When you've never experienced better, "it works" seems fine. But Teams is what happens when a monopoly position means you don't have to care about quality. Microsoft has unlimited resources and still ships this.

Even Skype for Business was more stable, and in Skype for Business you couldn't reliably select text. That's how low the bar is.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#189

Post by pbhjpbhj »

starkparker wrote: post #149
badc0ffee wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

70 million Americans voted for him. His biggest demographic win compared to the last election was non-white men. Immediately dismissing this as racism isn't going to help you understand it, or help the Democrats beat the Republicans.

Notable and recent: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clym85ev64lo > When one-time Democrat Sam Negron headed to the polls to cast a ballot for Donald Trump in 2024, he did so with one thing on his mind above all - the economy. > "I didn't like paying $7 for eggs," said Negron, a Pennsylvania state constable in the majority-Latino city of Allentown. "But basically it was all his talking points… making the US a strong…

> When one-time Democrat Sam Negron headed to the polls to cast a ballot for Donald Trump in 2024

Did he just wake up from a coma?

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#190

Post by tombert »

input_sh wrote: post #167

Worth pointing out: France is not adopting existing open source software, they're building their own software and releasing it under the MIT licence. Most of it (or all of it?) is Django backend + React frontend (using a custom-built UI kit). Home page for the entire suite (in French) with some screenshots: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ Code bases are on GitHub and they use English there: https://github.com/suit…

I am certainly not going to complain about more well-funded FOSS software being out there.
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