Is this the same country where it takes 15 years of litigation to figure out whether a GPA violation should be treated as a contract breach or copyright matter?
France Endorses UN Open Source Principles
191–200 of 232 posts
Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles
#192This 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…
> This is just for show
That is simply wrong.
The reality is that millions of people work for the government, directly or indirectly, and that not all of these people have aligned incentives, the same constraints, etc.
The people pushing open source initiatives in the french public sector are very serious about it. It is also true that there is a lot of inertia. The consequence is that, while most of the large administrations, including those that don't have that much wiggle room for initiatives, still use big-name proprietary solutions, more and more open-source and open-data gardens spring around, and that they provide a strong base for new initatives, both public and private.
Two examples I personally used are dvf [1], a database and application showing real estate sales, which I used to check market prices when I bought my home, and publi.codes [2], a simulator and an open-source law-as-code repository, which is one of the cornerstones of a friend's private company.
Would I like more of France's administration to move to open-souce? Sure, but it's not going to happen overnight. In the meantime, I'm grateful for the core of people dedicated to push the case, bits by bits, and I know their effort is certainly not just for show.
[1]: https://app.dvf.etalab.gouv.fr/ [2]: https://publi.codes/
Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> it's undeniable that we are making progress. Yes, I agree that some public organizations in France are making progress with Open Source. For instance, free software is now common in universities (with local variations). And overall I think there's a central influence of the DiNum ("Direction Numérique", the Digital Department of the French State) in this direction. But I don't see how this UN charter makes any diff…
> And so slow that I would bet against "Open Source" becoming widespread in French schools within the next decade.
It's not a risky bet: no organisation this large, private or public, would manage to replace its IT this fast, even with appropriate funding (which schools don't have).
There's a reason why people say change in a company only happens as fast as people retire. large scale change is long, hard and costly.
Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most things don't work, and "France Connect" is really bad (it doesn't even accept non-ascii letters for your name or surname! which is insane coming from an official initiative of the French Government; they should at least know how to use the French language). Anything from the department of education is also abysmal, mostly broken, and needlessly convoluted. The one amazing thing that works is the taxes collection…
C'est vrai pour les particuliers mais vas voir le côté entreprise de impôts.gouv.fr et tu vas pleurer. C'est des sous menus dans des sous menus, si t'as plus qu'une page ouverte a la fois ça te déconnecte de l'autre, ...
It used to be the same for the individuals site some years ago, but they overhauled it bits by bits. From what I saw, the company site is also getting slowly overhauled, although it's not as high priority.
> C'est des sous menus dans des sous menus, si t'as plus qu'une page ouverte a la fois ça te déconnecte de l'autre, ...
The reason for that is that the site is basically a progressive merge-and-overhaul of many existing administrations and their sites.
Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> So it is, indeed, true. Office is a fairly unsignificant part of our cloud usage. I'm fairly sure we could come to an agreement with Microsoft if we needed to self-host. > there is an alternative to MS Office, which is LibreOffice People don't use Office like it's the 90s anymore. Everything which doesn't have seemless collaboration and document sharing is dead on arrival. > No, I really don't. It's not "awesome" t…
> The state doesn't owe you anything apart from safety and law enforment.
We should recognize this sentiment as actively fascist. Safety from who? Law enforcement targeting who?
Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have so many issues with German “sovereign” initiatives founded as GmbH companies. This feels so uncompetitive.
What sort of issues? They are just providing funding for open source, personally I would prefer that sort of funding to corporate funding.
A GmbH is s for-profit company. They have a managing director, shareholders, … ultimately it’s a for—profit org established on an insider-level knowledge and good luck creating a competitive business to the one of those players. Case in point: Bundesanzeiger Verlag GmbH.
Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s always holes. How can we know for sure the binaries running on the voting machines are compiled from the open source repo? It’s turtles all the way down.
Yeah this is why you shouldn't use voting machines. Paper voting is already great. Whoever is trying to sell you a voting machine does not have your best interests in mind. Very few people have any change of understanding machine voting systems. With paper voting we get much better transparency of the voting procedures. Any form of machine voting is terrible for transparency and democracy compared to just plain old p…
I'm generally open to the idea of more frequent elections with cheaper voting.
Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yes, I believe the Eclipse Foundation and others lobbied for that. 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…
Is there a specific risk you're worried about, or just the general risk of doing something wrong that's inherent to all business and is typically mitigated by insurance and by using a limited liability company?
Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So it is, indeed, true. Office is a fairly unsignificant part of our cloud usage. I'm fairly sure we could come to an agreement with Microsoft if we needed to self-host. > there is an alternative to MS Office, which is LibreOffice People don't use Office like it's the 90s anymore. Everything which doesn't have seemless collaboration and document sharing is dead on arrival. > No, I really don't. It's not "awesome" t…
> The state doesn't owe you anything apart from safety and law enforment. We should recognize this sentiment as actively fascist. Safety from who? Law enforcement targeting who?
There is nothing fascist there.
That's the core regalian powers at the heart of the state. Basically, a state is there to ensure laws can be voted, that they are fairly enforced and that things can stay that way. This notably means that people are safe in the broadest sense. They are not going to be mugged, murdered or dispossessed. That also means that the state has the mean to stay a state without becoming part of the next door state, which is to say, has an army to defend itself. A state which can't guarantee that is a failed state (or a former state if it was invaded).
Anything else is the cherry on the cake. Most states do a lot more because their citizen decided through laws this was a good thing - things like social security or education. If your state does these things for you, well, you should be grateful because they are in no way owed to you. You get them through the good will of the citizen who preceded you, the care of the civil servants that provide them to you and the continuously renewed commitment of your fellow citizen. If the French felt a bit less entitled and a bit more grateful, the country wouldn't be in the sorry state it's currently in.
Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hah. It used to be that Microsoft products were sleek, fast, and just plain more convenient than Open Source products. E.g. OpenOffice vs MS Office. And honestly, OS stuff still often sucks quite a bit. It's just that MS software has degraded to the point of utter shittiness (see: Teams) that now it's just plain worse than their own software from 15 years ago.
> It's just that MS software has degraded to the point of utter shittiness (see: Teams) that now it's just plain worse than their own software from 15 years ago. I sometimes feel like I live in a parallele universe reading the comments here on Office. The addition of collaboration and how it seemlessly integrated with sharepoints while easing the sharing of documents make Office365 a blessing in most office environme…
Now look at Outlook. Or Skype.
And 15 years ago, we just used Office files in a Dropbox folder. It solved all of our collaboration issues.