France's homegrown open source online office suite • Hacker News Board

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#191

Post by Certhas » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:19 PM UTC

ThinkBeat wrote: post #152

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 wi…

The EU doesn't really fund many things directly. It's total annual budget is just 170 billion euros. It can fund research and coordination projects but at the end of the day the EU is mostly a coordination mechanism for sovereign states. Looking purely at EU projects is not really a useful lense to get an idea of what is happening...

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#192

Post by nickpp » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:19 PM UTC

saubeidl wrote: post #188

nickpp wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> went MAGA and bought Trump the election Didn’t Harris actually raise and spend more than Trump on that election?

Yeah but the tech spend was way more effective. Elon took over Twitter.

So no, they didn't "bought Trump the election".

And the fact that a 3rd party supports an opponent does not kill any politician's career. Biden retired by himself, following his own party's pressure. And Harris is still around, I believe.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#193

Post by Insensitivity » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

I was looking at the Meet repository as an example, people literally don't know how to write React, without drowning in `useEffect`, `eslint-disable`, `any`. React has it's issues (and a ton of them), but writing code like this, I expect it to end up exactly like Microsoft Teams quality wise.

Honestly, at that point, it's indistinguishable from LLM slop

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#194

Post by megaman821 » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

saubeidl wrote: post #188

nickpp wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> went MAGA and bought Trump the election Didn’t Harris actually raise and spend more than Trump on that election?

Yeah but the tech spend was way more effective. Elon took over Twitter.

It seems like you have an unfalsifiable belief. If one side raises more money and wins, it because of the money. If one side raises more money and loses, it is still the money because the other side spend it more effectively.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#195

Post by stevetron » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:21 PM UTC

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…

I'm a little confused. You said LiveKit powers Visio. But isn't Visio a CAD and drawing app inside of Microsoft Office?

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#196

Post by samsonradu » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

padjo wrote: post #14

Makes sense, using an office suite hosted by a hostile power isn't a very smart longterm strategy.

Wondering what software are China/Russia using in their public administration?

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#197

Post by ipaddr » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

kuerbel wrote: post #149

ecshafer wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The welfare state can not exist in world where the government is against population growth. You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare. We need an exponential curve of population to maintain it, especialy when its at european levels. Mass immigration of uneducated people from low income countries doesnt cover the gap, especially when the government extends welfa…

cracks fingers The last sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a post that collapses if poked gently with a stick. "The welfare state cannot exist without exponential population growth." Sounds mathy, but is wrong. Welfare states do not require exponential population growth. They require a sufficient ratio of contributors to dependents, plus productivity. Those are not the same thing. Exponential curves + limit…

"Prosperity itself lowers fertility"

This is not true. Women entering the workforce instead of having babies earlier in life lowers prosperity. In our society women working during those early years creates more prosperity (two incomes) but those who are very rich like Musk has no issue producing a big stable of kids.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#198

Post by tokai » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

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.

>would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence

You have not been paying attention.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#199

Post by hommelix » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

stevetron wrote: post #195

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…

I'm a little confused. You said LiveKit powers Visio. But isn't Visio a CAD and drawing app inside of Microsoft Office?

Visio here is most likely a shorted "visioconférence", the French word for video conference, or online meeting.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#200

Post by array_key_first » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

consp wrote: post #177

xedrac wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sa…

Python is slow, though, and so was java compared to other compiled languages of its time. Sure, it might not matter much if you're mostly doing database calls. If you're not, though, then yes, it's the languages fault if your app is slow. You can try to make it faster, but it's gonna be marginal gains. Or, you could just switch to another language and get a 100x speedup for free.

I also denounce the notion that trading language complexity for slowness is the case. Python is already complex, and there's some language and frameworks that are actually quite a bit easier to use for web backends. Like java, or dotnet. It just makes no sense to use python for this usecase, even if you ignore the slowness.

But that's not completely true, there is one very good reason to use python. Your devs know it. But, that doesnt say anything about the language itself.