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France's homegrown open source online office suite

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Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#231

Post by well_ackshually »

wtcactus wrote: post #151
well_ackshually wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, life must be easy when you can't read and just get to make things up online. Especially when things such as the URSSAF's simulation tool is like, freely available online: https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-ne... giving you a copy of a pay slip with detailed amounts of where your money goes. Someone making 2500€ gross will take home 1885€ per month after taxes and contributions. On which yo…

Well, life isn't that easy then, because you failed to comprehend URSSAF's simulation tool. On a €2500 gross salary you take home €1651 (which is a very low salary in France very close to the minimum salary). But I guess you think the gross salary is what the company, by law, has to say they pay you, instead of what the total cost for the company of your salary. See, in France, even if you are getting close to the mi…

>It's a normal mistake for people that don't actually have to support the costs themselves. Once people actually start a small business or pay more attention to their own wages and how much is being taken away, they figure out how it actually works.

No, thank you, I am quite well versed in the concept of superbrut, and actively pay more than a SMIC in taxes every year: you won't play that game with me. Va jouer, comme on dit.

They're employer _contributions_ to the system. They're the price you pay for a healthy, well educated working population.

You don't get to claim it as "it would be your salary", because we both damn well know you'd never pay that back into the salary should it go away. We've had the experience every time, with tax writeoffs on SMICs, VAT lowered to 5.5% which led to zero jobs created and no changes in employment conditions, etc. You might even be old enough to remember the MEDEF's "1 million jobs" pin, where they created... 20k. Cool. The reality of things is, you as an employer cannot be trusted to not fuck over employees, especially the weakest and most vulnerable of us all.

Once again, your own damn links prove that 1/ France isn't that far off the OECD average for taxation and 2/ actually does better in not slapping in a bunch of unrelated crap in taxes.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#232

Post by drnick1 »

admissionsguy wrote: post #37
okanat wrote: post #26

Okay 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…

> 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…

> True as it may be that they are slow, I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages.

Yes it is. It's the same reason desktop GUI apps are now slower than Windows 95-era apps that were written in C.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#233

Post by YousefED »

larsiusprime wrote: post #174
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 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 prefe…

In our case, they started building on top of our project and then reached out, so not sure I can share any lessons on this. With that said:

- I think administrations in the EU are (slowly but steadily) adopting "Public Money, Public Code" policies and looking more seriously at open source

- Note that policy / strategy on this depends a lot per country / local administration / project etc. I think most governments don't actively develop in house - France is quite the exception in this

- There are a number of conferences that might be relevant (FOSDEM for example just finished)

- We also benefitted from EU grants (e.g.: NLNet) to bootstrap our work and the early research phases

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#234

Post by Normal_gaussian »

michelsedgh wrote: post #132
seszett wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing ironic, as since the GP said there is no risk associated with GitHub. Git fundamentally prevents vendor lock-in and tampering, and the project is open, so the US have no leverage and pose no threat at all here.

its not about leverage or threat, same as the office products, the french owned their docs at the end of the day, i thought it was about sovereignty and using french alternatives?

If you have the docs, but not the means to (legally) read and edit them, do you really own them?

When MS pulls services you are largely screwed.

When GitHub pulls services its a few hours downtime and a new provider.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#235

Post by ncallaway »

thayne wrote: post #222
savant2 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: why do you consider it to be nowhere near an "Office suite"? It seems to me it fits the definition given by Wikipedia [1]. I guess it is less advanced than Google Workspace or Microsoft Office but it would cover all of my needs at work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_software#Office_s...

If you scroll a little further down, you'll see that it lists components of an office suite as: - a word processor - a spreadsheet application - presentation software This doesn't look like it has any of these

Have you considered that “office suite” has drifted in meaning since Microsoft Office was introduced and things like:

- chat

- video calls

- notion

Might now be more important to an office than word processing or presentation software?

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#236

Post by ecshafer »

lII1lIlI11ll wrote: post #169
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…

> You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare. I'm curios what do you mean by this. Could you provide some examples of such policies or propaganda campaigns?

Legalizing abortion, unneeded regulations that require car seats at later ages which disincentivize more children for lack of car space, zoning that removes green space and side walks in favor of car infrastructure, expensive education and health insurance (family premiums are insane compared to individual), incentivizing two worker house holds through tax policy.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#237

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

iambateman wrote: post #216

Honest question…given how developed our sensibilities are around docs, file storage, and spreadsheets, what is the hard part to this? Don’t get me wrong…something is hard…I still use Microsoft Word because I feel like I have to. But what is keeping the industry from building a word processor that doesn’t suck and is capable of interfacing with .docx files?

Word has a billion features you did not know that exist. Getting something Word shaped is probably straight-forward enough (how long did it take to make Google Docs), but getting those dangling features and quirks would be a long haul.

Mimicking Excel - woof. This one is used by so many people in different ways, that unless you offer 1:1 bug compatibility, it would be challenging to get 100% of people to meet everyone's current use case.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#238

Post by 80696527890 »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #140
Nesco wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which it can’t. There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states

That is obviously not true. You don’t even define what a welfare state is or when a country stops being a welfare state.

[flagged]

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#239

Post by mekoka »

xedrac wrote: post #38
admissionsguy wrote: post #37

Earlier 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.

Is this not a discussion about a web application? Order of magnitude matters. If Python is slower than Rust by 2 orders, but faster than IO by another 2 orders, are you not haggling just to shave off a few dimes on your 100 dollar bill?

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#240

Post by ptman »

codethief wrote: post #143
drcongo wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm intrigued as to why both these, and the Suite Numerique have chose Element / Matrix as the chat component. Every time I've tried to use Element / Matrix it has failed dismally for me and everyone else in whatever community is trialling it. Element itself was so buggy as to be unusable.

I don't use Element myself but there was a recent HN discussion where people said it had improved significantly in last year or two.

It both still has problems and has been improving for all of its existence. It's been working for my usecases for years
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