It's very on-brand for France that the website is in French only, no English
France's homegrown open source online office suite
241–250 of 367 posts
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Refugees are not permanently "uneducated" But why import uneducated immigrants when you could import educated ones instead? The Canadian model has been a resounding success on that front and European countries should copy it. (And no, the "brain drain" argument doesn't really hold water. The successful migrants/expats tend to go back to their homelands after a while and become a much needed force for progress there…
You're mixing up refugees and economic migrants, which makes the argument collapse immediately.
Refugees are not "imported." They are people fleeing war, persecution, or state collapse under international law obligations that Europe helped write. You don't get to say "we'll take the engineers, but not the bombed-out schoolteachers." Treating asylum like a points-based talent visa is a category error, not a policy preference.
The brain drain argument absolutely does hold water. Systematically pulling scarce doctors, engineers, and academics out of low-income or fragile states weakens those societies. Some people return and contribute, yes, but many don't, and many return to systems too damaged to absorb their skills. That's not controversial. It's well documented in development economics.
What's being presented as "common sense" here is really a value judgement: that human worth should be ranked by immediate economic utility to the receiving country. That's not a fact, and it's not how real migration systems actually work.
If the goal is serious policy discussion, collapsing refugees, migrants, education, and prosperity into a single slogan doesn't get you there. It just makes the world simpler than it is.
One more point about the word "import," because language matters in how we think about policy.
Describing people as being "imported" frames migration as a centrally planned, top-down process, rather than as a response to war, persecution, economic collapse, or climate pressure. It shifts attention away from those underlying causes and toward the idea that governments are deliberately "bringing people in" as if they were interchangeable inputs.
That framing makes it easier to talk about migrants in abstract, instrumental terms, sorted by usefulness rather than understood as people reacting to circumstances, and it tends to oversimplify how migration actually works in practice, which is far more reactive and constrained than intentional or engineered.
Being precise about language helps keep the discussion grounded in reality rather than drifting into metaphors that flatten complex human movement into something it isn't.
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#243For those unaware, this is likely in response to the current US political crisis in which the US might decide at any point spike the prices or stop offering licenses on Microsoft etc products.
This already happened when USA sanctioned ICC judge, blocking them from american services. With such special leadership I will not surprised USA to block politicians or citizens with influence from EU that do not align with extreme right views,
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Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#244Earlier 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...
Google Docs is a document editor (opening/saving Microsoft office compatible documents, with layout, etc), not a wiki/markdown editor. The La Suite Docs seems a product more similar to Atlassian Confluence.
Work being done in offices is changing over time. I find myself writing less documents for printing and more for collaborating and sharing directly.
Even though many formal processes still require printable PDFs, we are slowly migrating to something paperless, or at least not paper-centric.
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That explains why Android was not affected by Pegasus and Apple was.
You forgot the /s
I suppose the assumption is that every HN reader follows headline hacking news, which is valid but still I did a double-take at the comment.
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#246Python and TypeScript... hard pass. Mediocre software made by mediocre web developers. Imagine a car manufacturer using wood instead of steel because they can only afford to pay cheap lumberjacks.
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#247Lasuite Docs PM here. Awesome to see we’ve made it top the first page again! Thanks for the interest :)
I’ve compiled a bunch of answers in an FAQ on this doc https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-...
Cheers!
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Refugees are not permanently "uneducated" But why import uneducated immigrants when you could import educated ones instead? The Canadian model has been a resounding success on that front and European countries should copy it. (And no, the "brain drain" argument doesn't really hold water. The successful migrants/expats tend to go back to their homelands after a while and become a much needed force for progress there…
You're mixing up refugees and economic migrants, which makes the argument collapse immediately. Refugees are not "imported." They are people fleeing war, persecution, or state collapse under international law obligations that Europe helped write. You don't get to say "we'll take the engineers, but not the bombed-out schoolteachers." Treating asylum like a points-based talent visa is a category error, not a policy pre…
Statistics differ, but refugees granted protection range from a single-digit percentage of recent immigration into France to about ~15% or so (other countries have a somewhat larger share, including other European countries). It's true that many people tend to conflate proper refugees and economic migrants to whom a points-system might apply, but this is a general problem with how migration policy is discussed on all sides of the political spectrum, not something that's original to my comment.
Want to admit more refugees without endangering social cohesion? Then you should make sure that you're also carefully selecting your economic migrants as best you can. It's not a matter of assigning different human worth to each, but of simultaneously abiding by legal obligations towards actual refugees that are binding for the country, and also trying to do the absolute best you can for the highest amount of people who might be wanting to expatriate to it for different but nonetheless valid reasons - without unduly burdening that country and society in the process.
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#249Earlier 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.
Can you define it then? What point does it start and what point does it stop being a welfare state.
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Docs is a document editor (opening/saving Microsoft office compatible documents, with layout, etc), not a wiki/markdown editor. The La Suite Docs seems a product more similar to Atlassian Confluence.
Work being done in offices is changing over time. I find myself writing less documents for printing and more for collaborating and sharing directly. Even though many formal processes still require printable PDFs, we are slowly migrating to something paperless, or at least not paper-centric.
Spot on this is what we aimed for. Office tools were meant to be printed to be shared. Or at least exported. When you think of it it’s really bad for information security. On the plus side doing everything in the browser manipulating jsons is you get to do way better real time collab and can include a lot more interactive content.