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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

#311

Post by scottyah »

yardie wrote: post #160
nonethewiser wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just goes to show how many structural problems there are to starting tech companies in Europe.

Yes, the problem is capital. US has loads of it and Europe does not. So a lot of European startups have 3 options: remain niche, get bought out buy US investors, move the corporate seat/brain trust to the US. There are many small European startups who do not have infrastructure to take on large European multinationals as clients. A lot of EU labor laws have hard requirements at 50 and 100 employees so startups stay b…

Also culture. I had a friend try with several German companies, but she said the leadership would default to "no", and every decision would need too much review. She even worked with some that opened offices in SF hoping to learn to move fast, but even those were way too cautious to succeed. Lots of premature optimization, and trying to establish structures and systems before any proof of concepts could be made. Obviously, this is just anecdotal but she had a real desire to have European growth in SF communities.

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

#312

Post by zelphirkalt »

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.

As bad and evil as MS Teams may be, I recently got invited to a Zoom meeting, and you simply can't use it in the browser! They just force you to download their shitty app to join. Naturally, I did not install crapware and closed the tab, as fortunately it was no mandatory event for me. At least in MS Teams I can isolate it into its separate ungoogled Chromium installation and treat that as a shitty app, without having to install crap onto my system.

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

#313

Post by zelphirkalt »

tartoran wrote: post #187
pelagicAustral wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I guess we could concoct something made out of PHP4/5 and jQuery and use Xampp stack, to get something worse. Or wait, I have it! We build it on top of MS Excel!

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

#314

Post by Teever »

cianmm wrote: post #286
Teever wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this totally. But while they certainly talk the talk I’m not totally convinced that European governments will actually walk the walk and follow through on this. To me a really significant signal that they’re serious will be when there’s an official Linux version of Solidworks. It’s remarkable to me that France has control over one of the premiere CAD suites but theyre entirely dependent on an American OS…

Why would a private company deciding to release a Linux version of their product signal a government's follow-through? As far as I can tell, there is no current connection between Solidworks and the French government.

Solidworks is produced by a company that is owned by the Dassault Group.

There is always a connection between the military industrial complex of a nation and the state.

If France feels that it is an existential threat they will not let the design and maintence of their weapons be dependent on an operating system produced by a company based out of a country that has threatened them.

I'm not saying that this will happen. I'm saying that should this happen you know France is serious about eliminating dependencies on unreliable and threatening countries.

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

#315

Post by [deleted] »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #247
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…

> Code bases are on GitHub Not a very solid way to move away from American big tech :/

[deleted]

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

#316

Post by amarant »

dkga wrote: post #290
bee_rider wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they have local copies as well, and just figured they might as well take GitHub’s free bandwidth and social networking features.

Next year: LeGit !

I propose gitgud.eu

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

#317

Post by marcosdumay »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #159
soperj wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only possibility is if you get it from Oracle instead.

Well no, there's always the European Oracle: SAP.

It's a good thing in this context that they are on the other side of the border.

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

#318

Post by zelphirkalt »

pjmlp wrote: post #107
kenjackson wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to admit, I have almost no problems with Teams. The one big issue I had was performance when screen sharing. But I got a new laptop and this problem went away. Seems so odd that so many people have major problems with it, while I feel like within my workgroup there are almost no problems to speak of.

One day they will discover threaded conversions.

And then we will get rid of them again, because some suits are telling us that we don't actually want them, that they are "complicated", we must trust them and that recursive data types are too hard to get right. Let's all write SMS again. Or better yet, send fax.

Some engineers will facepalm super hard but won't be listened to, as usual, and we will enter the next cosmic age of self-inflicted suffering.

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

#319

Post by the_monocle »

CapricornNoble wrote: post #185
melesian wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, w…

Suprisingly the number does in fact seem to be roughly 80k per year, though a similar amount moved from Europe to the US.

https://schengenvisainfo.com/news/over-75000-americans-moved...

real source here: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/migr_resfirst...

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

#320

Post by Barrin92 »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #197
Barrin92 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and no significant large technology companies I have to do my patriotic duty to remind you that SAP is the 6th/7th largest software company in the world by market cap. I know not as exiting as notepad with AI but they do exist. That said US software giants are a disease for democratic societies. If Europe wants software sovereignty we don't need "significant large software companies" we need a hundred medium sized o…

> If Europe wants software sovereignty we don't need "significant large software companies" we need a hundred medium sized ones that reflect the diversity of the dozens of nations on the continent...Europe needs in fact to be more ambitious than to build its own Microsoft. We need a genuinely open ecosystem which is not going to have as its goal to extract value out of its users. Sure, but can you be honest and admit…

>Sure, but can you be honest and admit that you don't have any of this yet?

Yes of course I can be honest. We don't have any of that. But if I'd sketch out a genuine European future in software to me it would look something like this. You have technologies like Tim Berner Lee's Solid[1] and social protocols like Mastodon/Bluesky/etc owned as public infrastructure and operated by its people. You could imagine each region of Europe having its own sovereign digital space federated with individuals owning their data, a genuine network mirroring the region as it is.

The big problem with this isn't just technical, it's mental. The user of today anywhere is a consumer. It's like turning a serf into a citizen. I don't think this is a five year vision, it's more like a 50 year program. I think it's going to be a long time until we've convinced people that taking ownership of and participating in their digital life, being tinkerers, owners, netizens is vital.

[1]https://solidproject.org

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