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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

#311

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Cool. I'm already in touch with a handful of civil servants in both Germany and the Netherlands, so I'll do as you say and look for more government led initiatives, and I'll follow up with my existing contacts. Which countries do you think are the most interested in this sort of thing so far?

Check out this one: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/documenten/rapporten/2025/07/04... https://vng.nl/nieuws/meer-regie-nodig-op-technologie-voor-d... https://www.amsterdam.nl/nieuws/nieuwsoverzicht/stappenplan-...

Thank you!

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Instagram's case, they do not use the ORM or Admin, and have an internal fork of the request handling/middleware stack that is 100% async (before the recent async bits were added to Django)[1]. It's great that Django's API design allowed them to move this way easily, but they aren't actually using Django in the traditional sense because it can't handle their scale. I've found that with the Django ORM and DRF espec…

It looks like the next release of Django will take seriious strides to solve a lot of the n+1 headaches, https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/6.1/#model-fi... . Also, I doubt solving Instagram-level scale issues is on the top ten list of concerns for this project. Just getting something out there and gaining users is way more important than solving far future scaling issues.

Oh I agree 100%. Use the right tool for the job. I'm just saying, the " uses " logic is rarely useful to justify anything.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#313
post #277

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Do these administrations still purchase licenses for software or do they just create open source maintained by government employees? How much are they willing to pay? Because people in Europe are notoriously paid less so I am curious of the financial aspect. Also curious about the logistics of ownership and support...

I know that my city's administration has a quite active development department. I don't know the current salary ranges,but they offer other values like vacation days, Work-Life-Balance (proper time tracking to avoid extra hours etc), part-time.offera, child care options and some other benefits, which most corporations won't give in addition to being the state, which means they won't go bankrupt, won't do reductions i…

Does getting these roles require French citizenship? Asking for a friend ;)

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#314

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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.

?

More like they don't even need Pegasus to get Androids.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#315
post #173
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…

Europe is a little bit busy bleeding money for defence if you hadn't noticed. There's only so many 50bn EUR it can conjure up for something

Digital sovereignty is realistically part of defence.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#316
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…

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...

For a traditional office suite, you'd want a word processor with somewhat of a decent layout engine in it, a spreadsheet, something for slide presentations, something for rudimentary databases/datasources, and some sort of diagram drawing capability, and all of these integrated together.

By a "decent layout" engine, you'd like the ability to change fonts, add spacing between paragraphs, segment the page into regions, e.g. by changing the number of columns on a page, insert images and diagrams and choose how text wraps around them, create captions for embedded media, set page numbering policies (or navigational policies for web generation), generate table of contents, set table headers, make more complex tables with merged cells and different types of boundaries, generate table of references, generate tabs, then export to a web page, to a pdf, or to whatever other format you want, hopefully all from the same source. Then when you send it out for review, people can attach their comments to portions of the document, you can accept or reject their changes, there is a document revision history, etc.

So for example, you could write up a quarterly report by importing summary financial data into your spreadsheet, doing some basic analysis, export tables to your word processor, generate some bar charts or graphs, draw some boxes and arrows with your drawing program, stick that into your word processor, add some footnotes and hyperlinks, put the same info into a slide presentation. Then if you want, you could save that as a pdf or turn into a webpage, etc.

One time I had to write up documentation for various security certifications, and that was my introduction to the world of Microsoft office. Learning office made the project more fun, I had never used it before and was impressed with the functionality.

That said, I don't think most people who have office suites actually need a full powered office suite. Probably markdown + slack is enough for a lot of people, but I always like a good drawing or diagram.

Most people I know have shifted to google suite, it really has everything you need and is OS independent. But apart from the convenience of being browser-based, it is just another MS Office clone. The google drawing functionality is very basic, I often wish you could integrate something like excalidraw into it.

I am not suggesting this project needs to keep adding clones of MS Office functionality until it turns into Libre Office, but funded by the French government. That would be a waste. Instead, why not make it better? Reimagine it? Look, for example, at excalidraw. It's fantastic. It was really a fresh take on the stuff people were doing with visio.

I think there is lots of room to make a truly modern office suite instead of another MS Office rehash, so I would encourage this project to go its own way and do something interesting if they intend to be a replacement for proprietary office suites like google suite or MS Office.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#317

Earlier 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.

markdown is superior in every way. whatever doesn't map 1:1, imo just trash it. if you can't do your work using markdown, you should be fired. if i'm downvoted it is by people who deserve to be fired.

I guess I am a markdown hater, but I don't like it. Markdown feels too much like hand writing your own html, when you have to put in tags, but like html it suffers from lack of layout control, which is why they invented CSS, but you don't get CSS control in markdown. If you start adding that, you end up with LaTex, and I don't know anyone who actually enjoyed writing serious documents in Latex. It was fun in the beginning, but it quickly became tiresome and I found myself not being very productive.

Doing layout is not easy. Programming layouts well requires real expertise, which is why most layout engines expose a gui and let you deal with larger text components graphically. Maybe someone else will come up with a usability innovation here, but I'm not aware of it, and markdown certainly doesn't have that capability.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

markdown is superior in every way. whatever doesn't map 1:1, imo just trash it. if you can't do your work using markdown, you should be fired. if i'm downvoted it is by people who deserve to be fired.

I guess I am a markdown hater, but I don't like it. Markdown feels too much like hand writing your own html, when you have to put in tags, but like html it suffers from lack of layout control, which is why they invented CSS, but you don't get CSS control in markdown. If you start adding that, you end up with LaTex, and I don't know anyone who actually enjoyed writing serious documents in Latex. It was fun in the begi…

You do know that you don't need to write markdown syntax right?

There are plenty of UI editors where they give you the basics for formatting and inserting stuff.

Markdown is fairly portable, and with AI it is easy to generate and share as well.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#319
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that my city's administration has a quite active development department. I don't know the current salary ranges,but they offer other values like vacation days, Work-Life-Balance (proper time tracking to avoid extra hours etc), part-time.offera, child care options and some other benefits, which most corporations won't give in addition to being the state, which means they won't go bankrupt, won't do reductions i…

Does getting these roles require French citizenship? Asking for a friend ;)

To work in French civil service (as a fonctionnaire) you need to be a EU/EEA citizen but not necessarily French.
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