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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

#341

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #331
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment misses the point and argues against something unrelated. It's fundamentally a data sovereignty and security move, not a commercial one. It's neither pro or anti business. This or "creating a more business friendly environment" policies is a false dichotomy. That could be done too via other means. It is unrelated. Speaking about this "business friendly" only is either misdirection or myopic.

You seem to be arguing for the sake of argument while avoiding the substance of my point by discarding it as "unrelated" while it is fundamentally on point. If the aim is indeed sovereignty, data and software (and this is software not data), and in general, then they need an effective and comprehensive plan. I think taxpayer-funded state-developed open-source software brings very little at a high cost and can even be…

You're just repeating your assumptions - "taxpayer-funded state-developed is bad", but "marketplace competitively" good. I'm not convinced.

You're not engaging with the sovereignty aspect - "compete globally" isn't the main goal at all as I said above, you're just restating you misconception. And so this part comes across as pure projection:

> You seem to be arguing for the sake of argument while avoiding the substance of my point

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#342

Post by mytailorisrich »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #341
mytailorisrich wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be arguing for the sake of argument while avoiding the substance of my point by discarding it as "unrelated" while it is fundamentally on point. If the aim is indeed sovereignty, data and software (and this is software not data), and in general, then they need an effective and comprehensive plan. I think taxpayer-funded state-developed open-source software brings very little at a high cost and can even be…

You're just repeating your assumptions - "taxpayer-funded state-developed is bad", but "marketplace competitively" good. I'm not convinced. You're not engaging with the sovereignty aspect - "compete globally" isn't the main goal at all as I said above, you're just restating you misconception. And so this part comes across as pure projection: > You seem to be arguing for the sake of argument while avoiding the substan…

How does this help sovereignty?

Yes in the most basic sense it does since they build their own tool instead of getting a foreign one. To be a little bit provocative I could say that Warsaw Pact countries used to do the same and built plenty of uncompetitive products themselves...

But beyond that it isn't a plan because it does not scale, it does not help the country develop its own industry and economy, it does not help competitiveness, and it is a huge cost for very little. Again, the sovereignty aspect means all of this must be addressed otherwise it is just a stunt and waste of taxpayers' money.

You've got to have a competitive industry to achieve and maintain 'sovereignty' in a broader and positive sense otherwise you end up like the Warsaw Pact or China before it realised that. You might survive but look more and more like North Korea (poor and obsolete but, yes, sovereign).

So yes, taxpayer-funded and state-developed internally in isolation for the sake of it is pretty much universally bad.

Taxpayer-funded is not bad per se, as already said in my previous comment, but here it is indeed more than that, it's the government building random stuff internally for frankly no good reason. Maybe next the government will manufacture its own 'sovereign' pencils as well?

They could have spent the same amount of money supporting small companies to develop similar products and that would have helped creating a competitive 'sovereign' ecosystem and commercial products to sell to everyone at home and also abroad. Much more bang for their buck and long term virtuous circle.

So, again have you got a point to discuss beyond just wanting to argue against me?

Edit:

An example of why competitiveness is important: Arianespace. It's great, Europe has the 'sovereign' ability to launch satelittes. That's useful for government agencies, a niche use-case. But everyone else in Europe who wants to launch a satelitte uses SpaceX because Arianespace is not competitive and is obsolete at this point.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#343

Post by vidarh »

wtcactus wrote: post #83
coredev_ wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not agree, I don't want EU to turn to US. Taxes should be on a level to support the welfare state.

[flagged]

47% total tax wedge is not 47% of gross wage anywhere except places with no payroll taxes / employer contributions.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#344

Post by kkfx »

plagiarist wrote: post #124
kkfx wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small note: in 2026, classic office suites shouldn't even exist in my opinion, so if the EU were to create a glorified R/Quarto, essentially a LaTeX wrapper with some basic calculation capabilities added, it would be infinitely better than any office suite. My personal setup is Emacs/org-mode, using babel for the rest; I use Python with Polars, Plotly, and very occasionally SymPy just to avoid using Maxima if I'm a…

Sometimes I really like a spreadsheet. I found out at work that spreadsheets all have map / reduce now. That's fun. If there were a spreadsheet interface that was secretly R under the hood and tricked me into understanding R that would be neat.

Spreadsheets are perhaps the only pseudo-visual programming tool to have achieved significant widespread use, but they are terrible:

- the logic is hidden; until you click on a cell, you don't know "what it actually contains"

- there is no entry point, no main(), so there is no way to read it other than keeping 100% of what the sheet does in your head, or ignoring parts of it and risking breaking them while working on others

- the logic tends to be coded in single lines rather than multi-line with proper indentation, which makes reading it very difficult

This is just the conceptual basis, without even counting the improper auto-formatting of cells that has even led to renaming genes to prevent them from being considered dates https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam... or the absurdities regarding date calculations.

They can be convenient when you have to play around with a few pieces of tabular data, yes, but the price you pay is much higher than working with high-level languages that would be easy for even the average user to understand if only they had started with them.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#345

Post by jpmonette »

samsonradu wrote: post #196
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?

Lark Suite? https://www.larksuite.com/en_us/product/creation?from=subnav

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#346

Post by busterarm »

ffsm8 wrote: post #305
busterarm wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very obvious. What part of your document editor needs to be backed by a relational database? Why use an MVT system if you don't need the Model part of it?

https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/blob/main/src/backend... I see, in your broad and experienced mind, document editors don't have users, permissions, and the whole document management itself, comments on lines/threads, reactions on comments Seriously, theyre all as cookie cutter perfect usecase for Django as you can get, but I guess you haven't actually thought about the domain and just wanted to take a dumb on…

You don't necessarily need that to get these things...

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#347

Post by jodrellblank »

progx wrote: post #22
forty wrote: post #15

Great, but why on GitHub? That doesn't seem very souverain to me

I wait for frenchhub, in french only, no english translation, nothing. Typical french. Greetings from you EU neighbor.

> frenchhub

*Lieu de Rencontre Français Pour le Contrôle de Version

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#349

Post by ffsm8 »

busterarm wrote: post #346
ffsm8 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/blob/main/src/backend... I see, in your broad and experienced mind, document editors don't have users, permissions, and the whole document management itself, comments on lines/threads, reactions on comments Seriously, theyre all as cookie cutter perfect usecase for Django as you can get, but I guess you haven't actually thought about the domain and just wanted to take a dumb on…

You don't necessarily need that to get these things...

Obviously, you don't need the model abstraction for any software, ever. It is just more or less suited for a domain.

And in this case, as would be obvious from thinking about it, the only part it's not suited for is the live syncing of the text edit on the frontend, which is one one small part of the whole.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#350

Post by busterarm »

ffsm8 wrote: post #349
busterarm wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't necessarily need that to get these things...

Obviously, you don't need the model abstraction for any software, ever. It is just more or less suited for a domain. And in this case, as would be obvious from thinking about it, the only part it's not suited for is the live syncing of the text edit on the frontend, which is one one small part of the whole.

Storing the text documents themselves in a relational database is itself a terrible idea.
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