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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

#451

Post by paulfitz »

mentalgear wrote: post #420
paulfitz wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at Grist, the "tableur collaboratif" (collaborative spreadsheet) listed on the La Suite homepage. We're in the interesting situation of being both a NYC-based company, and open source software the French gov has adopted and is helping to develop. Grist is mostly a node backend. So it is a complicated story. The key is having code the gov can review and trust and run it on sovereign infrastructure. Grist https:…

Kudos, Grist is great ! Super features, quite seamless only the UI could be more modern (or user stylesheet customizable) if you get to it.

Thanks! Fair about styling :). You can bring your own stylesheet https://support.getgrist.com/self-managed/#how-do-i-customiz...

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

#452

Post by yunnpp »

bulbar wrote: post #336
MichaelRo wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I would definitely prefer to use globally popular established solutions like Zoom and Teams and the English language and America as a reliable democracy. Weather or not they get Greenland, Trump and his supporters in the US administration have changed the world. Guy should definitely get Nobel prize for pushing decentralization.

Completely confused about which parts are sarcasm. Pretty sure the last sentence is and by this the rest must be as well. But oh boy in what kind of world do we live where you seriously can't tell easily anymore.

To be fair, Trump seems to be doing more for software freedom and against rent-seeking US monopolies than any previous president. Not saying he's doing it intentionally, but he is doing it. Heck, maybe he applies that policy domestically and US software companies flourish once again without the grip of big tech and unfair business practices that starve their competition. Right to repair, reverse-engineering and modding coming very soon...

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

#453

Post by hunterpayne »

epolanski wrote: post #430
GaryBluto wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so strange reading all these comments from Americans begging to be punished for collective misdeeds. It reads as unsettlingly masochistic.

I think the general vibe is more of a "let's learn a small lesson now than a severe one long term". I'm an eu freelancer, most of my clients are quitting US SaaS and cloud offerings, albeit slowly.

So story time. About 8 years ago, most of corporate America tried to do this. It was called the ad-pocalypse. They came crawling back to SV in less than 2 months. Turns out, the correct response to an organized (politically based) pressure campaign is to tell them to pound sand.

When your customers see the dev bill (what it costs to make software that actually works and doesn't get its secrets stolen), they will do the same. But not after some LLM based disasters cause some chaos. Should make your life more interesting, no?

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

#454

Post by hunterpayne »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #304
tyre wrote: post #23

As an American, this is awesome to see. We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement. And economic damage really is the key to the heart of these United States of Three Corporations in a Trench Coat. We’ve seen companies and CEOs paying millions in bribes to be close to the president. Now this aligns their financial interests with shifting our foreign policy. Not how it ought to work, b…

America is "Three Corporations in A Trench Coat"? Everything America is doing right now is because America is precisely NOT taking corporate decisions. America is doing things to the international order that are directly fucking up American corporations. Only a committed social democrat can look at the populist right-wing chaos right now, and claim that's "Corporate" action. If anything, Corporations were more libera…

> anything, Corporations were more liberal than the population at large in America

They are more to the left of the population, yes. But nothing about them or the current left in the US is liberal in any real way anymore. The Dems are nothing like they were before about 2008 and the policies they push are very very different from the ones passed in that era.

PS Liberal means French enlightenment ideals which (for example) includes meritocracy as a core tenant.

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

#455

Post by toomuchtodo »

hunterpayne wrote: post #445
toomuchtodo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what people who "vote their feelings" would assert. Most people think they are "sophisticated" and "educated" on these issues, both Democrats and Republicans. There is ample evidence that this is not the case for either. ~130M American adults have low literacy skills with 54% of people 16-74 below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. And they vote in some amount. Many may not be functional enough to be se…

Ok, but how about learn why that is instead of just insulting half the population. In politics, it is best to be liked and quoting such things doesn't help. Now, why is literacy so low? Because we stopped teaching phonics in schools. When we switch back (in tests/experiments) phonics wins hands down. When we did teach phonics, we had the highest test scores in the world (now we are 17th or so). Who opposes switching…

Low literacy is driven by systemic poverty and, more recently, social media consumption.

Insulting facts are still facts, regardless of feelings about the facts. I am not in politics, being liked is irrelevant to me.

https://youtu.be/ZvCT31BOLDM

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/09/whats-driving...

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

#456

Post by hunterpayne »

caycep wrote: post #264
yardie wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I kind of wonder, capital wise. the GDP isn't too far off US and there's def companies/families w/ insane amount of capital esp in luxury goods etc. Unless they're just hoarding it like Smaug and not investing it back into the economy, in which case the problem isn't capital but business culture.

European per capita GDP is half of the US average. Total GDP is between 60-75% of the US with an extra ~15% population. I'm sure Europe does have enough capital to do this build-out but its a shrinking pool as Europe loses ground to the US every year.

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

#457

Post by p_j_w »

chungy wrote: post #261
shevy-java wrote: post #192

Makes sense. This software dependency that Europe has on the USA is very, very bad - no just with regards to Zoom, but literally anything. The US corporations are forced by law to always prioritize whoever represents the current US government, and the current US government will remain hostile as long as it is in charge; but even afterwards it is quite logical to assume that any follow-up government will prioritize US…

> The US corporations are forced by law to always prioritize whoever represents the current US government Where do you get your information from? This is just plainly false. Heck, it runs afoul of the Constitution, so even if the government were to try something, it'd be smacked down real fast.

> Where do you get your information from?

Comment right above yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46877163

> even if the government were to try something, it'd be smacked down real fast.

One would hope, but evidently not!

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

#458

Post by userbinator »

Ctrl+F "SIP" - 0 results before this comment.

There are decades-old standards for VoIP and teleconferencing, which even the proprietary solutions will often let you interoperate with (at additional cost). Now would be a good time to actually promote them.

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

#459

Post by data-ottawa »

Good for France.

We've seen the US sanction the ICC, they have the Cloud Act and the Patriot Act. The US has shown both a willingness and a capability to weaponize your tech against you.

It should profoundly worry the world that three companies — whose heads all have frequent dinners at the White House — control virtually every phone, tablet, and computer in the world. If you expand that to data centres and clouds, email addresses, services and software it's far worse.

It should be considered a matter of national defence for basically all nations to ensure digital sovereignty.

(It doesn't matter who is in the White House, my point is it's a massive security nightmare to give this much control to one group)

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

#460

Post by wolvoleo »

Arathorn wrote: post #267
wolvoleo wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm not entirely true. The text chat of their suite is simply element.io (matrix) and they're paying them for development. Visio does seem built from scratch but I wonder if it's a temporary thing until element is feature complete with their move away from Jitsi. You can find more about la suite on their website and the opendesk one (German project using mostly the same software). Unfortunately I don't have the link…

Tchap (the chat part of the suite) is indeed a fork of Element. Unfortunately they haven't funded upstream development for many years (otherwise both Element and Tchap would be much much better!) Visio (aka meet) began in parallel with Element's work on MatrixRTC and Element Call. Hopefully the two can converge, given they are both built on LiveKit.

Oh I thought you said that you were doing custom features for the French government in a comment a few months ago. I must have misunderstood, sorry.
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