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France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

social.numerique.gouv.fr

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Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#51

Post by aborsy »

leesalminen wrote: post #43
fdefitte wrote: post #19

France has an undeserved bad reputation for this stuff. As a french citizen, I'm amazed to see how easy it has become to do anything administrative online, with great tools such as France Connect that allows a single login method for any administrative tool.

Like distributing an iOS app in France that uses encryption? What a pain in the ass that is. The bureaucracy was painful enough that we just removed from the French App Store and when someone complains we tell them to write their representatives to stop with these misguided laws. Excuse me, monsieur, do you have a license for that math?

Some apps have refused to distribute in French store for this reason, such as Syncthing apps Mobius and Synctrain.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#52

Post by pabs3 »

johnea wrote: post #10
MilnerRoute wrote: post #2

I'm always hoping to see more coverage of this initiative to drive Open Source adoption both within the United Nations and globally... https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/04/2350224/the-un-ditc...

Thanks for the slashdot link, which also links to the UN: https://unite.un.org/news/osi-first-endorse-united-nations-o... Is there other access to the French announcement? That Mastodon link: social.numerique.gouv.fr, isn't viewable for me...

If it doesn't work due to JS being off, try this tool:

https://github.com/jwilk/zygolophodon

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#53

Post by makeitdouble »

idoubtit wrote: post #34

This is just for show, and facts won't follow. It's not the first time a French government vows to stick to Open Source. Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception. Two months ago, the French government signed an "open bar" contract with Microsoft for the "Éducation Nationale" department. 152 M€, not for Open Source. Source (fr) https://www.april.org/nouvel-open-bar-mi…

There's some aspects that make it a more nuanced situation:

- you won't see angry letters in the news about services sticking to open source after they chose to move in

- the reason the CNLL can point the finger at Poytechnique is because there are explicit directives. Not even having those would be way worse.

- "Most of the public money" : Open Source contracts won't be in billions of euros most of the time, especially as a lot of the money will go to internal hiring and only a slice to external contractors.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#54

Post by wyldfire »

I would love to see more public funds going towards open source. Even if it were directed to private companies' cloud CI services, it would be a great boon. Many projects have to balance how many build/test configurations with the available CI resources.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#55

Post by jimbob45 »

RandomWorker wrote: post #26
canvascritic wrote: post #20

Real question is whether this is just symbolic or if the French state will actually redirect procurement pipelines + vendor mandates around these principles. i'd be more impressed if this came bundled with policy teeth, e.g. requiring all software vendors to deliver open-by-default interfaces or pushing funding toward open infra maintenance. Otherwise it's hardly much more than a manifesto

It will take time but yes. There are already numerous case studies. Libre office is already running on more than 500k gov computers. Anecdotical story, as a researcher I worked with a few French PhD students and they tend to send me documents Libre documents and spreadsheets.

Oh then it’s dead. LibreOffice never Just Works™. Ideological changes like this only work if they’re painless for the hoi polloi.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#56

Post by Zambyte »

drexlspivey wrote: post #28
andy99 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, thanks! Cette licence permet d'utiliser, reproduire, modifier et distribuer librement le code avec attribution, mais impose des restrictions pour les opérations dépassant 700 millions d'utilisateurs mensuels. Interesting they only mention the 700 million users thing and not the other restrictions on use. Personally I could regard the prohibition against basically Google and Microsoft using it to be a minor tran…

It's actually targeting Apple since both Google and Microsoft have their own models.

I'm a little confused by the context of this since I don't speak French, but it seems like you're unfamiliar with the OpenELM family of models.

https://huggingface.co/apple/OpenELM

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#57

Post by hx8 »

fdefitte wrote: post #25

This makes total sense. When a country is creating public software, it should be open source by default. This is the only way to create trust. In the long run, open source and closed source government software will probably differentiate dictatorships from democracies

> differentiate dictatorships from democracies

At first glance I thought this was hyperbole, but after reflection I'm not sure it's even an exaggeration. Too much critical infrastructure of power (voting, census, taxation, reporting, compliance) runs of software for us to accept anything less than full transparency from our governments.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#58

Post by hx8 »

twodave wrote: post #31

As an American, this sort of brings back into question for me thoughts of, "What should constitute a public utility in a Capitalism society?" Upon doing some cursory research (so cursory that I'm afraid to provide links), it occurs to me that I was maybe under a false impression that there _are_ any nationwide public utilities in the first place. We basically have: * The Federal Reserve * The Interstate Highway Syste…

Federal Aviation Administration keeps the skies a public utility.

Federal Communication Commission keeps part of the wireless communication spectrum open to the public.

National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management keeps some public land available for everyone to use.

The Library of Congress.

National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service probably satisfy "Public Utility" as much as Medicaid.

Federal Emergency Management Agency would be another stretch, but not something I would consider an entitlement program.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#59

Post by II2II »

rr808 wrote: post #32

I'd love to see a coordinated drive to get most off the world onto opensource and off Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android as well as databases etc. American tech companies are making billions off these products that really are simple and could be replaced.

> American tech companies are making billions off these products that really are simple and could be replaced.

The trouble is that simple concepts are not necessarily simple to implement. Tuning software for performance (e.g. to handle a large user base), security, and maintenance are all resource intensive. Then you have to consider that large user bases have diverse needs, which results in more complex software. Then there are the largest hurdles of all, training people in the use of new software and interoperability during the transition.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#60

Post by resource_waste »

idoubtit wrote: post #34

This is just for show, and facts won't follow. It's not the first time a French government vows to stick to Open Source. Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception. Two months ago, the French government signed an "open bar" contract with Microsoft for the "Éducation Nationale" department. 152 M€, not for Open Source. Source (fr) https://www.april.org/nouvel-open-bar-mi…

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