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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

#511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one of the big ironies of the EU - every time it gets larger (good! increases market size) it also gets more fragmented in terms of languages, retained local rules etc. (bad, obviously). Now up to 24 official languages and still potentially growing in the future (although this is a bit of an overcount because some of them are mutually intelligible to various degrees, it's still a lot). It's interesting to think…

I've been working with European companies for a decade, language is not a barrier for scaling, local laws are. E.g. why eu has some laws in terms of data and privacy, local laws take precedence (unlike in e.g. agriculture that it's entirely EU's business). Scaling across borders is expensive and difficult for regulatory reasons.

To be fair the US is not immune to that issue either, some states (looking at you CA) are very fond of making random extra state laws that don't exist at the federal level and affect commerce

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

#512
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thankfully I only have to use Teams in very specific projects, thus I still have them. :)

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

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Theyt are paid by the EU to tell how much they hate this institution. Correction: They're paid by the EU taxpayers. And as politicians, there's a chance their vociferation of hate towards the EU is just parroting the opinion their voters have towards the EU, which means they're doing their job as politicians, whether you like their opinions or not. >some are in schizophrenia mode (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia mostly)…

> they're doing their job as politicians Yes I completely agree with you. The EU is enabling spending its citizens' money to criticize itself. If this is not a sick situation, I do not know what this is. To be clear, I am all for a union of European countries *that all participate in the effort. We need this to stand against the US or the BRICS block, without a union we are a set of insignificant countries that have…

>The EU is enabling spending its citizens' money to criticize itself. If this is not a sick situation, I do not know what this is.

It's called freedom of speech. Why is that sick?

EU is also spengin 600 billion/year on NGOs to do pro-EU political activism.

>You count Poland as a poor country? With its economic growth that will overtake UK?

Learn to read, I said "poorest people", not poor country, Poland and eastern europe have a lot more vulnerable people and less generous welfare state to cover you when you can't afford to live anymore. UK is a rich country that also has a lot of poor people, but a more generous welfare state.

>who care about the region as a whole

Nobody cares about the whole region. People living and paying taxes in Spain care about what's happening in Spain, not all the way in Romania or Bulgaria. So Spaniard elect politicians that will do what's best for Spain not what's best for other EU countries. Same for every other EU member. Politicians get elected on how they can improve the lives of the people in that specific country.

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

#514
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…

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

It's not that unsettling nor is it masochism.

It's called responsibility.

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

#515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Theyt are paid by the EU to tell how much they hate this institution. Correction: They're paid by the EU taxpayers. And as politicians, there's a chance their vociferation of hate towards the EU is just parroting the opinion their voters have towards the EU, which means they're doing their job as politicians, whether you like their opinions or not. >some are in schizophrenia mode (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia mostly)…

> Worth remembering that Hungary, Slovakia, et-al have loved the EU for many, many years after joining. It's not like they suddenly decided to hate the EU for absolutely no reason. So then let's examine and talk about those reasons, instead of calling them schizophrenic which doesn't solve anything and just breeds more animosity and extremism. Please do so. All 3 countries benefit massively from being in the EU, part…

>All 3 countries benefit massively from being in the EU, particularly Poland, who is on track to become one of the largest EU economies.

So what? That doesn't change the fact that living costs far outpaced gains for a lot of people. They still deserve to be angry and ask for how are you gonna fix their problem.

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

#516

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 real troublemaker is ... Germany

Everyone is responding with rationale for this, but it's not actually true it's it? It feels like every week we see another German state moving away from Microsoft etc.

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

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 reg…

> 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.

It will be way more than 50 years unless EU nations' governments start funding lean, savvy grassroots programs that invest in digital services like you say.

I'm talking a few thousands to local volunteer groups for the cost of hosting infrastructure or tax incentives to companies for actually providing this local infrastructure, not 50k to some bureaucrat in Brussels for drawing up plans to do so.

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

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Theyt are paid by the EU to tell how much they hate this institution. Correction: They're paid by the EU taxpayers. And as politicians, there's a chance their vociferation of hate towards the EU is just parroting the opinion their voters have towards the EU, which means they're doing their job as politicians, whether you like their opinions or not. >some are in schizophrenia mode (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia mostly)…

ehm, Poland has a steady grow and might leap the UK in the nearby future. UK does not have grow per Capita since Brexit. Hungary is poor because Orban is corrupt and corruption is bad for economy.

>Poland has a steady grow

Can nobody read anymore? I said "poorest people". You can easily have a growing GDP like Poland while more and more people can't afford to pay bills anymore. The GDP going up graph is meaningless for that.

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

#519

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…

I work on BlockNote ( https://www.blocknotejs.org ), the block-based editor that powers Docs ( https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs ). 1.5 year ago DINUM (La Suite) and OpenDesk (Germany) reached out and started sponsoring quite a bit of our work which has really helped us accelerate the project

Do they have an impact on the roadmap? Like special features for gov work or specific integration?

And I believe BlockNote uses tiptap/prosemirror, no? Do they also contribute to those “primitives”? That would be a very nice gift to the OSS community

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

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta give them props for all the English. I know that can't have been easy. Now they just need to change the name so it's not so obviously French, and invite collaboration from the other large EU countries. I wonder how many Dutch or German will think of "La Suite Numerique" as an EU-wide office suite.

The Dutch are also working on this: https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau/

Which uses LaSuite.
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