| ▲ | France's homegrown open source online office suite(github.com) |
| 434 points by nar001 4 hours ago | 199 comments |
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| ▲ | YousefED 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Great to see this on HN. fyi, La Suite is an umbrella project built by DINUM in France that started several years ago, mainly to enable people in the public administration to use more independent tools. It's built in-house, often on top of other open source technologies. E.g.: Matrix powers chat and LiveKit powers Visio (which was recently featured on HN as well when they announced it's rolled out to replace Zoom / Teams, etc [1]) I'm fortunate to be collaborating with them as their Docs product is built on top of our open source BlockNote text editor (https://www.blocknotejs.org). Docs specifically started as an international collaboration with Germany [2] to explore how different EU countries can collaborate in building sovereign workplace solutions (several other countries including NL have shown interest as well). They're actively supporting us, and related projects like Yjs (https://yjs.dev) by sponsoring feature development. I'm sure many of the team members will follow along here as well! Happy to answer any questions. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294
[2] https://www.zendis.de/en |
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| ▲ | larsiusprime an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I had a question since there's growing interest in open source adoption for digital sovereignty purposes in Europe; I produce open source software for civil servants as well (for mass appraisal/property tax valuation specifically), and I was wondering if you could offer any advice about how to best meet the needs of/approach European governments (both local and national) about open source collaboration? Do they prefer to develop their own things in house, or do they like to work with community projects? | |
| ▲ | stevetron 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm a little confused. You said LiveKit powers Visio. But isn't Visio a CAD and drawing app inside of Microsoft Office? | | |
| ▲ | hommelix 20 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Visio here is most likely a shorted "visioconférence", the French word for video conference, or online meeting. | | |
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| ▲ | nickthesick 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Glad to be working as part of this initiative too! | | |
| ▲ | nhatcher an hour ago | parent [-] | | Hi! Congratulations to you and Yousef. And I am lucky enough to be in a position from learning from both of you. Anyone think what they might about La Suite, but blocknote is a solid product! | | |
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| ▲ | mmooss an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | The description of the Docs project, at least on the OP page, is interesting: "A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales. Built with Django and React." An office suite's 'docs' component is usually a word processor and people sometimes try to (mis)use it for the functions you actually list - i.e., you can try to use Word as a wiki, linking pages somehow, but it's not nearly as efficient as a purpose-built wiki. Based on the quote description, it looks like your project inverted the thinking: Is word processing not a/the primary function? Are the other functions truly prioritized - e.g., is the wiki somewhat as efficient as MediaWiki? | | |
| ▲ | nickthesick an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I think that the point of the project is more: “Content over form” so you don’t really need all the formatting options of something like Word when you are just trying to write meeting notes. They are definitely trending more towards a wiki, but it is still early days for this whole experiment. Though, many of the municipalities in the French gov are using it for their day to day work so it is clearly useful in some capacity. I don’t have numbers, but it’s definitely respectable | |
| ▲ | YousefED an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Think of Docs more of a modern, kind of Notion-style collaboration tool. It's not meant to be a Word replacement for full-scale document authoring (I believe La Suite will work with LibreOffice for that, but might be wrong here). The product vision is that Docs should focus on "Content over Form"; i.e.: make it easy to create well-structured documents (content), as opposed to Word which makes it easy to change every little visual detail of your document (form). In addition, there are some advanced integrations with other products in La Suite. For example, video calls made in Visio can be automatically AI-transcribed and presented in a Docs document, etc. | | |
| ▲ | mmooss an hour ago | parent [-] | | Thanks. I think your vision is much more useful for most day-to-day work for most people. It's interesting that a new office suite would aim in that direction. | | |
| ▲ | leoedin 35 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I almost never use word for exactly that reason. I don’t want to spend half an hour normalising my headings and fonts and margins. I want to focus on content and logical structure. I much prefer Google Docs over word for this reason too. I was writing a datasheet really and it’s really surprising how there isn’t ia straightforward solution. Confluence wasn’t expressive enough, while getting Word to apply consistent styles across tables, margins, headings etc is such a pain. |
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| ▲ | okanat 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 that got somewhere near of the commercial offering is OwnCloud's Infinity Scale (OCIS) which is written in Go. It is no surprise since OwnCloud is indeed running an open-core business and you cannot use their binaries in businesses. OpenCloud is the "open-source" fork but they are already in legal trouble with OwnCloud due to industrial espionage claims. If European governments are serious, the amount of money they _guarantee_ should be in the degree of tens of billions of Euros. Not fun 10k hackaton projects. The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it. And yes it will probably cause whatever current party to lose elections, independence has a price. It is high. |
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| ▲ | savant2 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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... | | |
| ▲ | mabedan 33 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | savant2 6 minutes ago | parent [-] | | For layouts and opening docs from other suites, it seems they rely on OnlyOffice, as listed on the marketing page of their Google Drive equivalent [1]. OpenDesk from ZenDiS (German counterpart to this project, also collaborating on La Suite) seems to rely on Nextcloud and Collabora Online for that [2]. Docs and Drive aren't the only products in this suite: they also provide alternative for Meet, Chat, GMail or Sheets. I have no doubt that Microsoft and Google products offer more features but my point still stands: a lot of employees (like myself) need productivity tools but only need the core features. [1] https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/fichiers [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesk |
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| ▲ | 999900000999 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You don't need to raise taxes for this, literally just stop wasting money on licensees once the open source projects are ready. It's not a "let do it in 3 months" thing, this will take at least a decade. | | |
| ▲ | culi 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | FramaSoft has been building "Dégooglisons" since 2001 https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/ | |
| ▲ | xp84 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | “Once ready” they’ll save (somewhat) on licenses, what about paying for it during the years it will take to build it, while it’s not ready? When any random company makes a Build vs. Buy decision the question is “is this a core competency?” Most companies use a package from MS or GOOG because it’s unlikely that they’ll be so good at productivity software that it’s (A) worth distracting themselves from their actual job and (B) good enough. The same caveats apply here. | | |
| ▲ | parchley an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | No, suggestion those caveats show that you are out of touch with what is at stake. This is about digital sovereignty, not saving money. It’s about not relying on the US. The US is literally forcing our hands here. | | | |
| ▲ | Certhas 37 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Being able to operate sovereignly is a core competency for governments. | | |
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| ▲ | gryn 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > once the open source projects are ready. so likely a decade or more of double spending in the meanwhile. that's 2 election terms in France for context. Good luck making the political parties agree to this. | | |
| ▲ | gtirloni 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | This likely won't need billions of Euros to implement and will be an earmark in the budget. My point being it's not such a grandious project, from a continental perspective. |
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| ▲ | zdc1 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | My initial thought was: why not fork LibreOffice and spend the extra dev time closing the gap between what it is and what they need? But after some thought, I feel a cloud collaboration suite makes more sense as big orgs often run on online-first solutions like Sharepoint. So they can tick the essential boxes by being an online collaboration suite, and fill in formatting features later. Though your points on speed and architecture do make me wonder if Python was their best choice... | |
| ▲ | nmstoker 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Interestingly neither their GitHub nor the La Suite front page (translated) actually mention "office" - that's what the OP titled it. | |
| ▲ | WarmWash 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Let young people get fantastically wealthy in a low friction business environment and you'll get all the enterprise grade homegrown software you need. | |
| ▲ | mhkgjkhn an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | you know le suite is a success, when random americans complain about it :) good for the french, they made the right choice. | |
| ▲ | maxloh 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Scaling horizontally is significantly cheaper than the additional engineering cost required to build these applications in statically typed languages, especially in developed nations like France. The real bottleneck lies on the database side, but it is rare for an average organization to actually hit its limits. Don't think at Microsoft scale if you aren't them. | | |
| ▲ | ethanpailes an hour ago | parent [-] | | Server costs actually matter quite a bit at the scales of the incumbents in this space. Also, speed can be an important part of UX. Scaling horizontally won’t help if the engine itself is slow enough that there is noticeable lag even with just a single document getting edited by a dozen people. |
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| ▲ | gib444 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 | |
| ▲ | whoamii 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Or maybe the solution must be one rooted in reducing taxes. Make investing extremely attractively, and stop relying on taxes to solve everything. | | |
| ▲ | coredev_ 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I do not agree, I don't want EU to turn to US. Taxes should be on a level to support the welfare state. | | |
| ▲ | Nesco 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Which it can’t. There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states | | |
| ▲ | victorbjorklund an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | That is obviously not true. You don’t even define what a welfare state is or when a country stops being a welfare state. | |
| ▲ | ecshafer 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The welfare state can not exist in world where the government is against population growth. You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare. We need an exponential curve of population to maintain it, especialy when its at european levels. Mass immigration of uneducated people from low income countries doesnt cover the gap, especially when the government extends welfare to them. This is all a fact. | | |
| ▲ | braiamp 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | With how many statements of fact you make, you are pretty wrong. There's not one of them being right. We have enough productivity that a minuscule part of the population can produce and distribute the basic needs for every human on earth. There's literally humans that can't find jobs to do because we don't educate them well enough to go and offer services that other humans need. Not only that, we try to say that they don't deserve enough pay to supply their basic needs. And yes, I'm talking about teachers and medics. We don't have enough of either, because we don't pay them enough compared to their workload. Those things we will always need, in great quantities to support our population. Greater quantities than engineers, architects, researchers, etc. but guess where everyone flocks because it pays more? - https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/250330/978924151... - https://ipsnoticias.net/2022/10/el-mundo-necesita-69-millone... | | |
| ▲ | zozbot234 an hour ago | parent [-] | | A welfare state that was genuinely targeted to serving basic needs of the population would look vastly different from present-day France and other comparable countries. Take a look at Singapore; last I checked, it was not known as a place where people might be at risk of starving. The underlying problem is that people expect the welfare state to solve issues of social marginalization, which are actually the result of fraying social capital as opposed to a mere lack of resources. Welfare states make these issues actively worse, not better. For instance, when every employer (including those that may be only marginally successful to begin with) is expected as a matter of law to extend onerous labor protections against firing and laying off to each and every worker,[0] this results in marginal workers (who may have been socially marginalized originally for reasons of ethnic heritage and the like) being completely excluded from the market, which makes their plight even worse. (Except for forms of "gig work" or informal employment, of course - which in practice function to sidestep the most onerous regulations to some extent.) A very relevant issue in present-day France. [0] And to fund those costly welfare programs through payroll contributions that are levied on employees and employers alike - which is its own issue and often amounts to exploitive, confiscatory taxation for the most marginal workers. |
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| ▲ | lII1lIlI11ll an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare. I'm curios what do you mean by this. Could you provide some examples of such policies or propaganda campaigns? | |
| ▲ | kuerbel an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | cracks fingers The last sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a post that collapses if poked gently with a stick. "The welfare state cannot exist without exponential population growth." Sounds mathy, but is wrong. Welfare states do not require exponential population growth. They require a sufficient ratio of contributors to dependents, plus productivity. Those are not the same thing. Exponential curves + limited resources = ecological faceplant. No serious economist argues that infinite demographic growth is a prerequisite for social insurance. What they talk about instead are levers: labor participation, productivity, retirement age, automation, taxation structure, and yes, migration. "Government policy makes 4+ child families rare." Prosperity itself lowers fertility. Governments can nudge at the margins, but they are not mind-controlling people out of large families. Most people stop at one or two kids because time, money, energy, housing, and sanity are finite. "Mass immigration of uneducated people doesn’t cover the gap." Ah, bundling multiple claims into a single blur. Efficient, but sloppy.
Refugees are not permanently "uneducated"; education and skills are state-dependent, not genetic properties. (Except if you are one of those right-wing grifters that think only white people are capable of intelligence, and maybe east asians. Those people get a hearty fuck you from me, that is not worth discussing at all).
Early years cost money; later years often don’t. But you know what, the same is true for children. Fourth argument: "Extending welfare to immigrants makes it worse." This assumes welfare is a static pot rather than a system designed to convert non-participants into participants. Welfare states don’t exist just to reward contributors; they exist to stabilize societies over time. Cutting people off doesn’t magically turn them into productive workers. Quite often it does the opposite. Now, let's zoom out a bit for the real category error here.
Modern welfare system are intergenerational risk-sharing mechanisms, not growth cults. "This is all a fact." Sure thing buddy | | |
| ▲ | ipaddr 21 minutes ago | parent [-] | | "Prosperity itself lowers fertility" This is not true. Women entering the workforce instead of having babies earlier in life lowers prosperity. In our society women working during those early years creates more prosperity (two incomes) but those who are very rich like Musk has no issue producing a big stable of kids. |
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| ▲ | nosianu 37 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Which it can’t. The welfare state for corporate interests is alive and well though, and costs much more. (2025) "Corporate Welfare in the Federal Budget" -- https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/corporate-welfare-feder... (2024) https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2024/07/16/100-years-of-risi... > There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states Okay? Let's get rid of that much more expensive type of welfare then! As if we have "real capitalism" - not even on a scale of local bakeries any more. Even the small businesses often are just a shop owned by a corporation. Not that I'm against some level of concentration, a lot of economic activity requires it. A lot of products are too expensive and require a certain scale to be viable at all. What is the goal of economic activity anyway? For the few to live well, while the majority struggles? By "struggle" I don't mean that the majority already lives in the streets, to me it is enough that they have to be afraid. Of getting sick, of losing the job, of anything bad happening. I saw myself how a single unfortunate event could spiral out of control, and a guy making a lot of money in enterprise sales ended up alone, broken, and sick in the streets. I count all those having to fear such a development as part of the "losers", even if they are still making money and living in their house now. That fear, suppressed or not, should not be necessary, and it influences stress levels and decisions, consciously or not. I mean, you are also right with your message, and I actually agree. The flow of money around and away from too many people should not be happening. Being part of the economy should be easy for the majority, and real "welfare" should only be necessary for the sick and otherwise temporarily or fully disabled. If a lot of normal people need welfare, something is not right. But then you need an economy that provides those easy options to participate and get enough of a share. You also need a system where an unfortunate event (or some) does not put you into an unescapable downward spiral, and provide a way back into the economy. |
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| ▲ | wtcactus 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 47% of the total gross wage (EDIT this was corrected, the original figure stated on Wikipedia is much higher and it's wrong). The French state spends 57% of all French GDP [2]. For context, this is higher than what the Soviet Union spent in the years before the communist regimen felt (41% to 47% during the 1980s [3]). How much taxes shall we pay to "support our independence"? Will I be allowed to keep at least 10% of what I earn, or am I supposed to give it all to the state to live in this wonderful Socialist utopia? And here you are, asking to increase taxes even more. The only way out of this madness is a civil war. We are past any sanity left. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_France [2] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/government-at-a-glance-... [3] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/display/book/9781557755186/ch05... EDIT: The wikipedia page is indeed wrong: "The overall rate of social security and tax on the average wage in 2022 was 82% of gross salary". This was the tax wedge of these 2 contributions, not the average tax on wage as the Wikipedia page states. Average tax on gross wage in France is 47%. The worker then has to pay VAT and other fees/taxes from the remaining 53%. | | |
| ▲ | qqrot 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Unfortunately you (and of course the wikipedia page) misunderstood the OECD document [1], which says: "In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax
wedge, compared with 77% of the total OECD average tax wedge." Note how it says "of the total tax wedge" not "of their salary. The tax wedge itself is 47.2% in 2024 in France. This is indeed high by international standards but nowhere as high as you claimed. [1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report... | |
| ▲ | kuerbel 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 82% tax wedge is not the same as taxes, or even the contribution of an individual. Also nobody is talking about taxing income even more. I do agree however with the sanity part, although I think of a whole different subset of people than you. | | |
| ▲ | braiamp 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Effective tax rate is what you should be looking at. The most efficient tax rate is one that describes a exponential saturation, where it starts growing faster once it reaches the point where you have too much wealth. |
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| ▲ | boomskats 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | None of what you've just said can be verified by looking at any of the references you just posted. However having just read through that wikipedia page, I realised that there I'd be paying almost half the income tax I pay living in the UK. So yeah, thanks I guess. Now I really really want to move to France. | |
| ▲ | abtinf 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Your wiki link contains only a single random reference to that number, and the page it links to justify it doesn’t exist. | |
| ▲ | well_ackshually 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Man, life must be easy when you can't read and just get to make things up online. Especially when things such as the URSSAF's simulation tool is like, freely available online: https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-ne... giving you a copy of a pay slip with detailed amounts of where your money goes. Someone making 2500€ gross will take home 1885€ per month after taxes and contributions. On which you can add a 20% VAT. Even should you want to operate in incredibly bad faith and add employer contributions, it would only amount to 3175 in total. For fun, I tried to figure out what would be needed for someone to have 82% of their salary going away into taxes. It is physically impossible to go anywhere above 55%, the math just stops scaling. Even taking employer costs into account, the max will be 65%. This all starts happening when you have the lowly gross salary of about 30 000€/month, something that I'm sure you're being paid right now to complain about to much about it. Hell, even the damn link you're posting shows that you can't read: > In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax wedge, compared with 77% of the total OECD average tax wedge What the fuck do you think tax brackets cover, ponies ? And acting offended about it like it's some unacceptable thing when the OECD average is... 5 percentage point lower ? > 82% of the average gross salary in France is indeed taken by the state, You literally can't read. > In other words, in France the take-home pay of an average single worker, after tax and benefits, was 71.9% of their gross wage > his means that an average married worker with two children in
France had a take-home pay, after tax and family benefits, of 83.1% of their gross wage Now, there are ways to solve these expenses, they involve cutting all pensions. I'm sure you'll be okay with letting your parents, and mine, die, right ? | | |
| ▲ | wtcactus an hour ago | parent [-] | | Well, life isn't that easy then, because you failed to comprehend URSSAF's simulation tool. On a €2500 gross salary you take home €1651 (which is a very low salary in France very close to the minimum salary). But I guess you think the gross salary is what the company, by law, has to say they pay you, instead of what the total cost for the company of your salary. See, in France, even if you are getting close to the minimum salary, the state is taking 33% of the cake for themselves. This is for people that earn very little. For people that earn average salaries of €2669 liquid (€5000 gross for the company), the French state takes 47% of the cake. It's a normal mistake for people that don't actually have to support the costs themselves. Once people actually start a small business or pay more attention to their own wages and how much is being taken away, they figure out how it actually works. |
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| ▲ | ul5255 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How did you arrive at 82% of salary being taken by taxes and social security? I read the Wikipedia article but I don’t how the numbers would add up to 82%. | |
| ▲ | skywal_l 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [2] You include pension, healthcare and education in this number. What would be the equivalent number in, say, the US if you were to include all this? | | |
| ▲ | lII1lIlI11ll 41 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > What would be the equivalent number in, say, the US if you were to include all this? Isn't it the point OP is making - France has much higher taxes compared to US because the state provides pensions, healthcare and higher education and US don't? |
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| ▲ | pyrale an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > The French state spends 57% of all French That figure is pretty tired. In France, the pension scheme is counted as public spending. In neighbouring countries, the very similar, mandatory, pension schemes count as private. The comparison makes little sense if you don't compare equivalent spending scopes, and equivalent service provided. If health care was to privatized, for instance, I'm pretty sure we would be worse off, but that number would go down. > The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary This figure, on the other hand, is straight up made-up bullshit. I dare you to find a salary that reaches 82% on URSSAF's salary simulator [1]. The OECD report quote is: > In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax
wedge 82% of the State's tax base are from income tax and social security contributions. That doesn't mean peopole are taxed 82% of their income. [1]: https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-ne... | | |
| ▲ | lII1lIlI11ll 14 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > That figure is pretty tired. In France, the pension scheme is counted as public spending. In neighbouring countries, the very similar, mandatory, pension schemes count as private. That "very similar" does a lot of heavy lifting for you. Your neighboring Swiss pillars 2 and 3 and not similar at all - they are neither financial pyramids that depend on population growth, nor are they subject to some arbitrary "points adjustment" bullshit (a retiree takes out exactly what they put in without any shenanigans from politicians or "Agirc-Arrco board of directors"). > If health care was to privatized, for instance, I'm pretty sure we would be worse off, but that number would go down. Care to elaborate why French middle class (we are on HN after all, not on Jacobin) would be worse off on Swiss health care model, for example? |
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| ▲ | handelaar 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > "The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary" This might be the most insane comment I've ever seen on this forum. What in the hell are you talking about? Did you actually read that first link, completely fail to understand a single word of it, and then the number 82 just magically fell out of the sky? |
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| ▲ | InsideOutSanta 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Having tax reduction as a primary goal is terrible for society, because taxes are the primary mechanism for converting money from rich people into services for everybody, particularly poor people. | | |
| ▲ | irishcoffee an hour ago | parent [-] | | > taxes are the primary mechanism for converting money from rich people into services for everybody Even California billionaires would rather leave the state than pay the 5% wealth tax. All to provide “services” that are generally superfluous or tied to corrupt kickbacks. |
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| ▲ | paulryanrogers 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Stop relying on ~investors~ [the business oligarchy] to solve everything | | |
| ▲ | brigandish 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | They're being asked, in this case, to solve a problem that business has already shown able to solve. More competition will also solve that oligarchy problem too. | | |
| ▲ | Krasnol 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, more competition does obviously NOT solve oligarchies. It is what we see RIGHT NOW. It is OUT THERE NOW. Oligarchs buy up competition and either incorporate their ideas or make them disappear if they threaten their established business models. Why are you keep repeating this myth? The only relevant player who might break up oligarchies before they become to powerful is the state they operate in. |
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| ▲ | kkfx 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 already in Python. I see no reason at all to use LibreOffice, MS Office, or anything similar. This is what's actually needed. Billions should be invested in IT training, not in copies of software from another era designed to let untrained secretarial staff use a desktop. | | |
| ▲ | harvey9 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You use emacs so why should anyone else need MS Word? A large number of people use word processor software because it has advantages over typewriters or handwriting for their purposes rather than because they lack training in something more esoteric. | | |
| ▲ | pydry an hour ago | parent [-] | | To be fair ms word is rooted in a world paper once ruled and the paper/document metaphor is becoming increasingly less relevant. I used to use it all day every day and now i use it once a year maybe (often for government related things, coz theyre often the only ones still asking me to fill out and sign PDF forms). Most office functions are better supplanted with a decent cms, spreadsheet, email and something to let you create forms for people to fill in. |
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| ▲ | bee_rider 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It’s like you aren’t even interested in reinforcing Microsoft’s moat at all! | |
| ▲ | plagiarist 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
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| ▲ | admissionsguy 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow True as it may be that they are slow, I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages. > The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it. You do you, but increasing taxes to build products to replace products built by private enterprise sounds like a 180 degree opposite of what Europe needs to prosper. | | |
| ▲ | bigfudge 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is pre MAGA thinking.
Investing in strategic industries that otherwise pose systemic risk to European economies wouldn’t be our first choice, but it’s now necessary. | | |
| ▲ | abtinf 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It’s called mercantilism. It was thoroughly refuted hundreds of years ago. | | |
| ▲ | braiamp 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, but apparently the biggest players now abuse their comparative advantage positions. So, we are back to mercantilism to the detriment of all humanity. |
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| ▲ | xedrac 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages. Depends which ones. Python? Definitely a source of slowness. | | |
| ▲ | consp an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > Definitely a source of slowness. I would first blame the programmers, the design and lack of specialty offloading before blaming any programming language. Well designed web calls scale nearly linearly with usage and usually poor design or programming is the source of slowness. You can always trade language complexity for speed but assuming it is the cause of all perceived slowness is a poor man's view. It is the same story every time again, first it was java, which has so many large scale projects most people won't even know it's running things they use, now it's apparently python who is to blame for all slowness on the web. When the next JIT or scripted language comes along which is not someone's favourite pet that will get the blame. | | |
| ▲ | array_key_first 19 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Python is slow, though, and so was java compared to other compiled languages of its time. Sure, it might not matter much if you're mostly doing database calls. If you're not, though, then yes, it's the languages fault if your app is slow. You can try to make it faster, but it's gonna be marginal gains. Or, you could just switch to another language and get a 100x speedup for free. I also denounce the notion that trading language complexity for slowness is the case. Python is already complex, and there's some language and frameworks that are actually quite a bit easier to use for web backends. Like java, or dotnet. It just makes no sense to use python for this usecase, even if you ignore the slowness. But that's not completely true, there is one very good reason to use python. Your devs know it. But, that doesnt say anything about the language itself. |
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| ▲ | admissionsguy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Hard imagining well designed web app bottlenecked by server-side processing that is not offloaded to database, or done via bindings to libraries written in compiled languages. |
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| ▲ | ericd 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It’s building infrastructure, which should lower costs in the long term. Seems like a good use of money from where I’m sitting. | |
| ▲ | echelon 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > You do you, but increasing taxes to build products to replace products built by private enterprise sounds like a 180 degree opposite of what Europe needs to prosper. Shhh, don't tell them. (Kidding, of course.) The best solution is skin-in-the-game, for-profit enterprise coupled with rigorous antitrust enforcement. Companies will go a million times faster than open source. They're greedy and will tear the skin off of inefficiencies and eat them for lunch. That's what they do. Let the system of capitalism work for you. It's an optimization algorithm. One of the very best. But when companies get too big and start starving off competition, that's when you need to declaw them and restore evolutionary pressure. Even lions should have to work hard to hunt, and they should starve and die with old age to keep the ecosystem thriving. | | |
| ▲ | roblabla 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > The best solution is skin-in-the-game, for-profit enterprise coupled with rigorous antitrust enforcement. Don't we have enough examples showing that this simply cannot work long-term, because the for-profit enterprises will _inevitably_ grow larger than the government can handle through antitrust? And once they reach that size, they become impossible to rein in. Just look at all the stupid large american corporations who can't be broken up anymore because the corporation has the lobbying power and media budget to make any attempt to enforce antitrust a carrier killer for a politician. I think it's very myopic to say that corporate structure is the "best solution". | | |
| ▲ | admissionsguy 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No a bad thing if you desire the corporate power to eventually become the main force shaping the world :) | |
| ▲ | nickpp 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > to make any attempt to enforce antitrust a carrier killer for a politician Any example of a politician carrier killed by an attempt to enforce antitrust? | | |
| ▲ | saubeidl an hour ago | parent [-] | | Biden. Him putting Lisa Khan in charge of antitrust enraged the tech oligarchs, who then all went MAGA and bought Trump the election. | | |
| ▲ | nickpp 44 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > went MAGA and bought Trump the election Didn’t Harris actually raise and spend more than Trump on that election? | | |
| ▲ | saubeidl 35 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Yeah but the tech spend was way more effective. Elon took over Twitter. | | |
| ▲ | megaman821 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | It seems like you have an unfalsifiable belief. If one side raises more money and wins, it because of the money. If one side raises more money and loses, it is still the money because the other side spend it more effectively. | |
| ▲ | nickpp 27 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | So no, they didn't "bought Trump the election". And the fact that a 3rd party supports an opponent does not kill any politician's career. Biden retired by himself, following his own party's pressure. And Harris is still around, I believe. |
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| ▲ | superze 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | To make matters worse, they are using Django. I can't take the EU serious any more. | | |
| ▲ | sgt 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Read this (among other articles on the same subject): https://medium.com/@tk512/django-scales-stop-blaming-the-fra... | |
| ▲ | ffsm8 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What issue do you have with Django? This is not a situation where you'll have thousands of people editing the same document, that'd be insane with Django for sure - but at general collaboration tooling with <100 (random number I made up) editing, Django is unlikely gonna be the bottleneck | | |
| ▲ | spwa4 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Does it really need explaining why Office 365/Google Docs cannot be written in Django? | | |
| ▲ | victorbjorklund an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Would love to hear that explanation why it is IMPOSSIBLE (not that Rust would be faster or use less resources but why it can’t be written) | |
| ▲ | cromka 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes |
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| ▲ | KingOfCoders 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What has that to do with the EU? | |
| ▲ | speedgoose 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What would you use instead? | | |
| ▲ | spwa4 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Something like this that's proven itself: https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-... TLDR: C++, WASM, and some form of GRPC with C++ on the server side as well. Because you need a language that's fast, can contain high complexity and large programs without collapsing (which is a short list of languages) and can work fast for the bits that need speed. | | |
| ▲ | macNchz 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That article is seemingly all about the perf of the complex frontend app with a custom renderer running in the browser, nothing to do with what’s happening on the server. | |
| ▲ | speedgoose 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I’m my opinion, you have to be kinda masochist to choose C++ for this. Web development is hard in C++. But thanks for answering honestly. | | |
| ▲ | spwa4 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | In my opinion one inherent property of languages is how large the largest program is that can be written in those languages. There's languages that work well for short programs. Bash, perl are examples on one end of the spectrum. Then you have things like lisp and Python where the largest programs are a lot larger already, but still hit obvious limits. And then you have the languages that support really large codebases. Java, C++ are ones currently in use. There's new languages where it's a bit of an open question still where they lie on the spectrum. Go would be one of them. I'd guess somewhere between Python and Java. Javascript I would argue is between perl and python. And Rust ... well ... good question. An office suite is a gigantic application, which will need feature upon feature upon feature upon feature. If you want it working on the web, I'd propose something like C++ and WASM. | |
| ▲ | irishcoffee an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Wt actually isn’t terrible, with the added benefit of being able to leverage the enormous c/c++ library ecosystem. Also, it can be quite fast if you care for it to be. Edit: also appears to be based in the eu, how fitting for this thread. https://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt |
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| ▲ | innocentoldguy 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Django is perfectly capable. I'd use Phoenix for its scalability and performance, if it were me, but I've built large-scale projects in Django before, and it worked well. | |
| ▲ | shimman 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What an asinine comment, Django is good enough for several billion dollar companies. It's probably good enough to use in a government capacity too. | | |
| ▲ | cbdevidal 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It really depends on how it’s used. I love Django in certain specific situations. You know that saying though about when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail… |
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| ▲ | iambateman 2 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Honest question…given how developed our sensibilities are around docs, file storage, and spreadsheets, what is the hard part to this? Don’t get me wrong…something is hard…I still use Microsoft Word because I feel like I have to. But what is keeping the industry from building a word processor that doesn’t suck and is capable of interfacing with .docx files? |
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| ▲ | GuB-42 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| On this topic, I think it is worth mentioning Framasoft [1] It is a French organization that offers plenty of alternatives to Google and other big tech products. A lot of them are just rebranded and hosted open source software, but they also develop their own, such as PeerTube and Framaprout (the last one is a joke, but PeerTube isn't). [1] https://framasoft.org/ |
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| ▲ | culi a minute ago | parent | next [-] | | Yup, I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned earlier but they're the ones behind PeerTube (which I see posted on HN a lot) and many other tools. They've been building google alternatives for over two decades now and many of their tools are quite mature https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/ | |
| ▲ | jonathanstrange an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I hate to say it because it's cute but that website is not going to win over large companies to use these tools. | | |
| ▲ | GuB-42 40 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I don't think they can win over large company, they are just a small nonprofit organization, large companies want to work with other large companies. Where they can make a difference is for fellow organizations and maybe small companies. A lot of them go to Google because that's the most convenient, even if it sometimes against their principles, they are proposing an alternative. One minor criticism I have is that while they are not hiding the fact that they are rebranding off-the-shelf free software, they could give them a bit more visibility, should users want to self host at some point. |
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| ▲ | dv_dt 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Hmm, and what of https://cryptpad.fr/ Though they also seem to be on github https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad |
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| ▲ | jraph 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | CryptPad is: - an office suite, where La Suite is at least partly a coherent package bundling existing software which has documents, chat, video calls, etc but wouldn't really play the role of an office suite IIUC - they serve different purposes mostly - E2EE, which comes with its unique set of benefits and drawbacks (and yes, sadly at XWiki SAS we host our code on GitHub too, I wish it wasn't like this) | |
| ▲ | nickthesick 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Made X-Wiki unrelated just happen to be the same country |
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| ▲ | defraudbah 5 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I came to bash on it but it looks nice, well done France! |
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| ▲ | klaustopher 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Also worth looking at: - Germany‘s OpenDesk: https://www.opendesk.eu/en - Netherland‘s MijnBureau: https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau-infra/ |
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| ▲ | drcongo 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm intrigued as to why both these, and the Suite Numerique have chose Element / Matrix as the chat component. Every time I've tried to use Element / Matrix it has failed dismally for me and everyone else in whatever community is trialling it. Element itself was so buggy as to be unusable. | | |
| ▲ | codethief an hour ago | parent [-] | | I don't use Element myself but there was a recent HN discussion where people said it had improved significantly in last year or two. |
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| ▲ | ninalanyon 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's not an office suite and the linked page doesn't claim it is. The title should be changed. |
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| ▲ | padjo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Makes sense, using an office suite hosted by a hostile power isn't a very smart longterm strategy. |
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| ▲ | samsonradu 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Wondering what software are China/Russia using in their public administration? | | | |
| ▲ | Winblows11 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes I remember when UK regulator blocked Microsoft from buying Activision there were posts on r/Microsoft regarding their ability to send update to brick all Windows installs in UK and delete all Azure data of UK companies, how UK was a small insignificant market compared to BRICs so it wouldn't hurt MSFT stock price. Given JD Vance obviously hates UK/EU way more than Trump, and he may be next US president, he may in fact threaten Microsoft to do it against UK and EU. | | |
| ▲ | bee_rider 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | On one hand the dependence on Microsoft is generally bad. On the other, we shouldn’t take the opinions of the sort of fan who hangs around on a corporation’s subreddit too seriously. |
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| ▲ | shermantanktop 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The trend up until the 2010s was that global companies were so big and ubiquitous that they could dictate the economic actions of nations, not the other way around. International military conflicts were influenced by the likes of Halliburton. Corporations were the new nation-states, countries were mere speed bumps in the flow of global capital. That was seen by some as a great thing, aligning everyone’s interests together and encouraging peace. In that world, France betting on Microsoft is not only benign, it’s a positive. That’s also the world of Davos and Jeffrey Epstein. We’re experiencing a global shift toward nationalism which has pushed back hard on that trend. There’s things to like about that and things to dislike, but those things differ wildly depending on your politics. | | |
| ▲ | thrance 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'd say it goes beyond nationalism. Even countries that haven't succumbed to the far right are forced to play by the new rules. I've heard some refer to it as "neomercantilism". |
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| ▲ | trolleski 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Politicians in the EU are complicit to say the least. And I hope they'll prove me wrong. |
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| ▲ | ThinkBeat an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The big problem EUs continuous big talk on digital sovereignty,
which is a good and vital concept, is that funding is ridiculously
lacking. Terms used like;
“European hyperscale cloud”
“Sovereign infrastructure”
“Strategic autonomy”
“European data centers for critical workloads” Which ended up in various efforts and projects Digital Europe Programme,
Recovery and Resilience Facility,
IPCE (I am not deeply familiar with EU projects) I believe funding was around low hundreds
of millions (€) total To build one hyperscaler region might cost around €10 billion. The second problem is that systems that were suggested
out of it still relied on US software stack, US computers,
etc. It is not like the EU member states could not fund it,
some estimates say aggregated EU and member states have
spent €350 billion in Ukraine. That is not to say they should not do that,
nor to suggest you have to chose one or the other
but it is demonstration
that EU+Member states can fund massive efforts,
If deemed important enough. and EU+Memberstates so far have not felt an urgency or will
to really invest in digital sovereignty. |
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| ▲ | Certhas 27 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The EU doesn't really fund many things directly. It's total annual budget is just 170 billion euros. It can fund research and coordination projects but at the end of the day the EU is mostly a coordination mechanism for sovereign states. Looking purely at EU projects is not really a useful lense to get an idea of what is happening... |
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| ▲ | julianozen 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is something we must be angry with our tech leaders for They thought they could support trump because they were upset with the democrats policies on crypto and AI cautiousness But instead they got someone willing to break the world order and our alliances which will harm tech growth |
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| ▲ | forty 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Great, but why on GitHub? That doesn't seem very souverain to me |
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| ▲ | Rexxar 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Git is distributed, the repository can be hosted concurrently at many places. | | |
| ▲ | tjwebbnorfolk 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | and the primary place they chose is owned by Microsoft | | |
| ▲ | saubeidl an hour ago | parent [-] | | I would strongly assume the primary place is on some French government server somewhere and this is just the public mirror. |
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| ▲ | Normal_gaussian 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The project benefits from the visibilityband community of GitHub and GitHub is completely replaceable with European hosted or self-hostable options should something untoward happen. | | |
| ▲ | michelsedgh 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | But they still chose an American company, github, lol ironic | | |
| ▲ | seszett 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There's nothing ironic, as since the GP said there is no risk associated with GitHub. Git fundamentally prevents vendor lock-in and tampering, and the project is open, so the US have no leverage and pose no threat at all here. | | |
| ▲ | michelsedgh 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | its not about leverage or threat, same as the office products, the french owned their docs at the end of the day, i thought it was about sovereignty and using french alternatives? |
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| ▲ | nolroz 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's the code that's hosted on GitHub, not the documents. Easier to move, easier to negotiate a move. You get visibility and easy distribution until they feel the need to bail. | |
| ▲ | faust201 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | With that argument we are discussing this on...errr US - the organization that perhaps grew those companies. The word is not ironic it is pragmatic. |
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| ▲ | nickthesick 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Not sure that it’s relevant to switch git hosts is trivial. And everyone is already there | |
| ▲ | nacozarina 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Underrated point: Bldg #1 needs to be sovereign hub for initiatives, for which OP is providing a first tenant… | |
| ▲ | saubeidl 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Cause that's where the traction is. The beauty of git is that it's inherently distributed, github is just a clone like any other. | |
| ▲ | prmoustache an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | given git is decentralized, my guess is github is just a public mirror. | |
| ▲ | LunaSea 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | GitHub is using Git which was developed by Linus Thorvald, a Finish and thus EU citizen. That does not sound very sovereign by the US to me. | | |
| ▲ | jraph 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There's a huge difference between the origin of some open source software, where a service is hosted and where the company providing it is from. You can take some open source software made in some other country and use it or fork it no strings attached to its country of origin. No leader from that country can decide to abruptly cut you off your usage of the software because they feel like it. | |
| ▲ | halapro 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | GitHub is literally Microsoft. US company with servers in the US. What you're talking about is the underlying technology. |
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| ▲ | progx 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I wait for frenchhub, in french only, no english translation, nothing. Typical french. Greetings from you EU neighbor. | | |
| ▲ | bee_rider 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | A lot of the documentation in La Suite seems to be available in English. |
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| ▲ | bsimpson 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This has been on HN a lot recently. For instance:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668 |
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| ▲ | highpost an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I wish them the very best, but I don't understand why it doesn't handle OpenDocument Format (ODF) natively. |
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| ▲ | Sytten 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It is interesting to see yjs with hoccuspocus being used. I am currently considering our options for real time document editing + full text search. Seems like a common approach is something like using yjs for sync with a temporary LSM storage like rocksdb for updates and then periodically snapshot to postgres for full text search and compaction. |
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| ▲ | Insensitivity 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I was looking at the Meet repository as an example, people literally don't know how to write React, without drowning in `useEffect`, `eslint-disable`, `any`. React has it's issues (and a ton of them), but writing code like this, I expect it to end up exactly like Microsoft Teams quality wise. Honestly, at that point, it's indistinguishable from LLM slop |
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| ▲ | shepherdjerred 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I have met very few devs who know how to avoid useEffect | |
| ▲ | moffkalast 12 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why would one decide to even go with React in recent years anyway? Strangely I've seen it happen a lot too. I'd have thought that Vue or Svelte would be a slam dunk choice. Do project managers love bloat and lag or something? |
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| ▲ | ricardobeat 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Why is Django so popular among open-source projects like these, especially government funded? I’ve never happened to see a commercial project use it in my twenty years in the field. Ruby/Go or even bun or node would be much more approachable and performant options today. |
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| ▲ | petcat 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I’ve never seen a commercial project use it in my twenty years in the field. This is very surprising to me considering some of the largest sites in the world are built on Django. Instagram, Pinterest, for instance. Large parts of stripe and Robinhood are implemented with Django. Eventbrite, bitbucket. I believe even Sentry is. All commercial products. | | |
| ▲ | seabrookmx an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 especially, it's very easy to create a poorly performing app by following the established patterns (N+1 queries being a huge problem created by DRF serializers). You need to be extremely diligent to create something performant in this ecosystem. Not every dev team has Armin Ronacher :P Where I work we found this exhausting, and moved on to FastAPI and ASP.NET. We make our queries much more explicit using tools like Dapper, and now a senior engineer can have a much better idea how a particular route will perform just by reading the code (obviously, we still do some profiling). [1]: https://djangochat.com/episodes/django-instagram-carl-meyer | | | |
| ▲ | macNchz 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Sentry is indeed, and is open source and self-hostable: https://github.com/getsentry/sentry It’s a pretty large app (I think >1M lines of Python). I ran a self hosted version for several years and found it performant and pretty easy to keep running and updated. | |
| ▲ | hobofan 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > stripe Stripe has always been a Ruby-heavy company. |
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| ▲ | mkl95 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Django must be more popular than Rails in the EU these days. Most Django devs have never used Go or Node and have never heard about Bun. Django is in the category of battle-tested frameworks that are very boring and easy to get things done with. | |
| ▲ | megaman821 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Does node or Go have a full-stack framework with any real usage? Those languages seem to have people that like piecing together libraries than using frameworks. Other languages all offer popular frameworks; Ruby on Rails, Java Spring, PHP Laravel, ASP.Net. | | |
| ▲ | ricardobeat 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The modern approach is to have a node-based fullstack framework like Next, SvelteKit or Astro, plus backend API services. I’m afraid i am one of those people :) | | |
| ▲ | megaman821 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | They are full-stack but not complete frameworks like the other. Where is the ORMs, authentication, form handling, etc? Will your bespoke choices hold up in 10 years? |
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| ▲ | LunaSea 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Bun is a very recent and thus unstable and immature project. It has also been acquired by Anthropic recently. Does not look like a great choice. | |
| ▲ | dingi 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Django is boring in a best possible way. Rather than spending six months setting up a bunch of microservices, you spend couple weeks on Django and ship a working product. Built in admin dashboard for example is a godsend at small scale. | | |
| ▲ | js4ever 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | or now you spend couple of hours/days with AI and produce a Rust implementation that will smoke Django 100X |
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| ▲ | rockinghigh 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Instagram uses it as their main backend. They have hundreds of million of daily users. Some of the critical backend services are in C++. | | |
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| ▲ | guerrilla an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What's wrong with libreoffice and collabra? |
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| ▲ | znort_ 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| bonjour, je suis clippy ... |
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| ▲ | tjwebbnorfolk 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is a toy. It really makes it look like they aren't that serious. |
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| ▲ | halapro an hour ago | parent [-] | | It's typical of non-technical people to ask for "like Facebook, but x y z." They just don't know the magnitude of effort required behind these projects. |
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| ▲ | bsenftner 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I would not be surprised if American PACs adopted this out of concern that US based office suites are politically compromised. |
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| ▲ | jmclnx 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Very nice. You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence, but they do. Over the years I have heard of many good Open Source Projects coming out of France. I sometimes wonder if it is because of French vs English Language were you hardly hear of their projects in English speaking Countries. |
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| ▲ | astrolx 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think an unsung hero in making open source broadly known and adopted in France is Framasoft [https://framasoft.org/en/], a non-profit association. They have since many many years an initiative to de-google internet and provide free and hosted alternatives and resources. | | |
| ▲ | BiteCode_dev 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | +1 on this, they had an amazing presence in the French community for 20 years and many of us own them our passion for FOSS. |
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| ▲ | bsenftner 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The French have amazing technologists, I worked with many stunningly brilliant French men and women across 3D gaming, film and media production. However, culturally they end up in a little "French pod" when not working in France because they know how to and really enjoy vigorous debate. If one cannot hold their own in their free wheeling intellectualized conversation and debate style, one might end up feeling insulted and stop hanging out with the frogs. There also seems to be a deep cultural understanding of design that is not present in people, generally, from other nations. That creates some interesting perspectives in software interactive design. | |
| ▲ | guerrilla an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence France has always been super heavy on open source. They even used to host Les Trophées du Libre, international open-source software competition. FramaSoft (i.e. PeerTube) and VLC are also French. | |
| ▲ | akdev1l 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Isn’t VLC French also? | | | |
| ▲ | caned 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Two words: Fabrice Bellard | |
| ▲ | tokai 20 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | >would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence You have not been paying attention. |
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| ▲ | sylware 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Of course, it is not forcing to use any whatng cartel web engines namely has noscript/basic (x)html interop support (aka classic web) and/or with public and as simple as possible network protocols anyone can implement a rich GUI client for. Of course its SDK has components choosen with care to maximize alternative (present and future) availability and its code is not stored on microsoft github.com. |
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| ▲ | ChrisArchitect 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Another one? Previously: This week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294 2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668 |
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| ▲ | ginko 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What's the value of it being online? Surely being able to run it as a native application would be preferable? |
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| ▲ | LunaSea 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It means that it is de-facto compatible with all operating systems. Also means that the tooling to make collaborative work in this suite possible already exists because it's a common use case on the web and less so on native software (see Microsoft Office vs. Microsoft 365 online). | | |
| ▲ | mimasama 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sure, "all" operating systems. "All" that is OSes that have a web browser built for it that at least supports [TransformStream](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/TransformSt...)... And the browser and spec written and maintained mostly by people outside of France. Kinda compromises the point of being "sovereign" doesn't it? | | |
| ▲ | touisteur 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Forking Firefox whenever the rug is pulled seems doable (with elbow grease), and in the meantime Europeans can invest on problems that don't have an already mature fully open-source solution. |
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| ▲ | vman81 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Managing documents on the back end can be very sensible, depending on your work context. Not having to deal with installations is also a real advantage in a heterogeneous environment with a mix of US-controlled operating systems and unencumbered OSes. It also makes migration between them easier, since you only need a common browser to be supported. | |
| ▲ | ddulaney 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There are definitely some benefits! Installation and updates become trivial. Also, collaboration is generally easier, because all you have to do is send a link. These are the same reasons Google Docs took off, and they are real advantages. |
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| ▲ | matt-p 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Office suite, cool! Looks Inside It's a Django app. |
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| ▲ | goodmythical 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| For those unaware, this is likely in response to the current US political crisis in which the US might decide at any point spike the prices or stop offering licenses on Microsoft etc products. |
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| ▲ | weberer 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Its part of La Suite which began planning in 2023. This is clearly marked in the linked README. Don't bring /r/politics level misinfo and speculation here. | |
| ▲ | sejje 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The first version for the "docs" program was released in May 2024 | |
| ▲ | simion314 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This already happened when USA sanctioned ICC judge, blocking them from american services. With such special leadership I will not surprised USA to block politicians or citizens with influence from EU that do not align with extreme right views, | | |
| ▲ | Muromec 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I posted about Amsterdam municipality digital strategy for next 10 years (tldr dont use azure clown for important stuff) yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46917768 That one explivitly cites the ICC judge incident as one of the reasons, even zo the motion to reduce dependence on American big tech was voted before that happened |
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