OuiChat
Every 2-3 years, the French government announces that they released a brand new homemade app that will replace some bigtech because sovereignty or whatever bureaucratic bullshit communication they fancy at the moment. Then they issue a BIG contract to an IT consulting company to develop the thing, who get tons of money to send junior devs to release a buggy tool that no one will ever use because migrations cost a lot. This new app will die like the others.
All this instead of just hiring a few senior devs to contribute to any of the number of existing open source projects that are already infinitely better than any new thing they will come up with.
the french do make some great stuff tho like cryptpad or mobilizon - the problem is usually always the same tho. it’s in french and they only give half a shit about their french users, anyone else is considered an obstacle.
heck i’ve been playing dofus for 20 years and the non-french community is always shafted. always.
This was long overdue.
Microsoft Office should be next.
They already developed alternatives for Microsoft Office:
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/docs as an alternative to word
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/grist as an alternative for excel and data management (much better than excel in my opinion)
It’s open source, actively developed with Germany and the Netherlands (as I’m writing this post the last commit to doc was 49min ago) and self hostableby any administration or company who want to do it.
not an english word in sight. must have super potential for becoming a new standard to replace ms office.
If you were not a troll you would have seen that all the technical documentation about how to contribute and how to host an instance in the repository is in English. The code is well documented 100% in English.
It make sense however that pages for users is in French, since it’s been developed for French users. If you want Geraldine, the secretary of the tax office in Trifouilly les Oies to use it, you need to address her in French.
Stop replying on U.S. companies for technologies that provide the backbone of our governments!
It’s opensource ! https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
It’s open source and they have documentation for swlf-hosting it !
uhhhh on github :(
… What’s wrong with GitHub?
The software that’s made to escape Microsoft’s ecosystem is being hosted on Microsoft’s GitHub.
Can’t tell of sarcasm or serious, damn Poe’s law.
Underrated comment
To be fair, I find the idea of a government outsourcing IT needs to entities under the sovereignty of foreign governments kind of fundamentally problematic to begin with.
Anything that kicks big tech’s teeth in is good.
ohh i can’t express how much i like that image.
The tone of these comments as weird.
I agree, it was the same on reddit.
Why do european tech companies need to call their products the same name as already established american products. Don’t they google the names before they make the decision?
It’s the French common name for this, visioconférence. Why would they care about Microsoft products for this?
tech companies
The French government is not a tech company.
Debatable
Visio is an outdated spreadsheet name, in English.
Visio is the new video conferencing software, in French.
France leads the world, it is up to everyone else to worry about conflict with France, not the other way around. /s
deleted by creator
We don’t do google here ok
It’s uncouth and unfashionable, the French prefer to get information by sticking their head out of the window whilst wildly waving a baguette and yelling: “Quoi de neuf ?”
american law is relative, who cares
Trump is amazing. He literally destroys anything he touches and still get rewarded for it. Just wow.
Edit: Destroys casinos and hotels. Gets rewarded a tv show. Destroy multiple brands. Get rewarded the presidency. Destroys so many American lives. Gets rewarded the presidency a second time. Destroys the United States and it’s ties with it’s allies. Gets rewarded with untold billions.
He is as fucking narcisist, he doesn’t care not to ruin anything.
magic or a trick?
Depends on if you believe in Satan or not.
amigo, i am on lemmy for 1 day, but i already forgot what you are replying to and i don’t know how to jump to my own comment to find what you are replying to. Can you help? Thank you√2
When you see my comment in your inbox, you can click the small icon below it that looks like a chainlink. That will take you to the original comment I replied to. From there you can also navigate up the thread.
Yeah. You asked if Trump being so successful despite a complete failure at everything was a trick or magic.
Could you destroy unnecessary apostrophes in possessive pronouns? Get rewarded with correct grammar.
Correcting grammar on the Internet is like trying to drink a ocean.
Ok incel.
Oh sorry, I interrupted you in the middle of changing the world.
Once these countries leave, they’ll never go back. And then the rest of us get better alternatives to this enshitification model.
Munich went open source / Linux a couple of years ago, ditching Microsoft. Using a big budget to convert everything and support employees etc. It was a huge act.
…Then they went back to Microsoft in yet another huge act, using a big budget. And then never revealed the budget for the last one. Which is really weird, considering its public money.
edit: just wanted to say that when idiots get power, there is always a way back. No matter how obviously stupid that would be
Also improves Teams/slows the enshitifcation. It’s harder to make the product bad when it’s hardly a monopoly.
Seriously, enshitification is the only thing US companies do well these days. They just dig deeper moats around their walled gardens because they’re too greedy to make decent products that people actually want.
Enshittification, AI slop and fascism are America’s greatest exports. And that’s not even a joke.
We grow pretty good weed too, that isn’t nothing.
Not exported overseas though.
I have a feeling it probably must be though. What other countries are pumping out literal metric tons annually?
I’m on medcan in Australia. It gets imported from everywhere but I’ve yet to come across a US grown flower.
All of the North American stuff I’ve gotten is Canadian.
My understanding is it’s only legalized on a state level and not federal. So I guess if they’re shipping it from an international airport or by sea the feds might see that as drug trafficking.
I absolutely mean smuggling
I live in Maine and the market is so flooded nobody can even grow straight for the black market and compete anymore, it’s all spills over from licenced grows. $80/oz for top shelf if you look around a little, $100 if you don’t. It’s almost impossible to spend more than $200. That has to be having farther reaching effects.
I think enshitification is a product of public traded companies promising infinite growth, not necessarily a problem of US only companies.
It’s also a consequence of low taxes on capital gains and corporate profits.
When those taxes were higher it made more sense to reinvest the profits back into your own company. You’d build a reputation and a structure that would pay out you and your family for a hundred years.
Now the dream is to build up a company just enough to sell it to some megacorp and cash out asap, with you and your family living off of investment money that only increases over time.
While I would love to see them never going back, here in Germany, all it takes is some corrupt politician taking a huge bribe from a lobbyist and swoosh, they are back to Microslop.
Edit: Knowing our little corrupt fuckers in charge in German politics, the bribe probably doesn’t even have to be mediocre.
In Australia a lobbyist would get that for around 10k AUD from Labor and probably 6 from the Coalition.
Our system (in the end it’s the same no matter where you are) is so fucked up :/ Kids need to learn empathy and selflessness as the most important school subject.
Once these countries leave, they’ll never go back.
Look up LiMux and the massive Microsoft deal that followed.
That deal that totally had nothing to do with Microsoft relocating their headquarters closer to Munich
The Bavarian state government is still entirely in Microslop’s pocket
Not surprised. From what I’ve heard from pretty much every German person I’ve talked to, Bavaria is basically their Texas (read UP if you’re Indian, not sure about analogies for other countries).
No, please stop with this garbage misinformation. Microsoft made a (suspected) under the table deal with the Munich government at the time to setup a Microsoft office in Munich if they switched back to Windows.
That’s what the news reported on endlessly. That’s the narrative that keeps getting falsely repeated over and over, and no one ever checks the BS stories they spread.
The rest of the story didn’t make headlines, where the new incoming Munich government said “hell no!” (prob in German) and continued the Linux rollout.
Today the environment is a mix of Linux and Windows, but they already have a large focus on FOSS software.
Despite the astonishingly stupid decision to roll their own in-house distro (LiMux), the program was massively successful, with Linux users filling only 40% the number of tickets the Windows users did.
Edit: I’m correcting something I said, they didn’t “continue the Linux rollout” as they had already covered most of their systems. The current status is a mix of Windows and Linux, because they vetoed the rollback to Windows in 2020.
Citation Needed
You first
You first
Are you afraid to provide any reference to your claim? Do you need extra time making up stuff?
“Die 43 000 städtischen Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter nutzen also mittlerweile wieder Word, Outlook und PowerPoint […] Einfacher sei die Software-Frage bei den Servern im städtischen Rechenzentrum zu beantworten. Zwar haben man durchaus auch Windows-Server, aber die meisten laufen mit Linux, so Gernhardt.” (29. Juni 2025) https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-verwaltung-open-source-it-microsoft-li.3256886
So Linux on servers, Windows including MS Office on desktops. The migration to Linux on desktops was completely reversed.
So where is ““hell no!” (prob in German) and continued the Linux rollout”? Where has it been “garbage misinformation”? Where are the exact stats about opening tickets? After all, you claim “Linux users filling only 40% the number of tickets the Windows users did”. That’s pretty specific.
Are you afraid to provide any reference to your claim? Do you need extra time making up stuff?
No. Just calling out your double standard. If you didn’t provide sources for your statements, then it’s rich for you to demand sources from me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
“In May 2020, it was reported that the newly elected politicians in Munich, while not going back to the original plan of migrating to LiMux wholesale, will prefer Free Software for future endeavours.”
There are no official numbers, but the rollback to Windows was halted. It’s estimated that it’s currently a mix of Linux and Windows. And it’s been acknowledged that the move back to Windows was almost entirely political due to influence from Microsoft.
“In May 2020, it was reported that the newly elected politicians in Munich, while not going back to the original plan of migrating to LiMux wholesale, will prefer Free Software for future endeavours.”
So you lied. You claimed that Munich said “Hell no” to Microsoft Migration but here you spell it out yourself: The politicians did sell out to Microsoft and only newly elected politicians partially reversed it.
They use Windows and MS Office on desktops to this day and use Linux on servers and some FOSS tools ON WINDOWS DESKTOPS.
I was right, you lied.
Im not an expert on this, but it seems like Ms was worried that success of Limux would be the drip that starts the trickle so to speak. It made sense for them to do whatever it took to patch that leak.
Things have really changed since then though. Valve has been very successful in a Linux end user environment, and Eu is becoming disenfranchised from the US rather than Microsoft specifically.
I think Munich’s motivations were financial, but Frances will be ideological.
With these things in mind, the calculus has changed. That doesn’t necessarily mean France won’t fail, but id be surprised if Microsoft pursues them in the same way.
Don’t listen to that other commenter. They’re wrong about the Munich LiMux story. It keeps getting repeated but it’s not correct.
Good on them, but I Wonder why they can’t just build on top of something open source like Nextcloud.
It already has the majority of the Office-365 suite
It is open source and built on top of livekit which is open source.
All the tools of “La Suite Numerique” are open source.
Because the French government is hell bent on saving money, but they don’t care about anyone’s privacy at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are building a privacy nightmare system here. Having said that, at least they are removing Microslop, and anything that could potentially hurt Microslop in any way, shape or form, is a good thing.
i mean, a lot ia still in handwriten notebooks, the french and other similar countries should just skip IT and jump eight into the future and stay on paper, no?
I don’t know on what it’s based on, but it’s open source and audited.
It’s based on LiveKit.
Kind of funny considering that Visio is the name of another Microsoft product.
ETA: I’m not defending Microsoft’s usage of the term ‘Visio’ here. The French use of that term makes a lot of sense, and Microsoft has an annoying tendency of using and copyrighting very common terms like ‘Word’ or ‘SQL Server’. And France (or the French government) should be allowed to use it for their video conferencing software. I’m just smiling at the idea of some people opening Microsoft Visio by mistake and trying to figure out how to make a call through a diagramming app.
Microslop can cry about it.
I doubt they will care that much. But it will create a bit of confusion, at least for since in the short-term.
And because of that confusion they will have a trademark complaint
It’s also a French word that means video conference (as a shortened form of visioconférence).
Gosh, someone should tell the Microsoft teams team that Microsoft teams for business and Microsoft teams for personal and Microsoft teams for students are also using the same names and make communication difficult. They should get a copilot team on it
In that case we’ll call it Frisio, French Visio.
i wonder if Isreal designed it for them.
If it is Israel it’s the same picture
Now replace Windows with Linux, and fucking invest into not needing to use American-controlled CPUs as every single one of them contains a backdoor.
I don’t understand why governments trust official matters in the hands of closed source software and suspicious hardware. Even China uses a special version of Windows 11 in public computers, this is nuts.
and fucking invest into not needing to use American-controlled CPUs as every single one of them contains a backdoor.
China has been working intensely for at least 2 decades to catch up, and they are still about a decade behind!
Netherlands has ASML which is a huge advantage for European independent manufacturing, but even with that it’s an insanely expensive investment to make a realistic competitor to AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom etc. because they have loads of patents that are hard to avoid, and they have decades of know how. This is not even accounting for the software infra structure that would have to be built almost from scratch.
Chip production is a global enterprise, and even USA isn’t independent anymore. They depend on ASML and TSMC for their most popular products in AI, Smartphones, servers, laptops and desktops. And more and more Arm is taking over from Intel/AMD.What we may be able to do would be using Arm and have TSMC help us with manufacturing. But to make such a project succeed is not an easy thing, we had European computer companies in the 70’s and 80’s that were heavily subsidized by governments that dominated home markets for several European countries, and they essentially all failed against international competition.
So what we risk if we were required to use a European product funded by EU/European governments would be to have to use an overpriced under-performing technology, that would be a millstone around the neck of all of Europe, making Europe not catch up, but instead fall further behind.they have loads of patents that are hard to avoid
China doesn’t care about patents of outsiders.
Seems to me that it’s time for the rest of the world to invalidate US IP and go from there.
And the rules based international order has been exposed as the wink during a handshake deal. Who cares about patent law?
He is talking about software. A fucking video conferencing tool not controlled by American tech is no ASML level investment.
We could at least start with this
American-controlled CPUs
matters in the hands of closed source software and suspicious hardware
Ignorance, mostly. It’s sad but Chinese leaders seem to listen to their experts, while EU leaders listen to CEOs, and of large companies only.
… Pretty much every CPU contains backdoors, not just american ones. The Chinese government does the exact same thing as the American government. They are two sides of the same coin but the Chinese government seems more competent and efficient unlike the US government.
Even if the hardware doesn’t have backdoors, the firmware often will, which you also can’t get around with software.
The tier after that is software which also has a lot of back doors, luckily, you can run Linux and open source software. That is the best you can do. Really the only thing you can “trust” not to have backdoors is MCUs because those backdoors are much more likely to need physical access.
Sadly, our entire tech world is built on backdoors and intentional security flaws to enable easier debugging, recovery, and compliance with government law enforcement after the sale.
Here’s my guess, and I could be completely wrong.
All the governments use 2 sets of computers. The first, is a closed network used only internally. Open source, connected as a network, but NOT connected to outside neteorks. This uses closed source OS that they themselves develop. No backdoors. Highly secured.
The second set is what you know. Windows 11, backdoors, easily spied on. Intentionally left open, because that’s their way to spy on the other countries.
They leave this open, to let themselves be spied on, so that they can spy on the other side. Neither side realizing they’re both doing the same thing, and both sides just getting mostly useless info.
Then, to throw off the trail of it being useless info, they occasionally allow a juicy bit of info into their windows computer. Just so it’s not obvious that this isn’t the real info.
I have zero evidence, and came up with this theory after reading your comment. So I could be very wrong.
You put way too much trust in governments if you think they can be this organized.
