146 pointsby nar0012 hours ago18 comments
  • okanatan hour ago
    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.

    • 999900000999a minute ago
      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.
    • superze23 minutes ago
      To make matters worse, they are using Django. I can't take the EU serious any more.
      • ffsm821 minutes ago
        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

        • spwa412 minutes ago
          Does it really need explaining why Office 365/Google Docs cannot be written in Django?
      • shimman9 minutes ago
        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.
        • cbdevidal5 minutes ago
          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…
      • speedgoose18 minutes ago
        What would you use instead?
        • spwa49 minutes ago
          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.

          • speedgoose5 minutes ago
            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.

    • maxloh13 minutes ago
      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.

    • whoamii21 minutes ago
      Or maybe the solution must be one rooted in reducing taxes. Make investing extremely attractively, and stop relying on taxes to solve everything.
      • coredev_13 minutes ago
        I do not agree, I don't want EU to turn to US. Taxes should be on a level to support the welfare state.
        • Nesco4 minutes ago
          Which it can’t. There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states
        • wtcactus3 minutes ago
          The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary (yes, you've read correctly, 82%). [1]

          The French state spends 57% of all French GDP (for context, this is higher than what the Soviet Union spent in the years before the communist regimen felt). [2]

          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?

          Man, 82%! 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-...

      • paulryanrogers2 minutes ago
        Stop relying on ~investors~ [the business oligarchy] to solve everything
    • admissionsguy43 minutes ago
      > 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.

      • bigfudge21 minutes ago
        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.
      • xedrac40 minutes ago
        > I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages.

        Depends which ones. Python? Definitely a source of slowness.

        • admissionsguy33 minutes ago
          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.
      • ericd26 minutes ago
        It’s building infrastructure, which should lower costs in the long term. Seems like a good use of money from where I’m sitting.
      • echelon32 minutes ago
        > 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.

        • roblabla24 minutes ago
          > 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".

          • admissionsguy9 minutes ago
            No a bad thing if you desire the corporate power to eventually become the main force shaping the world :)
          • nickpp16 minutes ago
            > 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?

  • YousefED11 minutes ago
    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

    • nickthesick5 minutes ago
      Glad to be working as part of this initiative too!
  • ninalanyon18 minutes ago
    It's not an office suite and the linked page doesn't claim it is.

    The title should be changed.

  • GuB-4210 minutes ago
    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/

  • fortyan hour ago
    Great, but why on GitHub? That doesn't seem very souverain to me
    • nickthesick5 minutes ago
      Not sure that it’s relevant to switch git hosts is trivial. And everyone is already there
    • Rexxaran hour ago
      Git is distributed, the repository can be hosted concurrently at many places.
    • Normal_gaussianan hour ago
      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.
      • michelsedghan hour ago
        But they still chose an American company, github, lol ironic
        • seszett25 minutes ago
          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.
        • faust20114 minutes ago
          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.

        • nolroz32 minutes ago
          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.
    • nacozarina15 minutes ago
      Underrated point: Bldg #1 needs to be sovereign hub for initiatives, for which OP is providing a first tenant…
    • progxan hour ago
      I wait for frenchhub, in french only, no english translation, nothing. Typical french. Greetings from you EU neighbor.
    • saubeidlan hour ago
      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.
      • 21 minutes ago
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  • Sytten20 minutes ago
    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.

  • padjoan hour ago
    Makes sense, using an office suite hosted by a hostile power isn't a very smart longterm strategy.
    • shermantanktopan hour ago
      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.

      • thrance36 minutes ago
        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".
    • Winblows11an hour ago
      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.

    • trolleskian hour ago
      Politicians in the EU are complicit to say the least. And I hope they'll prove me wrong.
  • bsimpson22 minutes ago
    This has been on HN a lot recently. For instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
  • dv_dtan hour ago
    Hmm, and what of https://cryptpad.fr/

    Though they also seem to be on github https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad

  • ricardobeat37 minutes ago
    Why is Django so popular among open-source projects like these, especially government funded? I’ve never seen 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.
    • petcat27 minutes ago
      > 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.

    • megaman8218 minutes ago
      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.
    • mkl9524 minutes ago
      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.
    • dingi28 minutes ago
      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.
      • js4ever16 minutes ago
        or now you spend couple of hours/days with AI and produce a Rust implementation that will smoke Django 100X
  • bsenftneran hour ago
    I would not be surprised if American PACs adopted this out of concern that US based office suites are politically compromised.
  • 31 minutes ago
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  • sylware31 minutes ago
    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.

  • jmclnxan hour ago
    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.

    • astrolxan hour ago
      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_devan hour ago
        +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.
    • bsenftneran hour ago
      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.
    • akdev1lan hour ago
      Isn’t VLC French also?
    • canedan hour ago
      Two words: Fabrice Bellard
  • Cynnabar2 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • nixassan hour ago
      Somewhat related, more overall context

      France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294

    • nar0012 hours ago
      Exactly what it says on the tin, France's gov made an office suite, online based, and video calling as an alternative/sovereign version of GSuite/Office 365
  • ginkoan hour ago
    What's the value of it being online? Surely being able to run it as a native application would be preferable?
    • vman81an hour ago
      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.
    • LunaSeaan hour ago
      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).

      • mimasama12 minutes ago
        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?
    • ddulaneyan hour ago
      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.

    • an hour ago
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  • matt-pan hour ago
    Office suite, cool! Looks Inside It's a Django app.
    • mosselmanan hour ago
      And it isn't an office suite at all
  • goodmythicalan hour ago
    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.
    • webereran hour ago
      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.
    • sejjean hour ago
      The first version for the "docs" program was released in May 2024
    • simion314an hour ago
      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,
      • Muromec39 minutes ago
        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