[sylvinus]

Facts (and code) are following. We're building a fully open source workspace (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en) among other ambitious initiatives (https://beta.gouv.fr/).

The turmoil caused by the two contracts you mention also prove that the new normal has already shifted towards open source. It's a slow process, but it's undeniable that we are making progress.

[jeynec]

These initiatives are only for show. I work in one of the biggest French goverment entity and no one uses this. We still very much use Microsoft products for virtually everything, and everything "sovereign" (Resana, Pline...) just doesn't work or isn't as convenient

[jacques_morin]

I disagree. I currently work as a phd student in a french lab and we're slowly but surely adopting these french government tools, and they work really well. It will take years, but the migration process is probably going to happen.

[dadoum]

What problems did you encounter with Resana?

[cyberax]

Hah. It used to be that Microsoft products were sleek, fast, and just plain more convenient than Open Source products. E.g. OpenOffice vs MS Office.

And honestly, OS stuff still often sucks quite a bit.

It's just that MS software has degraded to the point of utter shittiness (see: Teams) that now it's just plain worse than their own software from 15 years ago.

[StopDisinfo910]

> It's just that MS software has degraded to the point of utter shittiness (see: Teams) that now it's just plain worse than their own software from 15 years ago.

I sometimes feel like I live in a parallele universe reading the comments here on Office.

The addition of collaboration and how it seemlessly integrated with sharepoints while easing the sharing of documents make Office365 a blessing in most office environment. There is no way people are going back to sharing files like before after having worked this way.

[Ash_Crow]

This thread is comparing MS tools with the FR gov equivalents. So for word processing it would be Docs (https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/home/), which is a collaborative tool, with an integrated sharing feature.

[cyberax]

Now look at Outlook. Or Skype.

And 15 years ago, we just used Office files in a Dropbox folder. It solved all of our collaboration issues.

[StopDisinfo910]

> And 15 years ago, we just used Office files in a Dropbox folder. It solved all of our collaboration issues.

No, it did not.

I worked through that. Someone had to be in charge of the master version of all documents and ensure modifications were properly merged and not done simultaneously. Getting to the final version of anything was deeply annoying.

Now everyone can just work on the shared document. You see modifications as they happen. Office intelligently locks what needs to be locked. It just works. I can't tell you how much time this feature alone saves me.

[cyberax]

I agree that the collaborative tools in the current office are better. It's just that they are not that _much_ better than before to justify all the negatives.

[bratwurst3000]

this! this is so true for every big corporation product. Iphone is a shitty version of iphones from 10 years ago but with better cameras…. and windows is spamming me hard with their services

[kergonath]

That’s not quite true. Sure, there is still a lot of proprietary software, but there is also a lot of effort put into going to the right direction. A lot of agencies publish data openly, code for major things like taxes is getting published. Trump helped significantly, but there are audits being done right now on the different kind of proprietary foreign software, with different levels of importance, and shuffling what we can to open alternatives (or closed but European, depending on the field).

The Office365 subscriptions are probably going to go last, because the effort to deploy alternatives and retrain the 200,000 people using them is enormous. It is a very visible aspect that won’t change anytime soon, but it does not mean that there is nothing else happening.

For example, the Renater tools are getting more and more use from all the research and higher education institutions. It’s not going to happen overnight, but it is shifting.

[bambax]

It's absolutely true that nobody in the French govt, French semi-public companies (so-called "SEMs") or French large private companies uses anything but Microsoft and the big US cloud providers.

But I don't think the open-source initiatives are "just for show" because nobody cares, and so there is no one to show it to.

They are more wishful thinking, random initiatives. "Let's do open-source!" and throw a couple million euros here and a couple thousand there, and we have the illusion of doing something.

What is made in that manner is also of incredible low quality; most of the time it doesn't work; I recently tried to do a "téléconsultation" with a hospital, which uses state-sponsored software. It was impossible to connect (and the login and password are sent in the same email! why bother with a password then??)

Data sources are not maintained or are incomplete. Data about road accidents don't mention the brand of the car because French car companies lobbied against it! (Which tells a lot about car quality in the first place). Etc.

[StopDisinfo910]

> It's absolutely true that nobody in the French govt, French semi-public companies (so-called "SEMs") or French large private companies uses anything but Microsoft and the big US cloud providers.

I work from one of the biggest French companies and this is definitely untrue.

Everyone starting from the very top is concerned about the issue of sovereignty surrounding the cloud. This was true before and is even more true nowadays.

Obviously, everyone still use Office because, well, there is no alternative to Office. The only serious competitor is Google and it's a poor one on top of still begin an American company.

Still, you have some very successful initiative at the state level. Messaging is a good exemple. So is all the work done around GED and open data.

Do you realise how funny it is to see you complain that you can't see the car brands in a data base about road accidents while not realising how awesome it is that you have access to such a database?

[bambax]

> this is definitely untrue

> Obviously, everyone still use Office because, well, there is no alternative to Office

So it is, indeed, true. Can you clarify what your point is, exactly? (Also: there is an alternative to MS Office, which is LibreOffice. It works ok. It's not as powerful, maybe (maybe!) but it's fine.)

> Do you realise how funny it is to see you complain that you can't see the car companies in a data base about road accidents while not realising how awesome it is that you have access to such a database?

No, I really don't. It's not "awesome" to have access to that data. This is public information. Citizens don't have to be grateful of what the state does. THE STATE WORKS FOR US, not the other way around.

And as it is, it's not very useful, since the most important data is withheld.

[StopDisinfo910]

> So it is, indeed, true.

Office is a fairly unsignificant part of our cloud usage. I'm fairly sure we could come to an agreement with Microsoft if we needed to self-host.

> there is an alternative to MS Office, which is LibreOffice

People don't use Office like it's the 90s anymore. Everything which doesn't have seemless collaboration and document sharing is dead on arrival.

> No, I really don't. It's not "awesome" to have access to that data. This is public information. Citizens don't have to be grateful of what the state does. THE STATE WORKS FOR US, not the other way around.

The state doesn't owe you anything apart from safety and law enforment. Of course, you should be grateful that people fought for, put in place and maintain all the services you receive on top. They don't come by magic. That's actual people working.

The fact that you can easily and freely access this database is something to be celebrated. In most places, people who don't work for the state have to pay to access this or go through a public library and that's honestly perfectly fine.

It's baffling to me how the French seemingly fail to realise how incredible the breadth of services their government provides is and somehow manage to make themselves miserable rather than actually doing something of what they are gifted with.

[kergonath]

> The state doesn't owe you anything apart from safety and law enforment.

The parent was a bit whiny, but this is most definitely not true. The people are not entities subject to the state, it is a democratic and social republic, not a soviet. The people are the state and as such, the role of the state is to do whatever the people want it to do. In France, the state is supposed to guarantee the rights of Man, which is more fundamental than the constitution and also broader than safety and law enforcement.

> It's baffling to me how the French seemingly fail to realise how incredible the breadth of services their government provides is and somehow manage to make themselves miserable rather than actually doing something of what they are gifted with.

This I can agree with :) These threads are baffling, particularly considering what the people at INRIA are doing about trusted and transparent administration, and the massive effort put into sovereign software. It’s like everything is bad because they saw people using Windows at their city hall.

[vinceguidry]

> The state doesn't owe you anything apart from safety and law enforment.

We should recognize this sentiment as actively fascist. Safety from who? Law enforcement targeting who?

[prmoustache]

>Everything which doesn't have seemless collaboration and document sharing is dead on arrival.

cryptpad do exist as well as collabora office and anyoffice running in a nextcloud.

My observation however is that despite the sharing capabilities of office365, a lot of people even in fortune500 companies still email .docx files to work collaboratively instead of using he sharing capabilities.

[rad_gruchalski]

Why is it even relevant what car was involved in an accident?

[joseda-hg]

In this context, maybe it can tell you if some brand put a weaker engine in their vehicles and the extra time in overtaking is causing accidents

Or maybe a specific maker has a problem with a specific part shared across models

We're looking for patterns, not rules, extra shared data is generally better

[bambax]

In "one" accident, maybe not very. But as a criteria to do statistical studies, make, model, year and maintenance would be quite interesting. The whole point of this data is to do studies.

[kergonath]

> So it is, indeed, true. Can you clarify what your point is, exactly? (Also: there is an alternative to MS Office, which is LibreOffice. It works ok. It's not as powerful, maybe (maybe!) but it's fine.)

The problem is not software capability. The problem is training staff to use new software, planning the transition, and make it happen smoothly. You cannot just end your contract and get a new provider when you’re talking about 100,000 licenses. In fact, Office is likely going to go last, because it is easier to update the backend and centralised infrastructure than the client software used by hundreds of thousands of people in something like 500 different agencies.

Hell, we regularly have glitches going from one version of Office to the next. When it’s a university administration that’s out of operation for 2 months it’s bad enough, but survivable. When it’s all of public-facing civil servants it’s a different matter.

> No, I really don't. It's not "awesome" to have access to that data. This is public information. Citizens don't have to be grateful of what the state does. THE STATE WORKS FOR US, not the other way around.

Right. The fact is that it used to be inaccessible, and now it is. We should demand more, of course, but bitching about it is short-sighted and counter-productive. More and more data is accessible, leading to more and more transparency and new uses. It could be better (and it is the citizens’ responsibility to vote to make it get better), but you have to start somewhere.

[bsaul]

not sure why you were downvoted. You're working there, so i guess your testimony is an interesting data point.

[kergonath]

They are downvoted because their statement (that this is “only for show”) is simply not true. It may be their experience, but I know a few people in different government agencies and I can say that it is far more than show. There are more arguments in the thread about why their point of view is partial.

Also, you are likely downvoted because talking about downvotes is boring and does not bring anything, and also because what was downvoted when you posted might be upvoted now, leaving these complaints look a bit silly.

[idoubtit]

> it's undeniable that we are making progress.

Yes, I agree that some public organizations in France are making progress with Open Source. For instance, free software is now common in universities (with local variations). And overall I think there's a central influence of the DiNum ("Direction Numérique", the Digital Department of the French State) in this direction. But I don't see how this UN charter makes any difference.

There's progress, though not related to this charter. And so slow that I would bet against "Open Source" becoming widespread in French schools within the next decade.

> Facts (and code) are following.

I'm sorry, but the current situation and the past experience makes it really hard to believe that facts will follow from this charter. At least facts matching the claim that the French government will be "Open by default: Making Open Source the standard approach for projects" (quote from the first point of the charter).

If "France endorses UN Open Source principles", it shouldn't just mean that it will publish some code. It should means that it intends to respect these principles, and that proprietary software becomes the exception within the French administration.

I can't believe this post is more than symbolic, because the French law already promotes Open Source and forbids non-UE proprietary software in many public contexts. But these laws are usually not applied. Why would a non-prescriptive charter do any better?

[pyrale]

> And so slow that I would bet against "Open Source" becoming widespread in French schools within the next decade.

It's not a risky bet: no organisation this large, private or public, would manage to replace its IT this fast, even with appropriate funding (which schools don't have).

There's a reason why people say change in a company only happens as fast as people retire. large scale change is long, hard and costly.

[bsaul]

did you redevelop everything from scratch or did you try to reuse existing open source tech ?