As an illustration of it: I have been working for two years on a new national project for the french state. Le Référentiel National des Bâtiments (for National Buildings Registry) which aim at creating and distributing a id key to every building in the country.
The goal is to make databases about buildings much more interoperable.
One key aspect is to have a precise list of all buildings includings recent constructions and demolition. It gets interesting because we recognize nobody in the country has the perfect list of buildings so we radically open the data to let governement agencies, cities, companies, citizens write directly in the registry. Think OSM or Wikipédia but for an official dataset.
This approach is very experimental for the french state and we are encouraged to test it and disseminate our learnings in other state branches.
That's a lovely idea. I have been working for large open data projects and secretive private data collections and they both fail in their own ways. Maybe the open-source gathering with a proper authority to lock down and shepherd data in case of dispute or vandalism is the golden middle way. Sort of like the BDFL concept: open for all, ultimately vetoed by a benevolent entity.
Since OSM is, among other things, a list of building, will there be exchanges between the two projects? Are the licenses of the two projects compatible?
Well, we have some connections with the community and we are discussing how to incorporate our buildings IDs in OSM. The other way around (OSM to national registry) seems more complicated for license reasons.
Last summer we tested the open approch by doing a "RNB Summer game". Basically, anyone could come on the map and send some error reporting, we had a score per player, per territory and a shared global score. The OSM community absolutely rolled ont the game :)
This is just for show, and facts won't follow. It's not the first time a French government vows to stick to Open Source. Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception.
A few days after that, a major state-owned institution (Polytechnique) announced it was migrating (including the email system) to MS Office 365. Even if it violates several laws and official decrees (it's a semi-military school).
Source (fr) https://cnll.fr/news/polytechnique-men-office-365/
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> It’s like everything is bad because they saw people using Windows at their city hall.
No. French state companies (including military schools! and the Department of Education!!) use Windows, MS Office, and US-based cloud providers en masse. Good for them, I guess. I don't really care.
But pretending to do the opposite is what gets me.
Or when the Head of the BPI (Banque Publique d'Investissement) goes on TV to say that France should only buy French tech, and you learn that the same BPI that he leads, just signed a huge contract with AWS, then that's upsetting. (He's also very concerned with China because the Chinese State finances some of its private industry; never mind that it's the whole purpose and mission of the BPI.)
That's the core regalian powers at the heart of the state. Basically, a state is there to ensure laws can be voted, that they are fairly enforced and that things can stay that way. This notably means that people are safe in the broadest sense. They are not going to be mugged, murdered or dispossessed. That also means that the state has the mean to stay a state without becoming part of the next door state, which is to say, has an army to defend itself. A state which can't guarantee that is a failed state (or a former state if it was invaded).
Anything else is the cherry on the cake. Most states do a lot more because their citizen decided through laws this was a good thing - things like social security or education. If your state does these things for you, well, you should be grateful because they are in no way owed to you. You get them through the good will of the citizen who preceded you, the care of the civil servants that provide them to you and the continuously renewed commitment of your fellow citizen. If the French felt a bit less entitled and a bit more grateful, the country wouldn't be in the sorry state it's currently in.
> If the French felt a bit less entitled and a bit more grateful, the country wouldn't be in the sorry state it's currently in.
Oh please. The French are doing far better than we (the US) are. Precisely because their electorate has made their aristocracy rightly fearful of them. Chopping off their heads tends to do that.
> 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.
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.
But why focus on the car only? To me it would be interesting to know where has the driver got the driver license from. Or if they have a medical condition. Or maybe they have a stiff neck on the day of the accident. Were they distracted by children?
I’m probably failing to see the difference between Peugeot 208 or Renault 5 being involved in an accident. What insights could one expect from this info?
> To me it would be interesting to know where has the driver got the driver license from. Or if they have a medical condition. Or maybe they have a stiff neck on the day of the accident. Were they distracted by children?
Sure, but that's an information that is difficult to create; it will result from a police investigation (and even then, may or may not be accurate).
Mark, model and age of the vehicle is 1/ incredibly easy to get and 2/ 100% reliable.
It's not the end-all be-all of road safety, but it's interesting; and the fact that all it took to not publish it was some lobbying effort from car makers is incredible.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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?
> 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.
There's some aspects that make it a more nuanced situation:
- you won't see angry letters in the news about services sticking to open source after they chose to move in
- the reason the CNLL can point the finger at Poytechnique is because there are explicit directives. Not even having those would be way worse.
- "Most of the public money" : Open Source contracts won't be in billions of euros most of the time, especially as a lot of the money will go to internal hiring and only a slice to external contractors.
"Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception." → I've asked, twice, for the CNLL, the French Court of Auditors (Cour des Comptes) to work towards giving precise figures. This was rejected, but may reappear in a different form (given that the Court is currently running an enquiry on digital sovereignty - I hope, but I doubt, that they will be able to pull precise figures).
Everytime someone actually does something nice in this country, there will be a dozen nay-sayers complaining uselessly that it is not perfect while doing nothing of value themselves.
It always saddens me to see a country with so much too succeed being so impaired by its own citizens.
It is just how we express ourselves. We French are known internationally for complaining a lot, we know it and we even joke about it.
It doesn't mean that nothing gets done (and when it doesn't, it is not usually the reason). We are just not overly enthusiastic about it like Americans tend to be.
A way to see things is that in America, a 5/5 comment is great, 4/5 is acceptable, and anything less is crap. In France, 1/5 is crap, 2/5 is acceptable, and anything more is great. You just have to adjust your scale.
This comment didn't impair anything being done, though.
I totally agree with it. The EU could do something non-performative by it and its governments stopping issuing documents in proprietary Microsoft formats and use OSS only.
> The EU could do something non-performative by it and its governments stopping issuing documents in proprietary Microsoft formats and use OSS only.
They would get hairy quickly, because the Office formats are actually open standards.
It’s also a tall order. How they run their administration is fundamentally the member-states’ prerogative, I don’t really see what lever the commission would have to bend the council on that subject.
The constant criticism of people actually trying to do something by people who prefer sitting on their hands is impairing in itself.
People are basically constantly dragging everyone down including themselves while doing absolutely nothing.
I mean technically I guess they sometimes vocally protest in the street that they don't understand why someone else is not solving their own problem or that they would prefer we just pretended the problem never existed which is pretty much equivalent to doing nothing if not worse.
The reality is that millions of people work for the government, directly or indirectly, and that not all of these people have aligned incentives, the same constraints, etc.
The people pushing open source initiatives in the french public sector are very serious about it. It is also true that there is a lot of inertia. The consequence is that, while most of the large administrations, including those that don't have that much wiggle room for initiatives, still use big-name proprietary solutions, more and more open-source and open-data gardens spring around, and that they provide a strong base for new initatives, both public and private.
Two examples I personally used are dvf [1], a database and application showing real estate sales, which I used to check market prices when I bought my home, and publi.codes [2], a simulator and an open-source law-as-code repository, which is one of the cornerstones of a friend's private company.
Would I like more of France's administration to move to open-souce? Sure, but it's not going to happen overnight. In the meantime, I'm grateful for the core of people dedicated to push the case, bits by bits, and I know their effort is certainly not just for show.
It doesn't come from nowhere, though. It results in having had to tolerate the French bureaucracy, French lies, empty promises, and French way of (not) doing things for decades.
That's just governments being governments. I've spent 50% of my life in Sweden and 50% of my life in Spain, and everywhere it's the same. "had to tolerate the $NATION bureaucracy, $NATION lies, empty promises, and $NATION way of (not) doing things for decades" probably applies to most countries in the world, I know it applies for the countries I've lived in at least, and seemingly France too. Heard the same about every home country of my friends also.
Governments just move really slowly. Best we can do is cheer for the efforts we think will improve things, even if it'll take years, and protest about efforts we think are harmful.
and its coming on the back of US and Trumps tarif shittalk..
there's also talk about moving away from american software giants, among government sections in my country. Recently one such section moved from AWS to Hetzner (saving money in the process)
i've also heard talk about making EU-based alternatives to the office suite, etc.
Uh, I know n=1, but I used to work in a public research lab in France for almost a couple years, and already back then (4-5 years ago) they used tons of FOSS. Zimbra, Mattermost, Gitlab, the works. So I don't think it's all just theater.
Then again, if your employees still need PowerPoint, I say let them have it for now. You cannot switch a single company to FOSS overnight, let alone the entire public sector of an industrial nation.
This makes total sense. When a country is creating public software, it should be open source by default. This is the only way to create trust. In the long run, open source and closed source government software will probably differentiate dictatorships from democracies
At first glance I thought this was hyperbole, but after reflection I'm not sure it's even an exaggeration. Too much critical infrastructure of power (voting, census, taxation, reporting, compliance) runs of software for us to accept anything less than full transparency from our governments.
In Brazil there is black box testing. Party officials can choose a sample of a few ballots per polling location on election day, where a simulated election is run, with all inputs recorded on video. The machines have to tally the right votes for the input given at the end of day. These are machines that would be used for voting, and the party officials are parties unrelated to (and in a way, antagonistic with) the voting authority.
Yeah this is why you shouldn't use voting machines. Paper voting is already great. Whoever is trying to sell you a voting machine does not have your best interests in mind.
Very few people have any change of understanding machine voting systems. With paper voting we get much better transparency of the voting procedures. Any form of machine voting is terrible for transparency and democracy compared to just plain old paper voting.
Could you not compile them on the voting machines itself? But yes, there is always going to be some level of trust involved, and the bar for manipulation seems to be lower than re: manual counting.
At this point Open Source doesn't mean anything anymore.
It is like everybody putting a "fat free" logo on highly processed junk food a few decades ago. Yes but what is fat exactly?
What really make me suspicious is there is now a very dense web of fake, captured foundations and non profits with a lot of money flowing through them. Most of them do not write any code of course and it is very hard to understand they purpose or what they do beyond "advocacy".
None of those Open Source advocates care about the most urgent problems like the fact that now almost every human has one of the most locked up system in its hand (yes I know about AOSP) or we can't trust the connected micro-controllers in our homes.
Instead they have as their top goal to fight things like climate change [0] (I wish)
Strangely postmarketOS (the ones trying to make possible that we don't have to trash those cellphones after 3 years) survives on €12656 in yearly donations, €11175 after banks fees [1]. So probably less than the monthly salary of most of those foundations executives and employees. Or probably the cost of one big Zoom meeting in the UN.
Also ask yourself why the FSF, GNU and RMS have been marginalized while Open Source became an UN level cause...
While in many way software freedom won the server and workstation battle, we lost all the new battlefront which opened in the last two decades:
- Phones (the thing in the hand of almost every human now. And sorry LineageOS and GrapheneOS are quickly being marginalized now by things like Google Play Integrity)
- Javascript (yes it is a big problem [0])
- the Cloud
- IoT
The FSF was actually pretty good at identifying those issue early on but was overwhelmed and probably marginalized because they were right.
Notice that none of those new "Open Source" advocates really care about those ubiquitous issues.
We won some battles but lost the war.
The fact France endorses some UN Open Source principles really doesn't matter.
You might think caring about software freedom is almost fringe but look at:
- The US freaking out about all those Chinese devices and cyber attacks,
- The EU now freaking out about US big tech and the cloud.
I believe the best way to safeguard sovereignty and safety is for everyone be able to control as much as possible what is running on our "computers" and as close to you as possible. The FSF [1] has been consistent regarding those issue and doing something about it. But also some other folks like OpenBSD [2].
Very unclear to me what the goals of the UN and the OSI type foundations really is.
The poster child for this is the OSI rejecting the SSPL.
For anyone unfamiliar, the SSPL is a modification of the AGPL. It expands which source code you have to release, under certain circumstances. More specifically, if you resell the software as a cloud service, you have to make the entire service open source and not just the original software. (It has not yet been tested in court what constitutes the entire service.) This is awfully bad for the business models of several OSI members, which make money by reselling free software as a cloud service surrounded by proprietary stuff like management and load balancing.
In response to that, I don't trust the OSI and neither should you.
(There are reasons the SSPL is bad - mostly GPL/AGPL incompatibility. Not being open source isn't one. The OSI's rant applies just as well to AGPL as it does to SSPL, yet they recognize AGPL.)
FSF declined to make a statement either way - citing the fact that very little software uses this license and it all has xGPL alternatives, so there's no urgent need to make an official decision.
Debian didn't call it free or unfree, but rather decided not to include SSPL software in their distribution, which is an orthogonal issue, due to it having a higher risk of being incompatible with all the other stuff when used a certain way, which does not make it non-free.
Fedora calls it non-free, but just calls it their own belief, not something based on solid reasoning about meeting guidelines or not. Note that Fedora is a project of one of those open source reseller companies.
I found the points in your last comment to be true.
I still think you'd need to back the fact OSI rejected SSPL for commercial concerns of its members a bit more. Even if nobody else has formally rejected SSPL on convincing grounds, major parts of the free software ecosystem distrusts it and OSI is not that special in this. I found nobody making the case that SSPL is a free software license. Nobody likes it except mongodb, and formerly redis and elasticsearch. That would be an interesting revelation to me but I need more convincing evidences.
I do think that open source is the watered down corporate version of free software that attempts to get rid of the end user rights concerns (which I care about most, but the corporations around the OSI don't care about much or at all), and that the OSI is governed by big corps and is not the most trusty organization when it comes to protect free software. One only needs to see the definition they came up for open source AI models which is not quite restrictive (and thus useful) to see the least. So I'm actually somewhat inclined to believe this.
Real question is whether this is just symbolic or if the French state will actually redirect procurement pipelines + vendor mandates around these principles. i'd be more impressed if this came bundled with policy teeth, e.g. requiring all software vendors to deliver open-by-default interfaces or pushing funding toward open infra maintenance. Otherwise it's hardly much more than a manifesto
It will take time but yes. There are already numerous case studies. Libre office is already running on more than 500k gov computers. Anecdotical story, as a researcher I worked with a few French PhD students and they tend to send me documents Libre documents and spreadsheets.
As far as I can see, awful UI never stops people from using software that is "mandated" or "default". I mean have you seen Windows? MS Office? Web sites? Mobile apps??
I get it, but LibreOffice is awful in a much worse way than Office. On MacOS, the fonts and images just look low res and blurry. There's no polish, even though that is probably quite an easy fix.
But if they know the alternative is better. Everyone knows about ms office so they will complain/demand that instead. People put up with shitty software when they dont know about an alternative
MS Office is far from a good piece of software itself though. Frankly, the amount sub-menus and other bullshit I constantly have to fix for my parents does not make for a great experience either.
Mind, I barely actually use any Excel/Word/PowerPoint software, but I often have the feeling that a lot of user complaints for these types of things simply come down to: "It's not what I'm used to, therefore it's terrible.".
Yep. With known software there's always this "learned helplessness" of dismissing problems with "ah yeah, this is how it is". Even when it's quirky, inconsistent or just broken.
With new stuff, the blame will always lay on the new software even in situations where it's lack of skill or attention from the user.
I remember a University I used to work at as a dev moving a few classes of a few loud professors from open source Moodle to a paid product, and professors basically replicating Moodle's discussion board functionality by creating public wikis and hoping students wouldn't mess up when editing.
One day one professor approached me wanting a way to prevent students from messing up the "fake discussion board". He got a mouthful from the Dean who was nearby and was footing the bill of a few thousand per month on the expensive SaaS.
Notice how they say “No PR” on every single repo ? So for sure no PR was open.
Putting a bit more energy, you are redirected to a whole other system which I have never seen anywhere else (and in this case; unique doesn’t mean good). After 5 minutes of trying to navigate what is probably the least intuitive software forge I ever had the displeasure to witness, you understand that clearly these guys live in a different UI/UX bubble than the rest of us.
Seems like they use gerrit. A lot of larger projects use gerrit for their code review. It is different, yes, but many prefer it over GitHub's "pull request" paradigm which really sucks for high velocity contributors.
This is bad faith. You are not obligated to contribute any sort of code to point out problems in an open source project.
When I go to a restaurant and order a steak, and it arrives and tastes awful, the waiter does not have the right to say to me "if you don't like it, cook it yourself". The chef does not have the right to say to me "tell me exactly what I did wrong, since you're claiming you're an expert on steaks".
No. Anyone can complain about a thing, and the fact that they haven't tried to fix the code themselves is utterly irrelevant.
The difference is that at a restaurant you’re paying for it. If you show up at a soup kitchen and complain that it wasn’t seasoned just right, that’s fully on you.
I'm convinced this happens in a lot of projects. If you're e.g. Microsoft, you can pay a few people to contribute maliciously to a GPL competitor's coding and governance full time.
It's trivial to throw a million or two dollars at making sure some project ultimately goes nowhere (but survives), and that particular bugs don't get fixed or particular features don't get added. I've got no story to tell, and I've never heard solid evidence of it happening, but it would just be unbelievably tempting to do.
This does not surprise me. I've had the sense that the French government has been really forward in open source thinking since my interactions with ETAlab back in 2017. They were tracking some really bleeding edge civic tech stuff before anyone else was (including g0v.tw and the vTaiwan project)
France has an undeserved bad reputation for this stuff. As a french citizen, I'm amazed to see how easy it has become to do anything administrative online, with great tools such as France Connect that allows a single login method for any administrative tool.
Most things don't work, and "France Connect" is really bad (it doesn't even accept non-ascii letters for your name or surname! which is insane coming from an official initiative of the French Government; they should at least know how to use the French language). Anything from the department of education is also abysmal, mostly broken, and needlessly convoluted.
The one amazing thing that works is the taxes collection system. The French tax code is incredibly complex with hundred of special cases; yet the online system to declare revenues is perfect: super clear to use with excellent instructions, never broken (even at the end of a period where usage peaks must be insane) and with no errors.
I don't know who constructed this but it's proof that the French gvt can make good software when they really care (ie, when money's at stake).
C'est vrai pour les particuliers mais vas voir le côté entreprise de impôts.gouv.fr et tu vas pleurer. C'est des sous menus dans des sous menus, si t'as plus qu'une page ouverte a la fois ça te déconnecte de l'autre, ...
It used to be the same for the individuals site some years ago, but they overhauled it bits by bits. From what I saw, the company site is also getting slowly overhauled, although it's not as high priority.
> C'est des sous menus dans des sous menus, si t'as plus qu'une page ouverte a la fois ça te déconnecte de l'autre, ...
The reason for that is that the site is basically a progressive merge-and-overhaul of many existing administrations and their sites.
> It's true for individuals, but go look at the enterprise side of impôts.gouv.fr and you'll cry. It's submenus within submenus, if you've got more than one page open at a time it disconnects you from the other,...
I know HN doesn't appreciate snark, but isn't that kind of what you can expect from government websites anyway?
Sure, apart from paying your taxes with entirely pre-filled forms, accessing all your medical bills, upcoming reimbursments, communication with the public medical insurance and your full medical history from a single place, doing everything that needs to be done with the French equivalent of the DMV, paying fines, changing your address everywhere with one form when you move, getting a digital copy of your ids and driving licences with the same value as the official one in a couple of minutes, requesting official documents like your criminal record or birth certificate and getting them mailed to you and all of that with the same unique login, absolutely nothing works.
Most of what you mention either does not exist, or doesn't work, or is a completely unnecessary bureaucratic burden created for no reason, that we are expected to marvel about. Why do we need birth certificates in addition to IDs, exactly?
I have personally used everything I mention so I must be having hallucinations and dreamt it worked I guess.
> Why do we need birth certificates in addition to IDs, exactly?
Because it’s the official record of your actual birth which gives you right and is therefore useful when you need for exemple to get said ids or prove to anyone that it is indeed where you were born?
Birth certificates are in no way unique to France. What’s remarkable however is how easy to get a copy of yours if you are French.
Do you happen to now if France has public jobs for software devs or is it more like a governmental agency (which I guess is also a public sector job but feels different)?
AFAK each agency/entity manages its staff and can hire accordingly.
For the big project, my mental image is a public call for proposal, followed by one of the bigger groups (e.g. Cap Gemini) coming up with an initial solution that gets deployed. From there it becomes a mix of the public agency staff doing the day to day operation and maintenance, potentially including small bug fixes and updates, and external contracting again for wider range feature additions or changes like system wide security compliance.
Like distributing an iOS app in France that uses encryption? What a pain in the ass that is.
The bureaucracy was painful enough that we just removed from the French App Store and when someone complains we tell them to write their representatives to stop with these misguided laws.
Excuse me, monsieur, do you have a license for that math?
You can't sell encryption in France if you haven't proved it actually is strong encryption and not a rot13 or something, which is actually a _very_ good idea.
Could the implementation be better? Knowing french admin, 100% yes, but complaining about the law itself is, in my opinion, misguided. This is an overall good law that doesn't came from nowhere.
I'd love to see a coordinated drive to get most off the world onto opensource and off Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android as well as databases etc. American tech companies are making billions off these products that really are simple and could be replaced.
> American tech companies are making billions off these products that really are simple and could be replaced.
The trouble is that simple concepts are not necessarily simple to implement. Tuning software for performance (e.g. to handle a large user base), security, and maintenance are all resource intensive. Then you have to consider that large user bases have diverse needs, which results in more complex software. Then there are the largest hurdles of all, training people in the use of new software and interoperability during the transition.
Curious to know if this extends to LLMs and if so how they would define open source. Specifically it would be nice to see repudiation of Meta's "Open" BS by a nation state.
Cette licence permet d'utiliser, reproduire, modifier et distribuer librement le code avec attribution, mais impose des restrictions pour les opérations dépassant 700 millions d'utilisateurs mensuels.
Interesting they only mention the 700 million users thing and not the other restrictions on use. Personally I could regard the prohibition against basically Google and Microsoft using it to be a minor transgression, it's the larger list of unacceptable uses that's the big problem.
> The traditional Four Freedoms of free software are no longer enough. Software and the world it exists in have changed in the decades since the free software movement began. Free software faces new threats, and free AI software is especially in danger.
I didn't call the data the source and in the past have explicitly argued that training data is not necessary to exercise the freedoms normally associated with open source.
Llama models have usage restrictions that go against any mainstream definitions of open source.
Anyhow, I wasn't trying to put words in your mouth, simply stating my thoughts. And I focused on data because I see OSS code everywhere, so presume there is no issue there.
Big smokescreen, they only open the most trivial software. "France Identité" the virtual ID card has been closed source since day 1 and also happens to use Play Integrity.
“Various companies use the US government to bully other countries, but they also use license audits as a reaction to projects that move to open-source software.”:
I would love to see more public funds going towards open source. Even if it were directed to private companies' cloud CI services, it would be a great boon. Many projects have to balance how many build/test configurations with the available CI resources.
Truly hope that catches on, and not only for the « datalab » (incubation startup-like inside the gov doing cool stuff).
As a citizen, if only the first rule could become true for new and existing online public services such as « URSSAF », « Les Impôts » and « AMELI », that would be a great step forward (but I guess that will never happened as the hugh consulting firms developing these won’t have the same view on the matter)
This is great because it stops giving users to services which don't respect privacy. If you don't know CryptPad which provides forms but also many editors including Office with end to encryption, try it at https://cryptpad.fr
Is this the same country where it takes 15 years of litigation to figure out whether a GPA violation should be treated as a contract breach or copyright matter?
Software is sort of like real estate. It costs to maintain otherwise depreciates in value so you must be judicious with your investments. Unlike real property there’s not such a resale market, so you probably must be even more judicious.
It’s quite a thing for anyone to commit to software maintenance. The idea of open source that there will always be volunteers that reduce the fees you pay for maintenance is not a certainty.
Software is sort of like real estate. It costs to maintain otherwise depreciated in value so you must be judicious with your investments. Unlike real property there’s not such a resale market, so you probably must be even more judicious.
It’s quite a thing for anyone to commit to software maintenance. The idea of open source that there will always be volunteers that reduce the fees you pay for maintenance is not a certainty.
It was a subtle but satisfying (at least for me personally) moment in Tron: Legacy (2010) when Sam Flynn, the heir to ENCOM, breaks into the company HQ and releases their latest OS to the darknet for free, essentially forcibly-open-sourcing it as a protest against excessive corporate greed.
Does anyone know what Mercedes-Benz is doing? I can see why many of the others are on the endorsement list but this one seems out of place. I'm not a car nerd though so I'm sure there is something I'm really missing and be interested in learning about.
They have an entire webpage/associated github repository. It doesn't seem like they've published anything terribly well-known, but good on them for releasing some tooling
I remember knowing someone who worked in banking (completely non-technical role) telling me in 2011 I think about how a team doing work for him had lifted some code from a Mercedes Benz project and he was telling me how surprised he was that they could just do that.
A GmbH is s for-profit company. They have a managing director, shareholders, … ultimately it’s a for—profit org established on an insider-level knowledge and good luck creating a competitive business to the one of those players. Case in point: Bundesanzeiger Verlag GmbH.
As an American, this sort of brings back into question for me thoughts of, "What should constitute a public utility in a Capitalism society?" Upon doing some cursory research (so cursory that I'm afraid to provide links), it occurs to me that I was maybe under a false impression that there _are_ any nationwide public utilities in the first place. We basically have:
* The Federal Reserve
* The Interstate Highway System
* The Postal Service
* Homeland Security
* Medicaid/Medicare (does this even fit the list?)
* Other entitlements I'm also not sure fit this list
Did I leave anything major out? But getting to the point, I think the question is relevant because in order for something like this set of principles to take hold in the US I think we'd essentially have to kill certain classes of software in the private sector. Can you imagine the sorts of craziness that would ensure if the US government tried to adopt LibreOffice? Maybe it could happen at the state or municipal level, but we can't even agree that the government should own any of the power lines.
Yeah, these examples are all challenging in that they tend to represent more governance/funding than infrastructure. Out of both of our lists I think the USPS, highways, parks and land are the most infrastructure-related things. Of course these are all sort of weak analogues since software services are their own animal, but the fact that it’s a choice between governance, funding or a pittance of infrastructure projects I suppose makes the point.
You've limited your list to federal services. But state and local governments provide plenty more "public utility in a Capitalism society", don't they? Schools, fire protection, police for example.
The government getting interested in open source should terrify us all. The UN formally defining principles for what it means is a soft form of regulation that's only going to get more authoritarian over time. Traveling down this road, we're going to find ourselves living in a world where you're only allowed to share software if (1) you're working for a corporation, or (2) you're working for the government. Because (1) and (2) will have their lives managed and regulated and won't do anything they're not told to do. Anyone who wants to be a hobbyist who writes code of their own free will and shares it on GitHub just for fun will be criminalized, just like anyone today who wants to do farming just for fun is criminalized. Once they make these principles part of the law, it'll grow like the tax code, and be enforced. You used C and didn't write documentation? You're outlawed! Believe me when I say the government is not here to help. Code is speech and there'll be no freedom left the day our right to share what we've written in our preferred language in our own preferred way is taken away.
The CRA literally excludes free software developers from the obligations. Because if you're doing something for free you should have no obligations either. Instead, the obligations fall on commercial users of free software. Turns out regulations are sensible sometimes. Who knew.
However, this only happened because free software developers made an uproar about the act while it was a bill and was missing this provision. In a previous proposed version of the act, free software developers would have been liable for security vulnerabilities. So stay connected with politics!
Yes, I believe the Eclipse Foundation and others lobbied for that.
But here is the problem: if you now have a small business selling service around free software you are now facing the full wrath of the regulation and legal risk.
In the end only IBM, RedHat, Microsoft and big companies have the strength and the resources to monetize open source it but smaller actors don't. And it is becoming very difficult and risky even for most ~100 employees companies.
So you still have the right to develop and use free software but you can't really make a living out of it anymore unless you work for RedHat or others.
And yes it makes no sense. The EU is doing to the software industry what they did to agriculture a few decades ago.
Is there a specific risk you're worried about, or just the general risk of doing something wrong that's inherent to all business and is typically mitigated by insurance and by using a limited liability company?
So insurance did not offer much before the CRA. They will probably develop this market but it is gonna cost a lot probably and will be complex and imperfect.
Of course an LLC ultimately protect you but you have just multiplied by 10 or 100 the risk of blowing up your livelihood and the one of your employees.
Those regulations are just a nightmare, with "no-fault" liability, a simplified the burden of proof for the claimant, and are just very difficult to decrypt or applied to real world situations in an evolving landscape.
So unless you are big and have legal resources to work on it people are probably not gonna bother or give up.
Anyway your costs and risks have exploded and you are still competing with let's say Microsoft Azure.
Have you talked to an insurer? Business insurance requires a customized quote.
You didn't really answer the question. Do you have a specific risk in mind, or are you only worried about the risk of a random fuckup which all businesses face?
Really? It is up to them if they want to use what I wrote. Why would I get fined or jailed for not writing documentation? Good luck trying to prove any wrongdoing. If you want support feel free to hire me to do that, or just do it yourself, pretty much like big tech is doing right now with open source
Read "Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front" by Joel Salatin to learn about what the government did to farmers. The simple truth is you won't even have the ability to ask to be hired, because it will be illegal to demonstrate your skills in the first place.
I haven't read that book, but asked for a summary.
Honestly, I cannot see software being regulated the same way as food industry is, for the very simple reason that software can trivially cross borders (legally or not) while food cannot. Regulating that industry to prevent any progress by erecting bureaucratic barriers in a given country will just kill the industry in that country and make it thrive elsewhere where it's less regulated. As a result, the regulation-freak country will lose any of its competitive advantages due to lesser efficiency.
Doing this on a global scale requires "CFC-ban"-levels of global coordination which I cannot see happening in the world we live in today. Just look at how global CO2 reduction and climate change is being handled today at the global scale.
This book is now on my reading list, but I expect it to be a crackpot book along the same lines of people who think COVID vaccine mandates are the same thing as Nazi Germany.
This comes across as more than a little bit fanciful, nevertheless I agree with the sentiment. There's an awful lot of people on the sidelines with their eyes on gaining control over software with intentions that are not at all reflected by what they state publicly. We do not need some political body to come "help", they have no understanding of what makes this work in the first place and nothing of value to contribute.
All free (as in beer) work on software is voluntary. You do not need, and should not have, someone breathing down your neck to make you do it the way they want. However, that person is free to decide to allocate additional effort to work on the software themselves - even forking yours. They're also free to decide how much open source software they want to use, and which.
This is something I used to misunderstand too. That open source was something where there were a fixed set of projects available, one or two for each purpose, and if you wanted a change, you contributed that change and they take it. In reality, it's where everyone has their own project that does the thing they want. Most are written by one person or by tight-knit groups. Drive-by contributions often cost as much for the developers to process as just doing the contribution themselves. If you don't like how some software works, you have the right to write your own software using the existing software as a starting point - you do not have a right to edit the existing project. These are the same rights the UN has.
As an illustration of it: I have been working for two years on a new national project for the french state. Le Référentiel National des Bâtiments (for National Buildings Registry) which aim at creating and distributing a id key to every building in the country.
The goal is to make databases about buildings much more interoperable.
One key aspect is to have a precise list of all buildings includings recent constructions and demolition. It gets interesting because we recognize nobody in the country has the perfect list of buildings so we radically open the data to let governement agencies, cities, companies, citizens write directly in the registry. Think OSM or Wikipédia but for an official dataset.
This approach is very experimental for the french state and we are encouraged to test it and disseminate our learnings in other state branches.
And it’s an awesome dataset! My startup wouldn’t exist in its current form without it (elementdeclencheur.fr)
Thanks. It's great to read those feedbacks
That's a lovely idea. I have been working for large open data projects and secretive private data collections and they both fail in their own ways. Maybe the open-source gathering with a proper authority to lock down and shepherd data in case of dispute or vandalism is the golden middle way. Sort of like the BDFL concept: open for all, ultimately vetoed by a benevolent entity.
Nice!
Since OSM is, among other things, a list of building, will there be exchanges between the two projects? Are the licenses of the two projects compatible?
Well, we have some connections with the community and we are discussing how to incorporate our buildings IDs in OSM. The other way around (OSM to national registry) seems more complicated for license reasons.
Last summer we tested the open approch by doing a "RNB Summer game". Basically, anyone could come on the map and send some error reporting, we had a score per player, per territory and a shared global score. The OSM community absolutely rolled ont the game :)
Very interesting news. Is there an official portal where we can follow this project or similar efforts ?
Good luck (and thanks)
Thanks. Here is the website (in french): https://rnb.beta.gouv.fr and the documentation (also in french): https://rnb.beta.gouv.fr/doc
Oh nice, thanks a lot.
This is just for show, and facts won't follow. It's not the first time a French government vows to stick to Open Source. Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception.
Two months ago, the French government signed an "open bar" contract with Microsoft for the "Éducation Nationale" department. 152 M€, not for Open Source. Source (fr) https://www.april.org/nouvel-open-bar-microsoft-le-ministere...
A few days after that, a major state-owned institution (Polytechnique) announced it was migrating (including the email system) to MS Office 365. Even if it violates several laws and official decrees (it's a semi-military school). Source (fr) https://cnll.fr/news/polytechnique-men-office-365/
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.
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
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.
What problems did you encounter with Resana?
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> It’s like everything is bad because they saw people using Windows at their city hall.
No. French state companies (including military schools! and the Department of Education!!) use Windows, MS Office, and US-based cloud providers en masse. Good for them, I guess. I don't really care.
But pretending to do the opposite is what gets me.
Or when the Head of the BPI (Banque Publique d'Investissement) goes on TV to say that France should only buy French tech, and you learn that the same BPI that he leads, just signed a huge contract with AWS, then that's upsetting. (He's also very concerned with China because the Chinese State finances some of its private industry; never mind that it's the whole purpose and mission of the BPI.)
> 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?
There is nothing fascist there.
That's the core regalian powers at the heart of the state. Basically, a state is there to ensure laws can be voted, that they are fairly enforced and that things can stay that way. This notably means that people are safe in the broadest sense. They are not going to be mugged, murdered or dispossessed. That also means that the state has the mean to stay a state without becoming part of the next door state, which is to say, has an army to defend itself. A state which can't guarantee that is a failed state (or a former state if it was invaded).
Anything else is the cherry on the cake. Most states do a lot more because their citizen decided through laws this was a good thing - things like social security or education. If your state does these things for you, well, you should be grateful because they are in no way owed to you. You get them through the good will of the citizen who preceded you, the care of the civil servants that provide them to you and the continuously renewed commitment of your fellow citizen. If the French felt a bit less entitled and a bit more grateful, the country wouldn't be in the sorry state it's currently in.
You're only outing yourself more and more.
> If the French felt a bit less entitled and a bit more grateful, the country wouldn't be in the sorry state it's currently in.
Oh please. The French are doing far better than we (the US) are. Precisely because their electorate has made their aristocracy rightly fearful of them. Chopping off their heads tends to do that.
> 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.
Why is it even relevant what car was involved in an accident?
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.
But why focus on the car only? To me it would be interesting to know where has the driver got the driver license from. Or if they have a medical condition. Or maybe they have a stiff neck on the day of the accident. Were they distracted by children?
I’m probably failing to see the difference between Peugeot 208 or Renault 5 being involved in an accident. What insights could one expect from this info?
> To me it would be interesting to know where has the driver got the driver license from. Or if they have a medical condition. Or maybe they have a stiff neck on the day of the accident. Were they distracted by children?
Sure, but that's an information that is difficult to create; it will result from a police investigation (and even then, may or may not be accurate).
Mark, model and age of the vehicle is 1/ incredibly easy to get and 2/ 100% reliable.
It's not the end-all be-all of road safety, but it's interesting; and the fact that all it took to not publish it was some lobbying effort from car makers is incredible.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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
not sure why you were downvoted. You're working there, so i guess your testimony is an interesting data point.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
did you redevelop everything from scratch or did you try to reuse existing open source tech ?
There's some aspects that make it a more nuanced situation:
- you won't see angry letters in the news about services sticking to open source after they chose to move in
- the reason the CNLL can point the finger at Poytechnique is because there are explicit directives. Not even having those would be way worse.
- "Most of the public money" : Open Source contracts won't be in billions of euros most of the time, especially as a lot of the money will go to internal hiring and only a slice to external contractors.
"Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception." → I've asked, twice, for the CNLL, the French Court of Auditors (Cour des Comptes) to work towards giving precise figures. This was rejected, but may reappear in a different form (given that the Court is currently running an enquiry on digital sovereignty - I hope, but I doubt, that they will be able to pull precise figures).
Typical French reaction to anything positive.
Everytime someone actually does something nice in this country, there will be a dozen nay-sayers complaining uselessly that it is not perfect while doing nothing of value themselves.
It always saddens me to see a country with so much too succeed being so impaired by its own citizens.
It is just how we express ourselves. We French are known internationally for complaining a lot, we know it and we even joke about it.
It doesn't mean that nothing gets done (and when it doesn't, it is not usually the reason). We are just not overly enthusiastic about it like Americans tend to be.
A way to see things is that in America, a 5/5 comment is great, 4/5 is acceptable, and anything less is crap. In France, 1/5 is crap, 2/5 is acceptable, and anything more is great. You just have to adjust your scale.
This comment didn't impair anything being done, though.
I totally agree with it. The EU could do something non-performative by it and its governments stopping issuing documents in proprietary Microsoft formats and use OSS only.
> The EU could do something non-performative by it and its governments stopping issuing documents in proprietary Microsoft formats and use OSS only.
They would get hairy quickly, because the Office formats are actually open standards.
It’s also a tall order. How they run their administration is fundamentally the member-states’ prerogative, I don’t really see what lever the commission would have to bend the council on that subject.
> because the Office formats are actually open standards
They are technically open standards in that they've been ratified, but I'm not sure they're fully independently implementable.
The constant criticism of people actually trying to do something by people who prefer sitting on their hands is impairing in itself.
People are basically constantly dragging everyone down including themselves while doing absolutely nothing.
I mean technically I guess they sometimes vocally protest in the street that they don't understand why someone else is not solving their own problem or that they would prefer we just pretended the problem never existed which is pretty much equivalent to doing nothing if not worse.
> The constant criticism of people actually trying to do something by people who prefer sitting on their hands is impairing in itself.
No. You need to say how it's impairing the process of this specific adoption to make the claim. It's not self-evident.
> This is just for show
That is simply wrong.
The reality is that millions of people work for the government, directly or indirectly, and that not all of these people have aligned incentives, the same constraints, etc.
The people pushing open source initiatives in the french public sector are very serious about it. It is also true that there is a lot of inertia. The consequence is that, while most of the large administrations, including those that don't have that much wiggle room for initiatives, still use big-name proprietary solutions, more and more open-source and open-data gardens spring around, and that they provide a strong base for new initatives, both public and private.
Two examples I personally used are dvf [1], a database and application showing real estate sales, which I used to check market prices when I bought my home, and publi.codes [2], a simulator and an open-source law-as-code repository, which is one of the cornerstones of a friend's private company.
Would I like more of France's administration to move to open-souce? Sure, but it's not going to happen overnight. In the meantime, I'm grateful for the core of people dedicated to push the case, bits by bits, and I know their effort is certainly not just for show.
[1]: https://app.dvf.etalab.gouv.fr/ [2]: https://publi.codes/
I'm extremely tired of this attitude among French people that amounts to systematically shoot down any attempt at improvement with cynicism.
It doesn't come from nowhere, though. It results in having had to tolerate the French bureaucracy, French lies, empty promises, and French way of (not) doing things for decades.
That's just governments being governments. I've spent 50% of my life in Sweden and 50% of my life in Spain, and everywhere it's the same. "had to tolerate the $NATION bureaucracy, $NATION lies, empty promises, and $NATION way of (not) doing things for decades" probably applies to most countries in the world, I know it applies for the countries I've lived in at least, and seemingly France too. Heard the same about every home country of my friends also.
Governments just move really slowly. Best we can do is cheer for the efforts we think will improve things, even if it'll take years, and protest about efforts we think are harmful.
There's a slight increase in open source efforts. They recently released a react component framework for govt apps. They use keycloak very often.
Let's see what happens but I get that prior, demonstrable, actions are not conducive.
it's still a step in the right direction
and its coming on the back of US and Trumps tarif shittalk..
there's also talk about moving away from american software giants, among government sections in my country. Recently one such section moved from AWS to Hetzner (saving money in the process)
i've also heard talk about making EU-based alternatives to the office suite, etc.
Uh, I know n=1, but I used to work in a public research lab in France for almost a couple years, and already back then (4-5 years ago) they used tons of FOSS. Zimbra, Mattermost, Gitlab, the works. So I don't think it's all just theater.
Then again, if your employees still need PowerPoint, I say let them have it for now. You cannot switch a single company to FOSS overnight, let alone the entire public sector of an industrial nation.
[flagged]
I have some quotes about US sentiment, and it basically revolves around their need to have national grandeur despite being a lesser power.
US is all fanfare and rhetoric. Its fun stuff to play with in our imagination, but the ground reality of the world is different.
-- A French
Just switching country names does not really work. The US is the very curious case of a super power that attempts to become a third world country.
What's the ground for this? Where's grandeur in this declaration? Your comment tell us more about your disdain for France than anything else.
[flagged]
This makes total sense. When a country is creating public software, it should be open source by default. This is the only way to create trust. In the long run, open source and closed source government software will probably differentiate dictatorships from democracies
> differentiate dictatorships from democracies
At first glance I thought this was hyperbole, but after reflection I'm not sure it's even an exaggeration. Too much critical infrastructure of power (voting, census, taxation, reporting, compliance) runs of software for us to accept anything less than full transparency from our governments.
If you agree, here's a petition: https://publiccode.eu
Thanks, I just signed.
There’s always holes. How can we know for sure the binaries running on the voting machines are compiled from the open source repo?
It’s turtles all the way down.
> How can we know for sure the binaries running on the voting machines [..]
As far as elections are concerned, give me paper ballots every day, and make sure you count them by hand with plenty of Mk I human observers present.
You happen to be a moderator on Stack Overflow by any chance?
In Brazil there is black box testing. Party officials can choose a sample of a few ballots per polling location on election day, where a simulated election is run, with all inputs recorded on video. The machines have to tally the right votes for the input given at the end of day. These are machines that would be used for voting, and the party officials are parties unrelated to (and in a way, antagonistic with) the voting authority.
I think it's a pretty solid scheme.
Yeah this is why you shouldn't use voting machines. Paper voting is already great. Whoever is trying to sell you a voting machine does not have your best interests in mind.
Very few people have any change of understanding machine voting systems. With paper voting we get much better transparency of the voting procedures. Any form of machine voting is terrible for transparency and democracy compared to just plain old paper voting.
I'm generally open to the idea of more frequent elections with cheaper voting.
Could you not compile them on the voting machines itself? But yes, there is always going to be some level of trust involved, and the bar for manipulation seems to be lower than re: manual counting.
Turtles all the way down. Can you trust your compiler?
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
This problem can be solved by the bootstrappable builds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41368835
But do you trust the processor? Which can also be backdoored internally to start rewriting instructions on the fly?
You use different CPUs and compare the result. Also, you can try this: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor
This is called "security through compartmentalization", i.e., you don't trust one single entity. The only approach that works.
That's not really a "hole" - rather it's the idea not covering every possible form of corruption.
There's reproducible builds project for that. (Except too few people will know how to actually verify it.)
Free and Open Technology for a Free and Open Society
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software%2C_Free_Society
At this point Open Source doesn't mean anything anymore.
It is like everybody putting a "fat free" logo on highly processed junk food a few decades ago. Yes but what is fat exactly?
What really make me suspicious is there is now a very dense web of fake, captured foundations and non profits with a lot of money flowing through them. Most of them do not write any code of course and it is very hard to understand they purpose or what they do beyond "advocacy".
None of those Open Source advocates care about the most urgent problems like the fact that now almost every human has one of the most locked up system in its hand (yes I know about AOSP) or we can't trust the connected micro-controllers in our homes.
Instead they have as their top goal to fight things like climate change [0] (I wish)
Strangely postmarketOS (the ones trying to make possible that we don't have to trash those cellphones after 3 years) survives on €12656 in yearly donations, €11175 after banks fees [1]. So probably less than the monthly salary of most of those foundations executives and employees. Or probably the cost of one big Zoom meeting in the UN.
Also ask yourself why the FSF, GNU and RMS have been marginalized while Open Source became an UN level cause...
- [0] https://www.digitalpublicgoods.net/digital-public-goods-alli...
- [1] https://postmarketos.org/blog/2025/03/17/pmOS-budget-and-fin...
I don't think I agree with any part of this take, other than postmarketOS having a bit more money would be nice.
Which part?
While in many way software freedom won the server and workstation battle, we lost all the new battlefront which opened in the last two decades:
- Phones (the thing in the hand of almost every human now. And sorry LineageOS and GrapheneOS are quickly being marginalized now by things like Google Play Integrity)
- Javascript (yes it is a big problem [0])
- the Cloud
- IoT
The FSF was actually pretty good at identifying those issue early on but was overwhelmed and probably marginalized because they were right.
Notice that none of those new "Open Source" advocates really care about those ubiquitous issues.
We won some battles but lost the war. The fact France endorses some UN Open Source principles really doesn't matter.
You might think caring about software freedom is almost fringe but look at:
- The US freaking out about all those Chinese devices and cyber attacks,
- The EU now freaking out about US big tech and the cloud.
I believe the best way to safeguard sovereignty and safety is for everyone be able to control as much as possible what is running on our "computers" and as close to you as possible. The FSF [1] has been consistent regarding those issue and doing something about it. But also some other folks like OpenBSD [2].
Very unclear to me what the goals of the UN and the OSI type foundations really is.
- [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html
- [1] https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/campaigns-summaries
- [2] https://www.openbsd.org/goals.html
Yeah, so hopefully the EU (including France) will freak out about "fake open source" (building for iOS or Android, using Github...) too.
The poster child for this is the OSI rejecting the SSPL.
For anyone unfamiliar, the SSPL is a modification of the AGPL. It expands which source code you have to release, under certain circumstances. More specifically, if you resell the software as a cloud service, you have to make the entire service open source and not just the original software. (It has not yet been tested in court what constitutes the entire service.) This is awfully bad for the business models of several OSI members, which make money by reselling free software as a cloud service surrounded by proprietary stuff like management and load balancing.
In response, the OSI put out this official blog post seething with anger but not a single rational argument: https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l...
In response to that, I don't trust the OSI and neither should you.
(There are reasons the SSPL is bad - mostly GPL/AGPL incompatibility. Not being open source isn't one. The OSI's rant applies just as well to AGPL as it does to SSPL, yet they recognize AGPL.)
that doesn't hold. The whole ecosystem, not just the OSI, has agreed that SSPL is not open source / free software, including the FSF, Debian, Fedora.
That doesn't hold.
FSF declined to make a statement either way - citing the fact that very little software uses this license and it all has xGPL alternatives, so there's no urgent need to make an official decision.
Debian didn't call it free or unfree, but rather decided not to include SSPL software in their distribution, which is an orthogonal issue, due to it having a higher risk of being incompatible with all the other stuff when used a certain way, which does not make it non-free.
Fedora calls it non-free, but just calls it their own belief, not something based on solid reasoning about meeting guidelines or not. Note that Fedora is a project of one of those open source reseller companies.
I found the points in your last comment to be true.
I still think you'd need to back the fact OSI rejected SSPL for commercial concerns of its members a bit more. Even if nobody else has formally rejected SSPL on convincing grounds, major parts of the free software ecosystem distrusts it and OSI is not that special in this. I found nobody making the case that SSPL is a free software license. Nobody likes it except mongodb, and formerly redis and elasticsearch. That would be an interesting revelation to me but I need more convincing evidences.
I do think that open source is the watered down corporate version of free software that attempts to get rid of the end user rights concerns (which I care about most, but the corporations around the OSI don't care about much or at all), and that the OSI is governed by big corps and is not the most trusty organization when it comes to protect free software. One only needs to see the definition they came up for open source AI models which is not quite restrictive (and thus useful) to see the least. So I'm actually somewhat inclined to believe this.
> At this point Open Source doesn't mean anything anymore
Agreed and a case in point are those UN principles that bundle unrelated things together.
Real question is whether this is just symbolic or if the French state will actually redirect procurement pipelines + vendor mandates around these principles. i'd be more impressed if this came bundled with policy teeth, e.g. requiring all software vendors to deliver open-by-default interfaces or pushing funding toward open infra maintenance. Otherwise it's hardly much more than a manifesto
It will take time but yes. There are already numerous case studies. Libre office is already running on more than 500k gov computers. Anecdotical story, as a researcher I worked with a few French PhD students and they tend to send me documents Libre documents and spreadsheets.
Oh then it’s dead. LibreOffice never Just Works™. Ideological changes like this only work if they’re painless for the hoi polloi.
LibreOffice UI is so awful I'm 90% convinced there is a Microsoft plant that actively disrupts progress.
I don't lurk the github, so I'm just assuming there are a few accounts that disagree with UI improvements just to kill time and fake debate.
But yeah that UI is just awful.
Further, you mention any UI issue on the subreddit and you get banned. Yeah...
Really a shame, Fedora + Google's Office Suite has been a near complete replacement for me. Although Sheets could be improved a bit.
> But yeah that UI is just awful.
As far as I can see, awful UI never stops people from using software that is "mandated" or "default". I mean have you seen Windows? MS Office? Web sites? Mobile apps??
I get it, but LibreOffice is awful in a much worse way than Office. On MacOS, the fonts and images just look low res and blurry. There's no polish, even though that is probably quite an easy fix.
But if they know the alternative is better. Everyone knows about ms office so they will complain/demand that instead. People put up with shitty software when they dont know about an alternative
MS Office is far from a good piece of software itself though. Frankly, the amount sub-menus and other bullshit I constantly have to fix for my parents does not make for a great experience either.
Mind, I barely actually use any Excel/Word/PowerPoint software, but I often have the feeling that a lot of user complaints for these types of things simply come down to: "It's not what I'm used to, therefore it's terrible.".
Yep. With known software there's always this "learned helplessness" of dismissing problems with "ah yeah, this is how it is". Even when it's quirky, inconsistent or just broken.
With new stuff, the blame will always lay on the new software even in situations where it's lack of skill or attention from the user.
I remember a University I used to work at as a dev moving a few classes of a few loud professors from open source Moodle to a paid product, and professors basically replicating Moodle's discussion board functionality by creating public wikis and hoping students wouldn't mess up when editing.
One day one professor approached me wanting a way to prevent students from messing up the "fake discussion board". He got a mouthful from the Dean who was nearby and was footing the bill of a few thousand per month on the expensive SaaS.
Talk is cheap, did you create any PRs for the suggested changes?
This is the GH for the official LibreOffice project: https://github.com/LibreOffice
Notice how they say “No PR” on every single repo ? So for sure no PR was open.
Putting a bit more energy, you are redirected to a whole other system which I have never seen anywhere else (and in this case; unique doesn’t mean good). After 5 minutes of trying to navigate what is probably the least intuitive software forge I ever had the displeasure to witness, you understand that clearly these guys live in a different UI/UX bubble than the rest of us.
Seems like they use gerrit. A lot of larger projects use gerrit for their code review. It is different, yes, but many prefer it over GitHub's "pull request" paradigm which really sucks for high velocity contributors.
This is bad faith. You are not obligated to contribute any sort of code to point out problems in an open source project.
When I go to a restaurant and order a steak, and it arrives and tastes awful, the waiter does not have the right to say to me "if you don't like it, cook it yourself". The chef does not have the right to say to me "tell me exactly what I did wrong, since you're claiming you're an expert on steaks".
No. Anyone can complain about a thing, and the fact that they haven't tried to fix the code themselves is utterly irrelevant.
The difference is that at a restaurant you’re paying for it. If you show up at a soup kitchen and complain that it wasn’t seasoned just right, that’s fully on you.
Complaining is allowed, as long as you're not obnoxious about it and you acknowledge you're in no position to make demands.
I'm convinced this happens in a lot of projects. If you're e.g. Microsoft, you can pay a few people to contribute maliciously to a GPL competitor's coding and governance full time.
It's trivial to throw a million or two dollars at making sure some project ultimately goes nowhere (but survives), and that particular bugs don't get fixed or particular features don't get added. I've got no story to tell, and I've never heard solid evidence of it happening, but it would just be unbelievably tempting to do.
I think it's more a guideline principle for public software, for exemple apps that are used by citizens to declare taxes, renews IDs...
This does not surprise me. I've had the sense that the French government has been really forward in open source thinking since my interactions with ETAlab back in 2017. They were tracking some really bleeding edge civic tech stuff before anyone else was (including g0v.tw and the vTaiwan project)
https://g0v.tw/intl/en/
https://info.vtaiwan.tw
France has an undeserved bad reputation for this stuff. As a french citizen, I'm amazed to see how easy it has become to do anything administrative online, with great tools such as France Connect that allows a single login method for any administrative tool.
Most things don't work, and "France Connect" is really bad (it doesn't even accept non-ascii letters for your name or surname! which is insane coming from an official initiative of the French Government; they should at least know how to use the French language). Anything from the department of education is also abysmal, mostly broken, and needlessly convoluted.
The one amazing thing that works is the taxes collection system. The French tax code is incredibly complex with hundred of special cases; yet the online system to declare revenues is perfect: super clear to use with excellent instructions, never broken (even at the end of a period where usage peaks must be insane) and with no errors.
I don't know who constructed this but it's proof that the French gvt can make good software when they really care (ie, when money's at stake).
In the same vein, amendes.gouv.fr is incredibly easy to use for paying fines.
C'est vrai pour les particuliers mais vas voir le côté entreprise de impôts.gouv.fr et tu vas pleurer. C'est des sous menus dans des sous menus, si t'as plus qu'une page ouverte a la fois ça te déconnecte de l'autre, ...
It used to be the same for the individuals site some years ago, but they overhauled it bits by bits. From what I saw, the company site is also getting slowly overhauled, although it's not as high priority.
> C'est des sous menus dans des sous menus, si t'as plus qu'une page ouverte a la fois ça te déconnecte de l'autre, ...
The reason for that is that the site is basically a progressive merge-and-overhaul of many existing administrations and their sites.
> It's true for individuals, but go look at the enterprise side of impôts.gouv.fr and you'll cry. It's submenus within submenus, if you've got more than one page open at a time it disconnects you from the other,...
I know HN doesn't appreciate snark, but isn't that kind of what you can expect from government websites anyway?
> Most things don't work
Sure, apart from paying your taxes with entirely pre-filled forms, accessing all your medical bills, upcoming reimbursments, communication with the public medical insurance and your full medical history from a single place, doing everything that needs to be done with the French equivalent of the DMV, paying fines, changing your address everywhere with one form when you move, getting a digital copy of your ids and driving licences with the same value as the official one in a couple of minutes, requesting official documents like your criminal record or birth certificate and getting them mailed to you and all of that with the same unique login, absolutely nothing works.
I mean, what have the Roman ever done for us?
Most of what you mention either does not exist, or doesn't work, or is a completely unnecessary bureaucratic burden created for no reason, that we are expected to marvel about. Why do we need birth certificates in addition to IDs, exactly?
I have personally used everything I mention so I must be having hallucinations and dreamt it worked I guess.
> Why do we need birth certificates in addition to IDs, exactly?
Because it’s the official record of your actual birth which gives you right and is therefore useful when you need for exemple to get said ids or prove to anyone that it is indeed where you were born?
Birth certificates are in no way unique to France. What’s remarkable however is how easy to get a copy of yours if you are French.
Do you happen to now if France has public jobs for software devs or is it more like a governmental agency (which I guess is also a public sector job but feels different)?
AFAK each agency/entity manages its staff and can hire accordingly.
For the big project, my mental image is a public call for proposal, followed by one of the bigger groups (e.g. Cap Gemini) coming up with an initial solution that gets deployed. From there it becomes a mix of the public agency staff doing the day to day operation and maintenance, potentially including small bug fixes and updates, and external contracting again for wider range feature additions or changes like system wide security compliance.
Like distributing an iOS app in France that uses encryption? What a pain in the ass that is.
The bureaucracy was painful enough that we just removed from the French App Store and when someone complains we tell them to write their representatives to stop with these misguided laws.
Excuse me, monsieur, do you have a license for that math?
You can't sell encryption in France if you haven't proved it actually is strong encryption and not a rot13 or something, which is actually a _very_ good idea.
Could the implementation be better? Knowing french admin, 100% yes, but complaining about the law itself is, in my opinion, misguided. This is an overall good law that doesn't came from nowhere.
Some apps have refused to distribute in French store for this reason, such as Syncthing apps Mobius and Synctrain.
Compare to the US Open Source Principles where things become public domain by default.
https://www.usgs.gov/products/software
I'd love to see a coordinated drive to get most off the world onto opensource and off Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android as well as databases etc. American tech companies are making billions off these products that really are simple and could be replaced.
> American tech companies are making billions off these products that really are simple and could be replaced.
The trouble is that simple concepts are not necessarily simple to implement. Tuning software for performance (e.g. to handle a large user base), security, and maintenance are all resource intensive. Then you have to consider that large user bases have diverse needs, which results in more complex software. Then there are the largest hurdles of all, training people in the use of new software and interoperability during the transition.
What a time to be alive to see Android on that list.
[flagged]
Curious to know if this extends to LLMs and if so how they would define open source. Specifically it would be nice to see repudiation of Meta's "Open" BS by a nation state.
https://www.comparia.beta.gouv.fr/modeles compares models and Llama different licenses are not mislabeled as "open source".
Also, https://opensource.org/ai/endorsements shows code.gouv.fr in the list.
Cool, thanks!
Interesting they only mention the 700 million users thing and not the other restrictions on use. Personally I could regard the prohibition against basically Google and Microsoft using it to be a minor transgression, it's the larger list of unacceptable uses that's the big problem.Agreed. If you feel the need to report inconsistencies, the source code is here: https://github.com/betagouv/ComparIA
It's actually targeting Apple since both Google and Microsoft have their own models.
I'm a little confused by the context of this since I don't speak French, but it seems like you're unfamiliar with the OpenELM family of models.
https://huggingface.co/apple/OpenELM
that looks like a dinosaur now
OSI's OSAID is complete and utter bullshit. Look to Debian if you want a real definition of open source AI.
https://opensource.org/ai https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy
Related :
https://elevenfreedoms.org/
> The traditional Four Freedoms of free software are no longer enough. Software and the world it exists in have changed in the decades since the free software movement began. Free software faces new threats, and free AI software is especially in danger.
They're just those eight guidelines. Not particularly precise, with intent mattering more than any definition. This isn't a policy, just a goal.
I wouldn't call data "source", whether a book, a sound track, video, etc.
In my view of the world, the code to train, the software to run, that's open source joy.
Now... should the trained, and vectored data be free? Maybe so.
But I bet this UN thing doesn't cover that.
I didn't call the data the source and in the past have explicitly argued that training data is not necessary to exercise the freedoms normally associated with open source.
Llama models have usage restrictions that go against any mainstream definitions of open source.
The model is part of the data, agreed?
Anyhow, I wasn't trying to put words in your mouth, simply stating my thoughts. And I focused on data because I see OSS code everywhere, so presume there is no issue there.
Big smokescreen, they only open the most trivial software. "France Identité" the virtual ID card has been closed source since day 1 and also happens to use Play Integrity.
“Various companies use the US government to bully other countries, but they also use license audits as a reaction to projects that move to open-source software.”:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1013776
I hope this sets a strong precedent for open source public software.
I would love to see more public funds going towards open source. Even if it were directed to private companies' cloud CI services, it would be a great boon. Many projects have to balance how many build/test configurations with the available CI resources.
Truly hope that catches on, and not only for the « datalab » (incubation startup-like inside the gov doing cool stuff).
As a citizen, if only the first rule could become true for new and existing online public services such as « URSSAF », « Les Impôts » and « AMELI », that would be a great step forward (but I guess that will never happened as the hugh consulting firms developing these won’t have the same view on the matter)
A good news as part of this is that the United Nations is gathering the endorsements using end to end encrypted software CryptPad Forms (https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/GvF3q-LsyL-OZgX4G0r2p...)
This is great because it stops giving users to services which don't respect privacy. If you don't know CryptPad which provides forms but also many editors including Office with end to encryption, try it at https://cryptpad.fr
Is this the same country where it takes 15 years of litigation to figure out whether a GPA violation should be treated as a contract breach or copyright matter?
France has joined the Unified Patent Court (UPC), which will rubberstamp software patents in France, as it is replacing the french National Courts.
Software is sort of like real estate. It costs to maintain otherwise depreciates in value so you must be judicious with your investments. Unlike real property there’s not such a resale market, so you probably must be even more judicious.
It’s quite a thing for anyone to commit to software maintenance. The idea of open source that there will always be volunteers that reduce the fees you pay for maintenance is not a certainty.
Software is sort of like real estate. It costs to maintain otherwise depreciated in value so you must be judicious with your investments. Unlike real property there’s not such a resale market, so you probably must be even more judicious.
It’s quite a thing for anyone to commit to software maintenance. The idea of open source that there will always be volunteers that reduce the fees you pay for maintenance is not a certainty.
What are the UN Open Source Principles? Can anyone share a link to the original document? I could not find anything relevant on Google.
UN has Open Source principles but it took a budget decrease to consider it for itself and it's still not approved...
It was a subtle but satisfying (at least for me personally) moment in Tron: Legacy (2010) when Sam Flynn, the heir to ENCOM, breaks into the company HQ and releases their latest OS to the darknet for free, essentially forcibly-open-sourcing it as a protest against excessive corporate greed.
Leaking the source code is not forcibly-open-sourcing it, as multiple Windows leaks show.
Does anyone know what Mercedes-Benz is doing? I can see why many of the others are on the endorsement list but this one seems out of place. I'm not a car nerd though so I'm sure there is something I'm really missing and be interested in learning about.
They have an entire webpage/associated github repository. It doesn't seem like they've published anything terribly well-known, but good on them for releasing some tooling
https://opensource.mercedes-benz.com/projects/
I remember knowing someone who worked in banking (completely non-technical role) telling me in 2011 I think about how a team doing work for him had lifted some code from a Mercedes Benz project and he was telling me how surprised he was that they could just do that.
Thanks! I wish the page had linked to this!
Wonder when there will be a French equivalent of or funding for the Sovereign Tech Agency.
https://www.sovereign.tech/
I have so many issues with German “sovereign” initiatives founded as GmbH companies. This feels so uncompetitive.
What sort of issues? They are just providing funding for open source, personally I would prefer that sort of funding to corporate funding.
A GmbH is s for-profit company. They have a managing director, shareholders, … ultimately it’s a for—profit org established on an insider-level knowledge and good luck creating a competitive business to the one of those players. Case in point: Bundesanzeiger Verlag GmbH.
As an American, this sort of brings back into question for me thoughts of, "What should constitute a public utility in a Capitalism society?" Upon doing some cursory research (so cursory that I'm afraid to provide links), it occurs to me that I was maybe under a false impression that there _are_ any nationwide public utilities in the first place. We basically have:
* The Federal Reserve
* The Interstate Highway System
* The Postal Service
* Homeland Security
* Medicaid/Medicare (does this even fit the list?)
* Other entitlements I'm also not sure fit this list
Did I leave anything major out? But getting to the point, I think the question is relevant because in order for something like this set of principles to take hold in the US I think we'd essentially have to kill certain classes of software in the private sector. Can you imagine the sorts of craziness that would ensure if the US government tried to adopt LibreOffice? Maybe it could happen at the state or municipal level, but we can't even agree that the government should own any of the power lines.
Federal Aviation Administration keeps the skies a public utility.
Federal Communication Commission keeps part of the wireless communication spectrum open to the public.
National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management keeps some public land available for everyone to use.
The Library of Congress.
National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service probably satisfy "Public Utility" as much as Medicaid.
Federal Emergency Management Agency would be another stretch, but not something I would consider an entitlement program.
Yeah, these examples are all challenging in that they tend to represent more governance/funding than infrastructure. Out of both of our lists I think the USPS, highways, parks and land are the most infrastructure-related things. Of course these are all sort of weak analogues since software services are their own animal, but the fact that it’s a choice between governance, funding or a pittance of infrastructure projects I suppose makes the point.
But I think that's the issue -
for libertarian,
National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service probably satisfy "Public Utility" as much as Medicaid.
this would not be public utility, etc.
You forgot NIST, which incidentally would probably be the appropriate agency to handle management of open source software
> Did I leave anything major out?
You've limited your list to federal services. But state and local governments provide plenty more "public utility in a Capitalism society", don't they? Schools, fire protection, police for example.
I cany see anywhere how they define open source? Because I am sensing it is pretty much GPL or even AGPL only.
What’s wrong with that?
I'm always hoping to see more coverage of this initiative to drive Open Source adoption both within the United Nations and globally...
https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/04/2350224/the-un-ditc...
Thanks for the slashdot link, which also links to the UN:
https://unite.un.org/news/osi-first-endorse-united-nations-o...
Is there other access to the French announcement?
That Mastodon link: social.numerique.gouv.fr, isn't viewable for me...
Disclaimer: I work for code.gouv.fr.
No, there is no official French announcement (yet).
Thanks for your reply!
If it doesn't work due to JS being off, try this tool:
https://github.com/jwilk/zygolophodon
What business and role can the UN have to get into open source solutions?
> What business and role can the UN have to get into open source solutions?
The UN has a nine figure IT budget for starters.
These are principles, aka standards, not solutions.
Governance?
One word: Minitel
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Big move by France, leading the way in open source with real global impact!
The government getting interested in open source should terrify us all. The UN formally defining principles for what it means is a soft form of regulation that's only going to get more authoritarian over time. Traveling down this road, we're going to find ourselves living in a world where you're only allowed to share software if (1) you're working for a corporation, or (2) you're working for the government. Because (1) and (2) will have their lives managed and regulated and won't do anything they're not told to do. Anyone who wants to be a hobbyist who writes code of their own free will and shares it on GitHub just for fun will be criminalized, just like anyone today who wants to do farming just for fun is criminalized. Once they make these principles part of the law, it'll grow like the tax code, and be enforced. You used C and didn't write documentation? You're outlawed! Believe me when I say the government is not here to help. Code is speech and there'll be no freedom left the day our right to share what we've written in our preferred language in our own preferred way is taken away.
I don’t see how these principles could lead to people being restricted in the way you suggest.
Yep you are basically describing the EU Cybersecurity Act if anybody care to read it and try to understand how things work in reality.
The CRA literally excludes free software developers from the obligations. Because if you're doing something for free you should have no obligations either. Instead, the obligations fall on commercial users of free software. Turns out regulations are sensible sometimes. Who knew.
However, this only happened because free software developers made an uproar about the act while it was a bill and was missing this provision. In a previous proposed version of the act, free software developers would have been liable for security vulnerabilities. So stay connected with politics!
Yes, I believe the Eclipse Foundation and others lobbied for that.
But here is the problem: if you now have a small business selling service around free software you are now facing the full wrath of the regulation and legal risk. In the end only IBM, RedHat, Microsoft and big companies have the strength and the resources to monetize open source it but smaller actors don't. And it is becoming very difficult and risky even for most ~100 employees companies.
So you still have the right to develop and use free software but you can't really make a living out of it anymore unless you work for RedHat or others.
And yes it makes no sense. The EU is doing to the software industry what they did to agriculture a few decades ago.
Is there a specific risk you're worried about, or just the general risk of doing something wrong that's inherent to all business and is typically mitigated by insurance and by using a limited liability company?
So insurance did not offer much before the CRA. They will probably develop this market but it is gonna cost a lot probably and will be complex and imperfect.
Of course an LLC ultimately protect you but you have just multiplied by 10 or 100 the risk of blowing up your livelihood and the one of your employees.
Those regulations are just a nightmare, with "no-fault" liability, a simplified the burden of proof for the claimant, and are just very difficult to decrypt or applied to real world situations in an evolving landscape.
So unless you are big and have legal resources to work on it people are probably not gonna bother or give up.
Anyway your costs and risks have exploded and you are still competing with let's say Microsoft Azure.
Have you talked to an insurer? Business insurance requires a customized quote.
You didn't really answer the question. Do you have a specific risk in mind, or are you only worried about the risk of a random fuckup which all businesses face?
Really? It is up to them if they want to use what I wrote. Why would I get fined or jailed for not writing documentation? Good luck trying to prove any wrongdoing. If you want support feel free to hire me to do that, or just do it yourself, pretty much like big tech is doing right now with open source
Read "Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front" by Joel Salatin to learn about what the government did to farmers. The simple truth is you won't even have the ability to ask to be hired, because it will be illegal to demonstrate your skills in the first place.
I haven't read that book, but asked for a summary. Honestly, I cannot see software being regulated the same way as food industry is, for the very simple reason that software can trivially cross borders (legally or not) while food cannot. Regulating that industry to prevent any progress by erecting bureaucratic barriers in a given country will just kill the industry in that country and make it thrive elsewhere where it's less regulated. As a result, the regulation-freak country will lose any of its competitive advantages due to lesser efficiency.
Doing this on a global scale requires "CFC-ban"-levels of global coordination which I cannot see happening in the world we live in today. Just look at how global CO2 reduction and climate change is being handled today at the global scale.
This book is now on my reading list, but I expect it to be a crackpot book along the same lines of people who think COVID vaccine mandates are the same thing as Nazi Germany.
It's actually much much worse. Hitler never dictated that people be genetically engineered in order to keep their jobs.
I'm not sure if this is satire, but if it isn't you can look over for some history you may have never heard of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation
This comes across as more than a little bit fanciful, nevertheless I agree with the sentiment. There's an awful lot of people on the sidelines with their eyes on gaining control over software with intentions that are not at all reflected by what they state publicly. We do not need some political body to come "help", they have no understanding of what makes this work in the first place and nothing of value to contribute.
All free (as in beer) work on software is voluntary. You do not need, and should not have, someone breathing down your neck to make you do it the way they want. However, that person is free to decide to allocate additional effort to work on the software themselves - even forking yours. They're also free to decide how much open source software they want to use, and which.
This is something I used to misunderstand too. That open source was something where there were a fixed set of projects available, one or two for each purpose, and if you wanted a change, you contributed that change and they take it. In reality, it's where everyone has their own project that does the thing they want. Most are written by one person or by tight-knit groups. Drive-by contributions often cost as much for the developers to process as just doing the contribution themselves. If you don't like how some software works, you have the right to write your own software using the existing software as a starting point - you do not have a right to edit the existing project. These are the same rights the UN has.