[HN Gopher] France's homegrown open source online office suite
___________________________________________________________________
France's homegrown open source online office suite
Author : nar001
Score : 642 points
Date : 2026-02-07 13:34 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| jmclnx wrote:
| Very nice.
|
| You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open
| Source presence, but they do. Over the years I have heard of many
| good Open Source Projects coming out of France.
|
| I sometimes wonder if it is because of French vs English Language
| were you hardly hear of their projects in English speaking
| Countries.
| akdev1l wrote:
| Isn't VLC French also?
| jodrellblank wrote:
| OCaml and early Prolog are from France:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Colmerauer
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Institute_for_Research_.
| .. (INRIA)
| Galanwe wrote:
| Also QEmu and ffmpeg.
|
| Also Docker.
|
| Also Lichess.
|
| Also Scikit Learn.
| astrolx wrote:
| I think an unsung hero in making open source broadly known and
| adopted in France is Framasoft [https://framasoft.org/en/], a
| non-profit association. They have since many many years an
| initiative to de-google internet and provide free and hosted
| alternatives and resources.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| +1 on this, they had an amazing presence in the French
| community for 20 years and many of us own them our passion
| for FOSS.
| culi wrote:
| More people on HN seem to know of PeerTube than know of
| FramaSoft, the group that's building PeerTube
| caned wrote:
| Two words: Fabrice Bellard
| bsenftner wrote:
| The French have amazing technologists, I worked with many
| stunningly brilliant French men and women across 3D gaming,
| film and media production. However, culturally they end up in a
| little "French pod" when not working in France because they
| know how to and really enjoy vigorous debate. If one cannot
| hold their own in their free wheeling intellectualized
| conversation and debate style, one might end up feeling
| insulted and stop hanging out with the frogs. There also seems
| to be a deep cultural understanding of design that is not
| present in people, generally, from other nations. That creates
| some interesting perspectives in software interactive design.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good
| Open Source presence
|
| France has always been super heavy on open source. They even
| used to host Les Trophees du Libre, international open-source
| software competition. FramaSoft (i.e. PeerTube) and VLC are
| also French.
| tokai wrote:
| >would not think of France as having a good Open Source
| presence
|
| You have not been paying attention.
| ginko wrote:
| What's the value of it being online? Surely being able to run it
| as a native application would be preferable?
| LunaSea wrote:
| It means that it is de-facto compatible with all operating
| systems.
|
| Also means that the tooling to make collaborative work in this
| suite possible already exists because it's a common use case on
| the web and less so on native software (see Microsoft Office
| vs. Microsoft 365 online).
| mimasama wrote:
| Sure, "all" operating systems. "All" that is OSes that have a
| web browser built for it that at least supports
| [TransformStream](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/API/TransformSt...)... And the browser and spec
| written and maintained mostly by people outside of France.
| Kinda compromises the point of being "sovereign" doesn't it?
| touisteur wrote:
| Forking Firefox whenever the rug is pulled seems doable
| (with elbow grease), and in the meantime Europeans can
| invest on problems that don't have an already mature fully
| open-source solution.
| ddulaney wrote:
| There are definitely some benefits! Installation and updates
| become trivial. Also, collaboration is generally easier,
| because all you have to do is send a link.
|
| These are the same reasons Google Docs took off, and they are
| real advantages.
| vman81 wrote:
| Managing documents on the back end can be very sensible,
| depending on your work context. Not having to deal with
| installations is also a real advantage in a heterogeneous
| environment with a mix of US-controlled operating systems and
| unencumbered OSes. It also makes migration between them easier,
| since you only need a common browser to be supported.
| goodmythical wrote:
| For those unaware, this is likely in response to the current US
| political crisis in which the US might decide at any point spike
| the prices or stop offering licenses on Microsoft etc products.
| sejje wrote:
| The first version for the "docs" program was released in May
| 2024
| simion314 wrote:
| This already happened when USA sanctioned ICC judge, blocking
| them from american services. With such special leadership I
| will not surprised USA to block politicians or citizens with
| influence from EU that do not align with extreme right views,
| Muromec wrote:
| I posted about Amsterdam municipality digital strategy for
| next 10 years (tldr dont use azure clown for important stuff)
| yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46917768
|
| That one explivitly cites the ICC judge incident as one of
| the reasons, even zo the motion to reduce dependence on
| American big tech was voted before that happened
| weberer wrote:
| Its part of La Suite which began planning in 2023. This is
| clearly marked in the linked README. Don't bring /r/politics
| level misinfo and speculation here.
| padjo wrote:
| Makes sense, using an office suite hosted by a hostile power
| isn't a very smart longterm strategy.
| trolleski wrote:
| Politicians in the EU are complicit to say the least. And I
| hope they'll prove me wrong.
| Winblows11 wrote:
| Yes I remember when UK regulator blocked Microsoft from buying
| Activision there were posts on r/Microsoft regarding their
| ability to send update to brick all Windows installs in UK and
| delete all Azure data of UK companies, how UK was a small
| insignificant market compared to BRICs so it wouldn't hurt MSFT
| stock price.
|
| Given JD Vance obviously hates UK/EU way more than Trump, and
| he may be next US president, he may in fact threaten Microsoft
| to do it against UK and EU.
| bee_rider wrote:
| On one hand the dependence on Microsoft is generally bad.
|
| On the other, we shouldn't take the opinions of the sort of
| fan who hangs around on a corporation's subreddit too
| seriously.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| The trend up until the 2010s was that global companies were so
| big and ubiquitous that they could dictate the economic actions
| of nations, not the other way around. International military
| conflicts were influenced by the likes of Halliburton.
| Corporations were the new nation-states, countries were mere
| speed bumps in the flow of global capital. That was seen by
| some as a great thing, aligning everyone's interests together
| and encouraging peace.
|
| In that world, France betting on Microsoft is not only benign,
| it's a positive. That's also the world of Davos and Jeffrey
| Epstein.
|
| We're experiencing a global shift toward nationalism which has
| pushed back hard on that trend. There's things to like about
| that and things to dislike, but those things differ wildly
| depending on your politics.
| thrance wrote:
| I'd say it goes beyond nationalism. Even countries that
| haven't succumbed to the far right are forced to play by the
| new rules. I've heard some refer to it as "neomercantilism".
| samsonradu wrote:
| Wondering what software are China/Russia using in their public
| administration?
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Local LibreOffice forks. And MS Office, of course.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| MS office is pretty secure and private once you put a
| "Great Firewall" that blocks most outgoing/incoming
| connections.
| forty wrote:
| Great, but why on GitHub? That doesn't seem very souverain to me
| progx wrote:
| I wait for frenchhub, in french only, no english translation,
| nothing. Typical french. Greetings from you EU neighbor.
| bee_rider wrote:
| A lot of the documentation in La Suite seems to be available
| in English.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| The project benefits from the visibilityband community of
| GitHub and GitHub is completely replaceable with European
| hosted or self-hostable options should something untoward
| happen.
| michelsedgh wrote:
| But they still chose an American company, github, lol ironic
| nolroz wrote:
| It's the code that's hosted on GitHub, not the documents.
| Easier to move, easier to negotiate a move. You get
| visibility and easy distribution until they feel the need
| to bail.
| seszett wrote:
| There's nothing ironic, as since the GP said there is no
| risk associated with GitHub. Git fundamentally prevents
| vendor lock-in and tampering, and the project is open, so
| the US have no leverage and pose no threat at all here.
| michelsedgh wrote:
| its not about leverage or threat, same as the office
| products, the french owned their docs at the end of the
| day, i thought it was about sovereignty and using french
| alternatives?
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| If you have the docs, but not the means to (legally) read
| and edit them, do you really own them?
|
| When MS pulls services you are largely screwed.
|
| When GitHub pulls services its a few hours downtime and a
| new provider.
| faust201 wrote:
| With that argument we are discussing this on...errr US -
| the organization that perhaps grew those companies.
|
| The word is not ironic it is pragmatic.
| saubeidl wrote:
| Cause that's where the traction is. The beauty of git is that
| it's inherently distributed, github is just a clone like any
| other.
| Rexxar wrote:
| Git is distributed, the repository can be hosted concurrently
| at many places.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| and the primary place they chose is owned by Microsoft
| saubeidl wrote:
| I would strongly assume the primary place is on some French
| government server somewhere and this is just the public
| mirror.
| nacozarina wrote:
| Underrated point: Bldg #1 needs to be sovereign hub for
| initiatives, for which OP is providing a first tenant...
| nickthesick wrote:
| Not sure that it's relevant to switch git hosts is trivial. And
| everyone is already there
| LunaSea wrote:
| GitHub is using Git which was developed by Linus Thorvald, a
| Finish and thus EU citizen.
|
| That does not sound very sovereign by the US to me.
| halapro wrote:
| GitHub is literally Microsoft. US company with servers in the
| US. What you're talking about is the underlying technology.
| jraph wrote:
| There's a huge difference between the origin of some open
| source software, where a service is hosted and where the
| company providing it is from.
|
| You can take some open source software made in some other
| country and use it or fork it no strings attached to its
| country of origin. No leader from that country can decide to
| abruptly cut you off your usage of the software because they
| feel like it.
| prmoustache wrote:
| given git is decentralized, my guess is github is just a public
| mirror.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Hmm, and what of https://cryptpad.fr/
|
| Though they also seem to be on github
| https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad
| nickthesick wrote:
| Made X-Wiki unrelated just happen to be the same country
| jraph wrote:
| CryptPad is:
|
| - an office suite, where La Suite is at least partly a coherent
| package bundling existing software which has documents, chat,
| video calls, etc but wouldn't really play the role of an office
| suite IIUC - they serve different purposes mostly
|
| - E2EE, which comes with its unique set of benefits and
| drawbacks
|
| (and yes, sadly at XWiki SAS we host our code on GitHub too, I
| wish it wasn't like this)
| okanat wrote:
| Okay this is nowhere near an "Office suite". It is a cloud
| collaboration suite with a glorified markdown editor and with
| some extra utilities around. Almost nobody buys stuff like Google
| Docs and Microsoft Office for this reason.
|
| From my experience using open-source collaboration groupware like
| Nextcloud, their solutions written in dynamic programming
| languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow. Only
| thing that got somewhere near of the commercial offering is
| OwnCloud's Infinity Scale (OCIS) which is written in Go. It is no
| surprise since OwnCloud is indeed running an open-core business
| and you cannot use their binaries in businesses. OpenCloud is the
| "open-source" fork but they are already in legal trouble with
| OwnCloud due to industrial espionage claims.
|
| If European governments are serious, the amount of money they
| _guarantee_ should be in the degree of tens of billions of Euros.
| Not fun 10k hackaton projects. The money should be secured
| immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments.
| It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as
| Europeans should be ready to pay it. And yes it will probably
| cause whatever current party to lose elections, independence has
| a price. It is high.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| > solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP
| and Python are always woefully slow
|
| True as it may be that they are slow, I doubt it's _caused_ by
| the use of dynamic programming languages.
|
| > The money should be secured immediately that cannot be
| touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes.
| Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to
| pay it.
|
| You do you, but increasing taxes to build products to replace
| products built by private enterprise sounds like a 180 degree
| opposite of what Europe needs to prosper.
| xedrac wrote:
| > I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming
| languages.
|
| Depends which ones. Python? Definitely a source of slowness.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| Hard imagining well designed web app bottlenecked by
| server-side processing that is not offloaded to database,
| or done via bindings to libraries written in compiled
| languages.
| consp wrote:
| > Definitely a source of slowness.
|
| I would first blame the programmers, the design and lack of
| specialty offloading before blaming any programming
| language. Well designed web calls scale nearly linearly
| with usage and usually poor design or programming is the
| source of slowness. You can always trade language
| complexity for speed but assuming it is the cause of all
| perceived slowness is a poor man's view.
|
| It is the same story every time again, first it was java,
| which has so many large scale projects most people won't
| even know it's running things they use, now it's apparently
| python who is to blame for all slowness on the web. When
| the next JIT or scripted language comes along which is not
| someone's favourite pet that will get the blame.
| array_key_first wrote:
| Python _is_ slow, though, and so was java compared to
| other compiled languages of its time. Sure, it might not
| matter much if you 're mostly doing database calls. If
| you're not, though, then yes, it's the languages fault if
| your app is slow. You can try to make it faster, but it's
| gonna be marginal gains. Or, you could just switch to
| another language and get a 100x speedup for free.
|
| I also denounce the notion that trading language
| complexity for slowness is the case. Python is already
| complex, and there's some language and frameworks that
| are actually quite a bit easier to use for web backends.
| Like java, or dotnet. It just makes no sense to use
| python for this usecase, even if you ignore the slowness.
|
| But that's not completely true, there is one very good
| reason to use python. Your devs know it. But, that doesnt
| say anything about the language itself.
| mekoka wrote:
| Is this not a discussion about a web application? Order of
| magnitude matters. If Python is slower than Rust by 2
| orders, but faster than IO by another 2 orders, are you not
| haggling just to shave off a few dimes on your 100 dollar
| bill?
| echelon wrote:
| > You do you, but increasing taxes to build products to
| replace products built by private enterprise sounds like a
| 180 degree opposite of what Europe needs to prosper.
|
| Shhh, don't tell them.
|
| (Kidding, of course.)
|
| The best solution is skin-in-the-game, for-profit enterprise
| coupled with rigorous antitrust enforcement.
|
| Companies will go a million times faster than open source.
| They're greedy and will tear the skin off of inefficiencies
| and eat them for lunch. That's what they do. Let the system
| of capitalism work for you. It's an optimization algorithm.
| One of the very best.
|
| But when companies get too big and start starving off
| competition, that's when you need to declaw them and restore
| evolutionary pressure. Even lions should have to work hard to
| hunt, and they should starve and die with old age to keep the
| ecosystem thriving.
| roblabla wrote:
| > The best solution is skin-in-the-game, for-profit
| enterprise coupled with rigorous antitrust enforcement.
|
| Don't we have enough examples showing that this simply
| cannot work long-term, because the for-profit enterprises
| will _inevitably_ grow larger than the government can
| handle through antitrust? And once they reach that size,
| they become impossible to rein in. Just look at all the
| stupid large american corporations who can't be broken up
| anymore because the corporation has the lobbying power and
| media budget to make any attempt to enforce antitrust a
| carrier killer for a politician.
|
| I think it's very myopic to say that corporate structure is
| the "best solution".
| nickpp wrote:
| > to make any attempt to enforce antitrust a carrier
| killer for a politician
|
| Any example of a politician carrier killed by an attempt
| to enforce antitrust?
| saubeidl wrote:
| Biden.
|
| Him putting Lisa Khan in charge of antitrust enraged the
| tech oligarchs, who then all went MAGA and bought Trump
| the election.
| nickpp wrote:
| > went MAGA and bought Trump the election
|
| Didn't Harris actually raise and spend _more_ than Trump
| on that election?
| saubeidl wrote:
| Yeah but the tech spend was way more effective. Elon took
| over Twitter.
| nickpp wrote:
| So no, they didn't "bought Trump the election".
|
| And the fact that a 3rd party supports an opponent does
| not kill any politician's career. Biden retired by
| himself, following his own party's pressure. And Harris
| is still around, I believe.
| saubeidl wrote:
| Of course they did. They used their capital to influence
| democracy. That's capitalism baby!
| megaman821 wrote:
| It seems like you have an unfalsifiable belief. If one
| side raises more money and wins, it because of the money.
| If one side raises more money and loses, it is still the
| money because the other side spend it more effectively.
| saubeidl wrote:
| You almost got it. _We all lose_ as long as money
| determines power in social relations.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| No a bad thing if you desire the corporate power to
| eventually become the main force shaping the world :)
| ericd wrote:
| It's building infrastructure, which should lower costs in the
| long term. Seems like a good use of money from where I'm
| sitting.
| bigfudge wrote:
| This is pre MAGA thinking. Investing in strategic industries
| that otherwise pose systemic risk to European economies
| wouldn't be our first choice, but it's now necessary.
| abtinf wrote:
| It's called mercantilism. It was thoroughly refuted
| hundreds of years ago.
| braiamp wrote:
| Yes, but apparently the biggest players now abuse their
| comparative advantage positions. So, we are back to
| mercantilism to the detriment of all humanity.
| drnick1 wrote:
| > True as it may be that they are slow, I doubt it's caused
| by the use of dynamic programming languages.
|
| Yes it is. It's the same reason desktop GUI apps are now
| slower than Windows 95-era apps that were written in C.
| superze wrote:
| To make matters worse, they are using Django. I can't take the
| EU serious any more.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| What issue do you have with Django?
|
| This is not a situation where you'll have thousands of people
| editing the same document, that'd be insane with Django for
| sure - but at general collaboration tooling with <100 (random
| number I made up) editing, Django is unlikely gonna be the
| bottleneck
| spwa4 wrote:
| Does it really need explaining why Office 365/Google Docs
| cannot be written in Django?
| cromka wrote:
| Yes
| busterarm wrote:
| This is very obvious.
|
| What part of your document editor needs to be backed by a
| relational database?
|
| Why use an MVT system if you don't need the Model part of
| it?
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Would love to hear that explanation why it is IMPOSSIBLE
| (not that Rust would be faster or use less resources but
| why it can't be written)
| speedgoose wrote:
| What would you use instead?
| spwa4 wrote:
| Something like this that's proven itself:
| https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-
| time-...
|
| TLDR: C++, WASM, and some form of GRPC with C++ on the
| server side as well. Because you need a language that's
| fast, can contain high complexity and large programs
| without collapsing (which is a short list of languages) and
| can work fast for the bits that need speed.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I'm my opinion, you have to be kinda masochist to choose
| C++ for this. Web development is hard in C++.
|
| But thanks for answering honestly.
| spwa4 wrote:
| In my opinion one inherent property of languages is how
| large the largest program is that can be written in those
| languages. There's languages that work well for short
| programs. Bash, perl are examples on one end of the
| spectrum. Then you have things like lisp and Python where
| the largest programs are a lot larger already, but still
| hit obvious limits. And then you have the languages that
| support really large codebases. Java, C++ are ones
| currently in use.
|
| There's new languages where it's a bit of an open
| question still where they lie on the spectrum. Go would
| be one of them. I'd guess somewhere between Python and
| Java. Javascript I would argue is between perl and
| python. And Rust ... well ... good question.
|
| An office suite is a gigantic application, which will
| need feature upon feature upon feature upon feature. If
| you want it working on the web, I'd propose something
| like C++ and WASM.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| Wt actually isn't terrible, with the added benefit of
| being able to leverage the enormous c/c++ library
| ecosystem. Also, it can be quite fast if you care for it
| to be.
|
| Edit: also appears to be based in the eu, how fitting for
| this thread.
|
| https://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt
| macNchz wrote:
| That article is seemingly all about the perf of the
| complex frontend app with a custom renderer running in
| the browser, nothing to do with what's happening on the
| server.
| shimman wrote:
| What an asinine comment, Django is good enough for several
| billion dollar companies. It's probably good enough to use in
| a government capacity too.
| cbdevidal wrote:
| It really depends on how it's used. I love Django in
| certain specific situations. You know that saying though
| about when you have a hammer, everything looks like a
| nail...
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| What has that to do with the EU?
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| Django is perfectly capable. I'd use Phoenix for its
| scalability and performance, if it were me, but I've built
| large-scale projects in Django before, and it worked well.
| sgt wrote:
| Read this (among other articles on the same subject):
| https://medium.com/@tk512/django-scales-stop-blaming-the-
| fra...
| whoamii wrote:
| Or maybe the solution must be one rooted in _reducing_ taxes.
| Make investing extremely attractively, and stop relying on
| taxes to solve everything.
| coredev_ wrote:
| I do not agree, I don't want EU to turn to US. Taxes should
| be on a level to support the welfare state.
| Nesco wrote:
| Which it can't. There is nothing to disagree about. With
| current demographics projection no amount of taxes can
| cover welfare states
| ecshafer wrote:
| The welfare state can not exist in world where the
| government is against population growth. You cant have a
| robust welfare state and make through policy and
| propaganda 4+ child families rare. We need an exponential
| curve of population to maintain it, especialy when its at
| european levels. Mass immigration of uneducated people
| from low income countries doesnt cover the gap,
| especially when the government extends welfare to them.
|
| This is all a fact.
| braiamp wrote:
| With how many statements of fact you make, you are pretty
| wrong. There's not one of them being right. We have
| enough productivity that a minuscule part of the
| population can produce and distribute the basic needs for
| every human on earth. There's literally humans that can't
| find jobs to do because we don't educate them well enough
| to go and offer services that other humans need. Not only
| that, we try to say that they don't deserve enough pay to
| supply their basic needs.
|
| And yes, I'm talking about teachers and medics. We don't
| have enough of either, because we don't pay them enough
| compared to their workload. Those things we will always
| need, in great quantities to support our population.
| Greater quantities than engineers, architects,
| researchers, etc. but guess where everyone flocks because
| it pays more?
|
| - https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/250330/9789
| 24151...
|
| - https://ipsnoticias.net/2022/10/el-mundo-
| necesita-69-millone...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| A welfare state that was genuinely targeted to serving
| basic needs of the population would look _vastly_
| different from present-day France and other comparable
| countries. Take a look at Singapore; last I checked, it
| was not known as a place where people might be at risk of
| starving. The underlying problem is that people expect
| the welfare state to solve issues of _social_
| marginalization, which are actually the result of fraying
| social capital as opposed to a mere lack of resources.
| Welfare states make these issues actively worse, not
| better.
|
| For instance, when every employer (including those that
| may be only marginally successful to begin with) is
| expected as a matter of law to extend onerous labor
| protections against firing and laying off to each and
| every worker,[0] this results in marginal workers (who
| may have been socially marginalized originally for
| reasons of ethnic heritage and the like) being completely
| excluded from the market, which makes their plight even
| worse. (Except for forms of "gig work" or informal
| employment, of course - which in practice function to
| sidestep the most onerous regulations to some extent.) A
| very relevant issue in present-day France.
|
| [0] And to fund those costly welfare programs through
| payroll contributions that are levied on employees and
| employers alike - which is its own issue and often
| amounts to exploitive, confiscatory taxation for the most
| marginal workers.
| kuerbel wrote:
| _cracks fingers_
|
| The last sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a
| post that collapses if poked gently with a stick.
|
| "The welfare state cannot exist without exponential
| population growth."
|
| Sounds mathy, but is wrong. Welfare states do not require
| exponential population growth. They require a sufficient
| ratio of contributors to dependents, plus productivity.
| Those are not the same thing.
|
| Exponential curves + limited resources = ecological
| faceplant. No serious economist argues that infinite
| demographic growth is a prerequisite for social
| insurance. What they talk about instead are levers: labor
| participation, productivity, retirement age, automation,
| taxation structure, and yes, migration.
|
| "Government policy makes 4+ child families rare."
|
| Prosperity itself lowers fertility. Governments can nudge
| at the margins, but they are not mind-controlling people
| out of large families. Most people stop at one or two
| kids because time, money, energy, housing, and sanity are
| finite.
|
| "Mass immigration of uneducated people doesn't cover the
| gap."
|
| Ah, bundling multiple claims into a single blur.
| Efficient, but sloppy. Refugees are not permanently
| "uneducated"; education and skills are state-dependent,
| not genetic properties. (Except if you are one of those
| right-wing grifters that think only white people are
| capable of intelligence, and maybe east asians. Those
| people get a hearty fuck you from me, that is not worth
| discussing at all). Early years cost money; later years
| often don't. But you know what, the same is true _for
| children_.
|
| Fourth argument: "Extending welfare to immigrants makes
| it worse."
|
| This assumes welfare is a static pot rather than a system
| designed to convert non-participants into participants.
| Welfare states don't exist just to reward contributors;
| they exist to stabilize societies over time. Cutting
| people off doesn't magically turn them into productive
| workers. Quite often it does the opposite.
|
| Now, let's zoom out a bit for the real category error
| here. Modern welfare system are intergenerational risk-
| sharing mechanisms, not growth cults.
|
| "This is all a fact."
|
| Sure thing buddy
| ipaddr wrote:
| "Prosperity itself lowers fertility"
|
| This is not true. Women entering the workforce instead of
| having babies earlier in life lowers prosperity. In our
| society women working during those early years creates
| more prosperity (two incomes) but those who are very rich
| like Musk has no issue producing a big stable of kids.
| gramie wrote:
| I don't believe that there is a single case in world
| history where increased family income did NOT reduce the
| number of children per family. Likewise with improvements
| in child mortality.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Refugees are not permanently "uneducated"
|
| But why import uneducated immigrants when you could
| import educated ones instead? The Canadian model has been
| a resounding success on that front and European countries
| should copy it. (And no, the "brain drain" argument
| doesn't really hold water. The successful migrants/expats
| tend to go back to their homelands after a while and
| become a much needed force for progress there, if there's
| even the slightest scope for actual improvement.)
| kuerbel wrote:
| You're mixing up refugees and economic migrants, which
| makes the argument collapse immediately.
|
| Refugees are not "imported." They are people fleeing war,
| persecution, or state collapse under international law
| obligations that Europe helped write. You don't get to
| say "we'll take the engineers, but not the bombed-out
| schoolteachers." Treating asylum like a points-based
| talent visa is a category error, not a policy preference.
|
| The brain drain argument absolutely does hold water.
| Systematically pulling scarce doctors, engineers, and
| academics out of low-income or fragile states weakens
| those societies. Some people return and contribute, yes,
| but many don't, and many return to systems too damaged to
| absorb their skills. That's not controversial. It's well
| documented in development economics.
|
| What's being presented as "common sense" here is really a
| value judgement: that human worth should be ranked by
| immediate economic utility to the receiving country.
| That's not a fact, and it's not how real migration
| systems actually work.
|
| If the goal is serious policy discussion, collapsing
| refugees, migrants, education, and prosperity into a
| single slogan doesn't get you there. It just makes the
| world simpler than it is.
|
| One more point about the word "import," because language
| matters in how we think about policy.
|
| Describing people as being "imported" frames migration as
| a centrally planned, top-down process, rather than as a
| response to war, persecution, economic collapse, or
| climate pressure. It shifts attention away from those
| underlying causes and toward the idea that governments
| are deliberately "bringing people in" as if they were
| interchangeable inputs.
|
| That framing makes it easier to talk about migrants in
| abstract, instrumental terms, sorted by usefulness rather
| than understood as people reacting to circumstances, and
| it tends to oversimplify how migration actually works in
| practice, which is far more reactive and constrained than
| intentional or engineered.
|
| Being precise about language helps keep the discussion
| grounded in reality rather than drifting into metaphors
| that flatten complex human movement into something it
| isn't.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Statistics differ, but refugees granted protection range
| from a single-digit percentage of recent immigration into
| France to about ~15% or so (other countries have a
| somewhat larger share, including other European
| countries). It's true that many people tend to conflate
| proper refugees and economic migrants to whom a points-
| system might apply, but this is a general problem with
| how migration policy is discussed on all sides of the
| political spectrum, not something that's original to my
| comment.
|
| Want to admit more refugees without endangering social
| cohesion? Then you should make sure that you're _also_
| carefully selecting your economic migrants as best you
| can. It 's not a matter of assigning different human
| worth to each, but of simultaneously abiding by legal
| obligations towards actual refugees that are binding for
| the country, and _also_ trying to do the absolute best
| you can for the highest amount of people who might be
| wanting to expatriate to it for different but nonetheless
| valid reasons - without unduly burdening that country and
| society in the process.
| lII1lIlI11ll wrote:
| > You cant have a robust welfare state and make through
| policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare.
|
| I'm curios what do you mean by this. Could you provide
| some examples of such policies or propaganda campaigns?
| ecshafer wrote:
| Legalizing abortion, unneeded regulations that require
| car seats at later ages which disincentivize more
| children for lack of car space, zoning that removes green
| space and side walks in favor of car infrastructure,
| expensive education and health insurance (family premiums
| are insane compared to individual), incentivizing two
| worker house holds through tax policy.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Health insurance? Are you sure you are talking about
| welfare states and not America? Which welfare state has
| expensive education and health insurances?
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Hungary is a welfare state.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| That is obviously not true. You don't even define what a
| welfare state is or when a country stops being a welfare
| state.
| wtcactus wrote:
| Can you define it then? What point does it start and what
| point does it stop being a welfare state.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| It is a very abstract term. It is like "democracy". Yes,
| you can clearly say that North Korea is not a democracy.
| But US? Well, depends on who you ask.
|
| Same with welfare state. Which countries do you count as
| non-welfare states? And when do they stop being a welfare
| state? Let's take Poland as an example. When do they stop
| being a welfare state? If they lower the unemployment
| payments, will they stop being a welfare state?
|
| And at what timescale do you think Poland will stop
| existing because of demographics?
| nosianu wrote:
| > _Which it can't._
|
| The welfare state for corporate interests is alive and
| well though, and costs much more.
|
| (2025) "Corporate Welfare in the Federal Budget" --
| https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/corporate-welfare-
| feder...
|
| (2024)
| https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2024/07/16/100-years-of-
| risi...
|
| > _There is nothing to disagree about. With current
| demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover
| welfare states_
|
| Okay? Let's get rid of that much more expensive type of
| welfare then!
|
| As if we have "real capitalism" - not even on a scale of
| local bakeries any more. Even the small businesses often
| are just a shop owned by a corporation. Not that I'm
| against some level of concentration, a lot of economic
| activity requires it. A lot of products are too expensive
| and require a certain scale to be viable at all.
|
| What is the goal of economic activity anyway? For the few
| to live well, while the majority struggles? By "struggle"
| I don't mean that the majority already lives in the
| streets, to me it is enough that they have to be afraid.
| Of getting sick, of losing the job, of anything bad
| happening. I saw myself how a single unfortunate event
| could spiral out of control, and a guy making a lot of
| money in enterprise sales ended up alone, broken, and
| sick in the streets. I count all those having to fear
| such a development as part of the "losers", even if they
| are still making money and living in their house now.
| That fear, suppressed or not, should not be necessary,
| and it influences stress levels and decisions,
| consciously or not.
|
| I mean, you are also right with your message, and I
| actually agree.
|
| The flow of money around and away from too many people
| should not be happening. Being part of the economy should
| be easy for the majority, and real "welfare" should only
| be necessary for the sick and otherwise temporarily or
| fully disabled.
|
| If a lot of normal people need welfare, something is not
| right.
|
| But then you need an economy that provides those easy
| options to participate and get enough of a share.
|
| You also need a system where an unfortunate event (or
| some) does not put you into an unescapable downward
| spiral, and provide a way back into the economy.
| wtcactus wrote:
| The average rate of social security and tax state
| contributions from French workers is now 47% of the total
| gross wage (EDIT this was corrected, the original figure
| stated on Wikipedia is much higher and it's wrong).
|
| The French state spends 57% of all French GDP [2]. For
| context, this is higher than what the Soviet Union spent in
| the years before the communist regimen felt (41% to 47%
| during the 1980s [3]).
|
| How much taxes shall we pay to "support our independence"?
| Will I be allowed to keep at least 10% of what I earn, or
| am I supposed to give it all to the state to live in this
| wonderful Socialist utopia?
|
| And here you are, asking to increase taxes even more. The
| only way out of this madness is a civil war. We are past
| any sanity left.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_France
|
| [2] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/government-at-a-
| glance-...
|
| [3] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/display/book/9781557755186
| /ch05...
|
| EDIT: The wikipedia page is indeed wrong: "The overall rate
| of social security and tax on the average wage in 2022 was
| 82% of gross salary". This was the tax wedge of these 2
| contributions, not the average tax on wage as the Wikipedia
| page states. Average tax on gross wage in France is 47%.
| The worker then has to pay VAT and other fees/taxes from
| the remaining 53%.
| kuerbel wrote:
| 82% tax wedge is not the same as taxes, or even the
| contribution of an individual.
|
| Also nobody is talking about taxing income even more.
|
| I do agree however with the sanity part, although I think
| of a whole different subset of people than you.
| braiamp wrote:
| Effective tax rate is what you should be looking at. The
| most efficient tax rate is one that describes a
| exponential saturation, where it starts growing faster
| once it reaches the point where you have too much wealth.
| skywal_l wrote:
| [2] You include pension, healthcare and education in this
| number. What would be the equivalent number in, say, the
| US if you were to include all this?
| lII1lIlI11ll wrote:
| > What would be the equivalent number in, say, the US if
| you were to include all this?
|
| Isn't it the point OP is making - France has much higher
| taxes compared to US because the state provides pensions,
| healthcare and higher education and US don't?
| abtinf wrote:
| Your wiki link contains only a single random reference to
| that number, and the page it links to justify it doesn't
| exist.
| ul5255 wrote:
| How did you arrive at 82% of salary being taken by taxes
| and social security? I read the Wikipedia article but I
| don't how the numbers would add up to 82%.
| handelaar wrote:
| > "The average rate of social security and tax state
| contributions from French workers is now 82% of their
| salary"
|
| This might be the most insane comment I've ever seen on
| this forum.
|
| What in the hell are you talking about? Did you actually
| read that first link, completely fail to understand a
| single word of it, and then the number 82 just magically
| fell out of the sky?
| boomskats wrote:
| None of what you've just said can be verified by looking
| at any of the references you just posted. However having
| just read through that wikipedia page, I realised that
| there I'd be paying almost half the income tax I pay
| living in the UK.
|
| So yeah, thanks I guess. Now I really really want to move
| to France.
| well_ackshually wrote:
| Man, life must be easy when you can't read and just get
| to make things up online. Especially when things such as
| the URSSAF's simulation tool is like, freely available
| online: https://mon-
| entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-ne...
| giving you a copy of a pay slip with detailed amounts of
| where your money goes.
|
| Someone making 2500EUR gross will take home 1885EUR per
| month after taxes and contributions. On which you can add
| a 20% VAT. Even should you want to operate in incredibly
| bad faith and add employer contributions, it would only
| amount to 3175 in total. For fun, I tried to figure out
| what would be needed for someone to have 82% of their
| salary going away into taxes. It is physically impossible
| to go anywhere above 55%, the math just stops scaling.
| Even taking employer costs into account, the max will be
| 65%. This all starts happening when you have the lowly
| gross salary of about 30 000EUR/month, something that I'm
| sure you're being paid right now to complain about to
| much about it.
|
| Hell, even the damn link you're posting shows that you
| can't read:
|
| > In France, income tax and employer social security
| contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax
| wedge, compared with 77% of the total OECD average tax
| wedge
|
| What the fuck do you think tax brackets cover, ponies ?
| And acting offended about it like it's some unacceptable
| thing when the OECD average is... 5 percentage point
| lower ?
|
| > 82% of the average gross salary in France is indeed
| taken by the state,
|
| You literally can't read.
|
| > In other words, in France the take-home pay of an
| average single worker, after tax and benefits, was 71.9%
| of their gross wage
|
| > his means that an average married worker with two
| children in France had a take-home pay, after tax and
| family benefits, of 83.1% of their gross wage
|
| Now, there are ways to solve these expenses, they involve
| cutting all pensions. I'm sure you'll be okay with
| letting your parents, and mine, die, right ?
| wtcactus wrote:
| Well, life isn't that easy then, because you failed to
| comprehend URSSAF's simulation tool.
|
| On a EUR2500 gross salary you take home EUR1651 (which is
| a very low salary in France very close to the minimum
| salary). But I guess you think the gross salary is what
| the company, by law, has to say they pay you, instead of
| what the total cost for the company of your salary.
|
| See, in France, even if you are getting close to the
| minimum salary, the state is taking 33% of the cake for
| themselves. This is for people that earn very little. For
| people that earn average salaries of EUR2669 liquid
| (EUR5000 gross for the company), the French state takes
| 47% of the cake.
|
| It's a normal mistake for people that don't actually have
| to support the costs themselves. Once people actually
| start a small business or pay more attention to their own
| wages and how much is being taken away, they figure out
| how it actually works.
| well_ackshually wrote:
| >It's a normal mistake for people that don't actually
| have to support the costs themselves. Once people
| actually start a small business or pay more attention to
| their own wages and how much is being taken away, they
| figure out how it actually works.
|
| No, thank you, I am quite well versed in the concept of
| superbrut, and actively pay more than a SMIC in taxes
| every year: you won't play that game with me. Va jouer,
| comme on dit.
|
| They're employer _contributions_ to the system. They're
| the price you pay for a healthy, well educated working
| population.
|
| You don't get to claim it as "it would be your salary",
| because we both damn well know you'd never pay that back
| into the salary should it go away. We've had the
| experience every time, with tax writeoffs on SMICs, VAT
| lowered to 5.5% which led to zero jobs created and no
| changes in employment conditions, etc. You might even be
| old enough to remember the MEDEF's "1 million jobs" pin,
| where they created... 20k. Cool. The reality of things
| is, you as an employer cannot be trusted to not fuck over
| employees, especially the weakest and most vulnerable of
| us all.
|
| Once again, your own damn links prove that 1/ France
| isn't that far off the OECD average for taxation and 2/
| actually does better in not slapping in a bunch of
| unrelated crap in taxes.
| pqtyw wrote:
| > They're employer _contributions_ to the system
|
| No, they are the taxes you pay that are not shown on your
| payslip.
|
| > They're the price you pay for a healthy, well educated
| working population
|
| Yes, you as a worker pay it.
|
| > back into the salary should it go away
|
| It would be trivial for the government to make sure it
| does.
| well_ackshually wrote:
| No, they're not. As a proof, should my employer stop
| paying them, _my wages will not rise to match what they
| stopped paying_.
|
| >It would be trivial for the government to make sure it
| does.
|
| Yes, and we assume a spherical cow in a vacuum, I know.
| pqtyw wrote:
| > even should you want to operate in incredibly bad faith
| and add employer contributions,
|
| How is that bad faith? It's basic common sense to count
| that together. Total cost is what matters to employers.
| You can't compare different countries either if you don't
| hacks like this that try to confuse the workers about how
| much they are paying.
|
| e.g.
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Payro
| ll_...
|
| taxes in Denmark are presumably several times higher than
| in France?
| well_ackshually wrote:
| The subject is not employers, don't get sidetracked. I
| don't particularly give a shit about employer's costs
| either.
|
| The initial claim is "82% of wages go to taxes", which is
| inaccurate, a lie and a bad faith argument.
| qqrot wrote:
| Unfortunately you (and of course the wikipedia page)
| misunderstood the OECD document [1], which says:
|
| "In France, income tax and employer social security
| contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax
| wedge, compared with 77% of the total OECD average tax
| wedge."
|
| Note how it says "of the total tax wedge" not "of their
| salary.
|
| The tax wedge itself is 47.2% in 2024 in France. This is
| indeed high by international standards but nowhere as
| high as you claimed.
|
| [1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications
| /report...
| pyrale wrote:
| > The French state spends 57% of all French
|
| That figure is pretty tired. In France, the pension
| scheme is counted as public spending. In neighbouring
| countries, the very similar, mandatory, pension schemes
| count as private.
|
| The comparison makes little sense if you don't compare
| equivalent spending scopes, and equivalent service
| provided. If health care was to privatized, for instance,
| I'm pretty sure we would be worse off, but that number
| would go down.
|
| > The average rate of social security and tax state
| contributions from French workers is now 82% of their
| salary
|
| This figure, on the other hand, is straight up made-up
| bullshit. I dare you to find a salary that reaches 82% on
| URSSAF's salary simulator [1]. The OECD report quote is:
|
| > In France, income tax and employer social security
| contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax
| wedge
|
| 82% of the State's tax base are from income tax and
| social security contributions. That doesn't mean peopole
| are taxed 82% of their income.
|
| [1]: https://mon-
| entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-ne...
| lII1lIlI11ll wrote:
| > That figure is pretty tired. In France, the pension
| scheme is counted as public spending. In neighbouring
| countries, the very similar, mandatory, pension schemes
| count as private.
|
| That "very similar" does a lot of heavy lifting for you.
| Your neighboring Swiss pillars 2 and 3 and not similar at
| all - they are neither financial pyramids that depend on
| population growth, nor are they subject to some arbitrary
| "points adjustment" bullshit (a retiree takes out exactly
| what they put in without any shenanigans from politicians
| or "Agirc-Arrco board of directors").
|
| > If health care was to privatized, for instance, I'm
| pretty sure we would be worse off, but that number would
| go down.
|
| Care to elaborate why French middle class (we are on HN
| after all, not on Jacobin) would be worse off on Swiss
| health care model, for example?
| pyrale wrote:
| > That "very similar" does a lot of heavy lifting for
| you.
|
| The critical point if my claim is whether or not they are
| mandatory. Pillar 2 is mandatory for employees. Whether
| employees are forced to fork their cash to the state or
| to a private management company doesn't change the scheme
| or the benefits you get, but it changes OP's number.
|
| There's plenty more to say about the way pension schemes
| are set up, their benefits and drawbacks, but that's
| unrelated to my point.
|
| > Care to elaborate why French middle class (we are on HN
| after all, not on Jacobin) would be worse off on Swiss
| health care model, for example?
|
| I'm going to talk about the French as a whole here. The
| key metric to me is the share of money collected that is
| paid back to beneficiaries. In private insurance systems,
| it is usually between 75% and 90%. The french assurance
| maladie is between 96% and 99% [1].
|
| [1]: https://www.securite-sociale.fr/dossiers/quels-sont-
| les-cout...
| lucb1e wrote:
| > https:[...]?utm_source=chatgpt.com
|
| Considering the number of replies here saying "source
| does not contain claim" / "that is a misinterpretation of
| what it says"... LLMs are still autocomplete functions.
| Exceptionally good ones, but they don't reason. And they
| kiss your boots unprompted. Beware of whatever opinions
| this thing is justifying to you
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Stop relying on ~investors~ [the business oligarchy] to solve
| everything
| brigandish wrote:
| They're being asked, in this case, to solve a problem that
| business has already shown able to solve. More competition
| will also solve that oligarchy problem too.
| Krasnol wrote:
| No, more competition does obviously NOT solve
| oligarchies. It is what we see RIGHT NOW. It is OUT THERE
| NOW. Oligarchs buy up competition and either incorporate
| their ideas or make them disappear if they threaten their
| established business models.
|
| Why are you keep repeating this myth?
|
| The only relevant player who might break up oligarchies
| before they become to powerful is the state they operate
| in.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Having tax reduction as a primary goal is terrible for
| society, because taxes are the primary mechanism for
| converting money from rich people into services for
| everybody, particularly poor people.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| > taxes are the primary mechanism for converting money from
| rich people into services for everybody
|
| Even California billionaires would rather leave the state
| than pay the 5% wealth tax. All to provide "services" that
| are generally superfluous or tied to corrupt kickbacks.
| maxloh wrote:
| Scaling horizontally is significantly cheaper than the
| additional engineering cost required to build these
| applications in statically typed languages, especially in
| developed nations like France.
|
| The real bottleneck lies on the database side, but it is rare
| for an average organization to actually hit its limits. Don't
| think at Microsoft scale if you aren't them.
| ethanpailes wrote:
| Server costs actually matter quite a bit at the scales of the
| incumbents in this space. Also, speed can be an important
| part of UX. Scaling horizontally won't help if the engine
| itself is slow enough that there is noticeable lag even with
| just a single document getting edited by a dozen people.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| You don't need to raise taxes for this, literally just stop
| wasting money on licensees once the open source projects are
| ready. It's not a "let do it in 3 months" thing, this will take
| at least a decade.
| gryn wrote:
| > once the open source projects are ready.
|
| so likely a decade or more of double spending in the
| meanwhile.
|
| that's 2 election terms in France for context. Good luck
| making the political parties agree to this.
| gtirloni wrote:
| This likely won't need billions of Euros to implement and
| will be an earmark in the budget. My point being it's not
| such a grandious project, from a continental perspective.
| xp84 wrote:
| "Once ready" they'll save (somewhat) on licenses, what about
| paying for it during the years it will take to build it,
| while it's _not_ ready?
|
| When any random company makes a Build vs. Buy decision the
| question is "is this a core competency?" Most companies use a
| package from MS or GOOG because it's unlikely that they'll be
| so good at productivity software that it's (A) worth
| distracting themselves from their actual job and (B) good
| enough. The same caveats apply here.
| parchley wrote:
| No, suggestion those caveats show that you are out of touch
| with what is at stake. This is about digital sovereignty,
| not saving money. It's about not relying on the US. The US
| is literally forcing our hands here.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Honestly it's probably a good idea for governments to
| self host and self support anything that's important.
|
| >Microsoft Used China-Based Engineers to Support Product
| Recently Hacked by China
|
| https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-sharepoint-
| hack...
|
| Open source alternatives, audited by international teams
| could be much more trust worthy than closed sourced black
| boxes.
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| That explains why Android was not affected by Pegasus and
| Apple was.
| fn-mote wrote:
| You forgot the /s
|
| I suppose the assumption is that every HN reader follows
| headline hacking news, which is valid but still I did a
| double-take at the comment.
| Certhas wrote:
| Being able to operate sovereignly is a core competency for
| governments.
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| >sovereignly
|
| Minor powers still bend to the great powers.
| culi wrote:
| FramaSoft has been building "Degooglisons" since 2001
|
| https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/
| dmix wrote:
| These projects will always need funding indefinitely if they
| are going to do it.
|
| People always want more and it will never be finished.
| etiennebausson wrote:
| If the money is use to pay local developer, who reinvest
| most of it in a taxed local economy, it would need a HUGE
| amount of devs to match up the government's current MS
| license cost.
| kkfx wrote:
| A small note: in 2026, classic office suites shouldn't even
| exist in my opinion, so if the EU were to create a glorified
| R/Quarto, essentially a LaTeX wrapper with some basic
| calculation capabilities added, it would be infinitely better
| than any office suite.
|
| My personal setup is Emacs/org-mode, using babel for the rest;
| I use Python with Polars, Plotly, and very occasionally SymPy
| just to avoid using Maxima if I'm already in Python. I see no
| reason at all to use LibreOffice, MS Office, or anything
| similar. This is what's actually needed. Billions should be
| invested in IT training, not in copies of software from another
| era designed to let untrained secretarial staff use a desktop.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It's like you aren't even interested in reinforcing
| Microsoft's moat at all!
| harvey9 wrote:
| You use emacs so why should anyone else need MS Word? A large
| number of people use word processor software because it has
| advantages over typewriters or handwriting for their purposes
| rather than because they lack training in something more
| esoteric.
| pydry wrote:
| To be fair ms word is rooted in a world paper once ruled
| and the paper/document metaphor is becoming increasingly
| less relevant.
|
| I used to use it all day every day and now i use it once a
| year maybe (often for government related things, coz theyre
| often the only ones still asking me to fill out and sign
| PDF forms).
|
| Most office functions are better supplanted with a decent
| cms, spreadsheet, email and something to let you create
| forms for people to fill in.
| plagiarist wrote:
| Sometimes I really like a spreadsheet. I found out at work
| that spreadsheets all have map / reduce now. That's fun. If
| there were a spreadsheet interface that was secretly R under
| the hood and tricked me into understanding R that would be
| neat.
| hugh-avherald wrote:
| Shiny?
| savant2 wrote:
| Genuine question: why do you consider it to be nowhere near an
| "Office suite"? It seems to me it fits the definition given by
| Wikipedia [1]. I guess it is less advanced than Google
| Workspace or Microsoft Office but it would cover all of my
| needs at work.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_software#Office_s...
| mabedan wrote:
| Google Docs is a document editor (opening/saving Microsoft
| office compatible documents, with layout, etc), not a
| wiki/markdown editor. The La Suite Docs seems a product more
| similar to Atlassian Confluence.
| savant2 wrote:
| For layouts and opening docs from other suites, it seems
| they rely on OnlyOffice, as listed on the marketing page of
| their Google Drive equivalent [1]. OpenDesk from ZenDiS
| (German counterpart to this project, also collaborating on
| La Suite) seems to rely on Nextcloud and Collabora Online
| for that [2]. Collabora and OnlyOffice are also present in
| Lasuite Drive's development environment [3].
|
| Docs and Drive aren't the only products in this suite: they
| also provide alternative for Meet, Chat, GMail or Sheets. I
| have no doubt that Microsoft and Google products offer more
| features but my point still stands: a lot of employees
| (like myself) need productivity tools but only need the
| core features.
|
| [1] https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/fichiers
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesk
|
| [3] https://github.com/suitenumerique/drive/blob/46c9730d1b
| 6d5c4...
| smokel wrote:
| Work being done in offices is changing over time. I find
| myself writing less documents for printing and more for
| collaborating and sharing directly.
|
| Even though many formal processes still require printable
| PDFs, we are slowly migrating to something paperless, or at
| least not paper-centric.
| virdev wrote:
| Spot on this is what we aimed for. Office tools were
| meant to be printed to be shared. Or at least exported.
| When you think of it it's really bad for information
| security. On the plus side doing everything in the
| browser manipulating jsons is you get to do way better
| real time collab and can include a lot more interactive
| content.
| troebr wrote:
| Even when using google docs, I dropped the paper format,
| and at that point it's better to edit/read in a richer
| editor like Confluence which has better support for
| interactive widgets, expand zones, code blocks, etc. It's
| also been better at navigating a tree of documents.
|
| Google docs is still great when you need to make
| something you mean to print, it just tends to not be that
| often anymore.
|
| I even use markdown shortcuts to format in google docs
| nowadays.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > (opening/saving Microsoft office compatible documents,
| with layout, etc)
|
| Not being Microsoft Office(r)-compatible does not make
| something not an office suite. In that case, there is (by
| design) only one Office(r) suite in the world
|
| > not a wiki/markdown editor
|
| I was wondering if you meant WYSIWYG editing as opposed to
| markdown editing, but then you say
|
| > La Suite Docs seems a product more similar to Atlassian
| Confluence
|
| which is WYSIWYG (the best web-based wysiwyg editor I've
| ever used, in fact; even if I'd never choose it for being a
| vendor lock-in that has shown they want to own your data by
| removing the self-hosted options, maybe with exceptions for
| giant enterprises idk but at least we had to migrate and it
| wasn't fun)
|
| so then what _are_ you saying? What makes an 'office
| suite' an office suite to you?
| prmoustache wrote:
| > Google Docs is a document editor (opening/saving
| Microsoft office compatible documents, with layout, etc),
| not a wiki/markdown editor. The La Suite Docs seems a
| product more similar to Atlassian Confluence.
|
| In the last 10 years I've been spending much more time at
| the office consulting and editing confluence and web pages
| (sharepoint / mkdocs / readme and other markdown based
| resources) than the cumulative time spent on word, excel,
| powerpoint and pdf documents. I imagine it is the same for
| a significant portion of the population.
|
| Also, libreoffice is already a thing and nobody edits
| office365 documents using the web versions except when
| their employer can't/don't want to pay the license for the
| full version or the client is not vailable on their OS
| (linux users). Libreoffice doesn't have that problem, you
| only really need storage with sharing facilities, not
| featurefull web clients for your docs.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| markdown is superior in every way.
|
| whatever doesn't map 1:1, imo just trash it.
|
| if you can't do your work using markdown, you should be
| fired.
|
| if i'm downvoted it is by people who deserve to be fired.
| yladiz wrote:
| How do you do nested tables in markdown?
| thayne wrote:
| If you scroll a little further down, you'll see that it lists
| components of an office suite as:
|
| - a word processor - a spreadsheet application - presentation
| software
|
| This doesn't look like it has any of these
| ncallaway wrote:
| Have you considered that "office suite" has drifted in
| meaning since Microsoft Office was introduced and things
| like:
|
| - chat
|
| - video calls
|
| - notion
|
| Might now be _more_ important to an office than word
| processing or presentation software?
| virdev wrote:
| For sure
| thayne wrote:
| Maybe those those things may be more important, depending
| on the office, but IME, that isn't what people usually
| mean when they say "office suite".
| busterarm wrote:
| All _your_ needs at work.
|
| All of this goes out the window when you're dealing with a
| government bureaucracy that has hyper specific document
| formatting requirements.
|
| This is a real foundational need of nearly every business at
| some point. Every court system and government agency has
| their own rules and they need to be tracked and followed
| perfectly. There are whole sub-industries around dealing with
| this for legal documents in MS Word.
| nmstoker wrote:
| Interestingly neither their GitHub nor the La Suite front page
| (translated) actually mention "office" - that's what the OP
| titled it.
| zdc1 wrote:
| My initial thought was: why not fork LibreOffice and spend the
| extra dev time closing the gap between what it is and what they
| need?
|
| But after some thought, I feel a _cloud collaboration suite_
| makes more sense as big orgs often run on online-first
| solutions like Sharepoint. So they can tick the essential boxes
| by being an online collaboration suite, and fill in formatting
| features later.
|
| Though your points on speed and architecture do make me wonder
| if Python was their best choice...
| lucb1e wrote:
| > why not fork LibreOffice [...] But after some thought, I
| feel a cloud collaboration suite makes more sense
|
| LibreOffice has a cloud version :). From what they presented
| at T-Dose like 10 years ago, it's basically an instance of
| the software running on the server, cut up into tiles and
| displayed on a webpage as zoomable image using Leafletjs, the
| same way that google maps worked before switching to vector
| graphics 15 years ago. Clicks and other input events are
| presumably emulated on the server and the resulting display
| update is sent back to the client, a bit like VNC but using a
| map library
| gib444 wrote:
| Europe is a little bit busy bleeding money for defence if you
| hadn't noticed. There's only so many 50bn EUR it can conjure up
| for something
| mhkgjkhn wrote:
| you know le suite is a success, when random americans complain
| about it :)
|
| good for the french, they made the right choice.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Let young people get fantastically wealthy in a low friction
| business environment and you'll get all the enterprise grade
| homegrown software you need.
| thibaut_barrere wrote:
| From the FAQ:
|
| > With Docs our job is not to replace Microsoft Office
|
| https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-...
|
| Also: like when switching from AWS to EU provider, the goal is
| not feature parity. Not only it is costly to implement, but
| also a reason why so many features are in AWS or Office is to
| ensure vendor lock-in due to feature comparisons.
|
| Learning to do more with less is a feature, not a bug.
| throwaway89201 wrote:
| > OpenCloud is the "open-source" fork but they are already in
| legal trouble with OwnCloud due to industrial espionage claims.
|
| Can you expand on this or source this? I'm quite interested in
| OpenCloud, and haven't heard anything about this. I searched
| for a few keywords (espionage, legal, lawsuit), which only
| lands your comment on top.
| matt-p wrote:
| Office suite, cool! _Looks Inside_ It 's a Django app.
| mosselman wrote:
| And it isn't an office suite at all
| bsenftner wrote:
| I would not be surprised if American PACs adopted this out of
| concern that US based office suites are politically compromised.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Why is Django so popular among open-source projects like these,
| especially government funded? I've never happened to see a
| commercial project use it in my twenty years in the field.
| Ruby/Go or even bun or node would be much more approachable and
| performant options today.
| dingi wrote:
| Django is boring in a best possible way. Rather than spending
| six months setting up a bunch of microservices, you spend
| couple weeks on Django and ship a working product. Built in
| admin dashboard for example is a godsend at small scale.
| js4ever wrote:
| or now you spend couple of hours/days with AI and produce a
| Rust implementation that will smoke Django 100X
| petcat wrote:
| > I've never seen a commercial project use it in my twenty
| years in the field.
|
| This is very surprising to me considering some of the largest
| sites in the world are built on Django. Instagram, Pinterest,
| for instance. Large parts of stripe and Robinhood are
| implemented with Django. Eventbrite, bitbucket. I believe even
| Sentry is.
|
| All commercial products.
| hobofan wrote:
| > stripe
|
| Stripe has always been a Ruby-heavy company.
| macNchz wrote:
| Sentry is indeed, and is open source and self-hostable:
| https://github.com/getsentry/sentry
|
| It's a pretty large app (I think >1M lines of Python). I ran
| a self hosted version for several years and found it
| performant and pretty easy to keep running and updated.
| seabrookmx wrote:
| In Instagram's case, they do not use the ORM or Admin, and
| have an internal fork of the request handling/middleware
| stack that is 100% async (before the recent async bits were
| added to Django)[1].
|
| It's great that Django's API design allowed them to move this
| way easily, but they aren't actually using Django in the
| traditional sense because it can't handle their scale.
|
| I've found that with the Django ORM and DRF especially, it's
| very easy to create a poorly performing app by following the
| established patterns (N+1 queries being a huge problem
| created by DRF serializers). You need to be extremely
| diligent to create something performant in this ecosystem.
| Not every dev team has Armin Ronacher :P
|
| Where I work we found this exhausting, and moved on to
| FastAPI and ASP.NET. We make our queries much more explicit
| using tools like Dapper, and now a senior engineer can have a
| much better idea how a particular route will perform just by
| reading the code (obviously, we still do some profiling).
|
| [1]: https://djangochat.com/episodes/django-instagram-carl-
| meyer
| megaman821 wrote:
| It looks like the next release of Django will take seriious
| strides to solve a lot of the n+1 headaches,
| https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/6.1/#model-
| fi....
|
| Also, I doubt solving Instagram-level scale issues is on
| the top ten list of concerns for this project. Just getting
| something out there and gaining users is way more important
| than solving far future scaling issues.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Django must be more popular than Rails in the EU these days.
| Most Django devs have never used Go or Node and have never
| heard about Bun. Django is in the category of battle-tested
| frameworks that are very boring and easy to get things done
| with.
| megaman821 wrote:
| Does node or Go have a full-stack framework with any real
| usage? Those languages seem to have people that like piecing
| together libraries than using frameworks. Other languages all
| offer popular frameworks; Ruby on Rails, Java Spring, PHP
| Laravel, ASP.Net.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| The modern approach is to have a node-based fullstack
| framework like Next, SvelteKit or Astro, plus backend API
| services.
|
| I'm afraid i am one of those people :)
| megaman821 wrote:
| They are full-stack but not complete frameworks like the
| other. Where is the ORMs, authentication, form handling,
| etc? Will your bespoke choices hold up in 10 years?
| rockinghigh wrote:
| Instagram uses it as their main backend. They have hundreds of
| million of daily users. Some of the critical backend services
| are in C++.
| seabrookmx wrote:
| Depends on your definition of "use." They use an internal
| async fork, and don't use the ORM:
| https://djangochat.com/episodes/django-instagram-carl-meyer
| LunaSea wrote:
| Bun is a very recent and thus unstable and immature project.
|
| It has also been acquired by Anthropic recently.
|
| Does not look like a great choice.
| sylware wrote:
| Of course, it is not forcing to use any whatng cartel web engines
| namely has noscript/basic (x)html interop support (aka classic
| web) and/or with public and as simple as possible network
| protocols anyone can implement a rich GUI client for.
|
| Of course its SDK has components choosen with care to maximize
| alternative (present and future) availability and its code is not
| stored on microsoft github.com.
| bsimpson wrote:
| This has been on HN a lot recently. For instance:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
| Sytten wrote:
| It is interesting to see yjs with hoccuspocus being used. I am
| currently considering our options for real time document editing
| + full text search.
|
| Seems like a common approach is something like using yjs for sync
| with a temporary LSM storage like rocksdb for updates and then
| periodically snapshot to postgres for full text search and
| compaction.
| nickthesick wrote:
| Take a look at my Y.js sync server at https://teleportal.tools
| if you are already using JS on your backend
| ninalanyon wrote:
| It's not an office suite and the linked page doesn't claim it is.
|
| The title should be changed.
| YousefED wrote:
| Great to see this on HN. fyi, La Suite is an umbrella project
| built by DINUM in France that started several years ago, mainly
| to enable people in the public administration to use more
| independent tools. It's built in-house, often on top of other
| open source technologies. E.g.: Matrix powers chat and LiveKit
| powers Visio (which was recently featured on HN as well when they
| announced it's rolled out to replace Zoom / Teams, etc [1])
|
| I'm fortunate to be collaborating with them as their Docs product
| is built on top of our open source BlockNote text editor
| (https://www.blocknotejs.org).
|
| Docs specifically started as an international collaboration with
| Germany [2] to explore how different EU countries can collaborate
| in building sovereign workplace solutions (several other
| countries including NL have shown interest as well).
|
| They're actively supporting us, and related projects like Yjs
| (https://yjs.dev) by sponsoring feature development.
|
| I'm sure many of the team members will follow along here as well!
| Happy to answer any questions.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294 [2]
| https://www.zendis.de/en
| nickthesick wrote:
| Glad to be working as part of this initiative too!
| nhatcher wrote:
| Hi! Congratulations to you and Yousef. And I am lucky enough
| to be in a position from learning from both of you.
|
| Anyone think what they might about La Suite, but blocknote is
| a solid product!
| nickthesick wrote:
| Very much appreciated! We put a lot of effort into it!
| mmooss wrote:
| The description of the Docs project, at least on the OP page,
| is interesting:
|
| "A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform
| that scales. Built with Django and React."
|
| An office suite's 'docs' component is usually a word processor
| and people sometimes try to (mis)use it for the functions you
| actually list - i.e., you can try to use Word as a wiki,
| linking pages somehow, but it's not nearly as efficient as a
| purpose-built wiki.
|
| Based on the quote description, it looks like your project
| inverted the thinking: Is word processing not a/the primary
| function? Are the other functions truly prioritized - e.g., is
| the wiki somewhat as efficient as MediaWiki?
| YousefED wrote:
| Think of Docs more of a modern, kind of Notion-style
| collaboration tool. It's not meant to be a Word replacement
| for full-scale document authoring (I believe La Suite will
| work with LibreOffice for that, but might be wrong here). The
| product vision is that Docs should focus on "Content over
| Form"; i.e.: make it easy to create well-structured documents
| (content), as opposed to Word which makes it easy to change
| every little visual detail of your document (form).
|
| In addition, there are some advanced integrations with other
| products in La Suite. For example, video calls made in Visio
| can be automatically AI-transcribed and presented in a Docs
| document, etc.
| mmooss wrote:
| Thanks. I think your vision is much more useful for most
| day-to-day work for most people. It's interesting that a
| new office suite would aim in that direction.
| leoedin wrote:
| I almost never use word for exactly that reason. I don't
| want to spend half an hour normalising my headings and
| fonts and margins. I want to focus on content and logical
| structure.
|
| I much prefer Google Docs over word for this reason too.
|
| I was writing a datasheet really and it's really
| surprising how there isn't ia straightforward solution.
| Confluence wasn't expressive enough, while getting Word
| to apply consistent styles across tables, margins,
| headings etc is such a pain.
| nickthesick wrote:
| I think that the point of the project is more:
|
| "Content over form" so you don't really need all the
| formatting options of something like Word when you are just
| trying to write meeting notes.
|
| They are definitely trending more towards a wiki, but it is
| still early days for this whole experiment. Though, many of
| the municipalities in the French gov are using it for their
| day to day work so it is clearly useful in some capacity. I
| don't have numbers, but it's definitely respectable
| larsiusprime wrote:
| I had a question since there's growing interest in open source
| adoption for digital sovereignty purposes in Europe; I produce
| open source software for civil servants as well (for mass
| appraisal/property tax valuation specifically), and I was
| wondering if you could offer any advice about how to best meet
| the needs of/approach European governments (both local and
| national) about open source collaboration? Do they prefer to
| develop their own things in house, or do they like to work with
| community projects?
| nickthesick wrote:
| I think it definitely depends on the country, there isn't a
| one-size fits all answer to this for the countries in the EU.
|
| Even in this example, the French are building this in-house,
| but the Germans are repackaging this into their suite. And
| the Netherlands is on their way to do the same.
|
| So the approach would be different depending on which country
| you approached.
|
| My advice to you would be to follow government events like
| Hackdays to get yourself in front of people who can point you
| in the right direction
| larsiusprime wrote:
| Cool. I'm already in touch with a handful of civil servants
| in both Germany and the Netherlands, so I'll do as you say
| and look for more government led initiatives, and I'll
| follow up with my existing contacts. Which countries do you
| think are the most interested in this sort of thing so far?
| Muromec wrote:
| Check out this one:
|
| https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/documenten/rapporten/2025/07
| /04...
|
| https://vng.nl/nieuws/meer-regie-nodig-op-technologie-
| voor-d...
|
| https://www.amsterdam.nl/nieuws/nieuwsoverzicht/stappenpl
| an-...
| YousefED wrote:
| In our case, they started building on top of our project and
| then reached out, so not sure I can share any lessons on
| this. With that said:
|
| - I think administrations in the EU are (slowly but steadily)
| adopting "Public Money, Public Code" policies and looking
| more seriously at open source
|
| - Note that policy / strategy on this depends a lot per
| country / local administration / project etc. I think most
| governments don't actively develop in house - France is quite
| the exception in this
|
| - There are a number of conferences that might be relevant
| (FOSDEM for example just finished)
|
| - We also benefitted from EU grants (e.g.: NLNet) to
| bootstrap our work and the early research phases
| fsflover wrote:
| > "Public Money, Public Code" policies
|
| For those who want to know more: https://publiccode.eu
| stevetron wrote:
| I'm a little confused. You said LiveKit powers Visio. But isn't
| Visio a CAD and drawing app inside of Microsoft Office?
| hommelix wrote:
| _Visio_ here is most likely a shorted "visioconference", the
| French word for video conference, or online meeting.
| snakeboy wrote:
| It's the name of a french-developed open video conferencing
| software[0]. See the 1st prize result in TFA...
|
| [0] https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/visio
| aatd86 wrote:
| Do these administrations still purchase licenses for software
| or do they just create open source maintained by government
| employees? How much are they willing to pay? Because people in
| Europe are notoriously paid less so I am curious of the
| financial aspect. Also curious about the logistics of ownership
| and support...
| GuB-42 wrote:
| On this topic, I think it is worth mentioning Framasoft [1]
|
| It is a French organization that offers plenty of alternatives to
| Google and other big tech products. A lot of them are just
| rebranded and hosted open source software, but they also develop
| their own, such as PeerTube and Framaprout (the last one is a
| joke, but PeerTube isn't).
|
| [1] https://framasoft.org/
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| I hate to say it because it's cute but that website is not
| going to win over large companies to use these tools.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I don't think they can win over large company, they are just
| a small nonprofit organization, large companies want to work
| with other large companies.
|
| Where they can make a difference is for fellow organizations
| and maybe small companies. A lot of them go to Google because
| that's the most convenient, even if it sometimes against
| their principles, they are proposing an alternative.
|
| One minor criticism I have is that while they are not hiding
| the fact that they are rebranding off-the-shelf free
| software, they could give them a bit more visibility, should
| users want to self host at some point.
| culi wrote:
| Yup, I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned earlier but they're
| the ones behind PeerTube (which I see posted on HN a lot) and
| many other tools. They've been building google alternatives for
| over two decades now and many of their tools are quite mature
|
| https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| This is a toy. It really makes it look like they aren't that
| serious.
| halapro wrote:
| It's typical of non-technical people to ask for "like Facebook,
| but x y z." They just don't know the magnitude of effort
| required behind these projects.
| klaustopher wrote:
| Also worth looking at:
|
| - Germany's OpenDesk: https://www.opendesk.eu/en
|
| - Netherland's MijnBureau: https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau-
| infra/
| drcongo wrote:
| I'm intrigued as to why both these, and the Suite Numerique
| have chose Element / Matrix as the chat component. Every time
| I've tried to use Element / Matrix it has failed dismally for
| me and everyone else in whatever community is trialling it.
| Element itself was so buggy as to be unusable.
| codethief wrote:
| I don't use Element myself but there was a recent HN
| discussion where people said it had improved significantly in
| last year or two.
| ptman wrote:
| It both still has problems and has been improving for all
| of its existence. It's been working for my usecases for
| years
| lucb1e wrote:
| After having the same experience negative some time before
| Covid, I was kindly invited late last year to a homeserver
| of a local hackerspace and I gave it another try.
|
| I cannot send messages to people on another homeserver
| (such as the obscure matrix.org one) whereas other people
| can, as well as some other issues which I forgot by now.
| Not at all usable. It was a short-lived stint and I didn't
| even try to enable encryption this time :(
| Arathorn wrote:
| this sounds like something super weird about the setup -
| it really should just work. what client and server was
| it?
| lucb1e wrote:
| Element web and mobile have the same issue; server I'm
| not sure, where can I see this? I would assume the
| default/reference implementation but I don't know
|
| Groups work btw, it's just private chats that cannot be
| initiated from either side (I have like five pending
| 'rooms' or something now), so it's not that one server
| banned the other. I just took it for typical matrix
| experience
| znort_ wrote:
| bonjour, je suis clippy ...
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Another one?
|
| Previously:
|
| This week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294
|
| 2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| The big problem EUs continuous big talk on digital sovereignty,
| which is a good and vital concept, is that funding is
| ridiculously lacking.
|
| Terms used like; "European hyperscale cloud" "Sovereign
| infrastructure" "Strategic autonomy" "European data centers for
| critical workloads"
|
| Which ended up in various efforts and projects
|
| Digital Europe Programme, Recovery and Resilience Facility, IPCE
|
| (I am not deeply familiar with EU projects)
|
| I believe funding was around low hundreds of millions (EUR) total
|
| To build one hyperscaler region might cost around EUR10 billion.
|
| The second problem is that systems that were suggested out of it
| still relied on US software stack, US computers, etc.
|
| It is not like the EU member states could not fund it, some
| estimates say aggregated EU and member states have spent EUR350
| billion in Ukraine.
|
| That is not to say they should not do that, nor to suggest you
| have to chose one or the other but it is demonstration that
| EU+Member states can fund massive efforts, If deemed important
| enough.
|
| and EU+Memberstates so far have not felt an urgency or will to
| really invest in digital sovereignty.
| Certhas wrote:
| The EU doesn't really fund many things directly. It's total
| annual budget is just 170 billion euros. It can fund research
| and coordination projects but at the end of the day the EU is
| mostly a coordination mechanism for sovereign states. Looking
| purely at EU projects is not really a useful lense to get an
| idea of what is happening...
| guerrilla wrote:
| What's wrong with libreoffice and collabra?
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| > What's wrong with libreoffice
|
| I'm a very light user and only moved to onlyoffice because it
| was freezing[0] on my then new laptop, but at least on mac, I
| feel like it needs a UI refresh, icons that are not blurry, a
| look at the performance when doing basic tasks, etc.
|
| It's free and opensource, which is good, but it's not as
| polished as other paid alternatives.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43038942
| highpost wrote:
| I wish them the very best, but I don't understand why it doesn't
| handle OpenDocument Format (ODF) natively.
| julianozen wrote:
| This is something we must be angry with our tech leaders for
|
| They thought they could support trump because they were upset
| with the democrats policies on crypto and AI cautiousness
|
| But instead they got someone willing to break the world order and
| our alliances which will harm tech growth
| Insensitivity wrote:
| I was looking at the Meet repository as an example, people
| literally don't know how to write React, without drowning in
| `useEffect`, `eslint-disable`, `any`. React has it's issues (and
| a ton of them), but writing code like this, I expect it to end up
| exactly like Microsoft Teams quality wise.
|
| Honestly, at that point, it's indistinguishable from LLM slop
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I have met very few devs who know how to avoid useEffect
| moffkalast wrote:
| Why would one decide to even go with React in recent years
| anyway? Strangely I've seen it happen a lot too.
|
| I'd have thought that Vue or Svelte would be a slam dunk
| choice. Do project managers love bloat and lag or something?
| Insensitivity wrote:
| I personally don't mind React, but I do acknowledge, after
| using it for a couple of years, that it seems to be a magnet
| for issues. It's the kind of framework, where if you're not
| writing properly, mostly like [Thinking in
| React](https://react.dev/learn/thinking-in-react) (with some
| caveat for niche performance optimizations), you're going to
| have a rough time, and you're going to make life miserable
| for anyone that _does know_ what they 're doing
|
| It has a weird learning curve, where you can ship something
| somewhat working, fairly fast, but to write it properly, with
| no bugs, you need to understand a lot of niche React-specific
| things, and their solutions (and those solutions are never
| useEffect https://react.dev/learn/you-might-not-need-an-
| effect).
|
| At that point, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't
| already experienced with React. It's been an uphill battle,
| trying to work with anyone that is using React, without
| understanding how to write properly.
| defraudbah wrote:
| I came to bash on it but it looks nice, well done France!
| iambateman wrote:
| Honest question...given how developed our sensibilities are
| around docs, file storage, and spreadsheets, what is the hard
| part to this?
|
| Don't get me wrong...something is hard...I still use Microsoft
| Word because I feel like I have to. But what is keeping the
| industry from building a word processor that doesn't suck and is
| capable of interfacing with .docx files?
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| Word has a billion features you did not know that exist.
| Getting something Word shaped is probably straight-forward
| enough (how long did it take to make Google Docs), but getting
| those dangling features and quirks would be a long haul.
|
| Mimicking Excel - woof. This one is used by so many people in
| different ways, that unless you offer 1:1 bug compatibility, it
| would be challenging to get 100% of people to meet everyone's
| current use case.
| Steelclearance wrote:
| Nice to see this kind of initiative, but looks like too little
| too late IMO. Reminds me of Nextcloud, which is great but quite
| slow.
| jayde2767 wrote:
| Nice to see the "true spirit" of OpenSource being practiced and
| growing in Europe...I hope other countries jump into this as
| well, with support and resources.
| assaddayinh wrote:
| The french can make mountains move for very little money. There
| army capabilities compared to the us relative to the investment
| is outstanding. Wouldn't wonder if they dethroned Microsoft
| office by strategically supporting open source.
| karel-3d wrote:
| It's very on-brand for France that the website is in French only,
| no English
| IlikeMadison wrote:
| Python and TypeScript... hard pass. Mediocre software made by
| mediocre web developers. Imagine a car manufacturer using wood
| instead of steel because they can only afford to pay cheap
| lumberjacks.
| gavmor wrote:
| Ouch, harsh words!
|
| But, what would be your stack of choice? Or, what stack gives
| you the most confidence?
| virdev wrote:
| Lasuite Docs PM here. Awesome to see we've made it top the first
| page again! Thanks for the interest :)
|
| I've compiled a bunch of answers in an FAQ on this doc
| https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-...
|
| Cheers!
| gusfoo wrote:
| Love the fact that you use USA date format, not rest-of-world.
|
| Love the fact that your AI customer service bot takes a
| question and then asks for an email address for a reply.
|
| Love your incoherently bolded statements: " _The_ Docs app _is
| a_ note taking and knowledge management software.
|
| Love how the vast amount of emojis really clarify things and
| help the reader.
|
| s/love/hate/g
| lucb1e wrote:
| Thanks for posting an actual link to a demo, even if read-only.
| I tried some of the buttons on the site with rudimentary
| understanding of french, but all I found was login pages
| w4yai wrote:
| Vive la France !
| phtrivier wrote:
| Honest question, though I suspect you won't be able to give a
| complete answer : how shielded are you from political changes ?
| When the next president takes office, and they're more aligned
| with Trump than the current administration, will it also cause
| a backlash ? Or do you feel shielded by the "we're cheaper than
| MS licenses" ?
| virdev wrote:
| Shout out to Yjs, ProseMirror and BlockNote on which we relied to
| build LaSuite Docs
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| The problem is that open-source projects funded by the taxpayer
| bring nothing long term to create companies that can compete or
| generate economic growth or develop future industries. They would
| be much better off creating a more business friendly environment
| and supporting private businesses through grants, procurements,
| etc the way the US are good at.
| johnea wrote:
| And somehow, during the effort to achieve digital sovereigncy,
| they still manage to host the source on the Microsoft property of
| github 8-/
|
| Given that the only step necessary to host git on the internet is
| making port 22 publicly accessible, I fail to see why so many
| projects are hosted on this malware site...
| patrick4urcloud wrote:
| Good! I'll definitely give it a try!! we still need a good email
| server system in open source and simple to install / maintain ?
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