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
Glad to be working as part of this initiative too!
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!
>Great to see this on HN
Some form of this project has been on the front page every day for months now. Pretty tired news at this point.
That's the hacker spirit!
Real hackers care more about what office software one government body is using to host team meetings than the fact that those meetings are probably about banning encryption or VPNs
yawn whataboutism is so 2010s.
Real hackers care about open source software.
Real hackers don't necessarily care about open source software. Closed source offers more low hanging fruit attack vectors.
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.
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...
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.
“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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
Interestingly neither their GitHub nor the La Suite front page (translated) actually mention "office" - that's what the OP titled it.
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.
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.
Or maybe the solution must be one rooted in reducing taxes. Make investing extremely attractively, and stop relying on taxes to solve everything.
I do not agree, I don't want EU to turn to US. Taxes should be on a level to support the welfare state.
Which it can’t. There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states
That is obviously not true. You don’t even define what a welfare state is or when a country stops being a welfare state.
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.
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/10665/250330/978924151...
- https://ipsnoticias.net/2022/10/el-mundo-necesita-69-millone...
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
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%.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Your wiki link contains only a single random reference to that number, and the page it links to justify it doesn’t exist.
> 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...
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%.
[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?
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 2500€ gross will take home 1885€ 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 30 000€/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 ?
Well, life isn't that easy then, because you failed to comprehend URSSAF's simulation tool.
On a €2500 gross salary you take home €1651 (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 €2669 liquid (€5000 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. So yeah, life must not be that easy for you, when you couldn't figure the true cost of the salary after writing all that...
> "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?
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.
Stop relying on ~investors~ [the business oligarchy] to solve everything
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s like you aren’t even interested in reinforcing Microsoft’s moat at all!
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.
> 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.
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.
It’s called mercantilism. It was thoroughly refuted hundreds of years ago.
Yes, but apparently the biggest players now abuse their comparative advantage positions. So, we are back to mercantilism to the detriment of all humanity.
> I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages.
Depends which ones. Python? Definitely a source of slowness.
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.
It’s building infrastructure, which should lower costs in the long term. Seems like a good use of money from where I’m sitting.
> 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.
> 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".
No a bad thing if you desire the corporate power to eventually become the main force shaping the world :)
> 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?
Biden.
Him putting Lisa Khan in charge of antitrust enraged the tech oligarchs, who then all went MAGA and bought Trump the election.
To make matters worse, they are using Django. I can't take the EU serious any more.
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
Does it really need explaining why Office 365/Google Docs cannot be written in Django?
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)
Yes
What has that to do with the EU?
What would you use instead?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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).
I hate to say it because it's cute but that website is not going to win over large companies to use these tools.
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 (€) total
To build one hyperscaler region might cost around €10 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 €350 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.
Also worth looking at:
- Germany‘s OpenDesk: https://www.opendesk.eu/en
- Netherland‘s MijnBureau: https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau-infra/
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.
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.
Hmm, and what of https://cryptpad.fr/
Though they also seem to be on github https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad
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)
Made X-Wiki unrelated just happen to be the same country
It's not an office suite and the linked page doesn't claim it is.
The title should be changed.
Makes sense, using an office suite hosted by a hostile power isn't a very smart longterm strategy.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Politicians in the EU are complicit to say the least. And I hope they'll prove me wrong.
This has been on HN a lot recently. For instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
What's wrong with libreoffice and collabra?
Great, but why on GitHub? That doesn't seem very souverain to me
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.
But they still chose an American company, github, lol ironic
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.
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?
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.
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.
Git is distributed, the repository can be hosted concurrently at many places.
and the primary place they chose is owned by Microsoft
I would strongly assume the primary place is on some French government server somewhere and this is just the public mirror.
given git is decentralized, my guess is github is just a public mirror.
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.
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.
GitHub is literally Microsoft. US company with servers in the US. What you're talking about is the underlying technology.
Not sure that it’s relevant to switch git hosts is trivial. And everyone is already there
Underrated point: Bldg #1 needs to be sovereign hub for initiatives, for which OP is providing a first tenant…
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.
I wait for frenchhub, in french only, no english translation, nothing. Typical french. Greetings from you EU neighbor.
A lot of the documentation in La Suite seems to be available in English.
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.
Take a look at my Y.js sync server at https://teleportal.tools if you are already using JS on your backend
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.
> 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.
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
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.
> stripe
Stripe has always been a Ruby-heavy company.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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?
Instagram uses it as their main backend. They have hundreds of million of daily users. Some of the critical backend services are in C++.
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
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.
or now you spend couple of hours/days with AI and produce a Rust implementation that will smoke Django 100X
This is a toy. It really makes it look like they aren't that serious.
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.
bonjour, je suis clippy ...
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.
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.
+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.
> 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 Trophées du Libre, international open-source software competition launched. FramaSoft (i.e. PeerTube) and VLC are also French.
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.
Isn’t VLC French also?
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)
Also QEmu and ffmpeg.
Also Docker.
Also Lichess.
Also Scikit Learn.
Two words: Fabrice Bellard
I would not be surprised if American PACs adopted this out of concern that US based office suites are politically compromised.
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.
Another one?
Previously:
This week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294
2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
What's the value of it being online? Surely being able to run it as a native application would be preferable?
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
Office suite, cool! Looks Inside It's a Django app.
And it isn't an office suite at all
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.
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.
The first version for the "docs" program was released in May 2024
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,
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