21 ms·

France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

• pelagicAustral 8mo ago
  Refreshing. No more Teams? Sounds like a dream... Of all the crapware I am forced to work with, Teams really pushes the envelope in every single negative way conceivable. I think I have more love for SharePoint than Teams, and that is a massive concession.
  • Banditoz 8mo ago
    Every Teams team is backed by SharePoint, unfortunately.
    • muwtyhg 8mo ago
      And every private channel as well. And if you rename the Team, the SharePoint will become out-of-sync and all URLs will still use the old Team name.
      • zelphirkalt 8mo ago
        Oh, this is useful info... Another tool in the box of making other people realize how much it sucks.
    • jl6 8mo ago
      Teams, Sharepoint, Exchange, and OneDrive seem to be connected by a maze of dark twisty integration passages which no single human has mapped fully.
      • procflora 8mo ago
        Somewhere, in the deepest bowels, Skype still lives. I'm sure of it.
        • marcosdumay 8mo ago
          Lync is still there, lurking. With Communicator blocking every contact with the outside world. But eventually some message will pass through!
        • zelphirkalt 8mo ago
          It actually does or at least did, until at least a few years ago. When you opened the audio mixer (alsamixer or pulse audio control?) on XFCE, you could still see MS Teams labeled as Skype there. Not sure how it would be now, because I only ever use MS Teams isolated in a separate Ungoogled Chromium browser now, and have given up on the client for GNU/Linux.
    • blitzar 8mo ago
      I knew I could smell a poo in the room, I didn't know what or who was responsible but it all makes sense now.
  • macspoofing 8mo ago
    It's not that bad. It's well integrated into Sharepoint, Exchange, and Office, and does the job. I've used both Slack and Teams and if you're using MS365, then Teams is absolutely the better option.
    • clhodapp 8mo ago
      For many of us, you are describing a black hole of integrated nightmare software
    • sigmoid10 8mo ago
      As someone who has gone from 100% Slack in startups to all-in Teams in big corpo, I disagree. Teams won't even display all office file formats without you having to open the dedicated app. And if it does it's usually a half-baked browser mess. And don't even get me started on the UX or meeting options or mobile support or the complete lack of a dedicated Linux client. I don't need one app to do everything half-assed, I need one app that does exactly what it's meant for well. Preferably on every platform.
      • thewebguyd 8mo ago
        > I don't need one app to do everything half-assed That's primarily why it sucks, and that seems to be Microsoft's standard operating procedure. Everything they put out is in the category of "does everything, but half-assed with a web of fragile "integrations" that break if you look at it funny." Worse, it's all SharePoint all the way down. Every team (and private channel!) is a SharePoint site, every user's OneDrive in the same tenant is a personal SharePoint Site. Every M365 Group gets its own SharePoint site (and mailbox). Creating a Team also creates an M365 group, but not vice versa. Heaven forbid you rename something in the stack or you are in for a world of pain. It's also by design that way. SharePoint storage is expensive, and boy what a disaster it is to ever try and get your data out of it. Yet, for some reason, companies keep buying it and keep using it, letting Microsoft suck them in and hold them there for eternity. If you're starting a new company, never, ever, buy anything Microsoft. Just don't go down that road. It's not worth it.
      • orochimaaru 8mo ago
  • boringg 8mo ago
    I couldn't agree more with this. Teams somehow managed to supercede my other microphone preferences when I'm not even using teams (took me a while to figure out). It might be one of the apps I detest the most. There is very little satisfaction with it and much annoyance.
    • PeterStuer 8mo ago
      By default, Teams never releases your audio input channel, even when you close it.
      • boringg 8mo ago
        Why would they do that? So annoying.
        • zelphirkalt 8mo ago
          2 theories: (1) They couldn't imagine anyone ever closing their gloriously developed MS Teams. (2) Since everyone knows MS Teams and sitting in meetings all day is the one most important thing to get stuff done, they went ahead and made MS Teams a "priority". F using anything else! Maybe if it doesn't release the audio input, it will be 50ms faster next call! That ought to be enough for you!
    • marcosdumay 8mo ago
      Somehow, Teams overrides the volume controls on my Android phone. It's physically user-hostile.
  • tartoran 8mo ago
    Teams is the bane of my existence. Oh well, one of them at least and am forced to use it for the time being. Europeans may get lucky with some sane software or get something even worse than Teams. It remains to be seen how they do. If their software is starting to get better, perhaps US software will get better too because they can no longer justify the junk they're pumping out on us.
    • pelagicAustral 8mo ago
      > get something even worse than Teams I'm not sure that's actually possible, you know...
      • tartoran 8mo ago
        I hope for the best for Europeans but until I see results I'm not sure what they're capable of.
        • zelphirkalt 8mo ago
          I guess we could concoct something made out of PHP4/5 and jQuery and use Xampp stack, to get something worse. Or wait, I have it! We build it on top of MS Excel!
  • dgxyz 8mo ago
    They just shot Slack and moved to Teams only here. The company is falling apart so quickly they are going to have to pay up again before the end of the month.
    • andix 8mo ago
      Because slack startet to extort their customers. I guess many moved away, to be prepared if slack decides to push their prices even further.
      • wrs 8mo ago
        Though, if your choice is between Salesforce licensing and Microsoft licensing, at least it’s possible to understand Salesforce licensing.
        • andix 8mo ago
          A lot of companies already have Teams included in their existing licenses. But yeah, Microsoft licensing is impossible to understand.
  • kenjackson 8mo ago
    I have to admit, I have almost no problems with Teams. The one big issue I had was performance when screen sharing. But I got a new laptop and this problem went away. Seems so odd that so many people have major problems with it, while I feel like within my workgroup there are almost no problems to speak of.
    • pjmlp 8mo ago
      One day they will discover threaded conversions.
      • zelphirkalt 8mo ago
        And then we will get rid of them again, because some suits are telling us that we don't actually want them, that they are "complicated", we must trust them and that recursive data types are too hard to get right. Let's all write SMS again. Or better yet, send fax. Some engineers will facepalm super hard but won't be listened to, as usual, and we will enter the next cosmic age of self-inflicted suffering.
        • pjmlp 8mo ago
          Thankfully I only have to use Teams in very specific projects, thus I still have them. :)
    • delecti 8mo ago
      How extensively do you use it? When my team was just using it for meetings and the attached chats, it did actually work completely fine. When broader orgs started pushing more communications through it (the "teams" in teams, and all the weird chat room/forums that entails) all of the rough edges became very apparent. All of that is just a shockingly disorganized mess.
    • andix 8mo ago
      This was discussed before: if your Windows computer doesn't have a valid HEVC license installed, then Teams falls back to software encoding and performs horrible. Most manufacturers include the license, but not all. It's also only 99 cents on the Microsoft store (which might be unavailable on enterprise managed devices)
  • e12e 8mo ago
    Heh, now that our team has standardized on Teams rather than Zulip (so that we suffer/connect with the rest of the org whom are stuck in MS land) - and I've been given the chance to use Teams for a while - it really is worse than I initially thought. Which means it's time to look for alternative clients. I ws hoping for something like WeeSlack: https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack But all I found was: https://github.com/btp/teams-cli https://github.com/btp/teams-cli https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams Are there really no good Teams clients? Doesn't have to plug in to WeeChat or be a TUI... But something?
    • dijit 8mo ago
      You'd understand why there's no even half-decent clients for Teams if you ever tried to write a bot in Teams. That's just a pure lesson in pain. Webhooks work, but proper bots are borderline impossible; at least without giving you the feeling that you'd rather pull your own teeth out with pliers.
      • exceptione 8mo ago
        Sorry to hear. Pulling teeth with pliers on-premise has been out of support for a while. Please contact our sales team if you haven't tried our Pliers Copilot 365 For Teams and Dentists offering yet. It solves any problems you might currently experience.
        • dijit 8mo ago
          Audibly laughed. Thank you for that.
    • wizzwizz4 8mo ago
      Even authenticating to Teams is a herculean task. Microsoft's official APIs seem purpose-built to prevent people from writing proper Teams interfaces, and attempting to replicate their proprietary SSO flow is extremely painful. (In theory, you could hook into it by starting a fresh web browser at the appropriate login page, waiting for the appropriate redirects, and then harvesting the relevant cookies, but that's a really ugly solution, and it already represents a lot of invested work.)
  • TulliusCicero 8mo ago
    The risk is of course that the new thing might be worse than Teams somehow.
    • soperj 8mo ago
      The only possibility is if you get it from Oracle instead.
      • TulliusCicero 8mo ago
        Well no, there's always the European Oracle: SAP.
        • marcosdumay 8mo ago
          It's a good thing in this context that they are on the other side of the border.
    • ziotom78 8mo ago
      It will surely be worse, at least at the beginning. But there is a significant chance that with time they will improve it, and one can hope that one year after the first release the product will actually be better than Teams, given that the developers will improve it based on their own experience.
  • andix 8mo ago
    I don't have a lot of complaints with the current version of teams. Messaging and video calls work without major issues. It's bloated, and all those plugins are usually bad, but the basics work well for me. The new Outlook app is horrible though.
  • elzbardico 8mo ago
    You kids have it easy. Once I worked in a company with two brands after a fusion, and all of us had to use both Exchange and Lotus Notes. And I was almost forgetting SharePoint.
  • tedggh 8mo ago
    What’s so bad about Teams that makes it so hated? I used it lately and often to work with a customer and I don’t find anything terrible about it, other than some minor usability annoyances like phantom chat notifications once in a while. But overall it does what it’s supposed to do, get on a video call, share your screen and share files over channels. The transcript feature seems to work well too. I’m not amazed by it, but I don’t see anything to hate either. I guess it is one of those tools I don’t have a strong opinion about.
    • dijit 8mo ago
      "I don't have an issue with it" tells me you've never used anything else. Have you tried Slack? Zulip? Mattermost? Fucking... IRC from 1988? Teams isn't just mediocre, it's aggressively hostile to basic usability. The camera bar sits at the top of the window, directly blocking where you're supposed to position your camera for eye contact. Chat organisation is broken: you get duplicate groups because the order people were added matters somehow. Notifications phantom in and out. Reactions are buried in an activity feed. Search is useless. You can't reliably paste text without major formatting issues. The mobile app logs you out randomly and doesn’t tell you unless you manually check it. Desktop notifications don't sync with read state. Files uploaded to chat don't appear in the Files tab. The "new Teams" broke half the features that worked in classic Teams. Presence status is a coin flip. Audio settings reset themselves between calls. Screen sharing has a 50/50 chance of sharing the wrong window. The difference between a chat and a channel is arbitrary and confusing. You can't edit messages older than a few hours. Threading is bolted on and barely works. Performance is inexcusable. Multiple gigabytes of RAM to display text messages and lag constantly on modern hardware. How do you make a chat application lag? It's rendering text, not computing fluid dynamics. Opening the application takes 30 seconds on an SSD. Switching between chats stutters. Typing has input delay. The real problem isn't that Teams is terrible. It's that "it technically functions" has become an acceptable standard. When you've never experienced better, "it works" seems fine. But Teams is what happens when a monopoly position means you don't have to care about quality. Microsoft has unlimited resources and still ships this. Even Skype for Business was more stable, and in Skype for Business you couldn't reliably select text. That's how low the bar is.
  • randusername 8mo ago
    The Zen of Teams is that Teams is so clunky it cannot be Slack. Without threads, there is no breach of thread-etiquette. When "channels" are so awkward, nobody uses them. Then there is no constant deluge of middle-age folks creating a Facebook out of work, needing to be reminded that the photos channel is for business-photos, not pictures of their kids. When emoji support is limited, nobody has to police people pushing the boundaries of what emojis are appropriate. The software is baffling. But I like it that way.
    • wilsonnb3 8mo ago
      You can upload custom emoji to teams, most businesses just turn it off
    • nickkell 7mo ago
      For the most part I agree with you: there is less functionality and hence less to police. There are also fewer people in chats/channels, as for the most part they are private or undiscoverable. There are definitely still breaches of etiquette though, e.g. people frequently tagging a whole channel when they have a support question, even though it contains hundreds of people.
  • ergocoder 8mo ago
    > No more Teams? Sounds like a dream. No more Words? Introducing a worse software than Words...
  • rurp 8mo ago
    I've had to start using Teams more lately and it is indeed as terrible as I'd heard. The other day I needed to copy a number of items from an ongoing chat. Seems like an extremely simple and normal thing, but every time I hover over a message a popup jumps up with emoji reactions that partially covers the text I'm trying to copy. Trying to move quickly, I kept accidentally "reacting" to messages instead of double clicking the text. To make matters worse there's no way to disable this "feature"! Why?! Teams is supposed to be a professional workplace tool from one of the biggest software companies in the world, but it feels like something a high schooler coded up for fun. Weirdly Discord, a platform explicitly meant for gamers, is a more useful chat tool. I don't like Discord at all, but it's better than Teams.
    • internet_points 8mo ago
      What are the downsides of Discord?
  • zelphirkalt 8mo ago
    As bad and evil as MS Teams may be, I recently got invited to a Zoom meeting, and you simply can't use it in the browser! They just force you to download their shitty app to join. Naturally, I did not install crapware and closed the tab, as fortunately it was no mandatory event for me. At least in MS Teams I can isolate it into its separate ungoogled Chromium installation and treat that as a shitty app, without having to install crap onto my system.
    • tlarkworthy 8mo ago
      It makes you download it but then a button appears saying join in browser. I have tons of zoom binary copies
    • distances 8mo ago
      Zoom calls work fine in the browser. They first make it look like you need the native client, but there's some dance you need to make to get the web link. Reload, wait, spin in your chair, something like that. Of course I would never choose Zoom or Teams if I had the power, but Chromium does work with both when those are the tools your client uses.
• spicyusername 8mo ago
  Such a shame that so many U.S. citizens do not see the ramifications of their political decisions. Each one of these actions is a stepping stone the world is taking as a direct consequence of U.S. political negligence. And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.
  • iancmceachern 8mo ago
    Many of us see them and are fighting the fight if our lives against it
    • wrqvrwvq 8mo ago
      The US has openly spied on nato allies via msft for decades, and this was widely reported long before Snowden. All us tech is a tool of government surveillance and has always been. msft has also been repeatedly sued and sanctioned for corruption and bribery and coercive practices across europe over the past two decades. The fact that europe views trump as the threat but not the system he represents is cynical but the move towards autonomy is long past due. aws and msft etc all get away with overcharging for often terrible services is largely due to a lack of viable competition. europe has had great open-source offering for many years, but has "strategically" starved all of them of funding and credibility. This is as much a result of eu scleroticism as it is msft's bullying and anti-competitive practices. If trump makes it easier for them to get their act together it is to his credit.
  • mesk 8mo ago
    Being Great doesnt comes with Best to Live with, Best to Work with, Best to make Business with etc... US will be Great like all Giants are - terrifying and alone ;-)
  • burningChrome 8mo ago
    >>> Such a shame that so many U.S. citizens do not see the ramifications of their political decisions. Most US Citizens are not voting on what you think they're voting on. Most are worried about things that affect their day-to-day life like cost of eggs, the cost of gas, taxes going up, my 401K going in the dumpster. I live and breathe tech everyday. I see the dangers of it all around me. Day in and day out. You try and talk to people about how dangerous some of this stuff is. Unless people feel it somehow like having their identity stolen and they spend three years trying to fix it all? Nothing will ever change. People are 100% immune to this stuff now. Its the old frog in boiler water analogy.
• hvb2 8mo ago
  Conversation a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
• clot27 8mo ago
  so is there any open source alternative to these meeting apps? (selfhostable)
  • arm32 8mo ago
    I guess Jitsi?
    • teekert 8mo ago
      https://meet.proton.me https://meet.proton.me should also be ready for action soon.
  • MengerSponge 8mo ago
    Jitsi? https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet
  • philipwhiuk 8mo ago
    https://www.rocket.chat/ https://www.rocket.chat/
    • Etheryte 8mo ago
      We used to run this back in the day which, granted, was quite a long time ago now. I don't think we ever went longer than a few months without a serious outage of sorts, and that certainly wasn't for a lack of resources or manpower.
    • gilney 8mo ago
      The Jitsi site says rocket.chat uses it.
  • saubeidl 8mo ago
    The French government built their own: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
    • 8mo ago
• j_maffe 8mo ago
  Honest to god, everything that Trump is doing might actually end up being that the world becomes a better place. The US hegemony really ran its course.
  • tyre 8mo ago
    The US hegemony has been a tremendous boon to the world. Yes, the US has done terrible things (lots in South America, Vietnam, genocide in East Timor, failed nation building and war crimes in the Middle East, support for genocide in Palestine, etc.) This isn’t to minimize that. But the reality is that the US benefits immensely from free democracies with rules-based open markets and international order. Again, do we break that when it suits us? Absolutely. But America being selfish has been a positive outcome compared to, for example, more war in Europe. Polls consistently show that people recognize the benefits of US hegemony while acknowledging that the US does it purely from self-interest.
    • melesian 8mo ago
      The absence of war in Europe is more down to the EU than the US. Polls do not consistently show anything of the sort.
      • tyre 8mo ago
        Yes, they do: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/international-views-of-biden-and-u-s-largely-positive/ https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/international-... People globally have routinely acknowledged that: 1. The US is a hegemony that meddles in others’ affairs 2. It does so selfishly, despite the high flying rhetoric about freedom, democracy, etc. 3. This is good The preconditions for absence of war in Europe came before the EU existed and has to do with the post-WWII balance of power, which was heavily driven by the United States.
        • j_maffe 8mo ago
          The poll you reference didn't ask a single country in the middle east (except Israel, of course!) or most of South American countries (half of which puppet governments were placed). I wonder why. And you really argue with a straight face that this is representative of "People globally"? I'd be more insulted by your attempt of slight if PEW wasn't doing the same.
• pcj-github 8mo ago
  Good for them! As a US citizen, I am trying to do the same. Closing my gmail account and moving to ProtonMail.
• BurningFrog 8mo ago
  Note that this is only about European governments choosing to not use US software.
  • ezst 8mo ago
    Yeah, and once the precedent is settled, you can bet that the private sector will follow, and give birth to a bunch of local service companies to deploy and support those solutions in an healthier and fairer manner than the current GSuite/MSOffice duopoly.
    • DaSHacka 8mo ago
      Is this true though? There are tons of policies and procedures the US government has required for decades that never got adopted by the private sector.
      • snowpid 8mo ago
        OS will be cheaper. No monopoly rendite + development across more shoulders.
  • melesian 8mo ago
    You can be very sure that millions of Europeans and large numbers of businesses are finding alternatives.
    • DaSHacka 8mo ago
      Can we? Do you have any numbers to back this up?
      • johanyc 8mo ago
        Not direct numbers. But you can see r/BuyFromEU has 795K Weekly visitors. That is A LOT. In comparison, r/OpenAI has 676K Weekly visitors and r/webdev has 691K Weekly visitors.
    • 8mo ago
• lencastre 8mo ago
  it’s gotta be too good to be true, but at least one major economy taking the lead, imagine
• tyre 8mo ago
  As an American, this is awesome to see. We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement. And economic damage really is the key to the heart of these United States of Three Corporations in a Trench Coat. We’ve seen companies and CEOs paying millions in bribes to be close to the president. Now this aligns their financial interests with shifting our foreign policy. Not how it ought to work, but it’s the world we have.
  • techright75 8mo ago
    [dead]
  • MiiMe19 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    • tyre 8mo ago
      You can see my other comment in the thread calling out the US support of various genocides, including Palestine specifically. So, no, I’m not writing a pro-Apartheid apology.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 8mo ago
    Yes. We are at our best when we compete and have grown too fat and lazy IMO.
  • ReptileMan 8mo ago
    >We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement. How can you abandon something that never existed. While US was among the better superpowers it never for a moment engaged in good faith. Trump just makes it naked and brutish.
  • GaryBluto 8mo ago
    It's so strange reading all these comments from Americans begging to be punished for collective misdeeds. It reads as unsettlingly masochistic.
• Brian_K_White 8mo ago
  I would not have predicted that my country's government going bad would have such a positive side-effect on the world of software and network services.
• rayiner 8mo ago
  In favor of what? I’m all for economic nationalism, but you have to have competitive home grown alternatives. Does Europe have them? Or are they going to shoot themselves in the foot productivity-wise by boycotting the best products?
  • atherton94027 8mo ago
    The best products like Microsoft Teams? Let's be honest, a lot of the software they've replaced has a checkered past
  • belval 8mo ago
    Look I am all for Euro-skepticism, but "boycotting the best products" on an article about Microsoft Teams which is well known to be clawing its way into companies despite very negative feedback due to advantageous pricing when you are integrated with Office 365 (which is itself monopolistic behavior). Is not one. The reality is that chat apps nowadays have little moat, blocking the worst offenders for sovereignty's sake it perfectly logical.
  • marssaxman 8mo ago
    This is a great reason to invest in open-source software.
  • JoshTriplett 8mo ago
    In no world are Teams and Zoom anywhere close to the "best products". They're awful, and only persist because of network effects or because of "the people who buy it don't feel the pain".
• 999900000999 8mo ago
  Good. Open source solutions exist and need investment. Hopefully the EU as a whole can rally behind this.
• jgbuddy 8mo ago
  It's all fun and games until there's an outage, nothing screams efficient like a state-owned tech company
  • guywithahat 8mo ago
    Oh wow how did I not know it was state owned! The article keeps referring to "sovereign tech" which I assumed meant sovereign tech companies. I'm all for hating on teams (and sharepoint) but a state owned tech company sounds like an apocalyptically bad idea, and since it's state owned it can't really migrate to other industries/countries, and they likely won't update as quickly as they should as new technologies come around. I get the sharepoint/teams hate but I'm surprised a startup form isn't making more fun of France for this
    • NicuCalcea 8mo ago
      The first sentence of the article: > In France, civil servants will ditch Zoom and Teams for a homegrown video conference system. I don't see an issue with government workers using government software. They are not licencing it to businesses or consumers, although with it being open source, I'm sure some will use it.
      • guywithahat 8mo ago
        To me "homegrown video conference system" would mean like made in France by a French company, not made by the French government. I could be wrong but chat systems seem dynamic and important enough I wouldn't want it to be run and managed by the government. It will be interesting to see how it pans out though, and it's always nice to have more open source code
  • runarberg 8mo ago
    Most of Europe did just fine with state owned telecommunication companies which lasted well into the 1990s or even the 2000s. To this day some of the largest telecommunications companies in Europe are still state owned, partially, and in some cases in full. Growing up in Iceland where we had a state monopoly on telecommunications until the late 90s, I don‘t remember a single telecommunication outage. In fact, after moving to America where I have a private internet provider, I have experience quite a few internet blackouts actually.
• firefoxd 8mo ago
  After an acquisition, we are transitioning from google meet and slack, to Teams. I used to hate slack so much with their random features popping left and right and menus moving around. Oh I didn't know how good we had it. Slack is a delight compared to Teams. And I'm not even alone in this, everyone is still using slack until it gets pried off our hands. So help me God anyone mentions Copilot one more time...
  • radicaldreamer 8mo ago
    Due to the way Microsoft does sales to enterprises, there’s no incentive for its software to be any good or even compete directly with anyone else… as long as it ticks the right boxes, the people making purchasing decisions are fine with it (it’s bundled in with something critical like Excel anyway). If the gov really took an expansive view of antitrust, it would break up software bundling and require ala carte pricing per app, defined as a single primary use case. This will become all the more important as OpenAI/Anthropic start bundling all of their products together and putting existing SaaS out of business for no reason other than to get some crucial model or capability, companies have to buy the whole bundle.
  • asnyder 8mo ago
    Despite their confusion as to whether they want to really support their free and open source versions (without some absurd user count cliff), Mattermost (https://mattermost.com https://mattermost.com) is quite excellent and IMO is better than Slack. For example, editor leans towards native Markdown so things like syntax highlighting with backticks work as you expect. Their recent update removed the paywall from SSO (and unfortunately the Gitlab SSO workaround) for social logins up to 100 seats, afterwards there's an absurd per seat cost similar to its non-open source brethren. One day if needed, I plan to drop-in an SSO middleman allowing anyone to leverage their own SSO layer (which will map to the login form with username/password) to avoid the SSO limits altogether. Though good enough for my needs, and likely yours too. Especially if you're open to paying for their seats.
• lenerdenator 8mo ago
  If only they'd taken the same approach with Russian natural gas in 2008.
  • DaSHacka 8mo ago
    But that'd be difficult, and the EU is all about easy PR wins
• stopbulying 8mo ago
  Are those US software firms still obligated to comply with EU restrictions and legal demands if they are banned/barred/fascisticly_denied_the_option_to_compete by one or more EU territories?
  • stopbulying 8mo ago
    Isn't it reasonable to block access to countries that deny you the option to compete and copy your business? Then you'll need to pay for a VPN.
    • stopbulying 8mo ago
      Should US businesses block all connections from countries which deny them the option to compete? Does it matter whether a competitor in such a country is copying their business while they are denied the option to compete?
  • pessimizer 8mo ago
    Just like Europeans, you need to understand international law. It's not law like law within a country. It's a warning. US software firms were never obligated to comply with anything. If you don't comply, you create an enemy. You comply based on your judgement of that enemies' ability, determination and level of creativity that they will use to punish you for noncompliance. Do you want to do any business at all there? Do you have any vendors there? Do your owners own anything else that does business there? Do you have any investors that live there? Do your kids go to college there? Do you have to fly over or through it, ever? It's leverage against leverage.
    • stopbulying 7mo ago
      Is you don't comply, they block your ranges and legal recommends that you block customers connecting from those IP range. (They're perfectly free to choose a different vendor on this their need for chat productivity and video.)
  • tensor 8mo ago
• larsnystrom 8mo ago
  There seems to be a huge business opportunity in Europe right now, to sell support and customization of open source software to government players. Has anyone heard about a European company that’s been successful in this area?
  • pstuart 8mo ago
    Yeah, this is a win/win opportunity and could drive more sponsorship of those projects as there'd be more interests invested in seeing them thrive.
  • pkulak 8mo ago
    Matrix has done a bunch of work with the French government in the past. Hopefully they can capitalize on this sentiment.
    • Flere-Imsaho 8mo ago
      More information here: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366633894/European-governments-opt-for-open-source-alternatives-to-Big-Tech-encrypted-communications https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366633894/European-gover... (0ct 2025) Interestingly, there is also a NATO-Matrix app: https://element.io/en/case-studies/nato https://element.io/en/case-studies/nato
      • deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
  • dataviz1000 8mo ago
    > to sell support and customization of open source software to government players Time to start a Drupal consulting firm again.
  • wickedwiesel 8mo ago
    Sure. Nextcloud GmbH seems to be one of the winners. It sells a customized version aimed at government agencies. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nextcloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nextcloud
• jt2190 8mo ago
  > The French government… announced last week that 2.5 million civil servants would stop using video conference tools from U.S. providers — including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex and GoTo Meeting — by 2027 and switch to Visio, a homegrown service.
  • jl6 8mo ago
    Ahhh, collaboration via Visio. Those were the days!
• lefstathiou 8mo ago
  As an American, I will echo Trump's speech at Davos. We want strong allies, not vassals. Be capable of building your own EVs, your own rockets, your own fighter jets, your own subway systems, your own zoom alternatives, your own search engines, your own operating systems, etc etc. Make Europe great again. Bring back creativity. Bring back jobs. Build a talented workforce that stays local instead of migrating to the US. Be independent. Stand tall. Do all of these things and preferrably do them now. America and China's rise shouldnt be zero sum. It should lift the world. Europe forged the path we all follow. Come back to it.
  • melesian 8mo ago
    Patronizing rubbish. The EU builds plenty of EVs, rockets and fighter jets and has far more subway systems and public transport than the US. Europe is already great. It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025. As for being a vassal: Trump was warned of the consequences of invading Greenland and he backed down immediately. Some vassal.
    • techright75 8mo ago
      [dead]
    • lefstathiou 8mo ago
      Latest leaks indicate the US will be given sovereignty over its existing and future bases in Denmark, along with oil drilling rights, at $0 to US tax payers. Some vassal indeed.
    • CapricornNoble 8mo ago
      Re: fighter jets, the US and China are each producing about 4x as many jets as all of Europe combined. Europe's deliveries (41) barely exceed Russia's (33-39) despite Europe having 3x the population, supposedly superior industrial tech, not being the most sanctioned economy on Earth, etc... https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/2025-fighter-jet-deliveries/ https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/2025-fighter-jet-delive... Re: rockets.....well we don't want to judge by tonnage lifted, where SpaceX dwarfs the entire planet's efforts. Still it appears Europe struggles to put even a handful of new rockets up, so I'm not sure why you are characterizing that as "plenty" either: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/20/1113582/europe-is-finally-getting-serious-about-commercial-rockets/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/20/1113582/europe-i... > Europe is already great. It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025. HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS? Citation needed please. A migration of that scale would have journalists writing about it. Accurate data seems hard to come by but one expert puts TOTAL US expat numbers in Europe around 1.1 million. https://aaro.org/living-abroad/how-many-americans-live-abroad https://aaro.org/living-abroad/how-many-americans-live-abroa... > As for being a vassal: Trump was warned of the consequences of invading Greenland and he backed down immediately. Some vassal. Yes sometimes vassals oppose their suzerain's most egregious overreaches of power successfully. King John of England's barons pressured him to create the Magna Carta. Afterwards...they were still his vassals, as they were before it. Just ask Mark Rutte: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/01/29/rutte-is-right-europe-cant-win-without-the-us-says-former-us-nato-official https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/01/29/rutte-is-right... A relevant opinion piece from a European: https://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/columns/nothing-more-than-vassals-or-slaves-time-for-europe-to-wake-up https://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/columns/nothing-more-than...
• ChrisArchitect 8mo ago
  [dupe] Discussion from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
• FpUser 8mo ago
  Long time overdue. It is so stupid to rely on a single country in so many areas
• wateralien 8mo ago
  Almost all businesses need email, contacts, calendars, live chat, video calls, docs, sheets, and presentations. Ideally all linked. Where is the open source foundation for this package that everyone needs?
  • drdec 8mo ago
    Where are the businesses setting up and donating to an organization/foundation to pay for development of such a package?
  • mhitza 8mo ago
    Aside from email I think nextcloud (+ jitsi integration) covers most, if not all, of those requirements.
  • GaelFG 8mo ago
    Nextcloud is great !
    • xanthor 8mo ago
      Nextcloud is not great, it's just the only available package that approximates an all-in-one GSuite experience. In practice, the UI is really janky and unpolished.
• stronglikedan 8mo ago
  lol, "Europe" isn't seeking anything of the sort. France maybe, and a couple other countries, but very, very far from the whole of Europe. And even then, only a handful of people relative to the whole country. This won't even cause a blip on a balance sheet. What are they gonna switch to? I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams. It's all just theater.
  • runarberg 8mo ago
    Zoom and Teams are both proprietary software, I doubt any available forks exist, or could exist, for use outside of corporation where they are developed. I’m guessing they will probably use something built on top of Matrix which is an open protocol maintained by a Community Interest Corporation (CIC) in the UK. https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/30/france_matrix/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/30/france_matrix/ I’m less sure what they will use for video conferencing, but they could do worse then something built on top of WebRTC, which is also an open protocol maintained by W3C, an international standards organization with location in 4 countries (including France and USA).
    • Arathorn 8mo ago
      The French video conferencing tool is called Visio, and is here: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet. It uses LiveKit for video, but doesn't yet use Matrix - the hope is to make it speak MatrixRTC so it can interop nicely with Tchap (the French fork of Element).
    • mgbmtl 8mo ago
      We have EU clients that now force us to use BBB (big blue button) for security reasons. It's not perfect, but good enough, and Zoom/Hangouts/Teams all have their quirks. We decided to adopt it where I work, and cut a few paid Zoom accounts. Some clients use Jitsi, but I find it more complicated to run Jitsi in-house. BBB was really easy to setup.
  • bborud 8mo ago
    Actually, video conferencing systems aren't that hard to build anymore. But it is hard to grow them as companies. Just among my circle of friends there were two startups that made video conferencing systems. One generic, and one for uses that required a higher degree of security. If we move one stratum out, there are about half a dozen startups where friends of friends take part in developing smart cameras for video conferencing as well as industrial uses. And then there was the Tandberg video conferencing platform which was acquired by Cisco in 2010. (That entire stack was designed and engineered in Norway. From low level DSPs to software). There are dozens of companies that could make a video conferencing system in Europe today that would be no worse than what you find in Zoom, Teams etc. But since it is a crowded field, they haven't had the muscle to compete.
• chaostheory 8mo ago
  Imo this was inevitable even without Trump. He just massively accelerated it. The end of globalism also marks the end of the global internet and the transition to regional internets.
• quadrifoliate 8mo ago
  This needs to go much, much further before it is even mildly effective. The EU has a population of ~450 million (more than the US) and no significant large technology companies. They are largely dependent on US Big Tech as a population. I love that there is a lot more enthusiasm about OSS adoption within EU software devs, but at a population or government level there doesn't appear to be any coherent strategy to gradually replace US tech other than these knee-jerk headliner moves that don't move the needle much. As a software consumer I would love it if there were open-first software standards adopted within this large of a population that would force US Big Tech to actually compete rather than rest on their monopoly power. But I am pretty skeptical and pessimistic about this actually being able to happen, given the historical failures of the EU.
  • anon291 8mo ago
    OSS software is also mostly owned by the US. This entire thing of 'replacing' American software with American software under a different commercial model is so silly.
    • antirez 8mo ago
      That's not true. For instance in the field of video pipelines ffmpeg is the standard, and was started by an European (French) person. Runs on Linux of course, that ..., and so forth. Do you really believe in Europe there is no the tech capability to recreate the tech stack? This is an extremely naive way to put it. US tech is much more developed because of money infusion even on companies that take 10/20 years to get productive. It was the right call, by the US, to put things in this way, but the European disadvantage is not for technical merits.
      • anon291 8mo ago
        And who is the largest contributor to ffmpeg? These sorts of things are so silly. By and large, open source software is worked on by companies who are paying contributors because the project provides them some value. Most of these are American companies, which means they exert control, whether you like it or not. In the case of ffmpeg, about a decade ago, I worked at a company who made substantial contributions to it, and employed many significant contributors. You guys live in fantasy land. Linux is also an American thing. The benevolent-dictator-for-life of Linux lives in Portland, OR. Intel (also in Portland mostly) is one of the largest contributors, along with AMD. We can go on and on. this is obviously going to be the case when the main CPU vendors are American.
• kkfx 8mo ago
  EU governments don't want to learn one thing: you don't replace one dictator with another. The specific case says little, France has been developing "La Suite" for YEARS, Italy had experimented with Jitsi Meet and Big Blue Button at GARR during the COVID era, but what the EU wants is to create EU GAFAMs, whereas what we need, and not just in the EU, is FLOSS, self-hosting, desktop computing. This, however, is not welcome, starting with eIDAS 2.0 which pushes for a "super-sovereign" app-wallet for the notoriously sovereign Android and iOS instead of smart cards and USB readers that we've had for years and that various countries have used for years to log into online banking and, more recently, to sign documents. The substantial point is that they don't want freedom, they only want to steal like others steal, to do business like others do business, instead of doing something different.
• input_sh 8mo ago
  Worth pointing out: France is not adopting existing open source software, they're building their own software and releasing it under the MIT licence. Most of it (or all of it?) is Django backend + React frontend (using a custom-built UI kit). Home page for the entire suite (in French) with some screenshots: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ Code bases are on GitHub and they use English there: https://github.com/suitenumerique/ https://github.com/suitenumerique/ Dev handbook (in English): https://suitenumerique.gitbook.io/handbook https://suitenumerique.gitbook.io/handbook Not French and I can't say I personally tried deploying any of them, but I've been admiring their efforts from afar for a while now.
  • WhyNotHugo 8mo ago
    > Code bases are on GitHub Not a very solid way to move away from American big tech :/
    • alpha_squared 8mo ago
      This is probably just the first big step (communications) in a series of big steps.
    • bee_rider 8mo ago
      Maybe they have local copies as well, and just figured they might as well take GitHub’s free bandwidth and social networking features.
      • dkga 8mo ago
        Next year: LeGit !
        • bilekas 8mo ago
          Or GitOobe.. although I like the idea of ÜberGit.eu
          • 8mo ago
• richardw 8mo ago
  Great. There’s no reason why all countries don’t start preferring locally or regionally developed software. Of course interoperability is always a thing but there needs to be another option between “one company” and “everyone host your own instance”.
• shevy-java 8mo ago
  Makes sense. This software dependency that Europe has on the USA is very, very bad - no just with regards to Zoom, but literally anything. The US corporations are forced by law to always prioritize whoever represents the current US government, and the current US government will remain hostile as long as it is in charge; but even afterwards it is quite logical to assume that any follow-up government will prioritize US interests over European interests. So it makes no sense to pay for outsiders who would work against you. France does a few things right; scandinavian countries too (I include The Netherlands here, though they are not really scandiavians but in their decision-making, they are often a bit like a hybrid between France and Denmark or Sweden). Spain and Italy lag behind but sometimes, surprisingly, also do the right thing. The real troublemaker is ... Germany. For a reason nobody understands, Germany is like an US satellite in everything it does, but only ... half-hearted. Naturally, "the economy" is one reason (export centric country so it is readily blackmailable by the USA here) but even then you have to ask why german politicians have absolutely no pride at all. France has pride - that's good and bad but good in this context. (UK is more an US colony really after Brexit anyway, with Farage probably going to win - and cause more damage. Brits just don't learn from this.)
  • mrits 8mo ago
    [flagged]
  • derektank 8mo ago
    >For a reason nobody understands, Germany is like an US satellite in everything it does I don’t see what’s surprising about this. In the post-war period, most of Europe was hostile to German empowerment, from initial opposition to West Germany’s inclusion in NATO to later resistance to German reunification. The presence of tens of thousands of US troops in Germany also required more diplomatic communication and alignment to maintain status of forces agreements. The status quo has only really changed in the last twenty years.
  • chungy 8mo ago
    > The US corporations are forced by law to always prioritize whoever represents the current US government Where do you get your information from? This is just plainly false. Heck, it runs afoul of the Constitution, so even if the government were to try something, it'd be smacked down real fast.
• atonse 8mo ago
  I couldn't tell from the article but any reason they wouldn't just adopt Matrix? I thought some European governments (especially in France) were already adopting Matrix.
  • Arathorn 8mo ago
    France was one of the first to already adopt Matrix. However, when they began Visio, Element was embedding Jitsi for VoIP. Meanwhile Element built Element Call, which is somewhat similar to Visio (except E2EE and decentralised thanks to Matrix). Hopefully the two can converge :)
• esel2k 8mo ago
  Working for a large business in Europe- I think MSFT and Google co know exactly about the threat to their business. Thats why the aggressively integrate every AI tool where they can - like copilot to make large companies and government stick to their solutions. I wish government will find am even better way to embed LLM to their tools…
• benob 8mo ago
  Too bad it doesn't have zooms echo cancelation / isolation
• Fairburn 8mo ago
  How refreshing.
• n4pw01f 8mo ago
  Why not Jitsi - genuinely curious
  • buovjaga 8mo ago
    Just a guess, but Jitsi having no governance structure outside of 8x8, Inc. might have something to do with it.
• nemo44x 8mo ago
  Cool. It won’t even be a blip on the earnings report. I guess a sales rep in Europe isn’t getting their preferred vacation this year. But other than that this is of no consequence. I’ll still buy France’s wine.
• caycep 8mo ago
  does Zoom still dump an unkillable web server into the bowels of your OS?
• Waterluvian 8mo ago
  I think this is one of the silver linings to this new era. By trying to renegotiate intolerable terms, the Americans are forcing the rest of the world to figure out how to make it all work without them. This will inevitably be a rough transition but it results in more worldwide resiliency and product/service options. I think one question, which we might be seeing a bit here and there, is if the Americans decide that no, you can’t also do that. You must accept the intolerable terms or be punished.
• teffy512 8mo ago
  RIP: Zoom Public Sector AE, EMEA
• whatever1 8mo ago
  If they also make US copyright not enforceable then they can have office clones and then it’s game over.
• awesome_dude 8mo ago
  This was always going to happen as soon as the USA decided to be overtly all about itself. Tact and diplomacy meant that previously the USA was seen as, yes being all about itself, but not threateningly so when it came to its allies/friends. As soon as that veneer was removed the reaction was always going to be, "we'll look after ourselves then" - using the same tools China has (see: China having its own linux distribution)
• lagniappe 8mo ago
  How many times are we going to see this same exact topic posted?
• znhll 8mo ago
  They named their video conference tool "Visio" ? lol Meanwhile... Micro$lop: Aha! Sharpen your lawyers, mes amis!
• tzs 8mo ago
  How did they decide to name their Zoom/Teams replacement "Visio"? There's already an extremely well known program called "Visio", namely Microsoft Visio, and it is included in many of the same Microsoft commercial office products that include Microsoft Teams. If you tell someone to switch from Microsoft Teams to Visio a lot of people will assume you mean Microsoft Visio and get rather confused.
  • bandie91 7mo ago
    let me fix this for you: l`Visio - but with a French accent ;)
• pyuser583 8mo ago
  What does Europe imagine their relationship with Silicon Valley looking like? I'm looking for examples here - Israel has a very specific relationship with the tech sector, as does Taiwan, China, South Korea, etc. Even within the US, North Virginia, Huntsville, and Manhattan have specific relationships with Silicon Valley. Is the idea to copy Silicon Valley's stuff into government sponsored, "to committed to fail" operations? Create complementary tech ecosystems? Recruit Silicon Valley veterans and put them in charge, or just fire them after they get their tech? Just look at how hard it is to come to a decision on something like allow Huawei to build a telephone network. Is it a good idea? Smart people say, Huawei should be allowed to provide the dumb pipes of the system, but not the high level stuff. Anything sensitive needs to be reviewed by domestic security services. Is that the approach to America? It seems like the article saying: "copy America's SaaS offerings." Not clear how that makes you digitally sovereign.
  • scottyah 8mo ago
    Airbus has been the most successful example I know of. Basically, clone off and slightly modify something another country has created, then force a large population to use it. It's like tariffs on steroids.
• mikelpr 8mo ago
  wonder why they didn't use jitsi
• dash2 8mo ago
  Is this gonna go as well as when they built their own search engine?
• dperhar 8mo ago
  Actually its now worth it to be building software in EU. It will have its market for sure
• cadamsdotcom 8mo ago
  This is SO exciting to see! One analogy to our current moment in software is to think of skyscrapers in cities. In the early days of skyscraper construction, most knowledge needed to build one was concentrated in Chicago and New York, so those were the only places really building serious skyscrapers. It took a while but eventually the knowledge diffused out into the industry and the world. Now we take for granted that high quality skyscrapers are in every city, with the tremendous space efficiency they give. So is the same diffusion happening to software? It really looks like it! Knowledge of building and operating large-scale software seems to have reached a point where countries and companies no longer need to rely on Silicon Valley companies (and Microsoft) for software. (Note this is less about location and more about capability level, the skyscrapers/cities analogy breaks a little there) Anyway every country and company can now build its own complex software. It’s been like this for a bit, but current US circumstances did the world a favor when it nudged Europe to get serious. Software is headed for an exciting and multi-color future and I’m so here for it.
• matt3210 8mo ago
  This is AI enhanced workflows eating SaaS. I’d be scared if I ran a SaaS
• PlatoIsADisease 8mo ago
  France speaks for Europe? Heh heh heh... France wants to really really reallllllyyyy believe they do. Poland and Germany lets France say such fanciful words, but they keep their actual thoughts for themselves. They know France has an Adler inferiority complex, so they let them pretend.
• userbinator 8mo ago
  Ctrl+F "SIP" - 0 results before this comment. There are decades-old standards for VoIP and teleconferencing, which even the proprietary solutions will often let you interoperate with (at additional cost). Now would be a good time to actually promote them.
• data-ottawa 8mo ago
  Good for France. We've seen the US sanction the ICC, they have the Cloud Act and the Patriot Act. The US has shown both a willingness and a capability to weaponize your tech against you. It should profoundly worry the world that three companies — whose heads all have frequent dinners at the White House — control virtually every phone, tablet, and computer in the world. If you expand that to data centres and clouds, email addresses, services and software it's far worse. It should be considered a matter of national defence for basically all nations to ensure digital sovereignty. (It doesn't matter who is in the White House, my point is it's a massive security nightmare to give this much control to one group)
• deleted 8mo ago
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• sbinnee 8mo ago
  During covid I was studying in France. The school deliberately chose not to use zoom. It was software called BigBlueButton. I was happy with it. I appreciated them for having their own opinions instead of just following what others do.
• carlosjobim 8mo ago
  It would take less than one day for every European government, business, or individual to ditch Zoom and Teams without loosing any benefits: It's called a fucking telephone.
• blubber 8mo ago
  While I like the move, I think it could have come a few decades earlier and I'm stunned by the fact that this is Franc-only. When will Europe ever wake up?
• nottorp 8mo ago
  ... and here I was thinking they're dropping them because they're annoyances ... [Teams more than zoom. I just got switched to Teams at work and now I understand why no one ever chats on it.]
• jillesvangurp 8mo ago
  Zoom and teams are low hanging fruit in terms of replacability. I use both with various customers. Internally we use teams. Occasionally somebody insists on webex or other tools. Meets isn't actually horrible now that Google seems to have stopped the internal battles to replace it every six months. But in the end it is very replaceable as well. All of these tools cover the basics (being able to video call others, screen sharing, doing calls with multiple/many participants, chat, etc.). You can get most/all of that with free and OSS options. You might struggle a bit with larger meetings or some corporate networking situations. UX wise, all of these tools are a bit challenged. It seems Google at least embraces the whole "it's just a browser app and that's fine" more than others that insist standalone applications are the way to go. And since these applications are effectively electron applications that run mostly fine in a browser, it is a bit of a smoke and mirrors thing in any case. Bloated is a word that is used frequently in relation to these apps. It would be nice if tools like this could rally around federated solutions and open protocols. Actually, the smart thing for France (and other countries that care about ending the miserable status quo) would be to dictate usage of open protocols, identity, and security standards. You are welcome to connect with zoom, teams, meets and whatever as long as people not paying for those tools can still participate in a call using whatever compatible tool they prefer. Give these tools a chance to adapt and compete on features. The solution maybe isn't another app but just forcing this market out of the stone age of moats, "owning" user identities, etc. Email is the one that got away before Silicon Valley got its act together. MS, Novel, America Online, and others completely failed to get their grubby fingers on the space before email was so widely used that not supporting full interoperability with non proprietary email servers was economical suicide. And they tried really hard. Video calls should be the same. And calendars. And word processors (a space that hasn't had any meaningful innovation in decades), spreadsheets, and all the rest. Most of MS Office is a commodity at this point. Not particularly good at anything it does actually. MS has been moving deck chairs around on the deck of that sinking ship for a few decades now.
• LightBug1 8mo ago
  Well done, Trump and Musk ! ... Your people are proud of you. Tourism, Tech, Tesla, Chlorinated Chickens (lol), ICE ... practically anything American sounds toxic overseas now. Apologies to the good people of America. You didn't deserve this but your "democracy" has spoken.
• red_admiral 8mo ago
  Digital autonomy aside, I like the concept of something like "Microsoft apps, but without copilot".
• ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
  Isn’t Zoom Chinese? Anyway, I have been dealing with Zoom for over five years (like most folks). I don’t especially like it, but there’s really no viable alternative. Its video quality is light years ahead of anyone else, and its UI, though still klunky, has become a de facto standard. Everyone knows the UX, and is afraid to use anything else. Classic “the devil you know” conundrum. I’ve found it really difficult to get non-technical people to use anything else. At one time, I could get folks to use BlueJeans, but that’s gone the way of the Dodo. It’s a pretty common issue, when adopting FOSS alternatives. The UI is often optimized for FOSS lovers (tech people), not regular mensch. The tech may be great, but the UI is inscrutable. Tech folks just can’t seem to grok how important good UX is. It’s actually a bit depressing, seeing this type of thing happening. It’s like a slow-motion trainwreck. Inevitable, unstoppable, and we can’t look away.
• xaldir 7mo ago
  Maybe it's just a PR stunt, maybe not, we'll find out in due time. The thing is, there has been a lot of announcement like that in the past, but when the dust settles, you find out that every other ministry just signed another contract with Microsoft, so yeah. The DINUM (the state agency behind these tools) just try very hard to be relevant, but in the end, the ministries are relatively autonomous in their choices.
• sunwukung 7mo ago
  This suggests governments need to commission infrastructure level dependencies directly rather than relying solely on the market and consumer behaviour, particularly given the poor outcomes in areas where there is little to no competition
• davidfekke 7mo ago
  The countries of the EU need to ask themselves why these software unicorns are not starting in their countries. Why do so many European entrepeneurs come to the United States to start their businesses? The EU has a tendency to regulate business before they ever get started. They might want to look at their regulatory structure so companies like Zoom start in the EU, and not in United States.
• gadders 7mo ago
  Reminds me of the Zuckerberg quote from the film: "If you could have build Facebook, you would have built Facebook." I don't think the main thing stopping an EU Zooms or Teams from capturing the market is not enough help from the French government.
• mdf 7mo ago
  Just today, a citizens' initiative started collecting signatures in Finland to stop recent projects that aim to transfer hosting of election, taxation, and social security data on services provided by US-run companies.[1] [1] https://digitaalinenitsenaisyys.fi/ https://digitaalinenitsenaisyys.fi/
• malklera 7mo ago
  Good for them. More curious about file types and protocols, would their software output an open file type and "speak" open protocols? Let's say a French office needs to talk to a US office. Can each party use their own client and it still work, or does one party have to download the software of the other? The same with documents: can each party read the documents produced by the other?