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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary (yes, you've read correctly, 82%). [1]
The French state spends 57% of all French GDP (for context, this is higher than what the Soviet Union spent in the years before the communist regimen felt). [2]
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?
Man, 82%! 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.
EDIT: Fixed link for the OECD source stating the fact that 82% of the average gross salary in France is indeed taken by the state, since the arguments characteristic of HN were that they can't trust Wikipedia and can't be bothered to confirm it on Google. I hope it's enough now, but I'm sure that OECD will also be deemed an untrustworthy source to avoid the pain of reality for the far left community.
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.
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%.
> "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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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).
- an office suite, where la suite numérique 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 advantages and drawbacks
(and yes, sadly at XWiki SAS we host our code on GitHub too, I wish it wasn't like this)
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why is Django so popular among open-source projects like these, especially government funded? I’ve never seen 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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
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!
>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!
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 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.
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.
Interestingly neither their GitHub nor the La Suite front page (translated) actually mention "office" - that's what the OP titled it.
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
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...
The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary (yes, you've read correctly, 82%). [1]
The French state spends 57% of all French GDP (for context, this is higher than what the Soviet Union spent in the years before the communist regimen felt). [2]
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?
Man, 82%! 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://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
[2] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/government-at-a-glance-...
EDIT: Fixed link for the OECD source stating the fact that 82% of the average gross salary in France is indeed taken by the state, since the arguments characteristic of HN were that they can't trust Wikipedia and can't be bothered to confirm it on Google. I hope it's enough now, but I'm sure that OECD will also be deemed an untrustworthy source to avoid the pain of reality for the far left community.
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.
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.
Your wiki link contains only a single random reference to that number, and the page it links to justify it doesn’t exist.
[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?
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%.
> "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?
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.
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.
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?
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…
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.
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.
> 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?
On this topic, I think it is worth mentioning Framasoft [1]
It is a French organization that offers plenty of alternatives to Google and other big tech products. A lot of them are just rebranded and hosted open source software, but they also develop their own, such as PeerTube and Framaprout (the last one is a joke, but PeerTube isn't).
[1] https://framasoft.org/
Also worth looking at:
- Germany‘s OpenDesk: https://www.opendesk.eu/en
- Netherland‘s MijnBureau: https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau-infra/
It's not an office suite and the linked page doesn't claim it is.
The title should be changed.
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 numérique 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 advantages 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
Makes sense, using an office suite hosted by a hostile power isn't a very smart longterm strategy.
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".
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.
Politicians in the EU are complicit to say the least. And I hope they'll prove me wrong.
Great, but why on GitHub? That doesn't seem very souverain to me
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.
Git is distributed, the repository can be hosted concurrently at many places.
and the primary place they chose is owned by Microsoft
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.
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.
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.
This has been on HN a lot recently. For instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
bonjour, je suis clippy ...
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 seen 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.
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.
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.
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.
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++.
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.
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.
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.
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