[jdvh]

In the short term a free open source govt alternative may be a net positive for society. I don't think it is in the long run. Government projects like these are not likely to really push the state-of-the-art forward. This project even advertises itself as a FOSS Notion alternative. Do government-sponsored clones encourage or stymie innovation? I think the latter.

Every week we read in the news that the EU struggles with entrepreneurship. That our tech industry is languishing. That the EU gets out-competed by the US on software and by China on everything else. Europe should be making industry-leading apps. Europe should produce software startups that make products that get used worldwide. EU subsidized clones of popular American products feels like admitting defeat.

I'm obviously biased because I'm also working on a product in this space. But if Notion developers must become farmers because innovation no longer pays that is a loss to the world in my book.

[rtpg]

There are plenty of projects pushing the state of the art forward.

A very specific example: basically all interactive theorem proving tooling is built in public research halls. This has allowed Compcert, a C compiler with “no bugs”[0] to exist.

The Compcert case is interesting because private funding is also involved. Public state research can still pull in private funds! We are not entirely throwing in the towel!

[0] “no bugs” here means “we have defined a spec for C, and this compiler is guaranteed to compile your C code along the spec we defined, so long as your program terminates”. There’s some hand waving around a theorem prover’s own validity but all Compcert bugs have been “we misewrote a chunk of spec” varietals

[sham1]

What part of this project would stop you or someone else from "innovating" and making it "state of the art"?

After all, it's licensed under the MIT License, and the readme explicitly states that it can be contributed to, and that in fact they encourage it.

[rglullis]

Your whole argument is based on neomania: progress is always good and there is no point in working on something unless it advances the state of the art.

[jdvh]

Certainly not. I don't believe progress is always good. But subsidies should be reserved for ambitious projects that push the state of the art forward. For those projects that realistically will not get funded commercially. CERN, for instance.

[Xelbair]

>government projects like these are not likely to really push the state-of-the-art forward.

why it would need to be state of the art? it needs to be stable and 'good enough'. This isn't rocket science, nor quantum mechanics - this is literally a glorified CRUD app that focuses on documentation.

[jdvh]

Because when innovative software isn't made inside the EU then Europeans will simply use the best products made elsewhere.

[cyberax]

> Government projects like these are not likely to really push the state-of-the-art forward.

Well, if a government project can easily push you out, then you're not really a state-of-the-art.

> EU subsidized clones of popular American products feels like admitting defeat.

Governments need to think long-term. And one danger of relying on something like Notion is vendor lock-in. You can't easily migrate your data out of Notion, with all the rich content preserved (edit history, text comments, etc.)

EU can try to mandate a common interoperability standard, but it takes years and the end result always ends up being behind the state of the art.

[pfannkuchen]

Government projects today, you mean.

The government could act like an immortal mega corp if it had the authority to do so. Such as pushing out competition via loss leaders. And as a bonus, with the government, every program can be a loss leader.

The funding potential for this pattern is constrained today, which is why government projects that compete with private industry are generally terrible. But, clearly, the money is there to be captured by this segment out of government funding generally, if the government is allowed to enter business directly.

The solid argument I see against allowing such actions is a slippery slope towards the above. Slippery slope arguments aren’t always correct, of course, but they aren’t always wrong either; they just point out a risk. Depending on one’s risk tolerance, it is wise to avoid slippery slopes when you can’t quantify just how steep it is.

[mikae1]

> Europe should be making industry-leading apps. Europe should produce software startups that make products that get used worldwide.

I've kind of lost hope when it comes to commercial services and proprietary apps. They're sadly all sooner or later enshittified. We need something different, not by promises but by design (FOSS).

> EU subsidized clones of popular American products feels like admitting defeat.

I think it's a fresh and needed take on the financing of our common digital infra.

[bluedino]

I can't think of too many apps that I use that are truly FOSS.

Databases, compilers/interpreters, web servers, operating systems...but apps? (Other than gnu/bad command line tools of course)

[jdvh]

I think the main problem is lock-in. If you can't get your data out you can't leave. This is true for open source and for commercial products alike.

If you own your data and if you have the option to self-host you can always opt out of updates you don't like.

[virdev]

Maybe you are not building something in the sector but do you have any idea of how shitty collaborative work is for public agents ?

The possibility of data being sifoned back to the US if they use american cloud services has millions of public agents not being able to collaborate online.

Some of them try to provide on premise versions of the software but Microsoft want you so bad to pay for 365 or teams that they are willing to maintain only super old versions.

I spoke with a guy reponsible for 100k public agents who told me his only choice is to host Sharepoint 2011 (in 2025 !)

So maybe Docs is not as innovative as Notion but hey, we need as efficient as we can public servants. And we will do that by providing modern tools they can use online with their colleagues.

+ When we think of Microsoft we think about the Office Suite but in lot of cases they do the authentication with Active Directory. Go luck doing interoperability or SSO accross agencies when all of them rely on closed source code and are locked in by vendors...

We're actually solving with OIDC identity federation called ProConnect.