Lyon Drops Microsoft to Boost Digital Sovereignty

[tormeh]

Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia are switching to OpenTalk for teleconference. It's really wild to see things actually happen - not just research grants and talking.

[hyperman1]

I noticed a similar thing as an European with COVID. Noise from a new disease came from China, so everybody is a bit scared and does nothing. Then Italy got the full blast of it, overloaded hospitals and all. This somehow made it real. People in our ingroup were suffering. At that point, governements got actively involved.

The Microsoft vs ICC situation seems similar. IT independence is now taken serious at governemental organisations. Our ingroup got a problem.

[eigenspace]

It's *almost* like those research grants and talking laid some groundwork ;)

[sigmoid10]

Munich switched to Linux in 2012. But they switched back to Microsoft in 2020 because they never could get it to work completely. At least not to the level of comfort in the old system. Open source has its advantages, but MS dominates the business world because of its tech support that is truly second to none on that scale. If Europe wants independence, they need to support local businesses and not just technology.

[v5v3]

Article says they are switching to OnlyOffice.

It looks and feels very similar to ms office (So easier to adopt than libre)

https://www.onlyoffice.com/document-editor.aspx?docs=downloa...

https://www.onlyoffice.com/spreadsheet-editor.aspx?docs=down...

(Edited to remove statement saying paid product, as it's free with enterprise offerings as below)

[bni]

I thought at first it was a typo of OpenOffice. Turns out that is not the case.

I think OnlyOffice focusing on web based collaboration only is on point. It is what organizations want today and what users expect.

[GTP]

You can actually use it for free, I don't know if that's just for private use, or if it's something like Nextcloud that you can self-host for free.

[amelius]

It would be fair if we'd see an increase in government funding of open source projects.

Or at least the government could pay for security audits.

[kergonath]

I think you are not familiar with how governments work. They are not going to rely on a random git repo, they are going to have contractors to ensure a basic level of support and bug fixing. And some contractors to ensure development and availability of tooling. And deployment and integration. They are also going to test, audit and validate updates, not just pull from remote.

Also, in some cases there are research agencies doing some work as well (sometimes they have been doing it for a long time on not-so-sexy but vital projects like Inria and the open source tax code in France).

[tormeh]

Governments don't generally get Bob from accounting to install it on a spare laptop they have lying around. There's a contractor involved that will also be tasked with fixing bugs and other improvements and change requests. As long as the software is GPL improvements will flow back upstream somehow.

[JimDabell]

They do. Take a look at things like NLNet, which is largely EU-funded:

https://nlnet.nl

[jddj]

It doesn't seem like it, but can someone shed any light on whether La Suite Numerique (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en) and the Territoire Numérique Ouvert are related?

[Disposal8433]

I don't think so. "Territoire Numérique Ouvert" seems to be a private project that would give tools to the "collectivités territoriales" (i.e. mayors and local people).

La Suite Numerique is a bunch of tools for a more global population. It's mostly for government workers I guess but it looks like anyone can use it. The most famous tool is Tchap (see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol)>) which is used by cops in France as a secure messaging platform.

[PoignardAzur]

I'm not sure either, but those seem like completely parallel initiatives, with overlapping but not quite identical feature sets.

[eigenspace]

Almost certainly related. Im sure Lyon won't just use those tools, but im sure they'll also be front of the queue for consideration.

[williamdclt]

googling a bit (as a french speaker with no specific knowledge about these): doesn't seem like it

[glitchc]

What's the open-source equivalent of a collaborative platform like Sharepoint? Without that, it's going to be tough to migrate most organizations.

[sublimefire]

I found it hard to even bid to solve problems for councils locally. The requirements are mental sometimes, there is a reason the company would focus on consumers rather than gov sales. This in turn makes it easy for the large corps to win over contracts. There needs to be more willingness to engage locally with the engineers to help them setup and run OSS systems. With the new generation this could become true.

[nxobject]

Do they need an intranet wiki/web page solution to replace Sharepoint as well?

[hermanzegerman]

I don't know. But if they do, they would probably go with the french XWiki. It is also already part of the german OpenDesk Project

[guappa]

I think even a .txt file over a shared directory would work better than sharepoint.

[cyberkar]

Well open-source projects are free. Why pay for editing Software while you can get it for free in 2025 ??

[Disposal8433]

You're very very wrong nowadays, see https://code.gouv.fr/fr/ and https://www.data.gouv.fr/fr/datasets/socle-interministeriel-....

[lionkor]

Finally, the year of the Linux desktop!

[buyucu]

I said this before, but will say it again: Trump is pure evil, but he is having positive (unintended) consequences. One of them will be is the migration he is triggering away from Big Tech.

[TiredOfLife]

Away from AMERICAN big tech

[esbranson]

Don't count your chickens before they hatch. Europe is likely to get in as many civil society and foreign aid funding cuts as they can while Trump is in office. It's Trump all the way down.

[xeonmc]

Trump is teaching the world a lesson that they will remember in their bones.

[madaxe_again]

Everyone is either pure good or pure evil now, huh? Red team or blue team, compromise is anathema, the centre a desert.

FWIW I’m no fan of Trump, but I’m even less of a fan of this bipolar tribalism.

[amelius]

I'm thinking more: maybe we'll see an increase in commits from dubious hacker groups.

Who is going to audit these open source projects?

[sylware]

Don't forget, "open source" is not enough: we need _lean_ open source and I do include the SDK (then programing language).

That for software/protocol/file formats (and hardware programing interfaces...).

It is much easier to say than done, and when you read that, often it is to apply pressure on microsoft pricing only without a real intent to start to "digitally assume themselves".

Keep in mind: there is ZERO, Z-E-R-O, economic competition with big tech as they are backed by funds with thousands of billions of $ and they their billions of $ too. They will spend anybody out of business (~usually 5-10 years, even longer), and "buy" anybody (then throw them away once lock-in is assured).

For instance: libreoffice is horrible (c++ grotesque syntax complexity is the culprit), PDF file format is insane (I cannot event download the specs with noscript/basic (x)html browsers!). Better write simple utf8 text files along with some PNG images mkv(AV1/OPUS) video if needed.

Basically, you need to generate programmatically the PDF files of the administration since there are no "reasonable" (as far as I know) open source software to do so (often c++, then excluded de-facto).

[tonyedgecombe]

I agree with you that the PDF format is insane (I have had my head buried in the spec for the last month) but it has won in the marketplace. It's unlikely anything can supersede it now.

Microsoft had a technically strong alternative but it was far too late.

[sodimel]

We generate pdf files using weasyprint (convert html+css into cool pdf files), I think tools like this are very valuable and practical for building higher-level pdf-generators tools.

[vasco]

IBM has some cool AI tools for PDFs that I used for some side project toys: https://github.com/docling-project/docling