[paulfitz]

I work at Grist, the "tableur collaboratif" (collaborative spreadsheet) listed on the La Suite homepage. We're in the interesting situation of being both a NYC-based company, and open source software the French gov has adopted and is helping to develop. Grist is mostly a node backend. So it is a complicated story. The key is having code the gov can review and trust and run it on sovereign infrastructure.

Grist https://www.getgrist.com/

A write-up of how the French gov uses it https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...

[yunnpp]

Your position is fantastic because it immediately puts to death all of that nationalistic nonsense about the EU becoming "anti-American" by enforcing privacy laws on US Big Tech etc, when in fact they are just protecting their citizens' rights against unethical business models regardless of origin. I might be naive, but your company to me represents a win for free/open software and cross-country collaboration.

That being said, I should ask: to what extent do you see being US-based an advantage or a problem in the current state of things? For example, in regards to exports controls, or any other such thing that may potentially limit your business scope depending on $current_admin.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> in fact they are just protecting their citizens' rights against unethical business models regardless of origin.

I don't think it's just that. It's also the increasingly plausible idea that the US government could pressure the EU by actually or threatening to control, throttle or tax EU access to online platforms such as Zoom, Teams, MS Office, Google docs, Azure or AWS.

[jesterson]

> in fact they are just protecting their citizens' rights against unethical business models regardless of origin

Would you elaborate how this "in fact" is "protecting their citizens' rights"? Very curious to know.

[sequoia]

wow it reminds me of Microsoft Access, a great piece of software in terms of rapidly building an application!

Does grist have forms?

[dylan604]

I'm not an MS dev type, but I've often seen these forms questions. What made their forms so easy, or more in general what is so complicated about forms that this was even a tool so many liked?

[flowerlad]

If you want forms try https://visualdb.com/ it is another tool that aims to be Microsoft Access

[gpm]

Form support is touted on the homepage: https://www.getgrist.com/forms/

For what it's worth, which isn't much because this is probably outdated: I remember trying grist a few years ago and leaving mildly unimpressed with form support (I think because I was hoping to have image upload in the forms and that wasn't supported yet).

[mentalgear]

Kudos, Grist is great ! Super features, quite seamless only the UI could be more modern (or user stylesheet customizable) if you get to it.

[paulfitz]

Thanks! Fair about styling :). You can bring your own stylesheet https://support.getgrist.com/self-managed/#how-do-i-customiz...