alt Hacker NewsFrance Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
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Countries are waking up to the danger of having the US in a position to take control of most of their computers and phones via software updates.
Open source solutions like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu could become more prominent. There's even interesting non us hardware options like https://starlabs.systems/
The US has had an unfair advantage in tech, defense, science and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With the newfound isolationism, tariffs, threats etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere, especially if governments can help bootstrap these sectors with efforts like these.
For those who don't want to use Twitter:
https://xcancel.com/lellouchenico/status/2015775970330882319
Or here's the linked article:
https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-...
And here's the app, Visio:
Switching to sovereignty-protecting, locally-hosted collaboration, compute, and storage is by no means impossible. FOSS advocates have been eagerly beating this drum and providing options for 25+ years.
The missing ingredient has always been the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change, and the friction of choosing something other than the standard, go-to, often at least apparently free (or at least bundled) tools.
The current U.S. threats against NATO and allies creates a rift in the previously-accepted international order that may finally motivate material change. Often such change is chaotic and discontinuous—it feels well nigh impossible, right up to the moment it feels necessary and inevitable.
The French Gendarmerie has been running Linux for a while now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu.
I don't know the details but it seems like a good first step.
I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
The reflex to bind Europe's IT with OSS is due to several factors, like Linus Torvalds being Finnish, Arch and SUSE having a European leadership, NEXT and OpenCloud started by German hands and an absence of a unicorn IT company in EU.
Relying on OSS in continental level is a blessing and a curse. It can scale very well to an homogenous basis but it might not be organised well in national and regional level due to poor economic motivation. The good scenario is a development of a modified Linux kernel, named like Europix, with a userland consisting of a full packet of OS apps, interoperable and secure in public and private level. The private companies can earn public contracts for support.
I really hope Marc Andreessen is happy.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/andreessen-horowitz-co-fou...
For what it's worth, if you want a self hosted replacement for Zoom Galene has worked great for me, The server requirements are remarkably low, especially if you are like me and just need a personal video chat to a few people. I run it on an old apu-2 with openbsd(which is just about the worst combination and it still works great) As a bonus there is no client, that is, the client is just a web page so very low friction to get people to use it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLODO
A Front for clandestine Operations? (Speculative Timeline)
- April 6 & 8, 1980: Sabotage and arson against Philips Data Systems and CII-Honeywell-Bull in Toulouse. Speculation: French State Operation. A move to protect national technological sovereignty during the "Plan Calcul" era.
- May 19, 1980: Arson attack on the archives of ICL (International Computers Limited) in Toulouse. Speculation: Continuation of the French State's "cleansing" of foreign influence.
- September 11, 1980 & December 2, 1980: Attacks against a computing firm in Toulouse and the UAP (Union des Assurances de Paris) in Paris. Speculation: American Operation? Possible retaliation or disruption of French administrative networks.
- January 28, 1983: Bombing of the new computer center at the Haute-Garonne Prefecture in Toulouse. Speculation: American Revenge. A direct hit against the French State's local administrative brain.
- October 26, 1983: Total destruction by fire of the Sperry Univac offices (a US multinational) in Toulouse. Speculation: French Revenge. A final "tit-for-tat" response targeting a key asset of the US military-industrial complex on French soil.
Many EU members impose regulatory requirements for software in some sectors. If you want to get certified you need to go through some of them and while they are arcane they are also required.
EU could easily force the hand - not in the next month or so but over a period of time. No need to discriminate against US companies but EU companies might be preferred and might have better access to EU services.
We already have customers asking for this. They are not the majority but given the recent events this could quickly become a valuable chunk of the business - perhaps even overnight. We as a business are already thinking about it. And it is not just about moving the data to an EU data center. This is of course acceptable in many cases but still subject to the CLOUD Act. We are talking about a clean cut situation.
It is true that good alternatives are not available, yet. But I would not underestimate EU tech companies either. There are plenty of great engineers and great companies in EU so strong competitors can spun up in short order. Now with AI coding assistants, it is even more doable then before.
It is also potentially a great opportunity especially now.
I don't see the dependency on these productivity and communication tools as that difficult of a problem to solve.
They are going to have a much harder time weaning off American cloud infrastructure and on to something purely domestic.
Can access X because it's X and locally blocked, "ironic" to use Twitter to post about sovereignty.
It's ongoing for a will with La suite numérique (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/).
- Tchap is a message app for officials, - Visio, based on LiveKit - FranceTransfert, I don't know what is it. - Fichiers => Drive - Messagerie => Email - Docs => A better Google Docs - Grist => Excel version of Google docs.
It aimed at "public worker", people working for the government.
They should probably fund their military first.
It’s petulant the way the EU is throwing a hissy fit after we’ve had lop-sided trade deals for years and funding the entire NATO alliance ourselves.
They act like we’re going to war with them when we’re asking for parity and for their self reliance to increase.
The inertia (or actively maintained status quo) in Europe towards the US platforms is massive.
Anecdotally, I recently found myself in the local government building of a small European town. They run several free digitalisation classes for small businesses.
The options? Introductory classes to:
- WhatsApp business
- Facebook and Instagram ads
- Gsuite
> France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
The odds that France will provide a competing offering is pretty high, because, in this day and age, and with AI, it's fairly straightforward to do so. The problem is adoption, do you think people in the USA or elsewhere will install it? Does that mean that only French companies and the French will be able to talk to eachother? Seems somewhat limiting and will limit business expansion.
Will the French government embed spyware in it, they can, since they'll be sponsoring this initiative, they've been intending to do with whatsapp and all the other messengers for years. Worrisome for the end user.
I'm all for competition, and I hope France succeeds in building a good product, because competition is great for everyone and creates jobs, and I hope it's going to take off soon, we'll see, bonne chance!
French report: The project presented is not new; it is a continuation of the Tixeo project (https://www.tixeo.com/en/secure-video-conferencing-solutions... video-conferencing-service-tixeocloud/trial-tixeocloud/), which was already the recommended solution for French government officials, public companies and all large companies required to process confidential or classified data via video conferencing.
Tixeo was fairly limited in its use and imposed on critical businesses (defence, nuclear, transport, energy, etc.). The aim is to extend the service to more areas, such as SMEs, universities, NGOs, etc., for all sensitive communications.
I don't think the project is intended to replace Zoom and Teams for the general public. Most public ministries use Teams and the Office suite.
French industries have been the target of quite a few cases of espionage by ‘advanced North American actors’. They have therefore been trying to distance themselves from US services for some time now (Google Tchap and Olvide).
As a FOSS advocate, I am quite astonished that this space has no FOSS "product." I mean PBX has things like asterix. We have good servers like ejabberd and prosody for XMPP. There are excellent voice chats like mumble.
Basically, Discord, but based on an open protocol to enable better interoperability. With a meeting functionality where you can send links that works directly in browser with no account. Also the discord video chat UI is garbage.
I know there are things like revolt chat. But my point is, I'm surprised that this is not more "filled".
We need more like this. Europe is totally dependent on US companies for cloud computing.
And they can strike back at corporate America by licensing the stuff under gnu licenses. Software that’s reasonably small, reasonably effective and portable. What a concept. If only the EU or UK had 5-10 hackers…
It will mean little if the infrastructure is still dependent on volatile partners (and I'm bundling allies and adversaries in this).
The core problem is Europe has been very successful betting and building upon though choices made by others (eg. Cheap manufacture in China, cheap energy in Russia, cheap defense/capital from US, cheap manpower/migrants from developing countries...).
Europe from its high ground flaunts this model to the whole world ("look at our development metrics! Our social spending") while completely ignoring the sustainability and the costs bore by others and neglecting its own responsibilities.
And now everything is crashing down simultaneously.
Not so much "aiming" as doing it. The alternative already exists, is open-source, and used by 40,000 government users. By 2027 all government agencies will use it exclusively.
We're not replacing services. We're replacing our dependence on the USA.
Every choice comes with a cost.
With allies like the USA, you don't need enemies.
This is great and definitely doable. It's the initial bit that's hard, people hate switching but then when they get used to it, they won't switch back.
What I'd really like to see is a pan-european payment processor, a European alternative to Visa/Mastercard.
I work at a French research institute and our Zoom contract ends soon so we get to switch to Visio. It's not too bad but quite tier below Zoom. Noise cancellation is not great, being browser based also comes with limitations, in half my meetings people don't manage to find the permissions to allow mic and/or webcam ...
Non-french might not realize that we have a huge free software community of france, made up in large part of communist state-funded scientists / researchers. They do a lot of cool stuff, you can see a few projects for example on Framasoft who has the explicit goal of un-Googling yourself : https://framasoft.org/en/ https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/
That said, having technical solutions isn't enough to replace USA / private solutions. The answer has to take into account the economical, social and political situation
My hope is that all this push towards tech independence (not just from EU) will make the most "basic" tools open-source and they wouldn't suck as much as they do now.
What I mean by this is e.g. you can already use Linux on a desktop and it's generally okay (or even good sometimes), however things like LibreOffice are absolutely unusable in terms of performance, functionality and user friendliness compared to e.g. Keynote or even Pages on macOS.
Multiple governments having to solve essentially the same issue on a global scale is a unique opportunity to save costs by working on open source together, and get funding and direction that's never been available to OSS before.
The irony of building 'sovereign' software on top of Windows and MacOS.
Without a hardware or OS pivot, this feels less like independence and more like empty posturing.
"Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying Microsoft". Same for Oracle and AWS, until a year ago. Before the current insanity, Europe whould become independent like never. Now, it will take about a decade, IF the insanity continues in the next presidential terms.
This is great. With more users alterantives will improve. The one place I would LOVE to see more effort at an international standard is in operating systems.
And no just adopting Linux is not enough. It needs to ecompass the full breadth of Windows and MacOS and be as turn-key and good at integration as MacOS. The Linux ecosystem is just too fragmented and still caters too strongly to developers. A full stack international standard, including being able to deploy packaged priorietary software and drivers, would provide potentially real competition to Microsoft and Apple.
the Europeans have only ever purchased American products because they were cheaper by the feature, and there wasn't a political constituency to placate (see the [wine lake|wikipedia]). and the US in return.
as it was, so shall it always be.
any appetite to flush money down the drain because Greenland feels insulted will dull very very quickly. However as defense treaties have always been more fleeting than NATO has been, we can be sure the Europeans will quickly find better, more reliable partners than they've had in the US, no doubt at lower cost for all concerned.
Isn't that what "LaSuite" is? I know this particular instance is for the French government; but isn't it open source?
De Gaulle strikes back)
I like CryptPad.fr. End-to-end encrypted google docs.
Every country should ban American social networks and messaging tools ASAP
The software part of this would be easy. People will literally write it for free, out of the sheer joy of building Free & open source software. The part the state needs to do is bootstrap a network effect that leads to people actually using it.
I guess they’ll need to employ a few engineers to add enough lines of code to rocket.chat to make it competitive with Teams levels of slowness.
The actual website listing all the tools of this office suite (in French)
Finally the year of Minitel on the desktop!
Don't believe this has anything other than to do with the USA's recent attacks on NATO countries.
They won’t be able to make products as great as here in the US
It's baffling that the E.U. and others (corporations anywhere really) keep using and paying for Zoom when Jitsi and Nextcloud Talk are free and work very well. This is not a political issue, but one of data sovereignty.
Instead of these politics driven projects that usually fail at least partially what tends to succeed is if an angry nerd starts a project to replace something with free alternative, such as Linux, VLC, ffmpeg, ...
This is the kind of thing France often wants to do yet never implements.
Replicating features from existing software has become extremely easy due to AI. I won’t be surprised if open source is able to easily catch up with the bigger products.
This would be a great thing for humanity as a whole, but not for France. So I doubt it will happen. Hope strings eternal.
If they did it by growing open source competitors, it would be brilliant. Linux-equivalents for all major categories.
Americans fail to appreciate a few things about our economy
1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans
2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market
3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with English + technology
When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada. Theres not an easy market to expand to without much deeper focus on that specific market and its needs, for much fewer returns.