alt Hacker NewsI’m looking with so much admiration what France has been building in this space, especially the latest gendarmerie transition into open source OS from windows.
The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost, despite the fact that is the most popular language in Europe.
Yes, I get that this is a way to preserve the French language and they have all the rights to do that (in the end, they’re the ones putting the effort in these initiatives) but imagine how faster these ideas could be shared and diffuse in Europe if French understood this. If all the countries in Europe just keep pushing their nationalist ideology instead of truly believing into a united and solid Europe Union, we won’t go any where.
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> The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost
Interestingly, a French-speaking Canadian who has spent some time in France told me that his right to use the French language is better protected in Canada than it is in France. He thinks that this is a consequence of the reciprocality implied by having more than one official language: French speakers in Canada get the same rights as English speakers, so people are happy to grant rights in return for getting them, whereas in France everyone gets screwed and you end up with a situation in which a French person wanting to do a PhD on French history at a French university has to write their grant application in English.
> Yes, I get that this is a way to preserve the French language and they have all the rights to do that (in the end, they’re the ones putting the effort in these initiatives) but imagine how faster these ideas could be shared and diffuse in Europe if French understood this.
Isnt this just baked into the idea? The French are building an OS for internal use for their own interests.
If we then try to extend that or the Dutch OS to other countries we have the original problem of dependence.
‘United and solid EU’ doesn’t have to involve forcing everyone to use a someone’s native language. Ideally we’d have a common language that’s neutral and used for international communication only. In fact, we already have a working solution; Esperanto has existed for well over 100 years at this point, and continues to be a healthy, living language. People just don’t seem to care that much. It always seems to be either practicality or national heritage, never both at the same time. Yet the common ground has been there all along.
I guess we could do with more weird third-path stuff with the Linux world, even if the reason for said weird stuff existing is the French having (le) NIH syndrome.
It's also great when an actual commercial organization with requirements gets into the Linux game, as they don't really yield to 'we could make that printer work but it would be against everything we stand for' style arguments that have cemented problems in Linux userland for decades.
Frenchman here. French companies and organization, in my experience actually really like the English language (at OVH for example, most official docs are in English), but I do think it makes sense for a government funded by people who speak mostly French (ie the French taxpayers) to do stuff in French, the language most of its citizens will be most familiar with.
Putting stuff in English will tend to exclude the less educated, or people who struggle to learn foreign languages.
EDIT: and actually, from looking at the README of https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix
> Ce README est en français mais le reste du code, les issuers et les PR sont en anglais.
The README is in French but the rest of the code, the issues (they wrote issuers, but that is a typo I suspect) and the PRs are in English.
So. :P
Hi (Sécurix developer), we wrote our documentation in English and in French: https://cloud-gouv.github.io/securix.
Maintaining both languages is hard but we will do our best.