France will replace Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Zoom, Webex and others with its own sovereign video conferencing application "Visio" for public officials

Seriously, enshitification is the only thing US companies do well these days. They just dig deeper moats around their walled gardens because they’re too greedy to make decent products that people actually want.

Once these countries leave, they’ll never go back.

Look up LiMux and the massive Microsoft deal that followed.

While I would love to see them never going back, here in Germany, all it takes is some corrupt politician taking a huge bribe from a lobbyist and swoosh, they are back to Microslop.

Edit: Knowing our little corrupt fuckers in charge in German politics, the bribe probably doesn't even have to be mediocre.

Munich went open source / Linux a couple of years ago, ditching Microsoft. Using a big budget to convert everything and support employees etc. It was a huge act.

...Then they went back to Microsoft in yet another huge act, using a big budget. And then never revealed the budget for the last one. Which is really weird, considering its public money.

edit: just wanted to say that when idiots get power, there is always a way back. No matter how obviously stupid that would be

Also improves Teams/slows the enshitifcation. It's harder to make the product bad when it's hardly a monopoly.

Microslop can cry about it.

It’s also a French word that means video conference (as a shortened form of visioconférence).

Gosh, someone should tell the Microsoft teams team that Microsoft teams for business and Microsoft teams for personal and Microsoft teams for students are also using the same names and make communication difficult. They should get a copilot team on it

In that case we'll call it Frisio, French Visio.

People who use Visio, probably wont even have (the wrong) Visio installed. There shouldn’t be any confusion.

and fucking invest into not needing to use American-controlled CPUs as every single one of them contains a backdoor.

China has been working intensely for at least 2 decades to catch up, and they are still about a decade behind!

Netherlands has ASML which is a huge advantage for European independent manufacturing, but even with that it's an insanely expensive investment to make a realistic competitor to AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom etc. because they have loads of patents that are hard to avoid, and they have decades of know how. This is not even accounting for the software infra structure that would have to be built almost from scratch.
Chip production is a global enterprise, and even USA isn't independent anymore. They depend on ASML and TSMC for their most popular products in AI, Smartphones, servers, laptops and desktops. And more and more Arm is taking over from Intel/AMD.

What we may be able to do would be using Arm and have TSMC help us with manufacturing. But to make such a project succeed is not an easy thing, we had European computer companies in the 70's and 80's that were heavily subsidized by governments that dominated home markets for several European countries, and they essentially all failed against international competition.
So what we risk if we were required to use a European product funded by EU/European governments would be to have to use an overpriced under-performing technology, that would be a millstone around the neck of all of Europe, making Europe not catch up, but instead fall further behind.

Ignorance, mostly. It's sad but Chinese leaders seem to listen to their experts, while EU leaders listen to CEOs, and of large companies only.

... Pretty much every CPU contains backdoors, not just american ones. The Chinese government does the exact same thing as the American government. They are two sides of the same coin but the Chinese government seems more competent and efficient unlike the US government.

Even if the hardware doesn't have backdoors, the firmware often will, which you also can't get around with software.

The tier after that is software which also has a lot of back doors, luckily, you can run Linux and open source software. That is the best you can do. Really the only thing you can "trust" not to have backdoors is MCUs because those backdoors are much more likely to need physical access.

Sadly, our entire tech world is built on backdoors and intentional security flaws to enable easier debugging, recovery, and compliance with government law enforcement after the sale.

Here's my guess, and I could be completely wrong.

All the governments use 2 sets of computers. The first, is a closed network used only internally. Open source, connected as a network, but NOT connected to outside neteorks. This uses closed source OS that they themselves develop. No backdoors. Highly secured.

The second set is what you know. Windows 11, backdoors, easily spied on. Intentionally left open, because that's their way to spy on the other countries.

They leave this open, to let themselves be spied on, so that they can spy on the other side. Neither side realizing they're both doing the same thing, and both sides just getting mostly useless info.

Then, to throw off the trail of it being useless info, they occasionally allow a juicy bit of info into their windows computer. Just so it's not obvious that this isn't the real info.

I have zero evidence, and came up with this theory after reading your comment. So I could be very wrong.

And all their videos are on Peertube!

!lasuite@tube.numerique.gouv.fr

Unfortunately source code is still hosted on GitHub...

They should have called it "du coup" for that authentic frenchness.

And the apps have docker for easy setup! I was expecting something very convoluted and not suitable for tinkerers. What's good/bad is that the the apps seem to be deployed independently. Would love to have single user for everything. Need to read a bit further to see how it's done

I guess they're all cloud tools? Or is there something I can install in my laptop?

I don't know on what it's based on, but it's open source and audited.

Because the French government is hell bent on saving money, but they don't care about anyone's privacy at all. I wouldn't be surprised if they are building a privacy nightmare system here. Having said that, at least they are removing Microslop, and anything that could potentially hurt Microslop in any way, shape or form, is a good thing.

It is open source and built on top of livekit which is open source.

All the tools of "La Suite Numerique" are open source.

ohh i can't express how much i like that image.

I've called them Gooplesoft now.

Check out Mistral if you want a good nonUS AI.

He is as fucking narcisist, he doesn't care not to ruin anything.

magic or a trick?

Could you destroy unnecessary apostrophes in possessive pronouns? Get rewarded with correct grammar.

They've been building an entire open source suite of software tailored to their needs. If I had to guess, Jitsi isn't performant enough for large (100+) user meetings in a way they can scale easily. It's a great tool, but it seems better geared towards smaller loads. Video conferencing at scale is a pretty big challenge.

Between this, their new Docs platform and some Matrix-based chat platforms, I think this is something they've put a fair bit of thought into how they want to build. Overall, it's a cool initiative, but I think it's pretty clear that it's open source as a means to be transparent as a government organization rather than to form a platform for broad use by everyone. They do have some self-hosting instructions on their GitHub though.

Jitsi is owned by a Campbell, California based firm called 8x8. Source: I worked for them during the acquisition.

Though admittedly avoiding US origin open source is unlikely to be possible. The thing they are using seems to be based on another package with a similar issue.

The gendarmerie has had its own Linux distribution for a while now but that's about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

Came to comment this. I know there are only so many letters, and so many combinations of 4-8 of them, but can we quit naming new things with the name of an old thing?

Finding any details about France's Visio is going to be a cluster.

Visio is an outdated spreadsheet name, in English.

Visio is the new video conferencing software, in French.

France leads the world, it is up to everyone else to worry about conflict with France, not the other way around. /s

tech companies

The French government is not a tech company.

We don't do google here ok

It's the French common name for this, visioconférence. Why would they care about Microsoft products for this?

american law is relative, who cares

This looks suspiciously similar to element call

MIT license unfortunate

Shows the importance of having a proper primary process. Biden fucked up and dropped out of the race way too late for any democratic candidate to have time to build up hype and momentum. Just being the VP shouldn't make one an automatic default candidate. Harris did pretty bad during the Primary back in 2020, she just was not popular and didn't inspire enough people to go vote.

Overwhelming propaganda.

These particular news are based and a long-term good for the humanity. Moving from spying corpo slop to an open-source solution is a win-win for the french people. Sad that it is only happening now, this should have been done decades ago, the US empire and its corporations have always been evil. Now they are just showing their true face to europe and the US population.

Why *less than half

It's a bit more complicated but essentially only a third support him, a third oppose, and a third are either too stupid to know what side to choose or too lazy to do anything. In my opinion it's this third camp that are the worst of the worst. At least the Trumpers are doing what they think is right, these guys are just lazy and willing to just let anything happen to them as long as they can watch Netflix and buy Funko pops.

@DarkSideOfTheMoon In a word? Marketing

i dont understand your comment? you know and we should tske care about the people that have the same tendencies. "it's a hell of a drug"

Next: move away from github, as it's owned by MS

But that's the French name for this: visioconférence.

Francio?

The French use "Visio" kinda like a generic term to talk about a video call (short for visio-conférence), I find that much better already than that W nonsense.

Me-Cally Call-kin

https://youtu.be/04njgbmEFD4?t=15

The "find out" will take forever. France just decided that a "sovereign server" can be AWS or any US big-tech providing the physical server is located in France.
France has also signed a contract with Microsoft ("sovereign" solution again) for the national health data hub, even as a parliament investigation had MS France GM stating MS can't guarantee the data won't leak to the US!
Most political leader are grossly ignorant on anything IT.

All this instead of just hiring a few senior devs to contribute to any of the number of existing open source projects that are already infinitely better than any new thing they will come up with.

It's made by the DINUM, not an outside consulting company. And the product made by the DINUM (Tchap, France Connect …) are still in use.

It's open source and they have documentation for self-hosting it !

uhhhh on github :(

Visio is also a common French word for videoconference.

That would be like making a phone app called Phone, and Samsung trying to claim copyright because they call their app Phone, too.

Why should they?

Nah, a little healthy competition is good for growth.

I agree, it was the same on reddit.

They already developed alternatives for Microsoft Office:

https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/docs as an alternative to word

https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/grist as an alternative for excel and data management (much better than excel in my opinion)

It's open source, actively developed with Germany and the Netherlands (as I'm writing this post the last commit to doc was 49min ago) and self hostableby any administration or company who want to do it.

No, Visio is based on BigBlueButton, and it is to interface with Tchap, which is an internal Matrix server for France's gov agents.
EDIT: Ah! Yes, apparently LiveKit is involved in the integration with Tchap. My bad, you seem to be right!

If it is Israel it’s the same picture

If is. It's free (orI guess libre makes more sense since they are French) under Apache-2.0

Yea Nextcloud already has a replacement for most of Microsoft. 365 and is Open Source.

No need to reinvent the wheel

Do you know what happens to trademarks and patents when a country starts threatening its (previous) allies with military invasion and tradewars, and start undermining the values of those allies? You're right! It goes into the square hole! Heck, maybe I'm going to start a new software company tomorrow called Microsoft, and then threaten left and right with all crazy shit if anybody complains. Nobody will care about US trademarks since US disqualified itself by now.

Trademarks don't matter when it's only for internal use.

By Microsoft, no less.

Probably not an enforceable trademark in France.

It is. Currently their code is published under an Apache 2.0 license. There's links to it on the website, but the whole suite is on Github. It would be nice to see them migrate that codebase elsewhere down the line though

SIP is a nightmare protocol for firewalls. Time to retire it.

SIP uses different signalling protocols amongst other things than WebRTC, and i imagine browser support is a hard requirement

Well sure they don't have to, but this makes it much easier to adopt.

It's a French common name for this.