- Great to see this on HN. fyi, La Suite is an umbrella project built by DINUM in France that started several years ago, mainly to enable people in the public administration to use more independent tools. It's built in-house, often on top of other open source technologies. E.g.: Matrix powers chat and LiveKit powers Visio (which was recently featured on HN as well when they announced it's rolled out to replace Zoom / Teams, etc [1])
I'm fortunate to be collaborating with them as their Docs product is built on top of our open source BlockNote text editor (https://www.blocknotejs.org).
Docs specifically started as an international collaboration with Germany [2] to explore how different EU countries can collaborate in building sovereign workplace solutions (several other countries including NL have shown interest as well).
They're actively supporting us, and related projects like Yjs (https://yjs.dev) by sponsoring feature development.
I'm sure many of the team members will follow along here as well! Happy to answer any questions.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294
[2] https://www.zendis.de/en
- Okay this is nowhere near an "Office suite". It is a cloud collaboration suite with a glorified markdown editor and with some extra utilities around. Almost nobody buys stuff like Google Docs and Microsoft Office for this reason.
From my experience using open-source collaboration groupware like Nextcloud, their solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow. Only thing that got somewhere near of the commercial offering is OwnCloud's Infinity Scale (OCIS) which is written in Go. It is no surprise since OwnCloud is indeed running an open-core business and you cannot use their binaries in businesses. OpenCloud is the "open-source" fork but they are already in legal trouble with OwnCloud due to industrial espionage claims.
If European governments are serious, the amount of money they _guarantee_ should be in the degree of tens of billions of Euros. Not fun 10k hackaton projects. The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it. And yes it will probably cause whatever current party to lose elections, independence has a price. It is high.
- On this topic, I think it is worth mentioning Framasoft [1]
It is a French organization that offers plenty of alternatives to Google and other big tech products. A lot of them are just rebranded and hosted open source software, but they also develop their own, such as PeerTube and Framaprout (the last one is a joke, but PeerTube isn't).
[1] https://framasoft.org/
- Lasuite Docs PM here. Awesome to see we’ve made it top the first page again! Thanks for the interest :)
I’ve compiled a bunch of answers in an FAQ on this doc https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-...
Cheers!
by klaustopher
1 subcomments
- Also worth looking at:
- Germany‘s OpenDesk: https://www.opendesk.eu/en
- Netherland‘s MijnBureau: https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau-infra/
by patrick4urcloud
0 subcomment
- Good! I'll definitely give it a try!!
we still need a good email server system in open source and simple to install / maintain ?
- Hmm, and what of https://cryptpad.fr/
Though they also seem to be on github https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad
- Makes sense, using an office suite hosted by a hostile power isn't a very smart longterm strategy.
by ninalanyon
0 subcomment
- It's not an office suite and the linked page doesn't claim it is.
The title should be changed.
- Great, but why on GitHub? That doesn't seem very souverain to me
- This has been on HN a lot recently. For instance:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
by ThinkBeat
1 subcomments
- The big problem EUs continuous big talk on digital sovereignty,
which is a good and vital concept, is that funding is ridiculously
lacking.
Terms used like;
“European hyperscale cloud”
“Sovereign infrastructure”
“Strategic autonomy”
“European data centers for critical workloads”
Which ended up in various efforts and projects
Digital Europe Programme,
Recovery and Resilience Facility,
IPCE
(I am not deeply familiar with EU projects)
I believe funding was around low hundreds
of millions (€) total
To build one hyperscaler region might cost around €10 billion.
The second problem is that systems that were suggested
out of it still relied on US software stack, US computers,
etc.
It is not like the EU member states could not fund it,
some estimates say aggregated EU and member states have
spent €350 billion in Ukraine.
That is not to say they should not do that,
nor to suggest you have to chose one or the other
but it is demonstration
that EU+Member states can fund massive efforts,
If deemed important enough.
and EU+Memberstates so far have not felt an urgency or will
to really invest in digital sovereignty.
by julianozen
0 subcomment
- This is something we must be angry with our tech leaders for
They thought they could support trump because they were upset with the democrats policies on crypto and AI cautiousness
But instead they got someone willing to break the world order and our alliances which will harm tech growth
by iambateman
1 subcomments
- Honest question…given how developed our sensibilities are around docs, file storage, and spreadsheets, what is the hard part to this?
Don’t get me wrong…something is hard…I still use Microsoft Word because I feel like I have to. But what is keeping the industry from building a word processor that doesn’t suck and is capable of interfacing with .docx files?
- Shout out to Yjs, ProseMirror and BlockNote on which we relied to build LaSuite Docs
- I wish them the very best, but I don't understand why it doesn't handle OpenDocument Format (ODF) natively.
- Nice to see the "true spirit" of OpenSource being practiced and growing in Europe...I hope other countries jump into this as well, with support and resources.
- It is interesting to see yjs with hoccuspocus being used. I am currently considering our options for real time document editing + full text search.
Seems like a common approach is something like using yjs for sync with a temporary LSM storage like rocksdb for updates and then periodically snapshot to postgres for full text search and compaction.
by guerrilla
1 subcomments
- What's wrong with libreoffice and collabra?
- bonjour, je suis clippy ...
by assaddayinh
0 subcomment
- The french can make mountains move for very little money. There army capabilities compared to the us relative to the investment is outstanding. Wouldn't wonder if they dethroned Microsoft office by strategically supporting open source.
- I would not be surprised if American PACs adopted this out of concern that US based office suites are politically compromised.
by defraudbah
0 subcomment
- I came to bash on it but it looks nice, well done France!
by Steelclearance
0 subcomment
- Nice to see this kind of initiative, but looks like too little too late IMO.
Reminds me of Nextcloud, which is great but quite slow.
by ricardobeat
6 subcomments
- Why is Django so popular among open-source projects like these, especially government funded? I’ve never happened to see a commercial project use it in my twenty years in the field. Ruby/Go or even bun or node would be much more approachable and performant options today.
- And somehow, during the effort to achieve digital sovereigncy, they still manage to host the source on the Microsoft property of github 8-/
Given that the only step necessary to host git on the internet is making port 22 publicly accessible, I fail to see why so many projects are hosted on this malware site...
by mytailorisrich
0 subcomment
- The problem is that open-source projects funded by the taxpayer bring nothing long term to create companies that can compete or generate economic growth or develop future industries. They would be much better off creating a more business friendly environment and supporting private businesses through grants, procurements, etc the way the US are good at.
- Very nice.
You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence, but they do. Over the years I have heard of many good Open Source Projects coming out of France.
I sometimes wonder if it is because of French vs English Language were you hardly hear of their projects in English speaking Countries.
- It's very on-brand for France that the website is in French only, no English
by Insensitivity
2 subcomments
- I was looking at the Meet repository as an example, people literally don't know how to write React, without drowning in `useEffect`, `eslint-disable`, `any`. React has it's issues (and a ton of them), but writing code like this, I expect it to end up exactly like Microsoft Teams quality wise.
Honestly, at that point, it's indistinguishable from LLM slop
- Of course, it is not forcing to use any whatng cartel web engines namely has noscript/basic (x)html interop support (aka classic web) and/or with public and as simple as possible network protocols anyone can implement a rich GUI client for.
Of course its SDK has components choosen with care to maximize alternative (present and future) availability and its code is not stored on microsoft github.com.
by ChrisArchitect
0 subcomment
- Another one?
Previously:
This week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294
2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668
by fleroviumna
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by johnjames87
0 subcomment
- [dead]
- [flagged]
- What's the value of it being online? Surely being able to run it as a native application would be preferable?
by IlikeMadison
1 subcomments
- Python and TypeScript... hard pass. Mediocre software made by mediocre web developers. Imagine a car manufacturer using wood instead of steel because they can only afford to pay cheap lumberjacks.
by tjwebbnorfolk
1 subcomments
- This is a toy. It really makes it look like they aren't that serious.
- Office suite, cool! Looks Inside It's a Django app.
by goodmythical
3 subcomments
- For those unaware, this is likely in response to the current US political crisis in which the US might decide at any point spike the prices or stop offering licenses on Microsoft etc products.
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