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I had a question since there's growing interest in open source adoption for digital sovereignty purposes in Europe; I produce open source software for civil servants as well (for mass appraisal/property tax valuation specifically), and I was wondering if you could offer any advice about how to best meet the needs of/approach European governments (both local and national) about open source collaboration? Do they prefer to develop their own things in house, or do they like to work with community projects?

Do these administrations still purchase licenses for software or do they just create open source maintained by government employees? How much are they willing to pay? Because people in Europe are notoriously paid less so I am curious of the financial aspect. Also curious about the logistics of ownership and support...

Glad to be working as part of this initiative too!

I'm a little confused. You said LiveKit powers Visio. But isn't Visio a CAD and drawing app inside of Microsoft Office?

The description of the Docs project, at least on the OP page, is interesting:

"A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales. Built with Django and React."

An office suite's 'docs' component is usually a word processor and people sometimes try to (mis)use it for the functions you actually list - i.e., you can try to use Word as a wiki, linking pages somehow, but it's not nearly as efficient as a purpose-built wiki.

Based on the quote description, it looks like your project inverted the thinking: Is word processing not a/the primary function? Are the other functions truly prioritized - e.g., is the wiki somewhat as efficient as MediaWiki?

Genuine question: why do you consider it to be nowhere near an "Office suite"? It seems to me it fits the definition given by Wikipedia [1]. I guess it is less advanced than Google Workspace or Microsoft Office but it would cover all of my needs at work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_software#Office_s...

You don't need to raise taxes for this, literally just stop wasting money on licensees once the open source projects are ready. It's not a "let do it in 3 months" thing, this will take at least a decade.

My initial thought was: why not fork LibreOffice and spend the extra dev time closing the gap between what it is and what they need?

But after some thought, I feel a cloud collaboration suite makes more sense as big orgs often run on online-first solutions like Sharepoint. So they can tick the essential boxes by being an online collaboration suite, and fill in formatting features later.

Though your points on speed and architecture do make me wonder if Python was their best choice...

> OpenCloud is the "open-source" fork but they are already in legal trouble with OwnCloud due to industrial espionage claims.

Can you expand on this or source this? I'm quite interested in OpenCloud, and haven't heard anything about this. I searched for a few keywords (espionage, legal, lawsuit), which only lands your comment on top.

Let young people get fantastically wealthy in a low friction business environment and you'll get all the enterprise grade homegrown software you need.

From the FAQ:

> With Docs our job is not to replace Microsoft Office

https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-...

Also: like when switching from AWS to EU provider, the goal is not feature parity. Not only it is costly to implement, but also a reason why so many features are in AWS or Office is to ensure vendor lock-in due to feature comparisons.

Learning to do more with less is a feature, not a bug.

Interestingly neither their GitHub nor the La Suite front page (translated) actually mention "office" - that's what the OP titled it.

Europe is a little bit busy bleeding money for defence if you hadn't noticed. There's only so many 50bn EUR it can conjure up for something

Scaling horizontally is significantly cheaper than the additional engineering cost required to build these applications in statically typed languages, especially in developed nations like France.

The real bottleneck lies on the database side, but it is rare for an average organization to actually hit its limits. Don't think at Microsoft scale if you aren't them.

you know le suite is a success, when random americans complain about it :)

good for the french, they made the right choice.

Or maybe the solution must be one rooted in reducing taxes. Make investing extremely attractively, and stop relying on taxes to solve everything.

A small note: in 2026, classic office suites shouldn't even exist in my opinion, so if the EU were to create a glorified R/Quarto, essentially a LaTeX wrapper with some basic calculation capabilities added, it would be infinitely better than any office suite.

My personal setup is Emacs/org-mode, using babel for the rest; I use Python with Polars, Plotly, and very occasionally SymPy just to avoid using Maxima if I'm already in Python. I see no reason at all to use LibreOffice, MS Office, or anything similar. This is what's actually needed. Billions should be invested in IT training, not in copies of software from another era designed to let untrained secretarial staff use a desktop.

> solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow

True as it may be that they are slow, I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages.

> 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.

You do you, but increasing taxes to build products to replace products built by private enterprise sounds like a 180 degree opposite of what Europe needs to prosper.

To make matters worse, they are using Django. I can't take the EU serious any more.

Yup, I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned earlier but they're the ones behind PeerTube (which I see posted on HN a lot) and many other tools. They've been building google alternatives for over two decades now and many of their tools are quite mature

https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/

I hate to say it because it's cute but that website is not going to win over large companies to use these tools.

Thanks for posting an actual link to a demo, even if read-only. I tried some of the buttons on the site with rudimentary understanding of french, but all I found was login pages

Vive la France !

Love the fact that you use USA date format, not rest-of-world.

Love the fact that your AI customer service bot takes a question and then asks for an email address for a reply.

Love your incoherently bolded statements: "The Docs app is a note taking and knowledge management software.

Love how the vast amount of emojis really clarify things and help the reader.

s/love/hate/g

I'm intrigued as to why both these, and the Suite Numerique have chose Element / Matrix as the chat component. Every time I've tried to use Element / Matrix it has failed dismally for me and everyone else in whatever community is trialling it. Element itself was so buggy as to be unusable.

CryptPad is:

- an office suite, where La Suite is at least partly a coherent package bundling existing software which has documents, chat, video calls, etc but wouldn't really play the role of an office suite IIUC - they serve different purposes mostly

- E2EE, which comes with its unique set of benefits and drawbacks

(and yes, sadly at XWiki SAS we host our code on GitHub too, I wish it wasn't like this)

Made X-Wiki unrelated just happen to be the same country

Yes I remember when UK regulator blocked Microsoft from buying Activision there were posts on r/Microsoft regarding their ability to send update to brick all Windows installs in UK and delete all Azure data of UK companies, how UK was a small insignificant market compared to BRICs so it wouldn't hurt MSFT stock price.

Given JD Vance obviously hates UK/EU way more than Trump, and he may be next US president, he may in fact threaten Microsoft to do it against UK and EU.

Wondering what software are China/Russia using in their public administration?

The trend up until the 2010s was that global companies were so big and ubiquitous that they could dictate the economic actions of nations, not the other way around. International military conflicts were influenced by the likes of Halliburton. Corporations were the new nation-states, countries were mere speed bumps in the flow of global capital. That was seen by some as a great thing, aligning everyone’s interests together and encouraging peace.

In that world, France betting on Microsoft is not only benign, it’s a positive. That’s also the world of Davos and Jeffrey Epstein.

We’re experiencing a global shift toward nationalism which has pushed back hard on that trend. There’s things to like about that and things to dislike, but those things differ wildly depending on your politics.

Politicians in the EU are complicit to say the least. And I hope they'll prove me wrong.

Git is distributed, the repository can be hosted concurrently at many places.

The project benefits from the visibilityband community of GitHub and GitHub is completely replaceable with European hosted or self-hostable options should something untoward happen.

Not sure that it’s relevant to switch git hosts is trivial. And everyone is already there

Cause that's where the traction is. The beauty of git is that it's inherently distributed, github is just a clone like any other.

Underrated point: Bldg #1 needs to be sovereign hub for initiatives, for which OP is providing a first tenant…

given git is decentralized, my guess is github is just a public mirror.

I wait for frenchhub, in french only, no english translation, nothing. Typical french. Greetings from you EU neighbor.

GitHub is using Git which was developed by Linus Thorvald, a Finish and thus EU citizen.

That does not sound very sovereign by the US to me.

The EU doesn't really fund many things directly. It's total annual budget is just 170 billion euros. It can fund research and coordination projects but at the end of the day the EU is mostly a coordination mechanism for sovereign states. Looking purely at EU projects is not really a useful lense to get an idea of what is happening...

Word has a billion features you did not know that exist. Getting something Word shaped is probably straight-forward enough (how long did it take to make Google Docs), but getting those dangling features and quirks would be a long haul.

Mimicking Excel - woof. This one is used by so many people in different ways, that unless you offer 1:1 bug compatibility, it would be challenging to get 100% of people to meet everyone's current use case.

Take a look at my Y.js sync server at https://teleportal.tools if you are already using JS on your backend

> What's wrong with libreoffice

I'm a very light user and only moved to onlyoffice because it was freezing[0] on my then new laptop, but at least on mac, I feel like it needs a UI refresh, icons that are not blurry, a look at the performance when doing basic tasks, etc.

It's free and opensource, which is good, but it's not as polished as other paid alternatives.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43038942

> I’ve never seen a commercial project use it in my twenty years in the field.

This is very surprising to me considering some of the largest sites in the world are built on Django. Instagram, Pinterest, for instance. Large parts of stripe and Robinhood are implemented with Django. Eventbrite, bitbucket. I believe even Sentry is.

All commercial products.

Django must be more popular than Rails in the EU these days. Most Django devs have never used Go or Node and have never heard about Bun. Django is in the category of battle-tested frameworks that are very boring and easy to get things done with.

Does node or Go have a full-stack framework with any real usage? Those languages seem to have people that like piecing together libraries than using frameworks. Other languages all offer popular frameworks; Ruby on Rails, Java Spring, PHP Laravel, ASP.Net.

Instagram uses it as their main backend. They have hundreds of million of daily users. Some of the critical backend services are in C++.

Django is boring in a best possible way. Rather than spending six months setting up a bunch of microservices, you spend couple weeks on Django and ship a working product. Built in admin dashboard for example is a godsend at small scale.

Bun is a very recent and thus unstable and immature project.

It has also been acquired by Anthropic recently.

Does not look like a great choice.

I think an unsung hero in making open source broadly known and adopted in France is Framasoft [https://framasoft.org/en/], a non-profit association. They have since many many years an initiative to de-google internet and provide free and hosted alternatives and resources.

The French have amazing technologists, I worked with many stunningly brilliant French men and women across 3D gaming, film and media production. However, culturally they end up in a little "French pod" when not working in France because they know how to and really enjoy vigorous debate. If one cannot hold their own in their free wheeling intellectualized conversation and debate style, one might end up feeling insulted and stop hanging out with the frogs. There also seems to be a deep cultural understanding of design that is not present in people, generally, from other nations. That creates some interesting perspectives in software interactive design.

> You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence

France has always been super heavy on open source. They even used to host Les Trophées du Libre, international open-source software competition. FramaSoft (i.e. PeerTube) and VLC are also French.

Isn’t VLC French also?

Two words: Fabrice Bellard

>would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence

You have not been paying attention.

I have met very few devs who know how to avoid useEffect

Why would one decide to even go with React in recent years anyway? Strangely I've seen it happen a lot too.

I'd have thought that Vue or Svelte would be a slam dunk choice. Do project managers love bloat and lag or something?

It means that it is de-facto compatible with all operating systems.

Also means that the tooling to make collaborative work in this suite possible already exists because it's a common use case on the web and less so on native software (see Microsoft Office vs. Microsoft 365 online).

Managing documents on the back end can be very sensible, depending on your work context. Not having to deal with installations is also a real advantage in a heterogeneous environment with a mix of US-controlled operating systems and unencumbered OSes. It also makes migration between them easier, since you only need a common browser to be supported.

There are definitely some benefits! Installation and updates become trivial. Also, collaboration is generally easier, because all you have to do is send a link.

These are the same reasons Google Docs took off, and they are real advantages.

Ouch, harsh words!

But, what would be your stack of choice? Or, what stack gives you the most confidence?

It's typical of non-technical people to ask for "like Facebook, but x y z." They just don't know the magnitude of effort required behind these projects.

And it isn't an office suite at all

Its part of La Suite which began planning in 2023. This is clearly marked in the linked README. Don't bring /r/politics level misinfo and speculation here.

The first version for the "docs" program was released in May 2024

This already happened when USA sanctioned ICC judge, blocking them from american services. With such special leadership I will not surprised USA to block politicians or citizens with influence from EU that do not align with extreme right views,