Stop replying on U.S. companies for technologies that provide the backbone of our governments!
Now replace Windows with Linux, and fucking invest into not needing to use American-controlled CPUs as every single one of them contains a backdoor.
I don’t understand why governments trust official matters in the hands of closed source software and suspicious hardware. Even China uses a special version of Windows 11 in public computers, this is nuts.
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.
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.
You put way too much trust in governments if you think they can be this organized.
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.they have loads of patents that are hard to avoid
China doesn’t care about patents of outsiders.
Seems to me that it’s time for the rest of the world to invalidate US IP and go from there.
And the rules based international order has been exposed as the wink during a handshake deal. Who cares about patent law?
He is talking about software. A fucking video conferencing tool not controlled by American tech is no ASML level investment.
We could at least start with this
I wouldn’t say that so fast. The kit Vision uses is from a partner of Grok.
This “find out” phase is gonna go on for a long, long time.
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.Most political leader are grossly ignorant on anything IT.
And corrupt.
Kind of funny considering that Visio is the name of another Microsoft product.
ETA: I’m not defending Microsoft’s usage of the term ‘Visio’ here. The French use of that term makes a lot of sense, and Microsoft has an annoying tendency of using and copyrighting very common terms like ‘Word’ or ‘SQL Server’. And France (or the French government) should be allowed to use it for their video conferencing software. I’m just smiling at the idea of some people opening Microsoft Visio by mistake and trying to figure out how to make a call through a diagramming app.
In that case we’ll call it Frisio, French Visio.
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
Once these countries leave, they’ll never go back. And then the rest of us get better alternatives to this enshitification model.
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
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.
That deal that totally had nothing to do with Microsoft relocating their headquarters closer to Munich
The Bavarian state government is still entirely in Microslop’s pocket
Not surprised. From what I’ve heard from pretty much every German person I’ve talked to, Bavaria is basically their Texas (read UP if you’re Indian, not sure about analogies for other countries).
Im not an expert on this, but it seems like Ms was worried that success of Limux would be the drip that starts the trickle so to speak. It made sense for them to do whatever it took to patch that leak.
Things have really changed since then though. Valve has been very successful in a Linux end user environment, and Eu is becoming disenfranchised from the US rather than Microsoft specifically.
I think Munich’s motivations were financial, but Frances will be ideological.
With these things in mind, the calculus has changed. That doesn’t necessarily mean France won’t fail, but id be surprised if Microsoft pursues them in the same way.
No, please stop with this garbage misinformation. Microsoft made a (suspected) under the table deal with the Munich government at the time to setup a Microsoft office in Munich if they switched back to Windows.
That’s what the news reported on endlessly. That’s the narrative that keeps getting falsely repeated over and over, and no one ever checks the BS stories they spread.
The rest of the story didn’t make headlines, where the new incoming Munich government said “hell no!” (prob in German) and continued the Linux rollout.
Today the environment is a mix of Linux and Windows, but they already have a large focus on FOSS software.
Despite the astonishingly stupid decision to roll their own in-house distro (LiMux), the program was massively successful, with Linux users filling only 40% the number of tickets the Windows users did.
Edit: I’m correcting something I said, they didn’t “continue the Linux rollout” as they had already covered most of their systems. The current status is a mix of Windows and Linux, because they vetoed the rollback to Windows in 2020.
Citation Needed
You first
You first
Are you afraid to provide any reference to your claim? Do you need extra time making up stuff?
“Die 43 000 städtischen Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter nutzen also mittlerweile wieder Word, Outlook und PowerPoint […] Einfacher sei die Software-Frage bei den Servern im städtischen Rechenzentrum zu beantworten. Zwar haben man durchaus auch Windows-Server, aber die meisten laufen mit Linux, so Gernhardt.” (29. Juni 2025) https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-verwaltung-open-source-it-microsoft-li.3256886
So Linux on servers, Windows including MS Office on desktops. The migration to Linux on desktops was completely reversed.
So where is ““hell no!” (prob in German) and continued the Linux rollout”? Where has it been “garbage misinformation”? Where are the exact stats about opening tickets? After all, you claim “Linux users filling only 40% the number of tickets the Windows users did”. That’s pretty specific.
Lol, replacing one o365 product with one named identically to another o365 product, classic.
Beautiful. Trump is causing the US to lose its grip on the world in yet another way.
To be fair, I find the idea of a government outsourcing IT needs to entities under the sovereignty of foreign governments kind of fundamentally problematic to begin with.
Good on them, but I Wonder why they can’t just build on top of something open source like Nextcloud.
It already has the majority of the Office-365 suite
I don’t know on what it’s based on, but it’s open source and audited.
It’s based on LiveKit.
Who partners with From.
Looks like this is it, but it’s called “Meet” here:
This looks suspiciously similar to element call
Element is open source, so I would be very unsurprised to learn it’s an Element fork.
E: TechCrunch says “TChap” is based on Matrix (unfortunately in a security vulnerability article):
Every 2-3 years, the French government announces that they released a brand new homemade app that will replace some bigtech because sovereignty or whatever bureaucratic bullshit communication they fancy at the moment. Then they issue a BIG contract to an IT consulting company to develop the thing, who get tons of money to send junior devs to release a buggy tool that no one will ever use because migrations cost a lot. This new app will die like the others.
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.
I doubt that there are significant development teams at the DINUM. They coordinate projects but do not build anything. On LinkedIn, here are the main skills associated with the company:
Yes because the department of the DINUM that made it, the « Opérateur de produits interministériels » is only one of it’s many department. I can link you multiple French article that explain it was developed by the DINUM. Please research a little bit before posting, looking for skills on LinkedIn means nothing. Also the French entrepreneurs that usually get contracts for this were very angry about it.
Why do european tech companies need to call their products the same name as already established american products. Don’t they google the names before they make the decision?
We don’t do google here ok
It’s uncouth and unfashionable, the French prefer to get information by sticking their head out of the window whilst wildly waving a baguette and yelling: “Quoi de neuf ?”
It’s the French common name for this, visioconférence. Why would they care about Microsoft products for this?
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
Can’t they invest in standardized SIP solutions? Linphone is already French.
SIP uses different signalling protocols amongst other things than WebRTC, and i imagine browser support is a hard requirement
I know of a few things that do a WebRTC interface for SIP. So you can make SIP calls from your webbrowser.
yes but you need a server in the middle which is just a huge waste of resources when you could just use webrtc with basically no down side
Only if one side is SIP.
to use SIP, in a web browser, you need to use wrapper of some kind (probably WebRTC-based)… you can not directly use SIP in a web browser. given that web browsers are likely a hard requirement, it makes no sense to use 2 separate standards
SIP is the wrong choice for this project, and any greenfield project wishing to integrate web browsers with no hard requirement to support SIP devices
SIP is what we have right now for VOIP. If you can connect to SIP, you can literally ring people over the current system. Audio only of course. Backwards compatibly is worth a lot. If they are also SIP, you should be able to do video. The providers I know are using WebRTC for a browser SIP client basically. Baresip has this as an example module, but there is commercial software that also does this. Avoid having to a local SIP client installed.
Backwards compatible laying for the win. Much easier to replace things that way.
these are different problems now though… sure you can make calls to existing VOIP endpoints and PSTN devices, but that’s not what they’re trying to implement: they’re trying to implement group video conferencing, which WebRTC was built for
This is only a part of france’s “LaSuite” (very original name guys), that seemingly will replace every equivalent american service.
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
They generally work pretty well (demo on the site) and are a mix of homegrown solutions and rebrands of existing projects like matrix. All of them are open source.
And all their videos are on Peertube!
!lasuite@tube.numerique.gouv.fr
Unfortunately source code is still hosted on GitHub…
Source code: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
Next: move away from github, as it’s owned by MS
