https://www.fsf.org/blogs/membership/jitsi-meet-an-often-ove...

This is the press release:

https://presse.economie.gouv.fr/souverainete-numerique-letat...

I am saying that as an European, just to be clear.

Expect 50% salary and taxes that will make your eyes water. French bureaucracy is kafkaesque even in 2026.

Other than that I agree I'd love to move there.

Which they are.

Globalization appears to be self imploding by virtue of the current american president.

Now everybody realises you can not trust no one.

Most of the time I deal with csv downloads for data, or the shit PDFs that I can only fill in with the Adobe reader on windows. I can't recall the last time I fired up OnlyOffice (better MS garbage compatibility) for anything related to work.

This doesn't mean that those tools are irrelevant, but significantly less needed, and less of a migration hurdle for many companies.

The problem is that the tech independence is being pushed by government who want more control - not less. (Not speaking specifically of France and this instance, but looking at the anti-encryption rules that the UK and Ireland are pushing)

From that standpoint, I imagine the "solution" here won't be to push an open source alternative, but a closed one that they to control.

I'm not even an advanced Word / Google Doc user.

Are we gonna wait for 100 more years for it to be good?

fortunately, legislation can help here

start with critical national infrastructure to build the market, and work your way out from there

the US regime cannot be permitted to have an off button for our infrastructure

Its still a small step, but its a start.

> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide

You can push people to do this. The government can switch as a matter of policy. It can require companies bigging for government contracts to only use systems based in approved countries. It can make it a requirement for regulated industries (e.g. infrastructure, critical financial services, etc.)

Microsoft Teams "won" entirely because it was given away free with Office. Even though it is acceptable these days, it was horrible when it started. There is no way it could have won without unlimited backing from a bigger force.

You have to see EU trying these things in the same light.

I think many of use will love to do this kind of stuff, but is mostly US companies that pay for it.

For example, I like to make RDBMs and ERPs kind of software, but here in LATAM is near impossible to get funding for it, how is in Europe?

No they need to tariff/ban things that are non-EU

Start with a target small municipality in each country. Switch to SUSE (with a desktop that supports Active Directory), Collabora and what not. Then switch the mail stack. Then the files stack. Etc.

Next step is scaling it up to a small city, then a big city, then a province, and finally the whole country.

Parallel to this you do the universities and militaries.

The beauty of this is that the untold tens (hundreds?) of billions € in Microsoft / Google / Amazon support contracts will now instead flow into open source support contracts. Can you imagine the insane pace LibreOffice would improve at if a few billion € in support contracts was paid to Collabora each year?

One thing the government would have to resist is thinking that open source is 'free' and that they can cut their yearly spend on digital office stuff to the bone.

IMO, if ones thinks the lessons about competition between tech platforms from the previous few decades are 1-to-1 applicable in the current geopolitical, economical, and strategic state of the world, then that person is either not paying attention, or they're in denial.

Companies, governments, and militaries are looking around their office right now and realizing their organization could grind to a complete halt if Trump made a phone call to a very small handful of executives.

That's an existential risk, and organizations absolutely can and do choose products that are on their face inferior if it helps shield them from existential risk. (Western) Tech is one of few industries that has no institutional experience with dealing with geopolitical risk, but it's happening now.

Ah yes, the mythical AngryOpenSourceNerd, heard about his Kick channel.

I am running a Galene instance via the YunoHost self-hosting package on a small dedicated server (2 cores, 4gb of RAM).

So far it’s much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality. Feels better than Jitsi and even a FaceTime / WhatsApp call.