France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

https://apnews.com/article/europe-digital-sovereignty-big-tech-9f5388b68a0648514cebc8d92f682060

by AareyBaba • 6 months ago

1149 585 6 months ago

Refreshing. No more Teams? Sounds like a dream... Of all the crapware I am forced to work with, Teams really pushes the envelope in every single negative way conceivable. I think I have more love for SharePoint than Teams, and that is a massive concession.

Banditoz• 6 months ago

Every Teams team is backed by SharePoint, unfortunately.

muwtyhg• 6 months ago

And every private channel as well. And if you rename the Team, the SharePoint will become out-of-sync and all URLs will still use the old Team name.

jl62• 6 months ago

Teams, Sharepoint, Exchange, and OneDrive seem to be connected by a maze of dark twisty integration passages which no single human has mapped fully.

blitzar2• 6 months ago

I knew I could smell a poo in the room, I didn't know what or who was responsible but it all makes sense now.

macspoofing• 6 months ago

It's not that bad. It's well integrated into Sharepoint, Exchange, and Office, and does the job. I've used both Slack and Teams and if you're using MS365, then Teams is absolutely the better option.

clhodapp• 6 months ago

For many of us, you are describing a black hole of integrated nightmare software

sigmoid102• 6 months ago

As someone who has gone from 100% Slack in startups to all-in Teams in big corpo, I disagree. Teams won't even display all office file formats without you having to open the dedicated app. And if it does it's usually a half-baked browser mess. And don't even get me started on the UX or meeting options or mobile support or the complete lack of a dedicated Linux client. I don't need one app to do everything half-assed, I need one app that does exactly what it's meant for well. Preferably on every platform.

boringg3• 6 months ago

It is 100% that bad.

soco• 6 months ago

Okay and what exactly does this integration bring?

- opening Sharepoint pages in Teams' half-baked browser;

- opening Word or Excel in Teams' own half-baked editor;

- Exchange integration is the calendar, period. Nothing else. The only thing actually usable.

Am I missing anything?

x0x02• 6 months ago

The children who write Teams cannot reliably deliver notifications on my mac without me restarting Teams every morning.

I've spent a full day attempting to send a webhook in. Teams used to work like slack (a channel admin can create an endpoint; you post to it.) Microsoft deprecated that because it worked. It's now a maze of permissions and it silently fails with no error messages at all.

Scrollback regularly fails and also requires app restart.

I cannot insert images into a channel w/ a customer via drag and drop, but I can paste them by opening them in preview, copying the image, and cmd+v into the channel. I wasted 4 hours w/ support trying to figure out why I can't drag images into the shared channel before giving up. This is typical of the Teams experience.

I could go on. Besides facebook's tools, it is the worst piece of software I've used and a demonstration of monopoly power to distribute total garbage. Slack has issues, but it does reliably do the core thing.

blitzar2• 6 months ago

Sharepoint, Exchange, and Office

A holy trinity if ever I have seen one.

Lio• 6 months ago

Teams not being able to do threaded conversations consistently or reliably is a massive pain for me. I hate it. Corporate IT is just hell for users.

cbolton• 6 months ago

Sharepoint... the only webapp I have to use that feels worse than Teams. I swear when I open the intranet landing page, the loading, reloading, resizing, rereloading, re-whatever takes at least 10 seconds to settle. How can engineers build something be so inefficient?

boringg3• 6 months ago

I couldn't agree more with this. Teams somehow managed to supercede my other microphone preferences when I'm not even using teams (took me a while to figure out). It might be one of the apps I detest the most. There is very little satisfaction with it and much annoyance.

PeterStuer2• 6 months ago

By default, Teams never releases your audio input channel, even when you close it.

marcosdumay4• 6 months ago

Somehow, Teams overrides the volume controls on my Android phone. It's physically user-hostile.

tartoran2• 6 months ago

Teams is the bane of my existence. Oh well, one of them at least and am forced to use it for the time being. Europeans may get lucky with some sane software or get something even worse than Teams. It remains to be seen how they do. If their software is starting to get better, perhaps US software will get better too because they can no longer justify the junk they're pumping out on us.

pelagicAustral2• 6 months ago

get something even worse than Teams

I'm not sure that's actually possible, you know...

dgxyz• 6 months ago

They just shot Slack and moved to Teams only here.

The company is falling apart so quickly they are going to have to pay up again before the end of the month.

andix4• 6 months ago

Because slack startet to extort their customers. I guess many moved away, to be prepared if slack decides to push their prices even further.

kenjackson• 6 months ago

I have to admit, I have almost no problems with Teams. The one big issue I had was performance when screen sharing. But I got a new laptop and this problem went away. Seems so odd that so many people have major problems with it, while I feel like within my workgroup there are almost no problems to speak of.

pjmlp2• 6 months ago

One day they will discover threaded conversions.

delecti• 6 months ago

How extensively do you use it? When my team was just using it for meetings and the attached chats, it did actually work completely fine. When broader orgs started pushing more communications through it (the "teams" in teams, and all the weird chat room/forums that entails) all of the rough edges became very apparent. All of that is just a shockingly disorganized mess.

andix4• 6 months ago

This was discussed before: if your Windows computer doesn't have a valid HEVC license installed, then Teams falls back to software encoding and performs horrible. Most manufacturers include the license, but not all. It's also only 99 cents on the Microsoft store (which might be unavailable on enterprise managed devices)

e12e• 6 months ago

Heh, now that our team has standardized on Teams rather than Zulip (so that we suffer/connect with the rest of the org whom are stuck in MS land) - and I've been given the chance to use Teams for a while - it really is worse than I initially thought.

Which means it's time to look for alternative clients. I ws hoping for something like WeeSlack:

https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

But all I found was:

https://github.com/btp/teams-cli

https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams

Are there really no good Teams clients? Doesn't have to plug in to WeeChat or be a TUI... But something?

dijit5• 6 months ago

You'd understand why there's no even half-decent clients for Teams if you ever tried to write a bot in Teams.

That's just a pure lesson in pain.

Webhooks work, but proper bots are borderline impossible; at least without giving you the feeling that you'd rather pull your own teeth out with pliers.

wizzwizz4• 6 months ago

Even authenticating to Teams is a herculean task. Microsoft's official APIs seem purpose-built to prevent people from writing proper Teams interfaces, and attempting to replicate their proprietary SSO flow is extremely painful. (In theory, you could hook into it by starting a fresh web browser at the appropriate login page, waiting for the appropriate redirects, and then harvesting the relevant cookies, but that's a really ugly solution, and it already represents a lot of invested work.)

internet_points5• 6 months ago

I'm in the same boat and I am this close to just torching the mainsail

canpan• 6 months ago

I actually had a look. Now you can get messages and stuff from MS Graph. The situation is better than a few years ago when only very useless Teams APIs were available.

But the available APIs still suck. For example there is none to just get all recent notifications. I don't know if teams itself has access to more and better apis? If not that would explain a lot.

Flere-Imsaho2• 6 months ago

https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/microsoft-te...

TulliusCicero6• 6 months ago

The risk is of course that the new thing might be worse than Teams somehow.

soperj• 6 months ago

The only possibility is if you get it from Oracle instead.

ziotom78• 6 months ago

It will surely be worse, at least at the beginning. But there is a significant chance that with time they will improve it, and one can hope that one year after the first release the product will actually be better than Teams, given that the developers will improve it based on their own experience.

andix4• 6 months ago

I don't have a lot of complaints with the current version of teams. Messaging and video calls work without major issues. It's bloated, and all those plugins are usually bad, but the basics work well for me.

The new Outlook app is horrible though.

elzbardico• 6 months ago

You kids have it easy.

Once I worked in a company with two brands after a fusion, and all of us had to use both Exchange and Lotus Notes. And I was almost forgetting SharePoint.

tedggh2• 6 months ago

What’s so bad about Teams that makes it so hated? I used it lately and often to work with a customer and I don’t find anything terrible about it, other than some minor usability annoyances like phantom chat notifications once in a while. But overall it does what it’s supposed to do, get on a video call, share your screen and share files over channels. The transcript feature seems to work well too. I’m not amazed by it, but I don’t see anything to hate either. I guess it is one of those tools I don’t have a strong opinion about.

wolvoleo3• 6 months ago

It's a resource hog, crashes, it's constantly littering files all over SharePoint which becomes even more than a garbage bin than it already is.

And the UI is terrible, huge balloons around everything. I want density but even at the densest setting it sucks.

Oh and it also fails to update online status. Often I click on a colleague who seems green and only then it updates and it turns out they've been away for 3 hours. Grrr

dijit5• 6 months ago

"I don't have an issue with it" tells me you've never used anything else. Have you tried Slack? Zulip? Mattermost? Fucking... IRC from 1988?

Teams isn't just mediocre, it's aggressively hostile to basic usability. The camera bar sits at the top of the window, directly blocking where you're supposed to position your camera for eye contact. Chat organisation is broken: you get duplicate groups because the order people were added matters somehow. Notifications phantom in and out. Reactions are buried in an activity feed. Search is useless. You can't reliably paste text without major formatting issues. The mobile app logs you out randomly and doesn’t tell you unless you manually check it. Desktop notifications don't sync with read state. Files uploaded to chat don't appear in the Files tab. The "new Teams" broke half the features that worked in classic Teams. Presence status is a coin flip. Audio settings reset themselves between calls. Screen sharing has a 50/50 chance of sharing the wrong window. The difference between a chat and a channel is arbitrary and confusing. You can't edit messages older than a few hours. Threading is bolted on and barely works.

Performance is inexcusable. Multiple gigabytes of RAM to display text messages and lag constantly on modern hardware. How do you make a chat application lag? It's rendering text, not computing fluid dynamics. Opening the application takes 30 seconds on an SSD. Switching between chats stutters. Typing has input delay.

The real problem isn't that Teams is terrible. It's that "it technically functions" has become an acceptable standard. When you've never experienced better, "it works" seems fine. But Teams is what happens when a monopoly position means you don't have to care about quality. Microsoft has unlimited resources and still ships this.

Even Skype for Business was more stable, and in Skype for Business you couldn't reliably select text. That's how low the bar is.

perching_aix• 6 months ago

Wrote up a few of my gripes on here a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45933952

cmoski• 6 months ago

Notifying you about messages you've already seen. You have to change chats and to back for it to dismiss it. Kills me.

Likes to open new windows if you click a notification.

It is slow.

The search is not good at showing multiple results from the one chat. Why does it search all the other chats anyway...

Switching accounts constantly is a pain in the arse - I unfortunately have to use four accounts and one sub-account (member of some other org's team or something).

rootusrootus8• 6 months ago

I don't love it, but I don't have many of the problems other people seem to have. And I've used everything from IRC in the 80s to Slack more recently. The only thing I can think of is that I don't run it on Windows, but rather a fairly new MacBook Pro M4. Maybe in this case it actually runs better on Mac, which is kind of ironic.

Agingcoder2• 6 months ago

It has a very large number of bugs.

My favourite one ( still happens ) is having to mute then unmute at the beginning of the conversation otherwise nobody can hear me. It was so common, with people fiddling with their headset, calling again etc that I eventually asked everyone exhibiting audio issues to start with this

Another interesting one is that if you’re not connected properly , you send messages , but never get notified that they never left, and are never notified that you’re not connected.

It’s also a resource hog and will eat your machine for breakfast.

The list goes on and on, it’s very surprising.

CamperBob2• 6 months ago

Teams feels as though it were vibe-coded, but dates back well before there was such a thing. It works, basically, but isn't something I'd feel good about shipping myself.

isk517• 6 months ago

Another one for the pile. You can choose to open office documents in Teams directly, the browser, or in the native desktop app, but you can only set it to open by default in either Teams or browser. Why?

randusername• 6 months ago

The Zen of Teams is that Teams is so clunky it cannot be Slack.

Without threads, there is no breach of thread-etiquette.

When "channels" are so awkward, nobody uses them. Then there is no constant deluge of middle-age folks creating a Facebook out of work, needing to be reminded that the photos channel is for business-photos, not pictures of their kids.

When emoji support is limited, nobody has to police people pushing the boundaries of what emojis are appropriate.

The software is baffling. But I like it that way.

wilsonnb3• 6 months ago

You can upload custom emoji to teams, most businesses just turn it off

nickkell• 6 months ago

For the most part I agree with you: there is less functionality and hence less to police. There are also fewer people in chats/channels, as for the most part they are private or undiscoverable.

There are definitely still breaches of etiquette though, e.g. people frequently tagging a whole channel when they have a support question, even though it contains hundreds of people.

ergocoder• 6 months ago

No more Teams? Sounds like a dream.

No more Words? Introducing a worse software than Words...

rurp• 6 months ago

I've had to start using Teams more lately and it is indeed as terrible as I'd heard. The other day I needed to copy a number of items from an ongoing chat. Seems like an extremely simple and normal thing, but every time I hover over a message a popup jumps up with emoji reactions that partially covers the text I'm trying to copy. Trying to move quickly, I kept accidentally "reacting" to messages instead of double clicking the text. To make matters worse there's no way to disable this "feature"! Why?!

Teams is supposed to be a professional workplace tool from one of the biggest software companies in the world, but it feels like something a high schooler coded up for fun. Weirdly Discord, a platform explicitly meant for gamers, is a more useful chat tool. I don't like Discord at all, but it's better than Teams.

internet_points5• 6 months ago

What are the downsides of Discord?

zelphirkalt7• 6 months ago

As bad and evil as MS Teams may be, I recently got invited to a Zoom meeting, and you simply can't use it in the browser! They just force you to download their shitty app to join. Naturally, I did not install crapware and closed the tab, as fortunately it was no mandatory event for me. At least in MS Teams I can isolate it into its separate ungoogled Chromium installation and treat that as a shitty app, without having to install crap onto my system.

tlarkworthy• 6 months ago

It makes you download it but then a button appears saying join in browser. I have tons of zoom binary copies

distances4• 6 months ago

Zoom calls work fine in the browser. They first make it look like you need the native client, but there's some dance you need to make to get the web link. Reload, wait, spin in your chair, something like that.

Of course I would never choose Zoom or Teams if I had the power, but Chromium does work with both when those are the tools your client uses.

spicyusername• 6 months ago

Such a shame that so many U.S. citizens do not see the ramifications of their political decisions.

Each one of these actions is a stepping stone the world is taking as a direct consequence of U.S. political negligence. And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.

iancmceachern• 6 months ago

Many of us see them and are fighting the fight if our lives against it

wrqvrwvq• 6 months ago

The US has openly spied on nato allies via msft for decades, and this was widely reported long before Snowden. All us tech is a tool of government surveillance and has always been. msft has also been repeatedly sued and sanctioned for corruption and bribery and coercive practices across europe over the past two decades. The fact that europe views trump as the threat but not the system he represents is cynical but the move towards autonomy is long past due. aws and msft etc all get away with overcharging for often terrible services is largely due to a lack of viable competition. europe has had great open-source offering for many years, but has "strategically" starved all of them of funding and credibility. This is as much a result of eu scleroticism as it is msft's bullying and anti-competitive practices. If trump makes it easier for them to get their act together it is to his credit.

mesk• 6 months ago

Being Great doesnt comes with Best to Live with, Best to Work with, Best to make Business with etc...

US will be Great like all Giants are - terrifying and alone ;-)

burningChrome• 6 months ago

>> Such a shame that so many U.S. citizens do not see the ramifications of their political decisions.

Most US Citizens are not voting on what you think they're voting on. Most are worried about things that affect their day-to-day life like cost of eggs, the cost of gas, taxes going up, my 401K going in the dumpster.

I live and breathe tech everyday. I see the dangers of it all around me. Day in and day out. You try and talk to people about how dangerous some of this stuff is. Unless people feel it somehow like having their identity stolen and they spend three years trying to fix it all? Nothing will ever change.

People are 100% immune to this stuff now. Its the old frog in boiler water analogy.

toomuchtodo3• 6 months ago

Well, that's the problem, these people are wildly uneducated and unsophisticated. They are voting their feelings. Prices levels do not come down without a depression, even if inflation slows. Their only solution is wages going up. Do they have a mechanism to push wages up? Taxes must go up, they have been too low for too long and the debt has accumulated (~$38T in US treasuries alone) and will need to be paid back or defaulted on. Insurance costs continue to rise due to rapidly increasing costs of materials and labor, as well as climate change (the US is currently spending ~$1B/year on climate driven events). Growth is over because the US population is not growing (tangentially, total fertility rate is below replacement rate in more than half of countries in the world, and this trend will continue). 401ks predicated on the S&P500 are held up by AI investment (which is outpacing consumer spending, the primary driver of the US economy, over the last year to the tune of ~$400B) and the Mag 7. When this stalls, everyone is going to be sad and not feel as wealthy as they did previously (“wealth effect”).

Happiness is reality minus expectations, and the future is not going to be as good as the past, based on available data, evidence, and trends Everything is downstream of that. The vibes might be bad, but they ain't gonna get better.

Financial Times: The consumer sentiment puzzle deepens - https://www.ft.com/content/f3edc83f-1fd0-4d65-b773-89bec9043... | https://archive.today/nFlfY - February 3rd, 2026

(some component of price increases has been predatory monopoly gouging covered extensively by Matt Stoller on his newsletter https://www.thebignewsletter.com/, but for our purposes, we can assume this admin isn't going to impair that component of price levels and inflation with regulation for the next 3 years)

lotsofpulp2• 6 months ago

Most are worried about things that affect their day-to-day life like cost of eggs, the cost of gas, taxes going up, my 401K going in the dumpster.

Are they? It seems to me like they’re worried about things like women having access to too much healthcare, too many non white people, and too many women leaders. They voted for a guy that wants to make the most expensive purchase of most people’s lives even more expensive:

https://youtu.be/ToJxd3HBviE

Not to mention the enormous tax increases by way of getting rid of the expanded ACA premium credits.

budududuroiu• 6 months ago

This is why I personally believe that the "anyone is allowed to vote for anyone" style of democracy is really dumb, and Chinese "democracy" (whatever that is), is superior for governance.

bryanrasmussen• 6 months ago

I mean this is essentially the same situation anyone is in when they have vendor lock in, they know it's a problem, but it is always just not worth it to get out, only this vendor lock in is all vendors from a country lock in and now it is not just worth it but imperative, absolutely necessary.

And of course once you have gotten out of vendor lock in, you never go back. If you do go back to that vendor that locked you in before, because of some sweetheart deal, you make sure to set up all sorts of escape hatches so if you need to bounce quickly you can.

The vendor lock in of the EU to the US for so many things is being dismantled.

giantg2• 6 months ago

How someone voted has almost no bearing on the dangers of tech. The dangers were there before the last election and none of the candidates had strong positions regarding tech privacy. Microsoft would still be doing what it has been doing regardless of the election outcome. I wouldnt hold my breath that a European Teams/Zoom replacement will have robust encryption and privacy protection based on all the backdoor stuff I've heard being pushed in some European countries.

lenerdenator3• 6 months ago

1) Most US citizens don't care for what's happening right now. That's why there's people protesting while armed in major cities.

2) Continental Europe has shown a willingness to continue dependency on other countries in the face of far, far worse national behavior. NordStream 2 planned after the invasion of Georgia and was still under construction after Putin had invaded and annexed Crimea. Not "threatened" to do so, he had actually done it. There was a body count involved. So it's not too far off-base to think that despite all of the foolishness from the Trump administration, the US could seek some slack for its technology sector. It's not like you need Teams to keep your factories running and to avoid freezing to death in the winter, but that was the sort of integration with the Russians that Europeans were seeking to maintain while Putin was redrawing the map, at least until the Ukraine invasion, and even then, it took clandestine activity to permanently take NordStream offline.

People like Trump will almost certainly point at this and say that this shows Europeans to be allies of convenience, not true partners. People like him love to cry about double standards.

8note• 6 months ago

note: the europeans didnt particularly mind maduro's kidnapping, and crimea isnt a part of the EU nor NATO.

putin still has not gone to war, nor threatened to invade the EU yet to the point of international incident. the US has both sent politicians and other operators to try and fail at formenting rebellion in greenland against denmark, and has readied troops to invade

maxloh• 6 months ago

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that people don't necessarily vote for the "best" candidate. Instead, they vote for the candidate who is "least bad" and do the minimum amount of damage to their interests. It is always a matter of compromise.

As a counter-example, you cannot expect an LGBT person to vote for a right-wing conservative who advocates against their own rights, even if that candidate makes the "right call" on every other issue.

klaff• 6 months ago

As a counter-example, you cannot expect an LGBT person to vote for a right-wing conservative who advocates against their own rights, even if that candidate makes the "right call" on every other issue.

I can't think of a candidate that fits this description.

adventured• 6 months ago

The French have created Mintel. May the world tremble.

It's a shame the Americans don't see the ramifications of their political decisions.

nradov• 6 months ago

Why did the French never follow up and improve Minitel?

alamortsubite3• 6 months ago

It's fun to think about what Minitel might have become if it had been born when today's Leopards Eating People's Faces Party had been in power, rather than the early 80's when Silicon Valley was dunking on everybody. It was way ahead of its time.

palata7• 6 months ago

Minitel, when it was created, was great technology. Sounds like you are proudly uninformed.

PaulDavisThe1st3• 6 months ago

A reminder that in the last presidential election, the winner was decided by one of the smallest margins ever, and the winner only won a plurality, not a majority.

Almost as many people voted against the current US administration as voted for it, so although it is true that "so many US citizens do not see the ramifications", there almost as many who do (or some version of them).

MiiMe19• 6 months ago

Almost as many, but not more than :)

quadrifoliate9• 6 months ago

Shame that so many EU citizens do not see the ramifications of theirs.

EU citizens have elected ineffective leaders for decades -- leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies. They have elected leaders who were until very recently heavily dependent on Russian energy.

As a result, EU dependence on US tech is near-total. I remember hearing a few months ago that companies in the EU still have to use Dun & Bradstreet (a US company) for routine government filings!

Some minor headlines about civil servants stopping their usage of office sound impressive but isn't really making a dent in Microsoft's bottom line. If and when Microsoft's revenues from the EU start dropping by double digits or more, I am sure they will contribute large amounts of money to make the US government more civil and normal than it's being today.

And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.

As a software consumer, if this takes off, I don't see any reason I would want the course to be reversed. More adoption and support of open software and standards is beneficial for consumers. It might even get Microsoft and the rest of US Big Tech to actively compete for a change rather than relying on their near-total monopoly.

anon2916• 6 months ago

Europe's main strategy these days seems to be blaming others instead of looking at themselves.

For example, they blame America for their own issue of lacking tech companies, despite Europe taking credit for having fewer work hours, more 'equitable' societies, etc.

They blame China for their own issue of lacking domestic manufacturing, despite their pride at having strong unions, supposedly good labor protections, and vacations.

They blame India for the bogey of 'buying Russian oil', instead of blaming themselves for being the LARGEST purchaser of refined oil products from India. As if India, one of the hottest countries on the planet, actually needs heating oil.

At this point, which country / region does Europe not blame? It's always someone else's fault. No one even thinks to look inside themselves.

bborud5• 6 months ago

leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies

Remarkable how it is the politicans who should have been doing this when it doesn't get done, and how everyone is quick to complain if politicians meddle in what the private sector should have been doing. This is a recurring theme in a lot of debates. And I think it has to do with our need to blame someone but ourselves.

Yes, one could solve this through procurement rules that favor domestic or regional products. And there are sometimes procurement rules that state that domestic vendors should be preferred. But I have seen that in practice and it doesn't actually work. One one project I worked on decades ago the military was sourcing a system for "local administration". A company that was effectively bankrupt, had the weirdest OS I have ever used, and the worst office support systems I've had the misfortune of trying to use, was the only domestic candidate. Yes, it did check the boxes in the procurement process, but everyone knew it was never going to happen.

Interoperability, product maturity, familiarity, feature completeness, quality etc tends to win out.

I think we have to realize that this has almost nothing to do with our political leaders and everything to do with our inability to create software businesses in Europe. We need to figure that bit out. And perhaps this is the kick in the behind we needed to get our act together.

TulliusCicero6• 6 months ago

Yup. Culturally, the EU has favored more regulations over supporting more tech growth to an absurd degree.

Not that I disagree in principle with most of the tech regulations; it does make sense to protect privacy and combat monopolistic abuses and so on.

But you also need to support your own tech industry at the same time, and the efforts there have been like quarter-assed at most.

BrandoElFollito4• 6 months ago

I am French. When I look at the EU I see great potentials but the effect is a huge bureaucratic mess that is advantageous for everyone involved.

About 25% of EU parliament parties are against EU. Theyt are paid by the EU to tell how much they hate this institution.

There are no two countries in the EU who are aligned. Some of them are not completely out of synch (mostly the Nordics), some are in schizophrenia mode (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia mostly) where they eat most of the EU funds (relatively and in absolute terms) but hate it.

With such an institution, there is no real hope of having a strong position backed by competent people. Just look at ENISA and the disgrace this organization is in the era of cybersecurity.

We also had a EU-wide referendum about daylight saving. 5 M peopel responsed (a few percent of the population). It was the largest response in the history of the EU. And then it was trashed.

The mountains of EUR we burn is insane.

MrDresden• 6 months ago

I remember hearing a few months ago that companies in the EU still have to use Dun & Bradstreet (a US company) for routine government filings!

Could you name which European nation this was?

I would genuinely be interested in knowing.

bdbdbdb• 6 months ago

EU citizens have elected ineffective leaders for decades -- leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies.

It's not like there are people out there on the campaign trail every election saying "if I'm elected, I'll ensure we build homegrown cloud alternatives". Nobody campaigns on issues like that. The reality is you have to choose between people who want to kick the immigrants out and people who don't, people who want to enact green policies and people who don't. People who want a European army and people who don't. These big issues are what people vote on, even if we care that there should be a homegrown cloud industry. I really do care, but it's not something I can do anything about at the ballot box

Jean-Papoulos• 6 months ago

EU citizens have elected ineffective leaders for decades -- leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies.

France has been doing this since De Gaulle. That's why they're able to do this now, as well as produce almost everything they use that is defense-related.

sam-cop-vimes• 6 months ago

I remember hearing a few months ago that companies in the EU still have to use Dun & Bradstreet (a US company) for routine government filings!

Only to do business with US companies, or have a USD account with some payment providers such as Wise I think, not for anything else.

skippyboxedhero• 6 months ago

Failing to make xenophobic choices when it comes to...enterprise software, is the issue?

The US has spent tens of trillions defending Europe indirectly subsidizing social policies despite this the US has persistently been unpopular with Europeans because, obviously, they are a political target for domestic politicians (btw, you see this almost everywhere...if country A gives country B subsidies, you will almost always find that country A's people are virulently hated by a significant proportion of country B's population, the US was more unpopular than Russian before the Ukraine invasion in Germany...let me just repeat: a country which invaded Europe was more popular than a country which gave hundreds of billions a year in defence subsidies).

Acting as if xenophobia towards the US hasn't always been part of the European political climate is not based in reality. Europe has been trying to protect its own market for decades, unsuccessfully. What is more, there is very limited trade WITHIN Europe in certain industries because of the hurdle of national xenophobia and protectionism. Europe has made an industry out of failure and greivance...and, for some reason, part of this narrative is that no country contributes as much as Europe.

Reality? Iran...continued to break US sanctions for years so that failing European defence companies could sell their junk, investigations of Iranian politicians bribing EU parliamentarians. Russia...continued to break US sanctions after Ukraine invasion, had an extremely subservient relationship with Russia despite being repeatedly told by the US that NordStream 2 would lead to Ukraine invasion, former German president actually works for NordStream. On and on, the same mistakes being made all the time because there has never been any real strategy apart from extreme short-term political advantage to protect continued failure to generate social or economic gain in most of Europe (not all tbf, but the executive polling numbers that you see in some countries is incredible, you wouldn't think they have elections).

lkjvkbn• 6 months ago

Stop with this nonsense. You know it is false.

USA is not defending Europe from anyone.

jabwd• 6 months ago

I think you are failing to realize the billions the US has made from "defending" europe. Regardless, once the US is no longer colonizing the entire planet and the dollar isn't the only currency anyone cares about your opinion will change realllll quick. You'll have forgotten this wall of nonsense you wrote though by then I'm sure.

PeterStuer2• 6 months ago

I do not think many U.S. citizens were consulted on the decision to blow up Nordstream.

alamortsubite3• 6 months ago

I remember a conversation I had with my uncle before the 2024 election during which I told him Donald Trump's leadership would result in a no-less-disastrous American version of Brexit, if he were somehow elected a second time. My uncle's an avid Fox News/Newsmax watcher, and had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

hvb2• 6 months ago

Conversation a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668

clot27• 6 months ago

so is there any open source alternative to these meeting apps? (selfhostable)

arm32• 6 months ago

I guess Jitsi?

teekert• 6 months ago

https://meet.proton.me should also be ready for action soon.

MengerSponge• 6 months ago

Jitsi? https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet

philipwhiuk• 6 months ago

https://www.rocket.chat/

Etheryte• 6 months ago

We used to run this back in the day which, granted, was quite a long time ago now. I don't think we ever went longer than a few months without a serious outage of sorts, and that certainly wasn't for a lack of resources or manpower.

gilney• 6 months ago

The Jitsi site says rocket.chat uses it.

saubeidl3• 6 months ago

The French government built their own: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet

fpoling• 6 months ago

But they hosted the repo on Microsoft-run GitHub ...

euio757• 6 months ago

"built their own" wrapper yes (which is a very important piece of a end-to-end Zoom like product)

But you can see:

Powered by [LiveKit](https://livekit.io/)

Fine since this is an open source product, but not full EU sovereignty of the software stack.

Livekit could at any time change their license and drop support for the free open-source version like so many products have done in the past.

If a EU entity forks it and maintains it, then that'd be end-to-end sovereignty IMO.

wongarsu• 6 months ago

For Teams-like chat I really like Zulip. Which also integrates with Jitsi for video conferencing

If you are hosting webinars there's also bigbluebutton

rectang• 6 months ago

It's not open source, but up until a few years ago I used whereby.com for videochats.

Unlike the alternatives at the time from Google, Apple, etc., it didn't require an account for participants — I could just give them the meeting room URL. So although it wasn't open source, it at least didn't lock you into a network.

(Unlike you, I wasn't up for self-hosting.)

kofu• 6 months ago

This one is often overlook but very good, I prefer it over Jitsi https://galene.org/

internet_points5• 6 months ago

what are the minimal server requirements? jitsi says prefer 8G ram (4G for small meetings) and 4 dedicated cpu cores https://jitsi.github.io/handbook/docs/devops-guide/devops-gu...

The chat seems extremely basic, so not really an alternative if you need chat with e.g. message edit/delete/formatting/pictures as well as video/audio.

j_maffe3• 6 months ago

Honest to god, everything that Trump is doing might actually end up being that the world becomes a better place. The US hegemony really ran its course.

tyre8• 6 months ago

The US hegemony has been a tremendous boon to the world. Yes, the US has done terrible things (lots in South America, Vietnam, genocide in East Timor, failed nation building and war crimes in the Middle East, support for genocide in Palestine, etc.) This isn’t to minimize that.

But the reality is that the US benefits immensely from free democracies with rules-based open markets and international order. Again, do we break that when it suits us? Absolutely. But America being selfish has been a positive outcome compared to, for example, more war in Europe.

Polls consistently show that people recognize the benefits of US hegemony while acknowledging that the US does it purely from self-interest.

melesian3• 6 months ago

The absence of war in Europe is more down to the EU than the US. Polls do not consistently show anything of the sort.

j_maffe3• 6 months ago

But the reality is that the US benefits immensely from free democracies

Would you like for me to start counting the number of times the US helped install a democracy vs the number of times it installed dictatorships?

pcj-github• 6 months ago

Good for them! As a US citizen, I am trying to do the same. Closing my gmail account and moving to ProtonMail.

BurningFrog• 6 months ago

Note that this is only about European governments choosing to not use US software.

ezst• 6 months ago

Yeah, and once the precedent is settled, you can bet that the private sector will follow, and give birth to a bunch of local service companies to deploy and support those solutions in an healthier and fairer manner than the current GSuite/MSOffice duopoly.

DaSHacka3• 6 months ago

Is this true though? There are tons of policies and procedures the US government has required for decades that never got adopted by the private sector.

melesian3• 6 months ago

You can be very sure that millions of Europeans and large numbers of businesses are finding alternatives.

DaSHacka3• 6 months ago

Can we? Do you have any numbers to back this up?

PlatoIsADisease3• 6 months ago

I was going to say 'No way, profit > idealistic moral virtues'. But I could totally see Europe knee capping themselves. Look at how their food is inferior to the US because they stick to tradition.

I can totally see themselves doing this out of pride/humiliation.

alamortsubite3• 6 months ago

Yes, and it's clear European governments are just catching up to the sentiment of European people.

lencastre• 6 months ago

it’s gotta be too good to be true, but at least one major economy taking the lead, imagine

tyre8• 6 months ago

As an American, this is awesome to see.

We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement. And economic damage really is the key to the heart of these United States of Three Corporations in a Trench Coat.

We’ve seen companies and CEOs paying millions in bribes to be close to the president. Now this aligns their financial interests with shifting our foreign policy. Not how it ought to work, but it’s the world we have.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 6 months ago

Yes. We are at our best when we compete and have grown too fat and lazy IMO.

ReptileMan3• 6 months ago

We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement.

How can you abandon something that never existed. While US was among the better superpowers it never for a moment engaged in good faith. Trump just makes it naked and brutish.

GaryBluto• 6 months ago

It's so strange reading all these comments from Americans begging to be punished for collective misdeeds. It reads as unsettlingly masochistic.

quadrifoliate9• 6 months ago

From a less masochistic and more self-interested perspective, it's not a good long-term thing for American corporations to thrive purely due to corruption and throwing around political weight.

We as consumers (and for that matter, aspiring businesspeople) all benefit when we have more entrants to the market that are challenging the existing monopolies. And to be honest I don't think the EU has the incentives to pull this off anyway, these are manufactured headlines around what's a minor blip in the vast coffers of American corporations. I'm sure zero alarm bells are going off in Redmond because some EU bureacrats wrote a headline around switching to a Django app built in a hackathon.

tyre8• 6 months ago

It’s in the US’s best interests to be a rule follower. It maintains our status as a global reserve currency. It gives our passports access to almost every country without visas. It attracts foreign investment.

As a US citizen, it is incredibly in my selfish interest for the US to not be a shitty friend. Just as it is in our selfish interest to promote democracy, less corruption, and free markets.

While I agree with those things, morally, they are also in the pure self-interest of the United States.

pessimizer2• 6 months ago

The selection of Americans commenting generally aren't suffering, and won't be suffering under any circumstances. They're upset that the institutions that they worship and rely on for their own professional legitimacy are now all under a buffoon, game show host, and professional wrestling valet. It calls into question the "meritocracy" that they believe rewards them for all their hard work.

They blame this on the people who lack merit, and didn't study hard enough to get their share of the highest profit margins in history. They want them to be punished. The people who actually do and make things, rather than shuffling things around, marketing things and sending emails.

It's no wonder that they hope for some sort of punishment to force people to flock to them. US Liberals offer working people absolutely nothing but mockery. The only reason they have a chance at getting back into government is because Trump's corruption will keep the people who voted for him from voting at all. MAGA (with fellow-travelers who voted for him while holding their noses, repulsed by the alternative) is falling apart over foreign wars, Epstein, and H1Bs, not any of the middle class lib objections. Democrats also will give you war, Epstein and H1B.

The midterms, and the next election, will be won by the side that has managed to disillusion slightly fewer voters to the entire democratic process. I'm sorry, but that still bodes well for the loudmouth strongman.

rootusrootus8• 6 months ago

The only people who hate Americans as much as (or more than) Europeans are Americans.

marcosdumay4• 6 months ago

They are the ones that get to face almost all of the consequences from their government. And they know that if the people that voted on their current government don't get severally punished, things will only escalate.

PlatoIsADisease3• 6 months ago

I would say with basically 100% certainty who they voted for, for president.

Cognitive bias is brutal. They have no idea what they are doing to their own self interests.

epolanski4• 6 months ago

I think the general vibe is more of a "let's learn a small lesson now than a severe one long term".

I'm an eu freelancer, most of my clients are quitting US SaaS and cloud offerings, albeit slowly.

silviogutierrez• 6 months ago

Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin

herbst5• 6 months ago

Yet they all are just whiny when they voted for this, and would likely do it again and have no hesitation to do anything against it.

hackable_sand• 6 months ago

It's not that unsettling nor is it masochism.

It's called responsibility.

TheMagicHorsey• 6 months ago

America is "Three Corporations in A Trench Coat"?

Everything America is doing right now is because America is precisely NOT taking corporate decisions. America is doing things to the international order that are directly fucking up American corporations. Only a committed social democrat can look at the populist right-wing chaos right now, and claim that's "Corporate" action. If anything, Corporations were more liberal than the population at large in America, and that's part of the reason why Trump's racist populism is so popular ... he's exploiting a backlash. Turns out America has far more nativists than you ever imagined.

But yeah, go ahead and call it "Corporations in a trenchcoat" because then you don't have to think about how Corporations have actually played the biggest role in promoting diversity in America. While government consistently goes sharply left and right based on whichever lunatic the American public elects next.

hunterpayne6• 6 months ago

anything, Corporations were more liberal than the population at large in America

They are more to the left of the population, yes. But nothing about them or the current left in the US is liberal in any real way anymore. The Dems are nothing like they were before about 2008 and the policies they push are very very different from the ones passed in that era.

PS Liberal means French enlightenment ideals which (for example) includes meritocracy as a core tenant.

rootusrootus8• 6 months ago

While government consistently goes sharply left and right based on whichever lunatic the American public elects next.

Has there been a non-Trump lunatic president? Or one that turned the government sharply left? I hear this kind of claim pretty often and I have trouble squaring it with reality.

tyre8• 6 months ago

Trump doesn’t have nearly the money he needs to win without dark money from corporations and oligarchs. Populism alone won’t win the presidency given the margins he’s had. The math doesn’t work.

BlackjackCF• 6 months ago

I think it’s also healthy overall for there to be multiple competitors in the market versus the tech monopolies we have now that have started abusing their customers.

yesimahuman• 6 months ago

Yep, and watching many of my peers in tech get red pilled and vote for this administration, or even be active participants in it, has been very hard to stomach. Financial penalties might be the only thing that gets them to realize the error of their ways

herbst5• 6 months ago

We all know that the next guy is likely going to be much worse, and if it's not the next guy it will be the one afterwards. This shithole of country has a brutally bad track record of dealing with their own problems in a reasonable fashion

Brian_K_White• 6 months ago

I would not have predicted that my country's government going bad would have such a positive side-effect on the world of software and network services.

rayiner• 6 months ago

In favor of what? I’m all for economic nationalism, but you have to have competitive home grown alternatives. Does Europe have them? Or are they going to shoot themselves in the foot productivity-wise by boycotting the best products?

atherton94027• 6 months ago

The best products like Microsoft Teams? Let's be honest, a lot of the software they've replaced has a checkered past

belval• 6 months ago

Look I am all for Euro-skepticism, but "boycotting the best products" on an article about Microsoft Teams which is well known to be clawing its way into companies despite very negative feedback due to advantageous pricing when you are integrated with Office 365 (which is itself monopolistic behavior). Is not one.

The reality is that chat apps nowadays have little moat, blocking the worst offenders for sovereignty's sake it perfectly logical.

marssaxman• 6 months ago

This is a great reason to invest in open-source software.

JoshTriplett2• 6 months ago

In no world are Teams and Zoom anywhere close to the "best products". They're awful, and only persist because of network effects or because of "the people who buy it don't feel the pain".

999900000999• 6 months ago

Good. Open source solutions exist and need investment.

Hopefully the EU as a whole can rally behind this.

firefoxd• 6 months ago

After an acquisition, we are transitioning from google meet and slack, to Teams. I used to hate slack so much with their random features popping left and right and menus moving around. Oh I didn't know how good we had it.

Slack is a delight compared to Teams. And I'm not even alone in this, everyone is still using slack until it gets pried off our hands. So help me God anyone mentions Copilot one more time...

radicaldreamer• 6 months ago

Due to the way Microsoft does sales to enterprises, there’s no incentive for its software to be any good or even compete directly with anyone else… as long as it ticks the right boxes, the people making purchasing decisions are fine with it (it’s bundled in with something critical like Excel anyway).

If the gov really took an expansive view of antitrust, it would break up software bundling and require ala carte pricing per app, defined as a single primary use case.

This will become all the more important as OpenAI/Anthropic start bundling all of their products together and putting existing SaaS out of business for no reason other than to get some crucial model or capability, companies have to buy the whole bundle.

asnyder• 6 months ago

Despite their confusion as to whether they want to really support their free and open source versions (without some absurd user count cliff), Mattermost (https://mattermost.com) is quite excellent and IMO is better than Slack. For example, editor leans towards native Markdown so things like syntax highlighting with backticks work as you expect.

Their recent update removed the paywall from SSO (and unfortunately the Gitlab SSO workaround) for social logins up to 100 seats, afterwards there's an absurd per seat cost similar to its non-open source brethren. One day if needed, I plan to drop-in an SSO middleman allowing anyone to leverage their own SSO layer (which will map to the login form with username/password) to avoid the SSO limits altogether. Though good enough for my needs, and likely yours too. Especially if you're open to paying for their seats.

lenerdenator3• 6 months ago

If only they'd taken the same approach with Russian natural gas in 2008.

DaSHacka3• 6 months ago

But that'd be difficult, and the EU is all about easy PR wins

stopbulying5• 6 months ago

Are those US software firms still obligated to comply with EU restrictions and legal demands if they are banned/barred/fascisticly_denied_the_option_to_compete by one or more EU territories?

stopbulying5• 6 months ago

Isn't it reasonable to block access to countries that deny you the option to compete and copy your business?

Then you'll need to pay for a VPN.

stopbulying5• 6 months ago

Should US businesses block all connections from countries which deny them the option to compete?

Does it matter whether a competitor in such a country is copying their business while they are denied the option to compete?

pessimizer2• 6 months ago

Just like Europeans, you need to understand international law. It's not law like law within a country. It's a warning. US software firms were never obligated to comply with anything. If you don't comply, you create an enemy. You comply based on your judgement of that enemies' ability, determination and level of creativity that they will use to punish you for noncompliance.

Do you want to do any business at all there? Do you have any vendors there? Do your owners own anything else that does business there? Do you have any investors that live there? Do your kids go to college there? Do you have to fly over or through it, ever?

It's leverage against leverage.

stopbulying5• 6 months ago

Is you don't comply, they block your ranges and legal recommends that you block customers connecting from those IP range.

(They're perfectly free to choose a different vendor on this their need for chat productivity and video.)

tensor2• 6 months ago

You are being denied the ability to sell to the French government, not denied selling into the market. Just like no one has "rights" to sell to the US government, you don't have any "right" to sell to any foreign government if they choose not to deal with you. And frankly it should be a matter of national security for governments to control the source and deployment of the software they use.

stopbulying5• 6 months ago

I am not being denied. They are being excluded from consideration for contracts there.

Fascist isn't fair. I shouldn't have said that. Fascism is when the government controls but does not actually own any or enough shares to control the means of production.

What a shame though. Should US exclude foreign firms (France,) from consideration for contracts for the same reason?

No doubt the tariff master has made this all better with cruel tit-for-tat leverage that caused loss for these US firms.

(EU just canceled aspects of GDPR etc, so it's not new privacy law?)

(Edit: Kushner is currently ambassador to France. Why wouldn't they trust US-based communication firms over there all of a sudden?)

larsnystrom• 6 months ago

There seems to be a huge business opportunity in Europe right now, to sell support and customization of open source software to government players. Has anyone heard about a European company that’s been successful in this area?

pstuart• 6 months ago

Yeah, this is a win/win opportunity and could drive more sponsorship of those projects as there'd be more interests invested in seeing them thrive.

pkulak• 6 months ago

Matrix has done a bunch of work with the French government in the past. Hopefully they can capitalize on this sentiment.

Flere-Imsaho2• 6 months ago

More information here:

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366633894/European-gover...

(0ct 2025)

Interestingly, there is also a NATO-Matrix app:

https://element.io/en/case-studies/nato

dataviz1000• 6 months ago

to sell support and customization of open source software to government players

Time to start a Drupal consulting firm again.

wickedwiesel• 6 months ago

Sure. Nextcloud GmbH seems to be one of the winners. It sells a customized version aimed at government agencies.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nextcloud

BrandoElFollito4• 6 months ago

If what they sell is the open source Nextcloud, it is a horrendous product.

Its architecture is weird, with a proxy inside you can harden only by editing data inside a container that is volatyile by design (and has to be). There are numerous issues opened on that topic, Nextcloud response is "live with it".

Zigurd• 6 months ago

I had an occasion to speak to some of the wire.com people a couple years ago. They seemed to be really dedicated to security and privacy.

internet_points5• 6 months ago

Can you do audio calls with their free plan? They say no "audio conferencing", but I see a call button. And if I get the SMB plan, can I invite externals to a video conference or do I then have to pay for plans for them as well?

nonethewiser• 6 months ago

Just goes to show how many structural problems there are to starting tech companies in Europe.

yardie2• 6 months ago

Yes, the problem is capital. US has loads of it and Europe does not. So a lot of European startups have 3 options: remain niche, get bought out buy US investors, move the corporate seat/brain trust to the US.

There are many small European startups who do not have infrastructure to take on large European multinationals as clients. A lot of EU labor laws have hard requirements at 50 and 100 employees so startups stay below those lines and remain tech lifestyle companies.

dbl0002• 6 months ago

That seems to be the intention of https://mosa.cloud/

internet_points5• 6 months ago

Pricing starts at €199/month based on resource usage. We'll discuss your specific needs during onboarding.

Out of the question for very small teams; very hard to evaluate with no free/cheap option.

PassingClouds• 6 months ago

It could be similar to when China kicked out a lot of non-domestic players. They even had a nickname for it. From the link below.

Fengkou fēng kǒu 风口

n. wind tunnel; an area or sector where, for a period of time, all investors want to invest in. Everyone stands a chance to fly when there is favorable wind blowing from behind.

https://www.newconceptmandarin.com/learn-chinese-blog/chines...

mrits3• 6 months ago

If so it will be acquired by a US company

mickael-kerjean4• 6 months ago

As a Frenchman involved in creating an open source Dropbox (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash) that can connect to any kind of storage and can expose itself as not only a web client but also SFTP, webdav and S3, with virtual filesystem capabilities and tons of other cool stuff, out of 60 customers, only 2 are French, the only people I see coming from France are only ever interested in open source because they don't want to pay anything (other countries in Europe are different though)

If anyone involved in this transition read this, please contact us, we already got open source technology to replace box / Dropbox / OneDrive and Gdrive

jt2190• 6 months ago

The French government… announced last week that 2.5 million civil servants would stop using video conference tools from U.S. providers — including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex and GoTo Meeting — by 2027 and switch to Visio, a homegrown service.

jl62• 6 months ago

Ahhh, collaboration via Visio. Those were the days!

jgbuddy• 6 months ago

It's all fun and games until there's an outage, nothing screams efficient like a state-owned tech company

guywithahat2• 6 months ago

Oh wow how did I not know it was state owned! The article keeps referring to "sovereign tech" which I assumed meant sovereign tech companies. I'm all for hating on teams (and sharepoint) but a state owned tech company sounds like an apocalyptically bad idea, and since it's state owned it can't really migrate to other industries/countries, and they likely won't update as quickly as they should as new technologies come around. I get the sharepoint/teams hate but I'm surprised a startup form isn't making more fun of France for this

NicuCalcea• 6 months ago

The first sentence of the article:

In France, civil servants will ditch Zoom and Teams for a homegrown video conference system.

I don't see an issue with government workers using government software. They are not licencing it to businesses or consumers, although with it being open source, I'm sure some will use it.

runarberg3• 6 months ago

Most of Europe did just fine with state owned telecommunication companies which lasted well into the 1990s or even the 2000s. To this day some of the largest telecommunications companies in Europe are still state owned, partially, and in some cases in full.

Growing up in Iceland where we had a state monopoly on telecommunications until the late 90s, I don‘t remember a single telecommunication outage. In fact, after moving to America where I have a private internet provider, I have experience quite a few internet blackouts actually.

ReptileMan3• 6 months ago

Most of Europe did just fine with state owned telecommunication companies which lasted well into the 1990s or even the 2000s.

Early 2000s were the times when 50Mbit in Eastern Europe when it was the wild west cost 10eur/month through lan cable and in Western Europe ADSL and ISDN cost multitude of the cost for fraction of the speed.

lefstathiou3• 6 months ago

As an American, I will echo Trump's speech at Davos. We want strong allies, not vassals. Be capable of building your own EVs, your own rockets, your own fighter jets, your own subway systems, your own zoom alternatives, your own search engines, your own operating systems, etc etc.

Make Europe great again. Bring back creativity. Bring back jobs. Build a talented workforce that stays local instead of migrating to the US. Be independent. Stand tall. Do all of these things and preferrably do them now.

America and China's rise shouldnt be zero sum. It should lift the world. Europe forged the path we all follow. Come back to it.

melesian3• 6 months ago

Patronizing rubbish. The EU builds plenty of EVs, rockets and fighter jets and has far more subway systems and public transport than the US.

Europe is already great. It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025.

As for being a vassal: Trump was warned of the consequences of invading Greenland and he backed down immediately. Some vassal.

lefstathiou3• 6 months ago

Latest leaks indicate the US will be given sovereignty over its existing and future bases in Denmark, along with oil drilling rights, at $0 to US tax payers. Some vassal indeed.

CapricornNoble3• 6 months ago

Re: fighter jets, the US and China are each producing about 4x as many jets as all of Europe combined. Europe's deliveries (41) barely exceed Russia's (33-39) despite Europe having 3x the population, supposedly superior industrial tech, not being the most sanctioned economy on Earth, etc...

https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/2025-fighter-jet-delive...

Re: rockets.....well we don't want to judge by tonnage lifted, where SpaceX dwarfs the entire planet's efforts. Still it appears Europe struggles to put even a handful of new rockets up, so I'm not sure why you are characterizing that as "plenty" either:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/20/1113582/europe-i...

Europe is already great. It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025.

HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS? Citation needed please. A migration of that scale would have journalists writing about it. Accurate data seems hard to come by but one expert puts TOTAL US expat numbers in Europe around 1.1 million.

https://aaro.org/living-abroad/how-many-americans-live-abroa...

As for being a vassal: Trump was warned of the consequences of invading Greenland and he backed down immediately. Some vassal.

Yes sometimes vassals oppose their suzerain's most egregious overreaches of power successfully. King John of England's barons pressured him to create the Magna Carta. Afterwards...they were still his vassals, as they were before it.

Just ask Mark Rutte: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/01/29/rutte-is-right...

A relevant opinion piece from a European: https://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/columns/nothing-more-than...

Am4TIfIsER0ppos• 6 months ago

It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025.

They should all give me their passports. I want in.

LightBug15• 6 months ago

... "your own Economics 101 classes!"

ChrisArchitect• 6 months ago

[dupe] Discussion from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767668

FpUser3• 6 months ago

Long time overdue. It is so stupid to rely on a single country in so many areas

wateralien• 6 months ago

Almost all businesses need email, contacts, calendars, live chat, video calls, docs, sheets, and presentations. Ideally all linked. Where is the open source foundation for this package that everyone needs?

drdec• 6 months ago

Where are the businesses setting up and donating to an organization/foundation to pay for development of such a package?

mhitza• 6 months ago

Aside from email I think nextcloud (+ jitsi integration) covers most, if not all, of those requirements.

GaelFG• 6 months ago

Nextcloud is great !

xanthor• 6 months ago

Nextcloud is not great, it's just the only available package that approximates an all-in-one GSuite experience. In practice, the UI is really janky and unpolished.

stronglikedan• 6 months ago

lol, "Europe" isn't seeking anything of the sort. France maybe, and a couple other countries, but very, very far from the whole of Europe. And even then, only a handful of people relative to the whole country. This won't even cause a blip on a balance sheet.

What are they gonna switch to? I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams. It's all just theater.

runarberg3• 6 months ago

Zoom and Teams are both proprietary software, I doubt any available forks exist, or could exist, for use outside of corporation where they are developed.

I’m guessing they will probably use something built on top of Matrix which is an open protocol maintained by a Community Interest Corporation (CIC) in the UK.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/30/france_matrix/

I’m less sure what they will use for video conferencing, but they could do worse then something built on top of WebRTC, which is also an open protocol maintained by W3C, an international standards organization with location in 4 countries (including France and USA).

Arathorn5• 6 months ago

The French video conferencing tool is called Visio, and is here: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet. It uses LiveKit for video, but doesn't yet use Matrix - the hope is to make it speak MatrixRTC so it can interop nicely with Tchap (the French fork of Element).

mgbmtl• 6 months ago

We have EU clients that now force us to use BBB (big blue button) for security reasons. It's not perfect, but good enough, and Zoom/Hangouts/Teams all have their quirks. We decided to adopt it where I work, and cut a few paid Zoom accounts.

Some clients use Jitsi, but I find it more complicated to run Jitsi in-house. BBB was really easy to setup.

bborud5• 6 months ago

Actually, video conferencing systems aren't that hard to build anymore. But it is hard to grow them as companies.

Just among my circle of friends there were two startups that made video conferencing systems. One generic, and one for uses that required a higher degree of security. If we move one stratum out, there are about half a dozen startups where friends of friends take part in developing smart cameras for video conferencing as well as industrial uses.

And then there was the Tandberg video conferencing platform which was acquired by Cisco in 2010. (That entire stack was designed and engineered in Norway. From low level DSPs to software).

There are dozens of companies that could make a video conferencing system in Europe today that would be no worse than what you find in Zoom, Teams etc. But since it is a crowded field, they haven't had the muscle to compete.

pbhjpbhj2• 6 months ago

I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams.

Aynthing that doesn't terminate in USA where it will be used for industrial espionage by Trump, and cut off as soon as USA's regime finds it useful to do so -- like to prevent reporting of the invasion of Greenland, say. European governments are using Microsoft, that's just not safe with MS paying fealty (and literally paying in $dollars) to a fascist regime.

It is unconscionable to maintain the status quo of using USA-based service companies.

chaostheory• 6 months ago

Imo this was inevitable even without Trump. He just massively accelerated it.

The end of globalism also marks the end of the global internet and the transition to regional internets.

quadrifoliate9• 6 months ago

This needs to go much, much further before it is even mildly effective. The EU has a population of ~450 million (more than the US) and no significant large technology companies. They are largely dependent on US Big Tech as a population.

I love that there is a lot more enthusiasm about OSS adoption within EU software devs, but at a population or government level there doesn't appear to be any coherent strategy to gradually replace US tech other than these knee-jerk headliner moves that don't move the needle much.

As a software consumer I would love it if there were open-first software standards adopted within this large of a population that would force US Big Tech to actually compete rather than rest on their monopoly power. But I am pretty skeptical and pessimistic about this actually being able to happen, given the historical failures of the EU.

anon2916• 6 months ago

OSS software is also mostly owned by the US. This entire thing of 'replacing' American software with American software under a different commercial model is so silly.

antirez• 6 months ago

That's not true. For instance in the field of video pipelines ffmpeg is the standard, and was started by an European (French) person. Runs on Linux of course, that ..., and so forth. Do you really believe in Europe there is no the tech capability to recreate the tech stack? This is an extremely naive way to put it. US tech is much more developed because of money infusion even on companies that take 10/20 years to get productive. It was the right call, by the US, to put things in this way, but the European disadvantage is not for technical merits.

meinersbur• 6 months ago

It doesn't matter whether OSS is American (in whatever sense) -- anything that is America-specific (e.g. server addresses) can be patched for a localized European version. The different commercial model does matter: American law does not apply (Cloud Act, National Security Letters, ...)

maelito• 6 months ago

The problem is not ownership. It's dev force. We're not bad here in europe, not bad at all.

Bengalilol2• 6 months ago

Could you elaborate? <https://nextcloud.com/blog/press_releases/digital-sovereignt...>

On a side and more general note: "Global Innovation Index 2025"

"Europe hosts 15 economies ranked among the global top 25, including six in the top 10. Switzerland (1st) retains the global lead, followed by Sweden (2nd), the United Kingdom (6th) and Finland (7th). Thirteen out of 39 European economies covered moved up the ranks, marking a notable increase from nine last year.

Notable movers include Ireland (18th), Belgium (21st) and Norway (20th), which breaks into the top 20.

Eastern European economies also show solid momentum. Lithuania (33rd) leads globally for unicorn valuation and digital innovation – with leading positions in app creation, ICT use and Knowledge-intensive employment.Europe is also home to dynamic innovation clusters, led by Germany with seven clusters and the United Kingdom with four, including Cambridge and Oxford. However, European innovation clusters trail the US in venture capital strength."

<https://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2025/article_0009...>

Barrin922• 6 months ago

and no significant large technology companies

I have to do my patriotic duty to remind you that SAP is the 6th/7th largest software company in the world by market cap. I know not as exiting as notepad with AI but they do exist.

That said US software giants are a disease for democratic societies. If Europe wants software sovereignty we don't need "significant large software companies" we need a hundred medium sized ones that reflect the diversity of the dozens of nations on the continent. We don't need gilded age robber barrons owning the largest communications network shaping politics. We need a democratic genuinely market respecting solution, we don't need to emulate the techno-feudalism of the US or China.

Europe needs in fact to be more ambitious than to build its own Microsoft. We need a genuinely open ecosystem which is not going to have as its goal to extract value out of its users.

quadrifoliate9• 6 months ago

If Europe wants software sovereignty we don't need "significant large software companies" we need a hundred medium sized ones that reflect the diversity of the dozens of nations on the continent...Europe needs in fact to be more ambitious than to build its own Microsoft. We need a genuinely open ecosystem which is not going to have as its goal to extract value out of its users.

Sure, but can you be honest and admit that you don't have any of this yet? Just to take a simple thing like messaging, Europeans mainly use WhatsApp (US), FB Messenger (US), and Telegram (Russian) to communicate.

SAP is the 6th/7th largest software company in the world by market cap

Okay I will give you that one. Market cap doesn't always equal ubiquity though; ask your non technical (or even most of your technical) friends what SAP does and you will get blank stares. Ask them what Microsoft does and you will usually get a reasonable answer that's not "Notepad with AI".

gib444• 6 months ago

and no significant large technology companies

I can only assume this is a comparison to the US

The world doesn't care about the US yard stick so much. Even less now than before. We in Europe don't care our economy is smaller than the US, that our cars are smaller etc.

Bigger is not always better

frumplestlatz• 6 months ago

You say stuff like this, and then simultaneously complain when the US winds up owning the entire technology stack and being the predominate western superpower.

So which is it? Does scale not matter, or are you unhappy with the outcome of ignoring it?

quadrifoliate9• 6 months ago

Sure, but at least you have homegrown car companies. They make cutting edge cars that are mainstream, and even popular abroad.

You have no equivalents for software. That's why all of your consumer and most of your official stuff runs on US software and cloud platforms, and why headlines like these are...headlines rather than just being normal.

Don't get me wrong -- as a US consumer, I would love for this to change and have EuroCloud or whatever. Hetzner isn't too bad. But it doesn't have the scale and service breadth that Microsoft, Amazon or Google bring.

palata7• 6 months ago

The US government has been working really hard on making sure that nobody can compete with the US Big Tech. See what Cory Doctorow has to say about this, for instance.

sbacic• 6 months ago

I'm just going to go out and say it: Europe is poor. At least compared to the US. You can see this plainly when comparing GDP per capita but it's particularly telling when you look at the revenue of tech giants, such as Alphabet and Meta. For example, Alphabet made roughly 50% of its revenue from the US and about 30% from EMEA in 2025.

Now compound that issue with conservative investors, a fractured "single" market and a strong preference for social equality over entrepreneurship.

kkfx• 6 months ago

EU governments don't want to learn one thing: you don't replace one dictator with another. The specific case says little, France has been developing "La Suite" for YEARS, Italy had experimented with Jitsi Meet and Big Blue Button at GARR during the COVID era, but what the EU wants is to create EU GAFAMs, whereas what we need, and not just in the EU, is FLOSS, self-hosting, desktop computing. This, however, is not welcome, starting with eIDAS 2.0 which pushes for a "super-sovereign" app-wallet for the notoriously sovereign Android and iOS instead of smart cards and USB readers that we've had for years and that various countries have used for years to log into online banking and, more recently, to sign documents.

The substantial point is that they don't want freedom, they only want to steal like others steal, to do business like others do business, instead of doing something different.

input_sh4• 6 months ago

Worth pointing out: France is not adopting existing open source software, they're building their own software and releasing it under the MIT licence. Most of it (or all of it?) is Django backend + React frontend (using a custom-built UI kit).

Home page for the entire suite (in French) with some screenshots: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/

Code bases are on GitHub and they use English there: https://github.com/suitenumerique/

Dev handbook (in English): https://suitenumerique.gitbook.io/handbook

Not French and I can't say I personally tried deploying any of them, but I've been admiring their efforts from afar for a while now.

aanet3• 6 months ago

Refreshing and impressive indeed. I wish other governments did this, esp those that are larger / have a reasonably large tech scene (e.g. Northern Europe, Nordic, AUS, Japan, Canada, Germany, India, etc).

It's time governments realize(d) that IT sector is as strategic as the Defense sector, which is usually/always given preferential treatment (e.g. Airbus, etc) and that they don;t have to be beholden to American tech behemoths. If this realization happened ~20 years ago, they might have stopped FB, Goog, Amazon, MSFT, etc. much earlier, and wouldn't be hand-wringing now trying to stop or delay the evil effects of social media.

I am pleased that AUS has banned social media for teens < 16yrs, and perhaps Finland is thinking the same route.

Already, China, Russia have their local tech companies supply their critical infra needs. Other governments should be wise enough to catch up, and not just to support + enhance local languages but to grow their critical ecosystem.

MichaelRo2• 6 months ago

Well I would definitely prefer to use globally popular established solutions like Zoom and Teams and the English language and America as a reliable democracy.

Weather or not they get Greenland, Trump and his supporters in the US administration have changed the world. Guy should definitely get Nobel prize for pushing decentralization.

Teever2• 6 months ago

I agree with this totally. But while they certainly talk the talk I’m not totally convinced that European governments will actually walk the walk and follow through on this.

To me a really significant signal that they’re serious will be when there’s an official Linux version of Solidworks.

It’s remarkable to me that France has control over one of the premiere CAD suites but theyre entirely dependent on an American OS to use it.

snowpid4• 6 months ago

Germany has https://www.opendesk.eu/de and https://www.sovereign.tech/programs/fund. both mentioned on HN

codethief2• 6 months ago

Already, China, Russia have their local tech companies supply their critical infra needs. Other governments should be wise enough to catch up, and not just to support + enhance local languages but to grow their critical ecosystem.

As a European, I agree. Zooming out a little, though, this whole decoupling process of entire economies (which has been well underway for a while) is going to increase the probability of armed conflict as the repercussions of military engagement will be lower.

wolvoleo3• 6 months ago

Hmmm not entirely true. The text chat of their suite is simply element.io (matrix) and they're paying them for development.

Visio does seem built from scratch but I wonder if it's a temporary thing until element is feature complete with their move away from Jitsi.

You can find more about la suite on their website and the opendesk one (German project using mostly the same software). Unfortunately I don't have the links to hand here.

Arathorn5• 6 months ago

Tchap (the chat part of the suite) is indeed a fork of Element. Unfortunately they haven't funded upstream development for many years (otherwise both Element and Tchap would be much much better!)

Visio (aka meet) began in parallel with Element's work on MatrixRTC and Element Call. Hopefully the two can converge, given they are both built on LiveKit.

tombert• 6 months ago

I am certainly not going to complain about more well-funded FOSS software being out there.

dbl0002• 6 months ago

I've been using the docs tool in my homelab for ~3 months now as a knowledge base for some projects I've been working on with some friends.

It's really good. The typing experience "feels" right and the collaboration features work. I haven't played with the other solutions yet but I'm very excited if they are up to the same standard.

I deployed it with docker and it was relatively smooth. I had to play a bit with the OIDC but I'm pretty sure that was more a me issue than anything.

quadrifoliate9• 6 months ago

Gotta give them props for all the English. I know that can't have been easy.

Now they just need to change the name so it's not so obviously French, and invite collaboration from the other large EU countries. I wonder how many Dutch or German will think of "La Suite Numerique" as an EU-wide office suite.

input_sh4• 6 months ago

That website is specifically to explain it to French audiences.

German version is here, but unlike France they're mostly boosting already-existing German open source software (like Nextcloud and Open Xchange): https://opencode.de/en/home

I don't know how the Netherlands really fits into all of this, but I know they're one of the biggest funders of open source projects in general via NLnet. Seriously, their list of projects they've given money to is ridiculously comprehensive, you're going to struggle naming some that are not listed here: https://nlnet.nl/project/index.html

latexr2• 6 months ago

Gotta give them props for all the English. I know that can't have been easy.

Why not? Plenty of French people speak English at a native level.

ta20240528• 6 months ago

"Now they just need to change the name so it's not so obviously French"

Where I live names that aren't so obviously American have an advantage.

michelb• 6 months ago

The Dutch are also working on this: https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau/

OJFord2• 6 months ago

The Dutch would probably use it no problem without even noticing it was French, same way they would if it were German, or English.

paulfitz5• 6 months ago

I work at Grist, the "tableur collaboratif" (collaborative spreadsheet) listed on the La Suite homepage. We're in the interesting situation of being both a NYC-based company, and open source software the French gov has adopted and is helping to develop. Grist is mostly a node backend. So it is a complicated story. The key is having code the gov can review and trust and run it on sovereign infrastructure.

Grist https://www.getgrist.com/

A write-up of how the French gov uses it https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...

sequoia• 6 months ago

wow it reminds me of Microsoft Access, a great piece of software in terms of rapidly building an application!

Does grist have forms?

mentalgear• 6 months ago

Kudos, Grist is great ! Super features, quite seamless only the UI could be more modern (or user stylesheet customizable) if you get to it.

yunnpp3• 6 months ago

Your position is fantastic because it immediately puts to death all of that nationalistic nonsense about the EU becoming "anti-American" by enforcing privacy laws on US Big Tech etc, when in fact they are just protecting their citizens' rights against unethical business models regardless of origin. I might be naive, but your company to me represents a win for free/open software and cross-country collaboration.

That being said, I should ask: to what extent do you see being US-based an advantage or a problem in the current state of things? For example, in regards to exports controls, or any other such thing that may potentially limit your business scope depending on $current_admin.

mrits3• 6 months ago

0% chance of working out

input_sh4• 6 months ago

Used each month by more than 500 000 staff, in 15 ministries and many administrations.

epistasis2• 6 months ago

Looking through the resources you've linked is one of the most hopeful and awesome software experiences I have had in a while.

There's a chance to unlock tremendous value for society here.

Imagine if you could fix all the awful bugs making video conferencing software shitty for you! It's perhaps the most bug-plagued software out there in the world, with the highest number of complaints I have ever seen.

We've had a large detour away from open-source running the core of the internet, at least outside of web pages, but this sort of software feels like we're getting back to the 90's and earlier.

Vive la France!

Agingcoder2• 6 months ago

This one made me laugh , thanks ! I wish there was some kind of slashdot like ´funny’ tag

philipallstar3• 6 months ago

Zoom isn't buggy I wouldn't say. It's really good.

WhyNotHugo• 6 months ago

Code bases are on GitHub

Not a very solid way to move away from American big tech :/

alpha_squared• 6 months ago

This is probably just the first big step (communications) in a series of big steps.

bee_rider• 6 months ago

Maybe they have local copies as well, and just figured they might as well take GitHub’s free bandwidth and social networking features.

cortesoft2• 6 months ago

If the move away from American big tech is for practical reasons rather than political, there is no harm in using GitHub. The worry with using an American firm is that the US government could force the company to handover confidential information, or shut down access.

For open source code, there is no risk of confidential information being given to the US government (since there is no confidential information), and moving to another forge would be pretty simple if necessary.

thrance• 6 months ago

I remember seeing some projects by the French government on their self-hosted Gitlab. Maybe these are just public mirrors of their private repos?

bilekas3• 6 months ago

The other commenter nailed it down. But I want to add that removing dependance on US companies is not some kind of spiteful act. It's purely down to both privacy and reliability.

Having private companies in the US becoming more involved with politics is fine for the US apperantly, but the EU just don't want to be involved.

amelius2• 6 months ago

React is also from US, no?

caycep3• 6 months ago

I mean if they're half as good as Handbrake and VLC I'm up for trying

Aeolun• 6 months ago

I like how they go to digital sovereignty on office. And then immediately turn around an host on Github.

morshu9001• 6 months ago

Is there not a FOSS solution like this already that they could just deploy?

andai• 6 months ago

Here's what I gathered:

- TChap - Group chat (looks like Slack / Discord)

- Visio - Video meetings

- FranceTransfert - File Transfer

- Messagerie - Email client

- Fichiers - Cloud file storage

- Docs

- Grist - Spreadsheet

mickael-kerjean4• 6 months ago

France is not adopting existing open source software

As a Frenchman, this stings. I have been working since 2017 in creating an open source alternative to Dropbox (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash), the reality is out of 60 customers, only 2 are French and most contacts I've had with French entities only shown interest onto open source because they were not willing to spend a dime on anything.

Customers are mostly US entities and other countries in Europe. The gist is our technology is already working accross every possible storage technology and every identity provider, has a clean modern UI, has gateway capabilities to expose your data with open protocols like SFTP, FTP, S3, MCP, with virtual filesystem capabilities that enables a decentralized approach through federation and tons of other advanced setup, is deployed in production in places like US military, MIT, European Commission and many other othher high profile places.

We just launched https://www.filestash.eu a few days ago hoping to talk to people in France who are interested in translating the talk of data sovereignty onto actual actions. If anybody who is reading this is truly interested onto a sovereign Dropbox and is willing to put talks onto a concrete reality, reach out to me, I'd love to talk to you

munksbeer• 6 months ago

Is your filestash.eu website intentionally only in French?

buibuibui• 6 months ago

This looks interesting. Does it also has desktop sync clients? Didn't read anything in that direction while glancing over.

oblio• 6 months ago

Does Filestash support replication/automated backups and encryption? Also, do you have mobile clients?

badsectoracula• 6 months ago

AFAIK - and what is mentioned at the bottom here[0] - La Suite is a joint effort by French and German (and others) governments.

I did try a local installation of Docs when i first saw the project a few months ago (i do not remember if it was posted here or on Reddit, though i think one of the developers posted in the comments wherever i saw it), it seems fine though it did feel a bit sparse for all the docker containers it expected from me to setup. I guess for an organization this might be ok, but it did feel a bit overengineered, especially since the actual functionality doesn't seem to be much (and the core editor isn't even written by them).

[0] https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs

YousefED2• 6 months ago

I work on BlockNote (https://www.blocknotejs.org), the block-based editor that powers Docs (https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs).

1.5 year ago DINUM (La Suite) and OpenDesk (Germany) reached out and started sponsoring quite a bit of our work which has really helped us accelerate the project

trcf23• 6 months ago

Do they have an impact on the roadmap? Like special features for gov work or specific integration?

And I believe BlockNote uses tiptap/prosemirror, no? Do they also contribute to those “primitives”? That would be a very nice gift to the OSS community

Bendy• 6 months ago

Should’ve called it OuiChat

MagicMoonlight• 6 months ago

That is awesome

richardw• 6 months ago

Great. There’s no reason why all countries don’t start preferring locally or regionally developed software. Of course interoperability is always a thing but there needs to be another option between “one company” and “everyone host your own instance”.

shevy-java• 6 months ago

Makes sense. This software dependency that Europe has on the USA is very, very bad - no just with regards to Zoom, but literally anything. The US corporations are forced by law to always prioritize whoever represents the current US government, and the current US government will remain hostile as long as it is in charge; but even afterwards it is quite logical to assume that any follow-up government will prioritize US interests over European interests. So it makes no sense to pay for outsiders who would work against you.

France does a few things right; scandinavian countries too (I include The Netherlands here, though they are not really scandiavians but in their decision-making, they are often a bit like a hybrid between France and Denmark or Sweden). Spain and Italy lag behind but sometimes, surprisingly, also do the right thing. The real troublemaker is ... Germany. For a reason nobody understands, Germany is like an US satellite in everything it does, but only ... half-hearted. Naturally, "the economy" is one reason (export centric country so it is readily blackmailable by the USA here) but even then you have to ask why german politicians have absolutely no pride at all. France has pride - that's good and bad but good in this context. (UK is more an US colony really after Brexit anyway, with Farage probably going to win - and cause more damage. Brits just don't learn from this.)

derektank• 6 months ago

For a reason nobody understands, Germany is like an US satellite in everything it does

I don’t see what’s surprising about this. In the post-war period, most of Europe was hostile to German empowerment, from initial opposition to West Germany’s inclusion in NATO to later resistance to German reunification. The presence of tens of thousands of US troops in Germany also required more diplomatic communication and alignment to maintain status of forces agreements.

The status quo has only really changed in the last twenty years.

chungy2• 6 months ago

The US corporations are forced by law to always prioritize whoever represents the current US government

Where do you get your information from? This is just plainly false. Heck, it runs afoul of the Constitution, so even if the government were to try something, it'd be smacked down real fast.

bigfudge2• 6 months ago

I don't know if you're joking, but if not you need to start paying attention to what has been happening in US courts recently.

le-mark• 6 months ago

I think it’s more accurate to say that US corporations are subject to US law. Indeed there are no laws that say anything about corporations prioritizing the party in power, but they often do as matter course.

p_j_w• 6 months ago

Where do you get your information from?

Comment right above yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46877163

even if the government were to try something, it'd be smacked down real fast.

One would hope, but evidently not!

dyslexit• 6 months ago

This software dependency that Europe has on the USA is very, very bad - no just with regards to Zoom, but literally anything.

More to this point, the article points out that one of the drivers of all this is when Microsoft killed one of the emails an ICC prosecutor's email because the US administration sanctioned them:

A decisive moment came last year when the Trump administration sanctioned the International Criminal Court’s top prosecutor after the tribunal, based in The Hague, Netherlands, issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an ally of President Donald Trump.
The sanctions led Microsoft to cancel Khan’s ICC email, a move that was first reported by The Associated Press and sparked fears of a “kill switch” that Big Tech companies can use to turn off service at will.

philipallstar3• 6 months ago

France does everything right except produce much software. I'm sure it can copycat things pioneered by the US, and 20 years later, but that's not exactly difficult.

victorbojica• 6 months ago

Doesn't really matter if copycat or not in this case. I'd argue it's even better to be a copycat in order to move faster.

chakazula• 6 months ago

To me this is the point right? Everything that's spent enough time in the oven and has been commodified should be eventually launched as a public service. If we lived in a reasonable world this would be how things are done instead of installing permanent toll booths on everything and letting it get shittier and more expensive.

mylifeandtimes• 6 months ago

why does it matter if it is difficult? You are right, these systems should be well understood by now. And public domain.

zppln• 6 months ago

Sounds like a pretty good deal for France to fork US software from 20 years ago, because shit sure hasn't improved much since then.

sofixa2• 6 months ago

Obviously you've never seen French software, so why pretend like you have?

Counterpoints: Deezer, Doctolib, Back Market, Tidal, Adopte, Mistral, Dassault Systemes (the company behind the two main CAD softwares out there), Thales, Qonto, Kyutai, Mirakl, BeReal, Klaxoon, ABTasty, etc etc. We can do this all day.

Oh, and there are ton of official government open source projects.

And no, "but they're not as big as a FAAG" does not mean that the software isn't good or innovative.

tacker20002• 6 months ago

Since WW2, German national pride is something that is not very well received, added to that the old east/west divide, and the generally strong identification with ones own state/region. It is a complex affair.

pyuser5832• 6 months ago

You're basically saying Western European countries' relationships with the US haven't changed much since the Cold War.

herbst5• 6 months ago

I wouldn't agree to that. However we are in the middle of a new cold war since orange guy the first and pretty much manifested it with orange guy the second.

epolanski4• 6 months ago

France is the only country in Europe and likely the world that builds anything defense related in France. Pistols, machine guns, aircrafts, ships, helicopters, etc, it's all french.

qball• 6 months ago

The big stuff, sure, but the French state's small-arms capacity (while once impressive) has atrophied to the point of non-existence.

They rely on the Germans (and to a point, Czechs) to supply their military these days.

RamblingCTO• 6 months ago

Are you saying only French companies build defense stuff in France or it's the only country in Europe that builds defense stuff in general?

Germany has quite a lot of defense companies that supply half the world I think.

_el1s7• 6 months ago

Europe? Uh, I think you mean the whole world.

BiteCode_dev• 6 months ago

Even worse than most people realize: https://www.bitecode.dev/p/the-eu-can-be-shut-down-with-a-fe...

That includes:

Dependency on US-hosted digital services (emails, chat, calendars, ticket systems, online editors, file hosting, sync services, payment providers) — e.g., Gmail, Google Docs.

Dependency on third-party authentication providers — e.g., login via Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, and iCloud on iPhones.

Dependency on US cloud infrastructure providers — e.g., companies relying on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

Dependency through supply chain partners who rely on US tech — e.g., digitization partners using AWS/Azure impacting invoice processing.

Dependency on US-based business IT software and data services — e.g., banks using Microsoft LDAP, accountants using Dropbox, telecoms storing data in Oracle data lakes.

Dependency on US-controlled operating systems on user devices — e.g., Windows, macOS, iOS, Android.

Dependency on US-designed chips in most devices — e.g., Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Apple chip hardware.

AlecSchueler2• 6 months ago

The real troublemaker is ... Germany

Everyone is responding with rationale for this, but it's not actually true it's it? It feels like every week we see another German state moving away from Microsoft etc.

tacker20002• 6 months ago

Some are, some arent.

The Bavarian state for example just signed a huge deal with MS.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Cloud-Row-in-Bavaria-over-billi...

atonse• 6 months ago

I couldn't tell from the article but any reason they wouldn't just adopt Matrix? I thought some European governments (especially in France) were already adopting Matrix.

Arathorn5• 6 months ago

France was one of the first to already adopt Matrix. However, when they began Visio, Element was embedding Jitsi for VoIP. Meanwhile Element built Element Call, which is somewhat similar to Visio (except E2EE and decentralised thanks to Matrix). Hopefully the two can converge :)

esel2k• 6 months ago

Working for a large business in Europe- I think MSFT and Google co know exactly about the threat to their business.

Thats why the aggressively integrate every AI tool where they can - like copilot to make large companies and government stick to their solutions. I wish government will find am even better way to embed LLM to their tools…

benob• 6 months ago

Too bad it doesn't have zooms echo cancelation / isolation

Fairburn• 6 months ago

How refreshing.

n4pw01f• 6 months ago

Why not Jitsi - genuinely curious

buovjaga• 6 months ago

Just a guess, but Jitsi having no governance structure outside of 8x8, Inc. might have something to do with it.

nemo44x• 6 months ago

Cool. It won’t even be a blip on the earnings report. I guess a sales rep in Europe isn’t getting their preferred vacation this year. But other than that this is of no consequence.

I’ll still buy France’s wine.

caycep3• 6 months ago

does Zoom still dump an unkillable web server into the bowels of your OS?

Waterluvian• 6 months ago

I think this is one of the silver linings to this new era. By trying to renegotiate intolerable terms, the Americans are forcing the rest of the world to figure out how to make it all work without them. This will inevitably be a rough transition but it results in more worldwide resiliency and product/service options.

I think one question, which we might be seeing a bit here and there, is if the Americans decide that no, you can’t also do that. You must accept the intolerable terms or be punished.

teffy512• 6 months ago

RIP: Zoom Public Sector AE, EMEA

whatever1• 6 months ago

If they also make US copyright not enforceable then they can have office clones and then it’s game over.

awesome_dude• 6 months ago

This was always going to happen as soon as the USA decided to be overtly all about itself.

Tact and diplomacy meant that previously the USA was seen as, yes being all about itself, but not threateningly so when it came to its allies/friends. As soon as that veneer was removed the reaction was always going to be, "we'll look after ourselves then" - using the same tools China has (see: China having its own linux distribution)

lagniappe• 6 months ago

How many times are we going to see this same exact topic posted?

tzs• 6 months ago

How did they decide to name their Zoom/Teams replacement "Visio"?

There's already an extremely well known program called "Visio", namely Microsoft Visio, and it is included in many of the same Microsoft commercial office products that include Microsoft Teams. If you tell someone to switch from Microsoft Teams to Visio a lot of people will assume you mean Microsoft Visio and get rather confused.

bandie91• 6 months ago

let me fix this for you: l`Visio - but with a French accent ;)

znhll2• 6 months ago

They named their video conference tool "Visio" ? lol

Meanwhile... Micro$lop: Aha! Sharpen your lawyers, mes amis!

pyuser5832• 6 months ago

What does Europe imagine their relationship with Silicon Valley looking like?

I'm looking for examples here - Israel has a very specific relationship with the tech sector, as does Taiwan, China, South Korea, etc. Even within the US, North Virginia, Huntsville, and Manhattan have specific relationships with Silicon Valley.

Is the idea to copy Silicon Valley's stuff into government sponsored, "to committed to fail" operations? Create complementary tech ecosystems? Recruit Silicon Valley veterans and put them in charge, or just fire them after they get their tech?

Just look at how hard it is to come to a decision on something like allow Huawei to build a telephone network. Is it a good idea? Smart people say, Huawei should be allowed to provide the dumb pipes of the system, but not the high level stuff. Anything sensitive needs to be reviewed by domestic security services.

Is that the approach to America?

It seems like the article saying: "copy America's SaaS offerings." Not clear how that makes you digitally sovereign.

scottyah3• 6 months ago

Airbus has been the most successful example I know of. Basically, clone off and slightly modify something another country has created, then force a large population to use it. It's like tariffs on steroids.

mikelpr• 6 months ago

wonder why they didn't use jitsi

dash2• 6 months ago

Is this gonna go as well as when they built their own search engine?

dperhar• 6 months ago

Actually its now worth it to be building software in EU. It will have its market for sure

cadamsdotcom• 6 months ago

This is SO exciting to see!

One analogy to our current moment in software is to think of skyscrapers in cities. In the early days of skyscraper construction, most knowledge needed to build one was concentrated in Chicago and New York, so those were the only places really building serious skyscrapers. It took a while but eventually the knowledge diffused out into the industry and the world.

Now we take for granted that high quality skyscrapers are in every city, with the tremendous space efficiency they give.

So is the same diffusion happening to software? It really looks like it! Knowledge of building and operating large-scale software seems to have reached a point where countries and companies no longer need to rely on Silicon Valley companies (and Microsoft) for software. (Note this is less about location and more about capability level, the skyscrapers/cities analogy breaks a little there)

Anyway every country and company can now build its own complex software. It’s been like this for a bit, but current US circumstances did the world a favor when it nudged Europe to get serious.

Software is headed for an exciting and multi-color future and I’m so here for it.

matt3210• 6 months ago

This is AI enhanced workflows eating SaaS. I’d be scared if I ran a SaaS

PlatoIsADisease3• 6 months ago

France speaks for Europe? Heh heh heh...

France wants to really really reallllllyyyy believe they do.

Poland and Germany lets France say such fanciful words, but they keep their actual thoughts for themselves. They know France has an Adler inferiority complex, so they let them pretend.

userbinator• 6 months ago

Ctrl+F "SIP" - 0 results before this comment.

There are decades-old standards for VoIP and teleconferencing, which even the proprietary solutions will often let you interoperate with (at additional cost). Now would be a good time to actually promote them.

data-ottawa• 6 months ago

Good for France.

We've seen the US sanction the ICC, they have the Cloud Act and the Patriot Act. The US has shown both a willingness and a capability to weaponize your tech against you.

It should profoundly worry the world that three companies — whose heads all have frequent dinners at the White House — control virtually every phone, tablet, and computer in the world. If you expand that to data centres and clouds, email addresses, services and software it's far worse.

It should be considered a matter of national defence for basically all nations to ensure digital sovereignty.

(It doesn't matter who is in the White House, my point is it's a massive security nightmare to give this much control to one group)

sbinnee• 6 months ago

During covid I was studying in France. The school deliberately chose not to use zoom. It was software called BigBlueButton. I was happy with it. I appreciated them for having their own opinions instead of just following what others do.

carlosjobim• 6 months ago

It would take less than one day for every European government, business, or individual to ditch Zoom and Teams without loosing any benefits: It's called a fucking telephone.

blubber• 6 months ago

While I like the move, I think it could have come a few decades earlier and I'm stunned by the fact that this is Franc-only. When will Europe ever wake up?

nottorp• 6 months ago

... and here I was thinking they're dropping them because they're annoyances ...

[Teams more than zoom. I just got switched to Teams at work and now I understand why no one ever chats on it.]

jillesvangurp• 6 months ago

Zoom and teams are low hanging fruit in terms of replacability. I use both with various customers. Internally we use teams. Occasionally somebody insists on webex or other tools. Meets isn't actually horrible now that Google seems to have stopped the internal battles to replace it every six months. But in the end it is very replaceable as well.

All of these tools cover the basics (being able to video call others, screen sharing, doing calls with multiple/many participants, chat, etc.). You can get most/all of that with free and OSS options. You might struggle a bit with larger meetings or some corporate networking situations.

UX wise, all of these tools are a bit challenged. It seems Google at least embraces the whole "it's just a browser app and that's fine" more than others that insist standalone applications are the way to go. And since these applications are effectively electron applications that run mostly fine in a browser, it is a bit of a smoke and mirrors thing in any case. Bloated is a word that is used frequently in relation to these apps.

It would be nice if tools like this could rally around federated solutions and open protocols. Actually, the smart thing for France (and other countries that care about ending the miserable status quo) would be to dictate usage of open protocols, identity, and security standards. You are welcome to connect with zoom, teams, meets and whatever as long as people not paying for those tools can still participate in a call using whatever compatible tool they prefer. Give these tools a chance to adapt and compete on features. The solution maybe isn't another app but just forcing this market out of the stone age of moats, "owning" user identities, etc.

Email is the one that got away before Silicon Valley got its act together. MS, Novel, America Online, and others completely failed to get their grubby fingers on the space before email was so widely used that not supporting full interoperability with non proprietary email servers was economical suicide. And they tried really hard. Video calls should be the same. And calendars. And word processors (a space that hasn't had any meaningful innovation in decades), spreadsheets, and all the rest. Most of MS Office is a commodity at this point. Not particularly good at anything it does actually. MS has been moving deck chairs around on the deck of that sinking ship for a few decades now.

LightBug15• 6 months ago

Well done, Trump and Musk ! ... Your people are proud of you.

Tourism, Tech, Tesla, Chlorinated Chickens (lol), ICE ... practically anything American sounds toxic overseas now.

Apologies to the good people of America. You didn't deserve this but your "democracy" has spoken.

red_admiral• 6 months ago

Digital autonomy aside, I like the concept of something like "Microsoft apps, but without copilot".

ChrisMarshallNY• 6 months ago

Isn’t Zoom Chinese?

Anyway, I have been dealing with Zoom for over five years (like most folks). I don’t especially like it, but there’s really no viable alternative. Its video quality is light years ahead of anyone else, and its UI, though still klunky, has become a de facto standard. Everyone knows the UX, and is afraid to use anything else. Classic “the devil you know” conundrum.

I’ve found it really difficult to get non-technical people to use anything else. At one time, I could get folks to use BlueJeans, but that’s gone the way of the Dodo.

It’s a pretty common issue, when adopting FOSS alternatives. The UI is often optimized for FOSS lovers (tech people), not regular mensch. The tech may be great, but the UI is inscrutable. Tech folks just can’t seem to grok how important good UX is.

It’s actually a bit depressing, seeing this type of thing happening. It’s like a slow-motion trainwreck. Inevitable, unstoppable, and we can’t look away.

xaldir• 6 months ago

Maybe it's just a PR stunt, maybe not, we'll find out in due time.

The thing is, there has been a lot of announcement like that in the past, but when the dust settles, you find out that every other ministry just signed another contract with Microsoft, so yeah.

The DINUM (the state agency behind these tools) just try very hard to be relevant, but in the end, the ministries are relatively autonomous in their choices.

sunwukung• 6 months ago

This suggests governments need to commission infrastructure level dependencies directly rather than relying solely on the market and consumer behaviour, particularly given the poor outcomes in areas where there is little to no competition

davidfekke• 6 months ago

The countries of the EU need to ask themselves why these software unicorns are not starting in their countries. Why do so many European entrepeneurs come to the United States to start their businesses?

The EU has a tendency to regulate business before they ever get started. They might want to look at their regulatory structure so companies like Zoom start in the EU, and not in United States.

gadders• 6 months ago

Reminds me of the Zuckerberg quote from the film: "If you could have build Facebook, you would have built Facebook."

I don't think the main thing stopping an EU Zooms or Teams from capturing the market is not enough help from the French government.

mdf• 6 months ago

Just today, a citizens' initiative started collecting signatures in Finland to stop recent projects that aim to transfer hosting of election, taxation, and social security data on services provided by US-run companies.[1]

[1] https://digitaalinenitsenaisyys.fi/

malklera• 6 months ago

Good for them. More curious about file types and protocols, would their software output an open file type and "speak" open protocols? Let's say a French office needs to talk to a US office. Can each party use their own client and it still work, or does one party have to download the software of the other? The same with documents: can each party read the documents produced by the other?

France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

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