Once these countries leave, they'll never go back. And then the rest of us get better alternatives to this enshitification model.
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Seriously, enshitification is the only thing US companies do well these days. They just dig deeper moats around their walled gardens because they’re too greedy to make decent products that people actually want.
Enshittification, AI slop and fascism are America's greatest exports. And that's not even a joke.
I think enshitification is a product of public traded companies promising infinite growth, not necessarily a problem of US only companies.
It's also a consequence of low taxes on capital gains and corporate profits.
When those taxes were higher it made more sense to reinvest the profits back into your own company. You'd build a reputation and a structure that would pay out you and your family for a hundred years.
Now the dream is to build up a company just enough to sell it to some megacorp and cash out asap, with you and your family living off of investment money that only increases over time.
Once these countries leave, they’ll never go back.
Look up LiMux and the massive Microsoft deal that followed.
That deal that totally had nothing to do with Microsoft relocating their headquarters closer to Munich
No, please stop with this garbage misinformation. Microsoft made a (suspected) under the table deal with the Munich government at the time to setup a Microsoft office in Munich if they switched back to Windows.
That's what the news reported on endlessly. That's the narrative that keeps getting falsely repeated over and over, and no one ever checks the BS stories they spread.
The rest of the story didn't make headlines, where the new incoming Munich government said "hell no!" (prob in German) and continued the Linux rollout.
Today the environment is a mix of Linux and Windows, but they already have a large focus on FOSS software.
Despite the astonishingly stupid decision to roll their own in-house distro (LiMux), the program was massively successful, with Linux users filling only 40% the number of tickets the Windows users did.
Edit: I'm correcting something I said, they didn't "continue the Linux rollout" as they had already covered most of their systems. The current status is a mix of Windows and Linux, because they vetoed the rollback to Windows in 2020.
Kind of funny considering that Visio is the name of another Microsoft product.
ETA: I'm not defending Microsoft's usage of the term 'Visio' here. The French use of that term makes a lot of sense, and Microsoft has an annoying tendency of using and copyrighting very common terms like 'Word' or 'SQL Server'. And France (or the French government) should be allowed to use it for their video conferencing software. I'm just smiling at the idea of some people opening Microsoft Visio by mistake and trying to figure out how to make a call through a diagramming app.
People who use Visio, probably wont even have (the wrong) Visio installed. There shouldn’t be any confusion.
Microslop can cry about it.
I doubt they will care that much. But it will create a bit of confusion, at least for since in the short-term.

It’s also a French word that means video conference (as a shortened form of visioconférence).
Gosh, someone should tell the Microsoft teams team that Microsoft teams for business and Microsoft teams for personal and Microsoft teams for students are also using the same names and make communication difficult. They should get a copilot team on it
Now replace Windows with Linux, and fucking invest into not needing to use American-controlled CPUs as every single one of them contains a backdoor.
I don't understand why governments trust official matters in the hands of closed source software and suspicious hardware. Even China uses a special version of Windows 11 in public computers, this is nuts.
and fucking invest into not needing to use American-controlled CPUs as every single one of them contains a backdoor.
China has been working intensely for at least 2 decades to catch up, and they are still about a decade behind!
Netherlands has ASML which is a huge advantage for European independent manufacturing, but even with that it's an insanely expensive investment to make a realistic competitor to AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom etc. because they have loads of patents that are hard to avoid, and they have decades of know how. This is not even accounting for the software infra structure that would have to be built almost from scratch.
Chip production is a global enterprise, and even USA isn't independent anymore. They depend on ASML and TSMC for their most popular products in AI, Smartphones, servers, laptops and desktops. And more and more Arm is taking over from Intel/AMD.
What we may be able to do would be using Arm and have TSMC help us with manufacturing. But to make such a project succeed is not an easy thing, we had European computer companies in the 70's and 80's that were heavily subsidized by governments that dominated home markets for several European countries, and they essentially all failed against international competition.
So what we risk if we were required to use a European product funded by EU/European governments would be to have to use an overpriced under-performing technology, that would be a millstone around the neck of all of Europe, making Europe not catch up, but instead fall further behind.
they have loads of patents that are hard to avoid
China doesn't care about patents of outsiders.
Seems to me that it’s time for the rest of the world to invalidate US IP and go from there.
This is only a part of france's "LaSuite" (very original name guys), that seemingly will replace every equivalent american service.
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
They generally work pretty well (demo on the site) and are a mix of homegrown solutions and rebrands of existing projects like matrix. All of them are open source.
And all their videos are on Peertube!
!lasuite@tube.numerique.gouv.fr
Unfortunately source code is still hosted on GitHub...
To be fair, I find the idea of a government outsourcing IT needs to entities under the sovereignty of foreign governments kind of fundamentally problematic to begin with.
Good on them, but I Wonder why they can't just build on top of something open source like Nextcloud.
It already has the majority of the Office-365 suite
I don't know on what it's based on, but it's open source and audited.
Because the French government is hell bent on saving money, but they don't care about anyone's privacy at all. I wouldn't be surprised if they are building a privacy nightmare system here. Having said that, at least they are removing Microslop, and anything that could potentially hurt Microslop in any way, shape or form, is a good thing.
Anything to ANYTHING to get away from MicrSlop, Google etc. is huge. HUGE!
Trump is amazing. He literally destroys anything he touches and still get rewarded for it. Just wow.
Edit: Destroys casinos and hotels. Gets rewarded a tv show. Destroy multiple brands. Get rewarded the presidency. Destroys so many American lives. Gets rewarded the presidency a second time. Destroys the United States and it's ties with it's allies. Gets rewarded with untold billions.
Why not jitsi meet? Isn't better to use an already "established" opensource conferencing tool?
They could just selfhost their instance.
They've been building an entire open source suite of software tailored to their needs. If I had to guess, Jitsi isn't performant enough for large (100+) user meetings in a way they can scale easily. It's a great tool, but it seems better geared towards smaller loads. Video conferencing at scale is a pretty big challenge.
Between this, their new Docs platform and some Matrix-based chat platforms, I think this is something they've put a fair bit of thought into how they want to build. Overall, it's a cool initiative, but I think it's pretty clear that it's open source as a means to be transparent as a government organization rather than to form a platform for broad use by everyone. They do have some self-hosting instructions on their GitHub though.
Jitsi is owned by a Campbell, California based firm called 8x8. Source: I worked for them during the acquisition.
Though admittedly avoiding US origin open source is unlikely to be possible. The thing they are using seems to be based on another package with a similar issue.
Nice, replace Microslop Windows too pls.
The gendarmerie has had its own Linux distribution for a while now but that's about it.
Lol, replacing one o365 product with one named identically to another o365 product, classic.
Why do european tech companies need to call their products the same name as already established american products. Don't they google the names before they make the decision?
Visio is an outdated spreadsheet name, in English.
Visio is the new video conferencing software, in French.
France leads the world, it is up to everyone else to worry about conflict with France, not the other way around. /s
I still don’t understand why half of the US still support a president that is doing a long term damage
That's great. I wish Visio/Vizio were not such common names for software and hardware. We done did those already. Do something else.
Visio and W....
They need to open up naming to public vote.
Cally McCallface
Beautiful. Trump is causing the US to lose its grip on the world in yet another way.
This "find out" phase is gonna go on for a long, long time.
The "find out" will take forever. France just decided that a "sovereign server" can be AWS or any US big-tech providing the physical server is located in France.
France has also signed a contract with Microsoft ("sovereign" solution again) for the national health data hub, even as a parliament investigation had MS France GM stating MS can't guarantee the data won't leak to the US!
Most political leader are grossly ignorant on anything IT.
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