French minister announces new plan for supporting open source | Hacker News Reader

French minister announces new plan for supporting open source

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61 pointsjrepinc12 comments

As a french, I would like to see a governmental institution at national or European level which aims to develop open-source software for administrations, police, public hospitals, defence... This would reassure me more about technological sovereignty and the use of taxpayers' money, I am even convinced that it would be much more interesting economically. It could even help to catch up with our technological delay in terms of cloud infrastructure...

Well, then you'll be happy to learn about "state startups", ("startups d'État"), a government initiative dating from 2015, and managed by the DINUM (Direction Interministérielle du NUMérique), a cross-ministry state institution.

Administrative language aside, they're basically a public incubator, built from the ground up for starting software projects with a focus on user experience for individual citizens and civil servants. The projects have a very "tech startup" structure: agile development, lots of CI-CD, code is open-source and usually hosted on Github, etc.

From what little I've seen, they seem to be pretty competent. I've opened a few minor issues on Github (about typos and stuff) and they replied quickly. I've used one of their projects (the one for validating documents when looking for an apartment) and it worked fine. Some of the projects they're listing seem pretty exciting too.

More info there: https://beta.gouv.fr/en

Seriously, the French government hasn't always been great with IT, but it's getting there fast.

Are places I could find or idea what are the most popular ( I guess may be "used" would be a better word ) programming language that is being used in these government sector, and in Tech in France in general?

Re France in general: no idea. It's a big country. (The industrial sector uses a lot of C++, like everywhere else.)

Re the government: you can look at the Github pages of various projects. The article mentions this list:

https://code.gouv.fr/#/repos

From what I remember of the last time I browsed through state startup projects, there was a lot of Node.js and Python.

It's good that they're making efforts, but in practice it still feels highly lacking: in france there are many competing & overlaping semi-public and public organisations whose copyright stance makes OSS difficult, even when the project is owned by another public institution!

That's not even entering into the issues with ministries which are (illegally) keeping certain software closed source, or have signed recent contracts which make open sourcing impossible.

There's also the related question of Open Data, which I think is often of more civic importance than open source itself. Here again, ministries drag their feet when politically convenient (covid data), or just play deaf.

https://www.data.gouv.fr/en/

> That's not even entering into the issues with ministries which are (illegally) keeping certain software closed source, or have signed recent contracts which make open sourcing impossible.

That part infuriates me.

They have built a huge skill pool over the last few years, with teams that have proved they were capable of handling major nation-scale projects with state-of-the-art development practices, and they're still handing entire projects to private contractors with lousy reputations who produce proprietary code.

If there's one thing the administration sucks at, it's using the assets it already has.

> copyright stance makes OSS difficult, even when the project is owned by another public institution!

I guess this petition is relevant here: https://publiccode.eu.

> Here again, ministries drag their feet when politically convenient (covid data), or just play deaf.

What Covid-related data are you finding lacking? Honestly it seemed like pretty much everything was made public rather fast.

> The goals are as follows: to increase awareness and use of free software and digital commons in the administration, to develop and support the opening of source code in the public sector, and to rely on free and open source software to strengthen the attractiveness of the public service as an employer to digital talent, in particular by promoting public contributions to the projects and communities concerned.

Wait wait wait.

Does that mean they're putting an end to the massive use of Microsoft licenses, like the "open bar Microsoft-défense" contract? Because that would be amazing.

The Gendermerie are already full on Linux, so why not?

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EU trying to be relevant in technology at its finest.

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