Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
github.com
github.com
I think state-funded open source solutions to digital platforms is a fantastic opportunity to get away from the big tech walled gardens. Of course, there is always the risk that this becomes unmaintained in the future, but the community at least can take over. But until then, it's a nice platform and a nice contribution to the community.
It feels like a colliding of worlds and a cannibalization that doesn't make sense to me. Like - if the government launched a messaging app competitive with WhatsApp and it drew users away from WhatsApp and it had better encryption ... Would that actually be better for the economy of this country? Something seems off about it to me.
Done, but for public workers. https://tchap.beta.gouv.fr
These tools are not yet for citizens, but for workers.
It wouldn’t make sense to rely on a foreign closed source company if they want to do anything serious with this IMO.
Let's first start with what I understand to be the premise- that private industry and governments are two worlds (ie your worlds colliding idea). Let's explore this from the other side: Private industry should never compete with the government.
We don't need bottled water- tap is fine, and it competes with government water.
Commercial radio and TV stations should not exist in countries that have a public station.
Doctors and nurses should never work in private clinics where government offers medical services, or supplementary insurance should not exist.
Back to government, though. Government should do what's best for the citizenry. It might make a public bridge to compete with a commercial ferry service. Or it might mean offering cheap Internet to compete with exploitive ISPs.
Proprietary software like this is an effective tax on the citizens, but a commercial one. Governments can fund a public alternative for a small amount of money. Why not?
First, you create the tools you need with the money your people give you. Then, you give back the tools you created to the public and/or everyone who needs them.
You keep your data in your own data center, use the tools which squarely fills the needs of your workers and people, and you share its maintenance with the outside users.
It's a win-win-win (country, its workers, people in the world). WWW is developed the same way, Europe's open data repository Zenodo (https://zenodo.org) is built the same way, alongside countless science tools.
We shouldn't be afraid of governments doing cool things. Heck, most if not all supercomputer centers in the US and around the world are government funded, and free for scientists.
Moreover, the project is licensed MIT to enable to be "taken and ran with it" by private sector. From the README.md:
> While Docs is a public driven initiative our licence (sic) choice is an invitation for private sector actors to use, sell and contribute to the project.
Yes! And you'd be surprised by the kind of talent we're able to attract. People want cool stuff to be built by the public. After all its also their money that's being spent. But you need to provide the right environment for their talent not to go waste and thats not easy.
I know. I work with some of them at a national HPC/Supercomputer center.
The environment is super important, too. You’re spot on at that regard.
One should not focus on the economic sphere as the be all and end all. We can just have improvements be distributed to everyone sometimes! We can just do good things through coordinated efforts and entirely sidestep the economy to get the good things.
All the people who were working on Notion now can go get some on the job training to learn to farm.
Why don't we just do this for everything? You can go read a bunch of political and economic philosophy about that.
Every week we read in the news that the EU struggles with entrepreneurship. That our tech industry is languishing. That the EU gets out-competed by the US on software and by China on everything else. Europe should be making industry-leading apps. Europe should produce software startups that make products that get used worldwide. EU subsidized clones of popular American products feels like admitting defeat.
I'm obviously biased because I'm also working on a product in this space. But if Notion developers must become farmers because innovation no longer pays that is a loss to the world in my book.
I've kind of lost hope when it comes to commercial services and proprietary apps. They're sadly all sooner or later enshittified. We need something different, not by promises but by design (FOSS).
> EU subsidized clones of popular American products feels like admitting defeat.
I think it's a fresh and needed take on the financing of our common digital infra.
If you own your data and if you have the option to self-host you can always opt out of updates you don't like.
Databases, compilers/interpreters, web servers, operating systems...but apps? (Other than gnu/bad command line tools of course)
And I’m a Mac user!
If I look at my phone, it's possible that I have more apps installed via F-Droid than through Google Play
why it would need to be state of the art? it needs to be stable and 'good enough'. This isn't rocket science, nor quantum mechanics - this is literally a glorified CRUD app that focuses on documentation.
They are putting their resources into the development of a product that can be universally shared and used. There is no favored party.
Also, I completely disagree with the "ambitious projects". I actually would favor the government let all the risky ventures to private enterprises and focused only on tried-and-true developments and make them universally available to its citizens.
At the very least, it works as a bargaining chip when it comes to negotiating contracts with the private sector.
If you develop an in-house tool, you have very predictable user numbers so you can go on-prem versus cloud for the compute and save ~10x on that side.
You also have the benefit of being second, the other guys already did the hard work of UX research etc. and your in-house team just needs to replicate a slightly complicated CRUD app.
The one significant roadblock I can see is being able to put together the right team for the job. But cost-wise it has to be a no-brainer that in-house is cheaper.
After all, it's licensed under the MIT License, and the readme explicitly states that it can be contributed to, and that in fact they encourage it.
The possibility of data being sifoned back to the US if they use american cloud services has millions of public agents not being able to collaborate online.
Some of them try to provide on premise versions of the software but Microsoft want you so bad to pay for 365 or teams that they are willing to maintain only super old versions.
I spoke with a guy reponsible for 100k public agents who told me his only choice is to host Sharepoint 2011 (in 2025 !)
So maybe Docs is not as innovative as Notion but hey, we need as efficient as we can public servants. And we will do that by providing modern tools they can use online with their colleagues.
+ When we think of Microsoft we think about the Office Suite but in lot of cases they do the authentication with Active Directory. Go luck doing interoperability or SSO accross agencies when all of them rely on closed source code and are locked in by vendors...
We're actually solving with OIDC identity federation called ProConnect.
Well, if a government project can easily push you out, then you're not really a state-of-the-art.
> EU subsidized clones of popular American products feels like admitting defeat.
Governments need to think long-term. And one danger of relying on something like Notion is vendor lock-in. You can't easily migrate your data out of Notion, with all the rich content preserved (edit history, text comments, etc.)
EU can try to mandate a common interoperability standard, but it takes years and the end result always ends up being behind the state of the art.
The government could act like an immortal mega corp if it had the authority to do so. Such as pushing out competition via loss leaders. And as a bonus, with the government, every program can be a loss leader.
The funding potential for this pattern is constrained today, which is why government projects that compete with private industry are generally terrible. But, clearly, the money is there to be captured by this segment out of government funding generally, if the government is allowed to enter business directly.
The solid argument I see against allowing such actions is a slippery slope towards the above. Slippery slope arguments aren’t always correct, of course, but they aren’t always wrong either; they just point out a risk. Depending on one’s risk tolerance, it is wise to avoid slippery slopes when you can’t quantify just how steep it is.
Right now, I can't fix that one small bug in Notion that keeps bothering me. I have to raise an issue and hope that they add the API required to do that. In the case of open source base produced by the government, I can make a small (perhaps paid) add-on with that functionality.
But it works fine for infrastructure where competition is not only rare, but often is counter-productive, like for sewer and water delivery. Can this include software infrastructure? Maybe.
A very specific example: basically all interactive theorem proving tooling is built in public research halls. This has allowed Compcert, a C compiler with “no bugs”[0] to exist.
The Compcert case is interesting because private funding is also involved. Public state research can still pull in private funds! We are not entirely throwing in the towel!
[0] “no bugs” here means “we have defined a spec for C, and this compiler is guaranteed to compile your C code along the spec we defined, so long as your program terminates”. There’s some hand waving around a theorem prover’s own validity but all Compcert bugs have been “we misewrote a chunk of spec” varietals
This would only work if the government replacement would be more efficient than Notion (in the sense that the French government employs less people for a product of the same quality).
How many sales people does this project need? It’s not zero because grants etc but let’s not kid ourselves.
I think this project will never spend as much money as notion on devs. Like ever.
I will grant that there’s a good idea around “well notion was doing operations for everyone at once so people don’t need as many tech/ops people ”. I’m hopeful that hosted variants pop up to help with this. I’m also hopeful that we can figure out how to make stuff easier to host when high availability is not a requirement.
So maybe we end up net more operators, and less sales people and devs. That’s kind of interesting!
The only reason why they might need less developers is because they are a copying an existing product, so less R&D. There is no reason to assume that the teams behind Notion, Outline, Google Docs ... are less effective than the French Government.
Outcompeting only works if a software company is truly unable to pivot or outperform open source tools sponsored by the government.
The same thing can be said by free tools given away by big tech, like vscode. Here, microsoft operates actually quite similar to the government. There is no way a new company can create a competitor to vscode and charge money for it anymore. This pushes people to solve other software problems, rather than doing something else entirely. I don't think we'll be at the limit of economic value we can generate by writing new software just yet, if such a thing even exists.
And regarding the economy, my understanding is that there's been a push in the French government (and in Europe to some extent) towards more independent services (the recent behaviour of US big tech are not helping for sure). If the government is going to generate some tool for its internal use, I sure would prefer if they open sourced it at the same time.
Finally for the WhatsApp alternative, if France or Germany or whoever else started an open source WhatsApp competitor with better encryption, I definitely think it would be good for European citizens: one less dependency on Meta. Why wouldn't we want that?
The economy works best when anyone does what is supposed to: the Government sticks to maintaining order, defending the country, public healthcare, public education. The companies are producing goods and services.
Governments trying to undercut businesses isn't doing any good to the economy. There will be less money, less jobs.
When it comes to software these governments are already shelling out X amount of money (which they don’t with WhatsApp, hence putting it aside). If they can make a comparable product they themselves own with X * 0.5 money it’s a clear win. Even if it’s X * 1.5 money to begin with while they create the software then decreasing over time as the software stabilises it’s still a win.
There’s an additional economic factor as well. For any country that isn’t the US licensing off the shelf software means transferring money directly to the US economy. Creating your own homegrown version keeps that money in your country, paying for employees that will themselves contribute to the economy. Without making the thread overtly political, this is something a lot of countries are thinking about more and more recently.
I'm curious to know why that seems off. If you're a "free market" proponent, you usually are because you want people to have access to "the best", as that's what competition is supposed to bring out.
And if a government manages to come up with a better Whatsapp (whatever that means), and users starts to change, then clearly the alternative is better, as proven by users moving over, so then even someone who wants free markets would believe that this is a good outcome, if I understand things correctly.
But instead it sounds crazy to you, it seems. It would be interesting to hear more about why you feel this is crazy. To me it sounds like a good idea for users, which I guess is what I care more about.
The Internet is a strong and definitive counterpoint to this claim, IMO.
If the government didn’t create the open internet, we would all be living in AOL style walled gardens right now.
Take this through to its logical conclusion and you have the government owning farms, making food, making its own steel, building its own cars, etc. with a corresponding loss of revenue-raising activity in the real economy.
In a bubble, there is no revenue raising difference between a government owned economy and a private economy with equal production.
Realistic differences come down to comparative disfunction of management (IMO, best considered in terms of which is worse).
Government services help everyone and raise the floor of the standard of living. Someone is now free to go write and do SOMETHING else and sell that.
By your logic, we should get rid of libraries since more economic activity would happen if everyone had to buy their own books.
They've started complaining, especially since prices have been going up, but while there's rumbling underground, we've yet to see any real movement away from Microsoft.
That may be true of local/state governments, but it isn't true for currency-issuing governments like the US. I'm not as familiar with the EU monetary system as I haven't read as much into it.
If they were privately owned, they would be priced appropriately and we would not have all the problems with traffic congestion.
It may compete with private software for a while, but not that much: companies will find a way to add value to existing open source software or create new propositions. Building out the boring and useful foundational stuff collectively will just move the bar on what is exciting and new software, or what are better takes on existing software. Companies will be creatively seeking out ever more complex problems to tackle once the government builds out the basic tooling.
And ideally, that is what private companies should be good at: quick to pivot, creative and innovative problem-solving.
Of course, that requires governments to play nice and enable companies to leverage their tooling too, and - perhaps a bigger problem - take responsibility for competent governance of the most important projects and manage their adoption well.
Most companies and people aren't going to want to maintain the VMs and/or infrastructure to run their own platforms, so they have the option to continue using SaaS offerings like Notion.
For example, if we had governments with strong tech departments that could fund helping the development of LibreOffice, then suddenly even if someone wants to use MS Office, that's still a bargaining chip to get a better deal because there's a viable alternative. Or to develop something like OpenProject, Kanboard etc., alternatives to the likes of Jira, that might be enough for many out there, while also possibly benefitting from community contributions. People love to complain about how Jira supposedly sucks, so that'd be a good opportunity to step up and make something "better". Or using open source technologies like PostgreSQL or MariaDB/MySQL for developing their own internal systems instead of always forking over a bunch of cash for Oracle or MS SQL by default.
If you want a government that's cost efficient, then invest in making it be so, treat the software landscape as an investment opportunity - spend some money now to save a bunch of money later. The same way how an app can be a home cooked meal, some software could be a public utility.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/04/germanys_northernmost...
Some larger than others, some attempts at having more negotiating power, others as a cost cutting measure, others yet as just exploration of what's doable.
I'd say that LibreOffice is fine for my needs - not great in all respects, but functional. I don't even have MS Office or use Google Docs on any of my devices right now.
The few times I need to use LibreOffice, it's just to export as PDF and send somewhere. That doesn't seem to be the workflow of the future.
I'm really happy I got our company out from using Notion. We just do markdown in Linear, which you can copy and paste from an editor easily.
It's really just standard "voluntary lock-in": any knowledge system you decide to use locks you into that knowledge system simply because you're going to be generating tons of content in it, which may at some point need to be migrated, and the longer you use it the more of a hassle that'll be.
And if it feels a bit gross (it's not, really, it's just what happens when someone has a good sales pitch) they're not holding your content hostage like some other platforms *cough*zendesk*cough*.
it is very much one of the most reproducible apps ever
I haven't found one that does what Notion does. I genuinely want to get off their AI training grounds but cannot. Your comment reeks of condescension because you are not the target user.
Notion treats information as a repository and keeps things indexed, searchable, and has some ways to automatically sort things, has ability to seamlessly create different types of documents and weave them together and so much more that Docs lack.
Docs doesn’t even have native markdown support last I checked
I feel like if Odoo foxed this it could be incredibly useful
This is always a major red flag for me.
Anytype seems worth checking out too. No affiliation, just tried out a bunch Of these and this is one that stood out. Appflowy looks well rounded too.
One option, which is open source and self hosted, is Trilium[sic], found at https://github.com/zadam/trilium It's open source, so if it's close to what you want, you might be able to adjust it to meet your needs.
Other commercial options include Realm, Tana, and Craft. With varying degrees of "AI".
I really like the UX of Tana for building out graphs of pages with properties, but it's slow to start up, doesn't support math, etc. So it's mainly a UX example for me.
But as for general notion alternatives, and actually if you prefer to go in the other direction away from web based—Hands down would recommend Obsidian.md above any other open source alternative.
While it's not 100% "batteries included" like proprietary apps (though this gap has narrowed considerably), Obsidian truly shines if you're even slightly inclined toward customization. It's "hackable to the core" — you can build practically anything on top of it, which satisfies open source purists. Yet for practical users not looking to build their own software, Obsidian still punches above its weight — it's highly functional and polished out of the box, requiring zero setup to be immediately productive.
The integrated community plugins library lets you extend vanilla Obsidian to match most proprietary software, including Notion's "databases" functionality (arguably Notion's best feature), LLM integration, and much more. Since these plugins are themselves open source, they too can be customized beyond their original design. It's the perfect blend of freedom with valuable functionality either built-in or one click away.
What initially drove me from Notion to Obsidian wasn't the customization aspect, but the need for local storage and non-cloud syncing for sensitive data. It's egregious that Notion still doesn't support this outside their Enterprise license. I almost overlooked this by simply not using Notion for sensitive data, but the final straw came when I lost access during Notion's service outages. Even though these were infrequent and brief, being unable to access my data when needed was unacceptable. Arguing with devs about local storage and offline functionality only to face that situation made me realize how absurd it was that Notion doesn't even provide a cached version when offline. Without internet, Notion is essentially a brick — your data exists somewhere in the aether, just not on your device. That's bananas.
After switching to Obsidian and solving the local storage "problem" in 30 seconds, I gradually discovered more functionality and have since customized it as my central organization and research tool. Couldn't recommend it more highly.
I'll stop my rant now — Obsidian speaks for itself and doesn't need my endorsement, just as Notion's shortcomings are equally well-established.
What Notion has built is amazing.
When leadership tells us our job is to replace Microsoft Office. I say it's not
This is Libre Office's job. While I truly admire this community’s work. If I ever get anywhere close to their level I’ll consider myself lucky. They do important work and I hope they continue for may years .
I’m not trying to replace Microsoft Office because work has changed.
As it came online, it became collaborative.
What’s replacing Microsoft isn’t perfectly similar alternatives to text editing, spreadsheets and slides which are tools that were made for formatting more than content editing.
These were meant to be printed to be shared.
What’s actually replacing Microsoft Office are tools like Notion.
Nowadays content is created in real time with 4, 6 or more pair of hands typing at the same time. ⌨
The way we actually replace Microsoft Office is by building products that follow the change in usage like Notion has been doing.
That’s what we need to do as an opensource community.
Adopting Notion won't do in times like we're living as states (hell, all of us!) we need strategic digital autonomy.
The product of our collaborative work is knowledge, we can't have it siphoned because it's sitting on an American server.
Notion has been leading the content over form revolution for a while now.
But revolutions are our thing right ?
We like to start them, but it's way more fun when they spread to the whole continent
Want to join us or support us with a little GitHub https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs
Maybe they have tickets and boards as well? Even better!
No, it’s not. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it has a Kanban board.
It’s a proprietary cloud-based wiki with support for every more or less mainstream feature (multimedia, databases, AI integration, collaboration, etc.). It’s a bit sluggish and doesn’t have a good mobile story, but if you don’t mind the proprietary aspect, it’s otherwise a polished product.
https://www.notion.com/blog/data-model-behind-notion
It's really nice to have one place to go for all kinds of content, but that content can link within itself, @mention other pieces of content, etc.
It can (and does) turn into a huge mess if you let it, of course. But that's down to team culture.
The innovation isn't the organized structures themselves either, but rather the intuitive non-technical interface for rapidly and concurrently updating both the information and structure. You can build a lot of Jira-like features but it doesn't dictate much of how you do that.
It does have a highly customizable Kanban view of their more generic database structure where each object is itself a page which can be filled with anything and everything else Notion has to offer (including more databases). Databases can have many views, structured as calendars, tables and a couple other forms I don't use, and each view can have its own set of filters, etc.
It kinda looked at Jira+Confluence and asked "what's the simplest fundametal software which can be used to build everything they have to offer"
Does notion work offline-first yet?
The only copy of my data should not exist solely in an app’s cloud, and I should not need to manually export anything.
Collaboration is nice, still has nothing to do with being offline-first.
Docs looks very promising. Congrats to the remnant he launch.
Another effort that might be a subset of Docs is Anytype - another French effort that seems to be very promising.
It does via a desktop application.
Maybe mobile will be important enough and enough users one day to have offline-first support.
I was going to say git, but really you need the whole environment.
Databases work like spreadsheets, and you can embed pages inside them, too. In fact, every row is a potential page, if you want.
While I prefer Obsidian for my technical (public and private) knowledge bases, life organization, and specific help pages I create for relatives live in Notion, and it works really well. Being able to script and formulate things allows great flexibility.
What I'm not very comfortable yet is "ejecting" from Notion, since the data model is so convoluted, what they give you as a package is not very convenient, yet.
Evernote had the best mechanism, giving you an XML file and an official XSLT to read/verify/transform what they give you. However, Evernote feels very underpowered when you start to use formulae and automation across your database.
the data model is banal. just a tree with limited "type" strings for the special things. it's literally no different than any other file format. and they make it as difficult to export as all the other companies
What I do is clearly written in my profile. Tangentially, do somebody has to be employee of $CORPORATION to like $CORPORATION.$PRODUCT?
Banal is boring, boring is good. If they can do useful and novel things with banal and boring things (which they can from my experience), it's doubly good.
They give a Markdown and CSV version of the stored data, which is not that bad, IMHO. Still doesn't beat Evernote on that regard, though.
As with all tools, Horses for Courses, YMMV & moreover, Caveat Emptor.
It isn't. The proof is simple: there aren't many reproductions that *tick all the boxes*. And no, "a directory of markdown files" isn't even close, it ticks two, maybe three of the dozens of boxes that notion ticks.
Joplin (my daily driver) and obsidian (can't get to like it) are closer, but certainly not there - though these alternatives tick some boxes that notion doesn't tick. Edit: But most of all, what "boxes notion ticks" very much depends on your (teams) needs and usage. A feature you may deem unimportant or even an anti-feature may very well be what keeps a lot of people on notion because no alternative has it.
The closest I have seen and used is appflowy. In some areas it ticks boxes that notion doesn't. But it's also "0.x" version software: self-admiddetly not 1.x stable software. And this has been in the makings since nov 2021, so over three years. Over three years of development to get to a point that it's on-par-ish with Notion.
If it takes a team three years to reproduce "the most reproducible app", it's clear that this app isn't that reproducible at all. And that's just reproducing features (amongst witch UX and UI). Reproducible also includes familiarity: It's almost a no-brainer to get a team on notion and to have management pay a pro licence. It's much harder, to impossible, to do this with [insert any alternative].
Crazy how such a simple tool can feel so slow and klunky :/
The fact that it got popular with productivity influencers seems pretty key to its initial and sustained popularity, even if it’s performance and the general clunkiness of its interface is frustrating.
The US had two very strong and competent tech departments -- 18F and USDS.
They got doge'd -- dismantled and coopted, respectively.
You realise that when governments write software, they just hire software developers, and designers, and project managers like any other organisation does, right?
They're not just asking around in parliament "so who has dabbled in python?" or what have you.
I don't know about the US, but I can see some crucial user data software suites moving to an open-source model where nobody has absolute power over or ownership of the data.
How to get such a multi-player project organised efficiently without burning through a load of money and time is another matter...
There are a ton of open source government projects from various agencies and contributing universities - from the government SSO (https://github.com/france-connect) to the Covid contact tracing and health pass management app (https://gitlab.inria.fr/stopcovid19) to the tax code to the unemployment app to a million other things (https://code.gouv.fr/sources/#/awesome). And all of them are good, usable, and (almost always) with permissive licenses.
Why hire an external vendor that has to add a profit margin, and lose the competency when that vendor changes for the next contract, or become a hostage to them? You literally can only lose.
This is much like the EU funding open source projects of public interest through grant calls.
It's exactly what we want: to fund individuals who's interests align with the public. In fact, it would be great if there were a browser which matches this criteria: publicly funded and designed for the average citizen (as opposed to designed to maximise ad revenue).
> I think it would be better to pay a vendor like Redhat or SuSE or Cannonical to do it.
We don't want governments to fund for-profit corporation. These corporations typically have interests opposite to end-users. E.g.: less digital rights, less digital autonomy, more vendor lock-in, and solidifying their position of power.
In an ideal world, you'd have none of these type of organisations, but much smaller teams and individuals working on individual projects which can inter-operate.
We can't even be certain that Notion won't be acquired, deprecated, or poorly maintained in the future. Risks exist on both sides.
At this point, I feel like we can be pretty sure the combination of "Huge VC investments + for-profit startup" will with 99% certainly eventually lead down the road of enshittification, either by acquisition or by going public. At least based on most previous "internet" startups with that combination.
I agree wholeheartedly with your point.
Government-funded open source like this, creating alternatives is a good idea. Taxes put to good use!
Those projects could truly be owned by the public and not solely corporations or government. Clearly data is the big thing, and I don't want to have to trust a government or corporation with access to all of it.
In reality, having been part of some of these projects, they often get bogged down by getting all parties and funding organised, in other words, death by committee.
Are you guys looking at adding localization support for languages beyond French as well (eg. English, German)?
It would be a great alternative to multiple disjointed OSS offerings like Mattermost or Appflowy.
Also, I found the DIPT to be fairly intruiging. How much inspiration did the org get from Gov.uk, and are there some resources, papers, or books you could point to about the DIPT initiative?
AFAIK we took a lot of inspiration from Gov.uk and 18F/USDS (RIP), at least for digital services. You can look at https://beta.gouv.fr/
Comments and custom styles would also be great.
I love that you guys are building a suite of next-gen tools rather than just recreating LibreOffice. Seems really smart to me!
For Docs, we bootstrapped the repository ourselves on top of Django, Next.js, BlockNote.js, Y.js and many others. We welcome contributions!
From the Grist-core readme : https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core
- Is it a project funded directly by the Governments or by the NGI funds?
- Is there an extensibility via plugins or other in the future thought for integrations ?
- Is the ProConnect the only way or can one use a self-hosted OIDC or another IdP to login?
That’s why I’m glad to see governments supporting Open Source alternatives to proprietary office software. Paying recurring subscription fees for low-maintenance tools like MS Office feels out of touch—especially when Microsoft once offered a one-time purchase model before shifting to SaaS to maximize profits. This change has made it difficult for individuals and businesses to retain long-term ownership of their tools without being tied to costly and recurring fees. The same trend has played out across the software industry, from design tools like Adobe Creative Cloud (which replaced one-time purchases with a mandatory subscription model) to communication platforms like Slack and Zoom, which lock companies into ongoing costs while limiting interoperability with other solutions.
The Matrix project lead talked at FOSDEM about an issue with this model [0]: a pure market approach to this just doesn't offer any way to fund upstream development.
Luckily the public sector ought to be a an arena where we can solve this problem by being englightened consumers instead of just buying from the provider that provides the most service per dollar. But that enlightenment does require some education.
By investing in open source projects, governments can create more efficient, transparent, and innovative digital services. If anything I’m sure it’ll save tax payers money on expensive licenses paid to a company in another country.
What is the correct full name then? lasuite docs (judging from the logo, that seem to be the brand part)? docs numerique (from the URL)?
La Suite Docs is better yes.
I wish they would improve search though; it's kind of a critical feature in a company.
without search it's useless.
I remember Slack's search being equally crap when I last used it a couple of years ago.
- AppFlowy: https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy
- AFFiNE: https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE
- SiYuan: https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan
- Trillium Next: https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes
- AnyType (only clients are source available): https://github.com/anyproto/anytype-ts
We also made a small scratchpad you can use to test collaboration features, if it doesn't get too flooded :) https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/a3f0becc-f2b7-45be-a5e5-...
Notion is particularly terrible here, so this could be a great alternative for people / organizations who need that.
And I agree, lots of popular, proprietary solutions should do better in terms of accessibility. I believe open-source helps in that regard, as in many others.
Here in La Suite we have some wcag-geeks in the team and regularly include some of our users with disabilities for feedback.
This comes from a place of pure curiosity, I don't actually believe this strata of editor packages is in any way inherently bad!
I found something I would qualify as a bug: if you click on the right of any text, the cursor is placed at the beginning of the line, where I would expect to have it at the end.
Most people would be better of with Obsidian, Bear, Notion or even Apple Notes.
And the best part: this is MIT licensed. If it's actually difficult to set up, build a nice web UI that makes it easy and you've got a product.
The idea is that you can choose between cloud or self-host (and "eject" at any time to switch between the two if you ever change your mind). We hope that might be a good balance between some companies or individuals wanting to self-host but still making it accessible when you don't know how any of that works, which indeed can get complicated fast.
would you implement database function like in Notion?
Is it a full feature todo app or just noting down tasks?
would be a killer app if it has 3 Yes
2. Yes. We have a bunch of default views like table, kanban, photo gallery, and calendar. You can also create your own views with a JS plugin, like this silly example of spinning globe view: https://x.com/wcools/status/1898828593255346287
3. Our aim is a full feature todo app. But we won't have every feature on day 1.
Love your site. Looks great. Lots of visual appeal. Not the same cookies cutter Tailwind theme that seems to be present everywhere.
* Postgres for permanent storage
* an OIDC identity provider so you don't have to make your own password system
* Redis for caching
* S3-compatible object storage (so you don't have to reinvent file uploads)
* The app itself
What would you rather them do? Waste time reinventing the wheel for no reason? If you have the IDP and object storage setup already figured out you can get away with just the app, postgres, and redis.
A similar project we collaborate on has Helm charts as an option. “Are you mad? You run an online archive with how many pods, come again?” You may say.
“When said archive can handle a continent’s load and scale almost indefinitely, you engineer things differently”, I’ll answer.
Also, nobody will probably make this comment, if the said application was built by a private company and was not open source.
Open source software built and supported by a national government is inspiring. Are there more examples of this I'm not aware of? I hope so.
The cops are rolling their own distro :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
I think it’s wise. Not idea if it’s good
I really appreciate how Notion is basically "what if Google Docs but you can actually organize your information". The collaborative components feel really powerful.
I do kind of wish that something that was more ... Wiki-flavored would show up though. I like confluence, it's just mega slow!
Also the average back office author knows a tiny fraction of Microsoft Word or Excel features.
Give them means to type in text, add pictures and collaborate. Templates for beautification. That’s all what is needed.
This has been known for ages. Alas Microsoft has a grip on governments and large orgs we know little about. CERN is an example.
I rarely read paper, but I find professionally designed documents much easier to read on my screens. It's such a relief to open a PDF of a professionally designed book, for example, after reading screenfuls of html.
I can prepare a decent looking document, or spreadsheet, with LibreOffice styles (CSS) without particular effort. With Docs should not be much different.
Have seen official government Word documents with formatting in need of assistance. Teams at very large firms share Word documents, via email, forth and back debating about revisions of text and numbers. Publishing was only the necessary last step.
In most cases authors use the bare minimum of functions to get the job done. Professional looking is something else instead. I don’t know where Docs stands here.
It is incredible that nowadays Markdown is considered "complex".
For notes, I don't see the appeal of having a browser interface. I just put my notes in a text file. No protocol, just search for text strings or text tags. If I need hierarchical organization, I use directories. What am I missing out on?
1. Non-technical colleagues.
2. Easy and real-time collaboration.
3. Slickness, mixing of multi-media, etc. This is related to 1.
Not arguing against your preference, just answering the "why".
I don't see the appeal of having a browser interface.
Browser level access allows for multi-device multi-context (personal/work) access.
Also google docs/drive is deeply unusable when trying to organize mental spaces.
Google docs is also browser based? And obviously not foss or self-hostable.
Are you saying "why does Google have docs app in addition to a note taking app?" (Google docs vs Google Keep, Microsoft Word vs Microsoft OneNote etc?)
1. Notions "Databases" are easier to use, edit, and manage than any similar setup I could figure out locally. And they have inbuilt integrations so you can sync things like Github/Gitlab/Jira, etc directly into your docs. I highly recommend setting up a personal project inside Notion to try it out.
2. Less important but still useful, the collaboration is good to use with my partner. We can have shared household notes/saved info/tasks/etc all in one place very easily using it.
It lets you structure your notes in a way that's reminiscent of object oriented programming (you've got templates to define types, inheritance of attributes to instantiate and specialize them, etc). I have hierarchies of hundreds/thousands of notes that for all intent and purposes are as good as Notion's Databases
Great until you need an image or more than the simplest table, as examples.
How do you embed an image? ASCII art?
Personally, I think the variety of tools is very interesting, and while I like Obsidian and plain markdown file, I do love to see different options in the space with hosted options and different capabilities.
Notion feels like it's got this serious range from individuals up to teams at large enterprises. It's incredibly flexible and configurable and I have to assume that's a big part of it, but it was so interesting to watch it eat away at other things like Confluence over the years. My perspective is probably skewed (and I know Confluence and other are probably still massive and dominant), but I'm surprised such a simple concept is getting so much more software. Or actually, that's probably why it's a space with so much software.
(a) git versioned
(b) CRDTs
(c) WYSIWYG but Markdown (esp GFM)
(d) front matter + markdown able to be SSGd
(e) comfortable UI for not-devs
(f) native (Swift) MacOS app, else Tauri/Electron self-hosted client+svc
(g) if online, OIDC / SAML SSO
Appears this can be cobbled leveraging Obsidian plugins, but unstable due to git vs. CRDT issues. And there are a few "CMS" for SSG stacks that almost but not quite meet this.
We support most of this (you'll need to also use Obsidian Git), but haven't released OIDC (please reach out of you need it!).
Have you solved the git repo index problem, Ive found that large vaults cause a problem and require occasional cleanup:
```bash git gc --prune=now # Garbage collection
git repack -ad # Repacked objects, optimizing repository storage ```
When I started Typemill.net years ago, my focus was actually on ebook publishing. But over time, I noticed that a lot of small businesses were looking for lightweight tools for documentation, note-taking, and similar content. So, I naturally shifted to documentation and small knowledge bases.
For a long time, this space was pretty much dominated by big enterprise tools like Confluence on one side and Evernote on the other. But now, with tools like Obsidian, BookStack, Docmost, Outline, and others, there’s finally a broad range of modern solutions that fit different needs and sizes. I think that’s a great step forward...
I got bit by notion when I assumed my recent i7 would be enough for it to keep up with my typing speed, but after a few pages of notes, notion uses 100% of a core and input lags considerably....
> Offline? No problem, keep writing, your edits will get synced when back online
Have been burned too many times in college.
person 1: is updating doc
person 2: is updating doc
person 3; updating doc
(( doc reaches a dozen pages ))
person 3 loses internet connection but everyone else continues working
Person 3 adds and edits a handful of pages while offline while #1, #2 keep chugging along.
#3 internet is restored and now the system attempts to merge in their changes and sync changes from #1, #2. At the same time, #1, #2 receiving updates from #3
Now chaos ensues as the system is throwing a shit ton of errors and old changes getting reverted. Immediate showstopper.
Not so fun times. And a lesson learned.
You'll have plenty of doc types with full end to end encryption, including for your drive.
> without the formatting complexity of markdown
Really, markdown is complicated of all things?
If you are 20 person startup then Notion will cost you around 200 Euro per month. Having Docs installation will be cheaper? Will 200 Euros cover the expenses? I am afraid the math is not on the Docs side.
First question that any bigger organization will ask is: how SSO will work, what is the integration with our company LDAP, etc. If they hear that well, install Docs for yourself and figure out integration by yourself no manager would agree to use Docs, as from his or her perspective it is cheaper, less risky to go with something like Notion. It is also true even with gov administration or public universities, they also operate within IT infrastructure and they gladly take something free, but it must integrate with that IT infrastructure. If not, this is not an option.
I'm always disappointed by note-taking tools calling themselves a Notion alternative when they do not provide an alternative to Notion and are instead just another note-taking tool with a simple UI.
If you want to be a Notion alternative provide the things that make Notion great, e.g. the database functionality. It's okay to be a simple colaborative notes tool, but that is not a Notion alternative.
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr
Of course, it's not a replacement to Notion yet.
The problem with Jira is that it's enterprise software that's put in place by people that don't actually have to use it.
This could also take the form of a custom block that you could embed in a text document.
IMO Notion really made an awesome job with real-time, collab features (comments, suggestions) and useful AI actions. So much, people only see databases ^^.
For now we’ll be focusing on these. That’s already plenty ^^ Further down road we’ll if we manage to take on databases.
Seriously , I never used to really think about france that much , but Emmanuel Macron correcting trump on live air really made me trust france more as a non US citizen.
Hopefully the circus currently taking place across the pond is enough to deter some from voting for them, come 2027?
There is no way you will win, no way they will stop, unless you fight (politically and socially) and defeat them.
I don't trust our neoliberal politicans (Dems or Macron here in France, whatever his party is called today) to do the right thing. If they get reelected it will be more mostly pro-buisness politics with a dash of mildly progressive policies, when it's convenient.
I'd add that they also found powerful allies in western oligarchs, who have a vested interest in the dismantling of the state for personal gains.
Unfortunately, that would mean that the politicians from the last 20 years need to do a mea culpa on quite a few things and that will never happen so the far right will eventually get in power.
Don't blame the players, blame the game.
They are having the same outcomes using the same tactics all over the world. It's not dependant on the country.
I was more about talking trust from intuition which can then create that sense of direction.
I thank you for creating this comment. I gotta read more about macron to see if he's really how I felt from my intution.
Because you are reading a lot of destabilisation propaganda online. I recommend you cut your news and social networks consumption a little bit.
The fact that you are beginning to trust FRANCE over something that MACRON did, no less, speaks volumes.
I'm no France-lover (hugs from north-east of Spain), but I think this sums up things pretty well. Someone who would have been jailed in any other democracy, is now the head of government, somehow.
Given France's experience with democracy and how hard it is to keep, and America's lack of experience (as a country and democracy), makes me trust France a lot more today.
This was the exact sentiment I was trying to capture.
Along with the fact that a lot of american politics simply doesn't make much sense to me following it. So that also helps.
the fact that france's president put his stance forward and corrected american's president's blatant lie also contributed just a little in my ignorant tiny world bubble to really considering about france as a more trustworthy country and then reasoning from it to concluding it as true.
There might be many other countries as well who are more trust worthy than france , but certain events which put them in spotlight would be required for the normies like me to find it.
Trust was maybe a different word , maybe hope is the correct word ? (but doesn't everybody trust hope)
But I trust the people who can make me hope for a better future by actively not submitting to those people who are actively trying to reduce my hope in better future.
There is absolutely no denying that what Trump has done , has absolutely made many people really hopeless. Such levels of incompetency at a presidential level just feels weird. Its as if nobody is seeing how absurd things are , when you connect everything.
Maybe its me , but this presidency feels like a chaos to me as an outsider / foreigner.
America , as it is right now , is a failed state.
I don't understand , don't we trust countries based on their stability and their stance. Such level of open defiance is what makes me trust france that they are more likely to stand to facts than ahem america.
To be honest , maybe I am being too gloom / sad over america. It feels like the world is shifting towards a russo-american , european , chinese influenceced multi polar world.
What america really hated russia was for are just past wars , but britain and france also had these but they collectively became allies after world war.
May I ask , where in my total arguments , am I sounding unreasonable? I thought it doesn't matter where you read the news , I was able to reason to a pessimist outlook of the trump presidency.
Everything is a propaganda , propaganda literally means something along the lines of sharing your ideas.
Listening to propaganda isn't bad , but blindly advocating for it without reason is bad and dismissing other opinions without reason to fulfill your bias is bad.
If you can really counter my reason , then hey , I can be glad that I don't have to be sad about USA.
Also , I watched a video somewhere that we have a limited amount of (he said "fucks" but in the sense of I give a fuck) things you can care and you have to use it wisely.
I really was giving too much care about USA but I have stopped caring now since its not my country anyway and what power do I really have? Maybe it might be my own fault / I read some things without really applying my own reason.
I am sorry if it offends people but this is my honest opinion America has fallen in my eyes. And there is nothing I can do to change that , so why even care about america?
also , whom Do you actually put hope on Europe?
> UK actively tries censorship against apple encryption etc.
Yes there are countries like germany whose people are really nice ,and I don't mean to offend any european but maybe its my own fault , but I don't know the name of german prime minister (or is it president?) , yes I can search it , but quite frankly , though I have more knowledge about all the countries and somewhat their borders etc. in europe , I don't remember their politicians except Macron.
It truly shows my ignorance but I just follow world affairs and I don't see many references to other presidents but rather their countries.
I may be wrong , I usually am , but judging from your tone , to me it seems that you wouldn't prefer right / conservative politicans .
Macron is a liberal (I fact checked using wiki) , and you are being dissatisfied with liberal politics considering selling his country for his masters comment?
I still don't understand this comment though , forgive my ignorance and please share references.
I am not sure if I am violating with hacker news comments by being too political and I am sorry for that but I am genuinely interested what your political leanings are.
To me , as a self acclaimed centrist who just believes in georgism and certain measures , these are only some moderately radical , not completely radical like socialism steps that I wish for a govt.
To be honest , I have this feeling that all politicians are evil and you have to choose the leser evil. I can think of running into politics but as a common man , its gonna be quite hard and you really have to engineer yourself for it which can be quite hard for normies so it attracts a lot of people who expect something out of running into politics and not for the good will of the people.
Choosing the lesser evil doesn’t cut it. You are still choosing and being complicit with evil. Siding with evil is Wrong. Relativism is a disease. Evil is evil.
By this , do you mean the Average age of a person or birth rate or what exactly , because I think europe doesn't have those issues.
Are you mentioning the fact that Europe has power vested in the old. Doesn't everybody ? Maybe you are mentioning this in the fact that europe doesn't have a startup culture like silicon valley which can give newcomers (young passionate people) a incentive.
I definitely have some points over relativism and though I don't necessarily agree with that , I think we can first agree to discuss about what you mean by the old people comment.
By status quo , what do you mean exactly ?
Most people are looking up to retirement and their pensions. The system is unsustainable and predatory on young people. They pay an overwhelming amount of taxes to sustain this system. It also needs massive immigration which causes severe security and cultural problems, but they don’t care as long as that guarantees they will get their pension.
Same about housing. It’s old people who own houses. They vote so new housing doesn’t get built as to keep the high value of their houses. They don’t care that young people can’t afford rent.
Many other examples you can think of probably. It’s a society that caters to the old. The young get screwed. And there’s nothing they can do because they are outnumbered and that will only get worse.
This is the status quo. A society that functions like this is dead.
Housing is a problem in every country and I totally agree about that. I myself, really like the georgist philosophy of economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
I doubt if this system really is broken. Catering to the old people's pensions so that they can live and unlike america's social security system which was recently cut by doge, which impacts every old person. I think it's decent? What suggestions do you think could help with the pensions scheme
The political landscape is completely split in 3 thirds in France at the moment, and people stay firmly in their lanes.
It would need an incredibly popular décision to bring anyone from the left or far right to approve of him.
[1] https://www.latribune.fr/la-tribune-dimanche/politique/barom...
Misinformation is a disease.
So there is, at the same time, an "oh, god, he's trying to use Russian fearmongering" effect that is just too big for comedians not to use ; and, somehow, a "rally around the flag" effect where people thinks he's actually on to something.
I would love to know if someone has studied the effects of comedians on misinformation. Hyperbole and exagérations are par for the course when making jokes - I just don't know if people are starting to take comedians both seriously (as you should) and literally (as you should not.)
France's government is working on a law to force the messaging providers to implement a backdoor that would break E-to-E.
Macron has promised to end homelessness before being elected. It never happened. He was supposed to stop the rise of the far right, the far right has never been higher.
He was suppose to simplify France's bureaucracy to help entrepreneurs and trim the fat so that we stop burdening the new generation with crippling debt. The debt has literally exploded under his presidencies, crime is on the rise and Islamism terrorism as well.
His political capital in France has vanished. His party does not control the parliament nor the senate. His own prime minister is not from his party and as such will not implement Macron's agenda.
Macron is more interested in pushing the interests of the EU or Ukraine than those of France itself.
In France, the president is the one who sets the agenda in terms of foreign policy and that is what Macron is focusing on. On the rest of the issues that France is currently facing, he basically has no say on it.
He is basically a lame duck president who has less than 2 years left and can never run again.
> He was suppose to simplify France's bureaucracy to help entrepreneurs and trim the fat so that we stop burdening the new generation with crippling debt. The debt has literally exploded under his presidencies
Was Macron supposed to magic Covid out of existence? The "whatever it takes" approach he took was the best possible policy for preserving the economy, and exploding debt was the cost.
It has taken me these places:
Obsidian - has whiteboard, but not collaborative. Sync plugin cannot be self hosted. Open source sync doesn’t have user management.
Affine - ditto. Also not completely open source.
Logseq - ditto. Some text editing features require advanced knowledge of databases to use (ie writing query) making it difficult to deploy to non-technical staff.
Excalidraw - whiteboards only.
We have integrated support for Excalidraw, Draw.io and Mermaid diagrams; Plus real-time collaboration.
* Allows more than one user editing the same page at once
* Is accessible on a mobile device (either app or mobile browser)
* Can be at the very least viewed in read only mode if disconnected from the internet
The last point is the most important to me and frustratingly has been the most elusive for me to find. For now I use Notion with the hopes they implement it eventually. I can't consider switching to a self hosted alternative without the last point.
What's wrong with those?
Kudos for their work!
Minio + Celery + 4-5 services just for the main app + Keycloak?
I'm sorry, but this isn't something that "anyone can run".
This is something that requires a beefy server and someone who can manage microservice architectures with 10+ services.
I'm not sure why all of those services are requirements for the app.
I don't know why you need an S3 provider and a federated identity manager to run something that looks like Notion.
I don't know why you need to split the app into 5 microservices.
And I honestly don't think that all of this overhead is needed.
I'll give Docs another look if it decides to trim some of this bloatware.
In any other circumstance it would be a clear trademark infringement on Google Docs. It's literally the same product with the same name, it has an extremely similar logo and almost exactly the same typeface in its logo.
But since this is a government project between France and Germany, maybe governments are allowed to ignore trademarks? Or Google wants to stay on their good side because of all the fines, so the last thing it's going to do is sue them for trademark infringement?
I've never seen a legal situation like this before.
If you say "open Calendar", I don't know if you mean Apple or Google or Microsoft. If you say "open Docs", I know it's Google and only Google.
This is no different than if the project called itself "Word", which would be equally confusing with Microsoft.
Neither Docs nor Word are genericized. They're both totally valid trademarks. Which is why naming this project "Docs" would be immediately shut down if any private organization tried it. And I've never heard of governments infringing private trademarks before, so I'm curious what's going on here.
Same with Books. It could be Google Books, Facebook, or Open Books.
No, they couldn't. That's why there isn't any Open Docs or Libre Word word processor.
That's very specifically why it's Libre Writer. Why it's FreeOffice TextMaker. Why it's FocusWriter and Writemonkey and whatever else.
A major part of trademark law is likelihood of confusion. Both Docs and Word are associated so strongly with Google and Microsoft, that a judge is almost certainly going to side with them if you try to call your new word processor Docs or Word.
And there's also AbiWord, which is still under active development.
Or speaking of which, all the gazillion office suites with Office in the name.
And "office" became the term for an office suite, the way "calendar" and "contacts" and "word processor" are just descriptive terms too.
But "Docs" and "Word" have a clear, obvious distinctiveness that "office" and "calendar" don't. "Word" and "Docs" don't inherently mean "word processor". Heck, OpenDocs.com is for legal forms, not word processing.
I really don't know what you're arguing. Go ahead, start a word processor named just "[Company name] Word" with the space and get sued by Microsoft and lose. You don't really think you'll win, do you? This is not a controversial or blurry area of trademark law.
E.g. you can't launch an ice cream brand called "Haagen" or called "Dazs", even though the trademark is for "Haagen-Dazs".
I'm sold.
- Pas mal non? c'est Français! :)
> Prerequisite
> Make sure you have a recent version of Docker and Docker Compose installed on your laptop:
See, this is the issue. If you want adoption, you can't assume that users are familiar with this.
You should start with a dmg for Mac users.
Governments make perverse customers with needs and incentives that don't align with other regular users and customers, in my experience. So the lack of a paid hosted version of Docs is concerning to me in terms of their priorities, quality, and the future product focus of this otherwise promising (and much needed) app.
Tldr: being customer-focused and having a product led organizational culture is unlikely if you're building for government.