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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

In a universe where the French government drops a perfect replacement for Notion and causes Notion to go out of business, this is still a net positive for society in the same way that things like Linux existing is a net positive for society.

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.

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In the short term a free open source govt alternative may be a net positive for society. I don't think it is in the long run. Government projects like these are not likely to really push the state-of-the-art forward. This project even advertises itself as a FOSS Notion alternative. Do government-sponsored clones encourage or stymie innovation? I think the latter.

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.

> Europe should be making industry-leading apps. Europe should produce software startups that make products that get used worldwide.

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.

I think the main problem is lock-in. If you can't get your data out you can't leave. This is true for open source and for commercial products alike.

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.

I can't think of too many apps that I use that are truly FOSS.

Databases, compilers/interpreters, web servers, operating systems...but apps? (Other than gnu/bad command line tools of course)

For me: Emacs, NetNewsWire, Gimp, Inkscape, Calibre, Firefox, Chrome, occasionally VS Code, very occasionally whatever Audacity is called today.

And I’m a Mac user!

To add to your list: Atril (PDF Viewer), Vokoscreen (Screen recorder), Transmission (Torrent CLient), Simple Scan (Scanner Tool), LibreOffice, Keepassxc, Thunderbird, Element Desktop, Dino, Handbrake, Beets (Music Collection Tagger/Manager), VLC, Kodi, Rhythmbox (Music Player), Syncthing

If I look at my phone, it's possible that I have more apps installed via F-Droid than through Google Play

Typically a FOSS community seems to take a while to get started, but once it gets going (Blender, Linux, etc) it tends to stick around and even seriously gain traction.

>government projects like these are not likely to really push the state-of-the-art forward.

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.

Because when innovative software isn't made inside the EU then Europeans will simply use the best products made elsewhere.

As of 2025 any US-based services are persona non grata for national security reasons. Which other nation's services could the EU switch to that isn't from US?

you seem to have missed the point that we are talking about glorified CRUD app.

Your whole argument is based on neomania: progress is always good and there is no point in working on something unless it advances the state of the art.

Certainly not. I don't believe progress is always good. But subsidies should be reserved for ambitious projects that push the state of the art forward. For those projects that realistically will not get funded commercially. CERN, for instance.

How is that a subsidy?

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.

Building this allows them to reduce the subsidy that is perpetual software license fees.

In exchange for perpetual development and maintenance costs. Total cost of ownership doesn't go down by rolling your own in-house.

Having a FOSS alternative allows you to share the R&D costs with other interested parties.

At the very least, it works as a bargaining chip when it comes to negotiating contracts with the private sector.

If that's true in a large organization, how do SaaS companies actually make a profit?

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.

What part of this project would stop you or someone else from "innovating" and making it "state of the art"?

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.

Maybe you are not building something in the sector but do you have any idea of how shitty collaborative work is for public agents ?

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.

> Government projects like these are not likely to really push the state-of-the-art forward.

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.

Government projects today, you mean.

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.

One limiting factor: the government-produced software will be open source. So the barriers for innovation will be significantly lower for _everyone_.

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.

Yeah totally I think this instance is fine too. I’m kind of speculating why some people seem to get a spooky feeling around stuff like this, even though on the surface it seems totally innocuous.

Government crowding out companies is absolutely a concern. I don't want the government running grocery shops or making video games.

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.

There are plenty of projects pushing the state of the art forward.

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

Agree, but rather than farming, I think it will enable developers to focus on more complex and interesting problems. Or spot a need in the market (doesn't have to be complex) and quickly solve new problems people are willing to pay money for.

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.

> All the people who were working on Notion now can go get some on the job training to learn to farm.

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).

This one felt obvious, but it feels a bit hard to reason on.

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!

If it feels hard to reason on, it might be a hint... Sales people provide value. Maybe a sales person would have told this project to focus on being an alternative to Notion or Google Docs, as they are different apps/use cases.

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.

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