France Endorses UN Open Source Principles
social.numerique.gouv.fr
social.numerique.gouv.fr
The goal is to make databases about buildings much more interoperable.
One key aspect is to have a precise list of all buildings includings recent constructions and demolition. It gets interesting because we recognize nobody in the country has the perfect list of buildings so we radically open the data to let governement agencies, cities, companies, citizens write directly in the registry. Think OSM or Wikipédia but for an official dataset.
This approach is very experimental for the french state and we are encouraged to test it and disseminate our learnings in other state branches.
Since OSM is, among other things, a list of building, will there be exchanges between the two projects? Are the licenses of the two projects compatible?
Last summer we tested the open approch by doing a "RNB Summer game". Basically, anyone could come on the map and send some error reporting, we had a score per player, per territory and a shared global score. The OSM community absolutely rolled ont the game :)
Good luck (and thanks)
Two months ago, the French government signed an "open bar" contract with Microsoft for the "Éducation Nationale" department. 152 M€, not for Open Source. Source (fr) https://www.april.org/nouvel-open-bar-microsoft-le-ministere...
A few days after that, a major state-owned institution (Polytechnique) announced it was migrating (including the email system) to MS Office 365. Even if it violates several laws and official decrees (it's a semi-military school). Source (fr) https://cnll.fr/news/polytechnique-men-office-365/
and its coming on the back of US and Trumps tarif shittalk..
there's also talk about moving away from american software giants, among government sections in my country. Recently one such section moved from AWS to Hetzner (saving money in the process)
i've also heard talk about making EU-based alternatives to the office suite, etc.
- you won't see angry letters in the news about services sticking to open source after they chose to move in
- the reason the CNLL can point the finger at Poytechnique is because there are explicit directives. Not even having those would be way worse.
- "Most of the public money" : Open Source contracts won't be in billions of euros most of the time, especially as a lot of the money will go to internal hiring and only a slice to external contractors.
The turmoil caused by the two contracts you mention also prove that the new normal has already shifted towards open source. It's a slow process, but it's undeniable that we are making progress.
And honestly, OS stuff still often sucks quite a bit.
It's just that MS software has degraded to the point of utter shittiness (see: Teams) that now it's just plain worse than their own software from 15 years ago.
I sometimes feel like I live in a parallele universe reading the comments here on Office.
The addition of collaboration and how it seemlessly integrated with sharepoints while easing the sharing of documents make Office365 a blessing in most office environment. There is no way people are going back to sharing files like before after having worked this way.
And 15 years ago, we just used Office files in a Dropbox folder. It solved all of our collaboration issues.
No, it did not.
I worked through that. Someone had to be in charge of the master version of all documents and ensure modifications were properly merged and not done simultaneously. Getting to the final version of anything was deeply annoying.
Now everyone can just work on the shared document. You see modifications as they happen. Office intelligently locks what needs to be locked. It just works. I can't tell you how much time this feature alone saves me.
Also, you are likely downvoted because talking about downvotes is boring and does not bring anything, and also because what was downvoted when you posted might be upvoted now, leaving these complaints look a bit silly.
But I don't think the open-source initiatives are "just for show" because nobody cares, and so there is no one to show it to.
They are more wishful thinking, random initiatives. "Let's do open-source!" and throw a couple million euros here and a couple thousand there, and we have the illusion of doing something.
What is made in that manner is also of incredible low quality; most of the time it doesn't work; I recently tried to do a "téléconsultation" with a hospital, which uses state-sponsored software. It was impossible to connect (and the login and password are sent in the same email! why bother with a password then??)
Data sources are not maintained or are incomplete. Data about road accidents don't mention the brand of the car because French car companies lobbied against it! (Which tells a lot about car quality in the first place). Etc.
I work from one of the biggest French companies and this is definitely untrue.
Everyone starting from the very top is concerned about the issue of sovereignty surrounding the cloud. This was true before and is even more true nowadays.
Obviously, everyone still use Office because, well, there is no alternative to Office. The only serious competitor is Google and it's a poor one on top of still begin an American company.
Still, you have some very successful initiative at the state level. Messaging is a good exemple. So is all the work done around GED and open data.
Do you realise how funny it is to see you complain that you can't see the car brands in a data base about road accidents while not realising how awesome it is that you have access to such a database?
> Obviously, everyone still use Office because, well, there is no alternative to Office
So it is, indeed, true. Can you clarify what your point is, exactly? (Also: there is an alternative to MS Office, which is LibreOffice. It works ok. It's not as powerful, maybe (maybe!) but it's fine.)
> Do you realise how funny it is to see you complain that you can't see the car companies in a data base about road accidents while not realising how awesome it is that you have access to such a database?
No, I really don't. It's not "awesome" to have access to that data. This is public information. Citizens don't have to be grateful of what the state does. THE STATE WORKS FOR US, not the other way around.
And as it is, it's not very useful, since the most important data is withheld.
Office is a fairly unsignificant part of our cloud usage. I'm fairly sure we could come to an agreement with Microsoft if we needed to self-host.
> there is an alternative to MS Office, which is LibreOffice
People don't use Office like it's the 90s anymore. Everything which doesn't have seemless collaboration and document sharing is dead on arrival.
> No, I really don't. It's not "awesome" to have access to that data. This is public information. Citizens don't have to be grateful of what the state does. THE STATE WORKS FOR US, not the other way around.
The state doesn't owe you anything apart from safety and law enforment. Of course, you should be grateful that people fought for, put in place and maintain all the services you receive on top. They don't come by magic. That's actual people working.
The fact that you can easily and freely access this database is something to be celebrated. In most places, people who don't work for the state have to pay to access this or go through a public library and that's honestly perfectly fine.
It's baffling to me how the French seemingly fail to realise how incredible the breadth of services their government provides is and somehow manage to make themselves miserable rather than actually doing something of what they are gifted with.
The parent was a bit whiny, but this is most definitely not true. The people are not entities subject to the state, it is a democratic and social republic, not a soviet. The people are the state and as such, the role of the state is to do whatever the people want it to do. In France, the state is supposed to guarantee the rights of Man, which is more fundamental than the constitution and also broader than safety and law enforcement.
> It's baffling to me how the French seemingly fail to realise how incredible the breadth of services their government provides is and somehow manage to make themselves miserable rather than actually doing something of what they are gifted with.
This I can agree with :) These threads are baffling, particularly considering what the people at INRIA are doing about trusted and transparent administration, and the massive effort put into sovereign software. It’s like everything is bad because they saw people using Windows at their city hall.
No. French state companies (including military schools! and the Department of Education!!) use Windows, MS Office, and US-based cloud providers en masse. Good for them, I guess. I don't really care.
But pretending to do the opposite is what gets me.
Or when the Head of the BPI (Banque Publique d'Investissement) goes on TV to say that France should only buy French tech, and you learn that the same BPI that he leads, just signed a huge contract with AWS, then that's upsetting. (He's also very concerned with China because the Chinese State finances some of its private industry; never mind that it's the whole purpose and mission of the BPI.)
We should recognize this sentiment as actively fascist. Safety from who? Law enforcement targeting who?
That's the core regalian powers at the heart of the state. Basically, a state is there to ensure laws can be voted, that they are fairly enforced and that things can stay that way. This notably means that people are safe in the broadest sense. They are not going to be mugged, murdered or dispossessed. That also means that the state has the mean to stay a state without becoming part of the next door state, which is to say, has an army to defend itself. A state which can't guarantee that is a failed state (or a former state if it was invaded).
Anything else is the cherry on the cake. Most states do a lot more because their citizen decided through laws this was a good thing - things like social security or education. If your state does these things for you, well, you should be grateful because they are in no way owed to you. You get them through the good will of the citizen who preceded you, the care of the civil servants that provide them to you and the continuously renewed commitment of your fellow citizen. If the French felt a bit less entitled and a bit more grateful, the country wouldn't be in the sorry state it's currently in.
> If the French felt a bit less entitled and a bit more grateful, the country wouldn't be in the sorry state it's currently in.
Oh please. The French are doing far better than we (the US) are. Precisely because their electorate has made their aristocracy rightly fearful of them. Chopping off their heads tends to do that.
I’m French.
The French hasn’t chopped the head of their aristocracy. Despite going through five republics, two monarchies and two empires in the last two hundred years, the country has very much de facto recreated an aristocracy. It’s one of the most unequal when it comes to social mobility in the whole OECD. Ever heard of Bourdieu?
What France has is a lot of redistribution so its Gini coefficient is quite low and a very generous through currently financially unsustainable safety net. Public services are also working fairly well even if it used to be better. That’s why I hate how ungrateful most French are. People have no interest in maintaining and protecting what they have. They prefer whining constantly while waiting for other people to do the work. That’s how you end up with the far right and the far left at 30% despite them only peddling non sense.
I’m not really interested in commenting further on your weird fascist obsession. I think it would be good for the discussion if you brushed up on what is both fascism and a state however.
That said, you are incredibly lucky to be living in a fascism-proof society and you should be thanking your fellow countrymen, all the way back to the French Revolution, for this fact. You don't have women in your hospitals dying of perfectly treatable conditions because the idiots in power have decided women don't deserve bodily autonomy.
You don't have nazis holding chainsaws tearing through your federal government. You don't have students disappearing off the streets into offshore concentration camps. You don't have tyrants arresting judges. None of these things are happening, or could happen, in France because heads would roll, again.
So color me unimpressed by your naive notions about what fascism is and isn't.
cryptpad do exist as well as collabora office and anyoffice running in a nextcloud.
My observation however is that despite the sharing capabilities of office365, a lot of people even in fortune500 companies still email .docx files to work collaboratively instead of using he sharing capabilities.
I’m probably failing to see the difference between Peugeot 208 or Renault 5 being involved in an accident. What insights could one expect from this info?
Sure, but that's an information that is difficult to create; it will result from a police investigation (and even then, may or may not be accurate).
Mark, model and age of the vehicle is 1/ incredibly easy to get and 2/ 100% reliable.
It's not the end-all be-all of road safety, but it's interesting; and the fact that all it took to not publish it was some lobbying effort from car makers is incredible.
Or maybe a specific maker has a problem with a specific part shared across models
We're looking for patterns, not rules, extra shared data is generally better
The problem is not software capability. The problem is training staff to use new software, planning the transition, and make it happen smoothly. You cannot just end your contract and get a new provider when you’re talking about 100,000 licenses. In fact, Office is likely going to go last, because it is easier to update the backend and centralised infrastructure than the client software used by hundreds of thousands of people in something like 500 different agencies.
Hell, we regularly have glitches going from one version of Office to the next. When it’s a university administration that’s out of operation for 2 months it’s bad enough, but survivable. When it’s all of public-facing civil servants it’s a different matter.
> No, I really don't. It's not "awesome" to have access to that data. This is public information. Citizens don't have to be grateful of what the state does. THE STATE WORKS FOR US, not the other way around.
Right. The fact is that it used to be inaccessible, and now it is. We should demand more, of course, but bitching about it is short-sighted and counter-productive. More and more data is accessible, leading to more and more transparency and new uses. It could be better (and it is the citizens’ responsibility to vote to make it get better), but you have to start somewhere.
The Office365 subscriptions are probably going to go last, because the effort to deploy alternatives and retrain the 200,000 people using them is enormous. It is a very visible aspect that won’t change anytime soon, but it does not mean that there is nothing else happening.
For example, the Renater tools are getting more and more use from all the research and higher education institutions. It’s not going to happen overnight, but it is shifting.
Yes, I agree that some public organizations in France are making progress with Open Source. For instance, free software is now common in universities (with local variations). And overall I think there's a central influence of the DiNum ("Direction Numérique", the Digital Department of the French State) in this direction. But I don't see how this UN charter makes any difference.
There's progress, though not related to this charter. And so slow that I would bet against "Open Source" becoming widespread in French schools within the next decade.
> Facts (and code) are following.
I'm sorry, but the current situation and the past experience makes it really hard to believe that facts will follow from this charter. At least facts matching the claim that the French government will be "Open by default: Making Open Source the standard approach for projects" (quote from the first point of the charter).
If "France endorses UN Open Source principles", it shouldn't just mean that it will publish some code. It should means that it intends to respect these principles, and that proprietary software becomes the exception within the French administration.
I can't believe this post is more than symbolic, because the French law already promotes Open Source and forbids non-UE proprietary software in many public contexts. But these laws are usually not applied. Why would a non-prescriptive charter do any better?
It's not a risky bet: no organisation this large, private or public, would manage to replace its IT this fast, even with appropriate funding (which schools don't have).
There's a reason why people say change in a company only happens as fast as people retire. large scale change is long, hard and costly.
Governments just move really slowly. Best we can do is cheer for the efforts we think will improve things, even if it'll take years, and protest about efforts we think are harmful.
Everytime someone actually does something nice in this country, there will be a dozen nay-sayers complaining uselessly that it is not perfect while doing nothing of value themselves.
It always saddens me to see a country with so much too succeed being so impaired by its own citizens.
I totally agree with it. The EU could do something non-performative by it and its governments stopping issuing documents in proprietary Microsoft formats and use OSS only.
People are basically constantly dragging everyone down including themselves while doing absolutely nothing.
I mean technically I guess they sometimes vocally protest in the street that they don't understand why someone else is not solving their own problem or that they would prefer we just pretended the problem never existed which is pretty much equivalent to doing nothing if not worse.
No. You need to say how it's impairing the process of this specific adoption to make the claim. It's not self-evident.
They would get hairy quickly, because the Office formats are actually open standards.
It’s also a tall order. How they run their administration is fundamentally the member-states’ prerogative, I don’t really see what lever the commission would have to bend the council on that subject.
They are technically open standards in that they've been ratified, but I'm not sure they're fully independently implementable.
It doesn't mean that nothing gets done (and when it doesn't, it is not usually the reason). We are just not overly enthusiastic about it like Americans tend to be.
A way to see things is that in America, a 5/5 comment is great, 4/5 is acceptable, and anything less is crap. In France, 1/5 is crap, 2/5 is acceptable, and anything more is great. You just have to adjust your scale.
Then again, if your employees still need PowerPoint, I say let them have it for now. You cannot switch a single company to FOSS overnight, let alone the entire public sector of an industrial nation.
That is simply wrong.
The reality is that millions of people work for the government, directly or indirectly, and that not all of these people have aligned incentives, the same constraints, etc.
The people pushing open source initiatives in the french public sector are very serious about it. It is also true that there is a lot of inertia. The consequence is that, while most of the large administrations, including those that don't have that much wiggle room for initiatives, still use big-name proprietary solutions, more and more open-source and open-data gardens spring around, and that they provide a strong base for new initatives, both public and private.
Two examples I personally used are dvf [1], a database and application showing real estate sales, which I used to check market prices when I bought my home, and publi.codes [2], a simulator and an open-source law-as-code repository, which is one of the cornerstones of a friend's private company.
Would I like more of France's administration to move to open-souce? Sure, but it's not going to happen overnight. In the meantime, I'm grateful for the core of people dedicated to push the case, bits by bits, and I know their effort is certainly not just for show.
[1]: https://app.dvf.etalab.gouv.fr/ [2]: https://publi.codes/
At first glance I thought this was hyperbole, but after reflection I'm not sure it's even an exaggeration. Too much critical infrastructure of power (voting, census, taxation, reporting, compliance) runs of software for us to accept anything less than full transparency from our governments.
It’s turtles all the way down.
As far as elections are concerned, give me paper ballots every day, and make sure you count them by hand with plenty of Mk I human observers present.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
This is called "security through compartmentalization", i.e., you don't trust one single entity. The only approach that works.
I think it's a pretty solid scheme.
Very few people have any change of understanding machine voting systems. With paper voting we get much better transparency of the voting procedures. Any form of machine voting is terrible for transparency and democracy compared to just plain old paper voting.
I don't lurk the github, so I'm just assuming there are a few accounts that disagree with UI improvements just to kill time and fake debate.
But yeah that UI is just awful.
Further, you mention any UI issue on the subreddit and you get banned. Yeah...
Really a shame, Fedora + Google's Office Suite has been a near complete replacement for me. Although Sheets could be improved a bit.
Notice how they say “No PR” on every single repo ? So for sure no PR was open.
Putting a bit more energy, you are redirected to a whole other system which I have never seen anywhere else (and in this case; unique doesn’t mean good). After 5 minutes of trying to navigate what is probably the least intuitive software forge I ever had the displeasure to witness, you understand that clearly these guys live in a different UI/UX bubble than the rest of us.
When I go to a restaurant and order a steak, and it arrives and tastes awful, the waiter does not have the right to say to me "if you don't like it, cook it yourself". The chef does not have the right to say to me "tell me exactly what I did wrong, since you're claiming you're an expert on steaks".
No. Anyone can complain about a thing, and the fact that they haven't tried to fix the code themselves is utterly irrelevant.
It's trivial to throw a million or two dollars at making sure some project ultimately goes nowhere (but survives), and that particular bugs don't get fixed or particular features don't get added. I've got no story to tell, and I've never heard solid evidence of it happening, but it would just be unbelievably tempting to do.
As far as I can see, awful UI never stops people from using software that is "mandated" or "default". I mean have you seen Windows? MS Office? Web sites? Mobile apps??
Mind, I barely actually use any Excel/Word/PowerPoint software, but I often have the feeling that a lot of user complaints for these types of things simply come down to: "It's not what I'm used to, therefore it's terrible.".
With new stuff, the blame will always lay on the new software even in situations where it's lack of skill or attention from the user.
I remember a University I used to work at as a dev moving a few classes of a few loud professors from open source Moodle to a paid product, and professors basically replicating Moodle's discussion board functionality by creating public wikis and hoping students wouldn't mess up when editing.
One day one professor approached me wanting a way to prevent students from messing up the "fake discussion board". He got a mouthful from the Dean who was nearby and was footing the bill of a few thousand per month on the expensive SaaS.
It is like everybody putting a "fat free" logo on highly processed junk food a few decades ago. Yes but what is fat exactly?
What really make me suspicious is there is now a very dense web of fake, captured foundations and non profits with a lot of money flowing through them. Most of them do not write any code of course and it is very hard to understand they purpose or what they do beyond "advocacy".
None of those Open Source advocates care about the most urgent problems like the fact that now almost every human has one of the most locked up system in its hand (yes I know about AOSP) or we can't trust the connected micro-controllers in our homes.
Instead they have as their top goal to fight things like climate change [0] (I wish)
Strangely postmarketOS (the ones trying to make possible that we don't have to trash those cellphones after 3 years) survives on €12656 in yearly donations, €11175 after banks fees [1]. So probably less than the monthly salary of most of those foundations executives and employees. Or probably the cost of one big Zoom meeting in the UN.
Also ask yourself why the FSF, GNU and RMS have been marginalized while Open Source became an UN level cause...
- [0] https://www.digitalpublicgoods.net/digital-public-goods-alli...
- [1] https://postmarketos.org/blog/2025/03/17/pmOS-budget-and-fin...
While in many way software freedom won the server and workstation battle, we lost all the new battlefront which opened in the last two decades:
- Phones (the thing in the hand of almost every human now. And sorry LineageOS and GrapheneOS are quickly being marginalized now by things like Google Play Integrity)
- Javascript (yes it is a big problem [0])
- the Cloud
- IoT
The FSF was actually pretty good at identifying those issue early on but was overwhelmed and probably marginalized because they were right.
Notice that none of those new "Open Source" advocates really care about those ubiquitous issues.
We won some battles but lost the war. The fact France endorses some UN Open Source principles really doesn't matter.
You might think caring about software freedom is almost fringe but look at:
- The US freaking out about all those Chinese devices and cyber attacks,
- The EU now freaking out about US big tech and the cloud.
I believe the best way to safeguard sovereignty and safety is for everyone be able to control as much as possible what is running on our "computers" and as close to you as possible. The FSF [1] has been consistent regarding those issue and doing something about it. But also some other folks like OpenBSD [2].
Very unclear to me what the goals of the UN and the OSI type foundations really is.
- [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html
For anyone unfamiliar, the SSPL is a modification of the AGPL. It expands which source code you have to release, under certain circumstances. More specifically, if you resell the software as a cloud service, you have to make the entire service open source and not just the original software. (It has not yet been tested in court what constitutes the entire service.) This is awfully bad for the business models of several OSI members, which make money by reselling free software as a cloud service surrounded by proprietary stuff like management and load balancing.
In response, the OSI put out this official blog post seething with anger but not a single rational argument: https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l...
In response to that, I don't trust the OSI and neither should you.
(There are reasons the SSPL is bad - mostly GPL/AGPL incompatibility. Not being open source isn't one. The OSI's rant applies just as well to AGPL as it does to SSPL, yet they recognize AGPL.)
FSF declined to make a statement either way - citing the fact that very little software uses this license and it all has xGPL alternatives, so there's no urgent need to make an official decision.
Debian didn't call it free or unfree, but rather decided not to include SSPL software in their distribution, which is an orthogonal issue, due to it having a higher risk of being incompatible with all the other stuff when used a certain way, which does not make it non-free.
Fedora calls it non-free, but just calls it their own belief, not something based on solid reasoning about meeting guidelines or not. Note that Fedora is a project of one of those open source reseller companies.
I still think you'd need to back the fact OSI rejected SSPL for commercial concerns of its members a bit more. Even if nobody else has formally rejected SSPL on convincing grounds, major parts of the free software ecosystem distrusts it and OSI is not that special in this. I found nobody making the case that SSPL is a free software license. Nobody likes it except mongodb, and formerly redis and elasticsearch. That would be an interesting revelation to me but I need more convincing evidences.
I do think that open source is the watered down corporate version of free software that attempts to get rid of the end user rights concerns (which I care about most, but the corporations around the OSI don't care about much or at all), and that the OSI is governed by big corps and is not the most trusty organization when it comes to protect free software. One only needs to see the definition they came up for open source AI models which is not quite restrictive (and thus useful) to see the least. So I'm actually somewhat inclined to believe this.
The incompatibility between *GPL and SSPL is a very good reason to dislike SSPL. I don't like it either, but I still think it's open source. Perhaps SSPL version 2 could be written to require that the source code for other parts of the service could be released under some particular set of licenses, which would make it much more compatible.
> OSI is not that special in this.
OSI is special because it's taken as an authority on what the term "open source" means, and it's special because it has actually written an official press release full of actual bullshit in order to justify its objectively wrong statement, while still claiming to be an authority and still being seen as one.
> I still think you'd need to back ... a bit more.
No competent capitalist entity will ever say outright "we lie for profit." It always has to be inferred from their actions. Look at what happened to Ratner's jewellery chain. If you outright say what everyone already knows, you can still get punished for breaking the suspension of disbelief. Same thing when Musk did the salute.
We can see that a capitalist entity did something which looks stupid on the face of it, but obviously advances its business interests. We conclude that either the board of directors were infected by brainworms, or they are advancing their business interests. The latter is much more likely. Burning social capital to gain financial capital is a tried and tested strategy.
Says who? I assume you have irrefutable evidence for this since you are stating this with such confidence?
It would be some major development in the SSPL case.
> No competent capitalist entity will ever say
As much as I don't like them, you need to back something you claimed. Until you do, it's just beautiful theory.
Agreed and a case in point are those UN principles that bundle unrelated things together.
For the big project, my mental image is a public call for proposal, followed by one of the bigger groups (e.g. Cap Gemini) coming up with an initial solution that gets deployed. From there it becomes a mix of the public agency staff doing the day to day operation and maintenance, potentially including small bug fixes and updates, and external contracting again for wider range feature additions or changes like system wide security compliance.
The bureaucracy was painful enough that we just removed from the French App Store and when someone complains we tell them to write their representatives to stop with these misguided laws.
Excuse me, monsieur, do you have a license for that math?
Could the implementation be better? Knowing french admin, 100% yes, but complaining about the law itself is, in my opinion, misguided. This is an overall good law that doesn't came from nowhere.
The one amazing thing that works is the taxes collection system. The French tax code is incredibly complex with hundred of special cases; yet the online system to declare revenues is perfect: super clear to use with excellent instructions, never broken (even at the end of a period where usage peaks must be insane) and with no errors.
I don't know who constructed this but it's proof that the French gvt can make good software when they really care (ie, when money's at stake).
I know HN doesn't appreciate snark, but isn't that kind of what you can expect from government websites anyway?
> C'est des sous menus dans des sous menus, si t'as plus qu'une page ouverte a la fois ça te déconnecte de l'autre, ...
The reason for that is that the site is basically a progressive merge-and-overhaul of many existing administrations and their sites.
Sure, apart from paying your taxes with entirely pre-filled forms, accessing all your medical bills, upcoming reimbursments, communication with the public medical insurance and your full medical history from a single place, doing everything that needs to be done with the French equivalent of the DMV, paying fines, changing your address everywhere with one form when you move, getting a digital copy of your ids and driving licences with the same value as the official one in a couple of minutes, requesting official documents like your criminal record or birth certificate and getting them mailed to you and all of that with the same unique login, absolutely nothing works.
I mean, what have the Roman ever done for us?
> Why do we need birth certificates in addition to IDs, exactly?
Because it’s the official record of your actual birth which gives you right and is therefore useful when you need for exemple to get said ids or prove to anyone that it is indeed where you were born?
Birth certificates are in no way unique to France. What’s remarkable however is how easy to get a copy of yours if you are French.
The trouble is that simple concepts are not necessarily simple to implement. Tuning software for performance (e.g. to handle a large user base), security, and maintenance are all resource intensive. Then you have to consider that large user bases have diverse needs, which results in more complex software. Then there are the largest hurdles of all, training people in the use of new software and interoperability during the transition.
In my view of the world, the code to train, the software to run, that's open source joy.
Now... should the trained, and vectored data be free? Maybe so.
But I bet this UN thing doesn't cover that.
Llama models have usage restrictions that go against any mainstream definitions of open source.
Anyhow, I wasn't trying to put words in your mouth, simply stating my thoughts. And I focused on data because I see OSS code everywhere, so presume there is no issue there.
Also, https://opensource.org/ai/endorsements shows code.gouv.fr in the list.
Cette licence permet d'utiliser, reproduire, modifier et distribuer librement le code avec attribution, mais impose des restrictions pour les opérations dépassant 700 millions d'utilisateurs mensuels.
https://opensource.org/ai https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy
> The traditional Four Freedoms of free software are no longer enough. Software and the world it exists in have changed in the decades since the free software movement began. Free software faces new threats, and free AI software is especially in danger.
https://lwn.net/Articles/1013776
I hope this sets a strong precedent for open source public software.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/04/2350224/the-un-ditc...
https://unite.un.org/news/osi-first-endorse-united-nations-o...
Is there other access to the French announcement?
That Mastodon link: social.numerique.gouv.fr, isn't viewable for me...
No, there is no official French announcement (yet).
This is great because it stops giving users to services which don't respect privacy. If you don't know CryptPad which provides forms but also many editors including Office with end to encryption, try it at https://cryptpad.fr
As a citizen, if only the first rule could become true for new and existing online public services such as « URSSAF », « Les Impôts » and « AMELI », that would be a great step forward (but I guess that will never happened as the hugh consulting firms developing these won’t have the same view on the matter)
It’s quite a thing for anyone to commit to software maintenance. The idea of open source that there will always be volunteers that reduce the fees you pay for maintenance is not a certainty.
It’s quite a thing for anyone to commit to software maintenance. The idea of open source that there will always be volunteers that reduce the fees you pay for maintenance is not a certainty.
https://www.sovereign.tech/legal https://www.sovereign.tech/faq https://www.sprind.org/ https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesagentur_f%C3%BCr_Sprungi...
I guess the government wouldn't fund more than one such org, even if the additional ones were non-profit instead.
At least NLnet (similar org from .nl) is a registered charity. IIRC its funds are from the EU level though.
What happened with Bundesanzeiger Verlag GmbH?
* The Federal Reserve
* The Interstate Highway System
* The Postal Service
* Homeland Security
* Medicaid/Medicare (does this even fit the list?)
* Other entitlements I'm also not sure fit this list
Did I leave anything major out? But getting to the point, I think the question is relevant because in order for something like this set of principles to take hold in the US I think we'd essentially have to kill certain classes of software in the private sector. Can you imagine the sorts of craziness that would ensure if the US government tried to adopt LibreOffice? Maybe it could happen at the state or municipal level, but we can't even agree that the government should own any of the power lines.
You've limited your list to federal services. But state and local governments provide plenty more "public utility in a Capitalism society", don't they? Schools, fire protection, police for example.
Federal Communication Commission keeps part of the wireless communication spectrum open to the public.
National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management keeps some public land available for everyone to use.
The Library of Congress.
National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service probably satisfy "Public Utility" as much as Medicaid.
Federal Emergency Management Agency would be another stretch, but not something I would consider an entitlement program.
for libertarian,
National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service probably satisfy "Public Utility" as much as Medicaid.
this would not be public utility, etc.
The UN can define standards and suggest processes to encourage the adoption and interoperability of free software in governance.
The UN has a nine figure IT budget for starters.
This is something I used to misunderstand too. That open source was something where there were a fixed set of projects available, one or two for each purpose, and if you wanted a change, you contributed that change and they take it. In reality, it's where everyone has their own project that does the thing they want. Most are written by one person or by tight-knit groups. Drive-by contributions often cost as much for the developers to process as just doing the contribution themselves. If you don't like how some software works, you have the right to write your own software using the existing software as a starting point - you do not have a right to edit the existing project. These are the same rights the UN has.
Doing this on a global scale requires "CFC-ban"-levels of global coordination which I cannot see happening in the world we live in today. Just look at how global CO2 reduction and climate change is being handled today at the global scale.
However, this only happened because free software developers made an uproar about the act while it was a bill and was missing this provision. In a previous proposed version of the act, free software developers would have been liable for security vulnerabilities. So stay connected with politics!
But here is the problem: if you now have a small business selling service around free software you are now facing the full wrath of the regulation and legal risk. In the end only IBM, RedHat, Microsoft and big companies have the strength and the resources to monetize open source it but smaller actors don't. And it is becoming very difficult and risky even for most ~100 employees companies.
So you still have the right to develop and use free software but you can't really make a living out of it anymore unless you work for RedHat or others.
And yes it makes no sense. The EU is doing to the software industry what they did to agriculture a few decades ago.
Of course an LLC ultimately protect you but you have just multiplied by 10 or 100 the risk of blowing up your livelihood and the one of your employees.
Those regulations are just a nightmare, with "no-fault" liability, a simplified the burden of proof for the claimant, and are just very difficult to decrypt or applied to real world situations in an evolving landscape.
So unless you are big and have legal resources to work on it people are probably not gonna bother or give up.
Anyway your costs and risks have exploded and you are still competing with let's say Microsoft Azure.
You didn't really answer the question. Do you have a specific risk in mind, or are you only worried about the risk of a random fuckup which all businesses face?
Every software you provide have to be secure and if not you are liable for damage. So this is not just a random f-up, and we know how hard security really is in practice.
I also know that when you are a provider of a software most vulnerabilities and risks are usually requested/created by the client who usually exercise pressure on you (especially if you are a small actor). It is often done in a sneaky manner, putting the provider in an impossible situation. You will need to document this the best you can because now you are liable big time.
EDIT: What I mean is I understand they did that to force big manufacturers of IoT device to care more about security. But if you are now a small provider setting up some customized software you fall under the same rules.
So I want to know what specific risks you're worried about that are not present in literally 100% of business interactions. Or do you expect software to be exempt from the general principles of liability?
Yes.
Have you read the EULA of most of the software you use ?
Any of the open source licenses ?
And this is why the computer world is almost the only thing that really progressed in the last decades.
Because we could take that risk because in most cases nobody was gonna die (medical devices or the ABS in your car are a separate category with other rules).
You do not realize how free from regulations computers have been and this is why you are on HN and probably work in this industry.
We ended up with a fairly acceptable ecosystem where you can either keep your ISP provided router, buy a very suspicious one on Aliexpress, or Nitrokey, Turris (both EU companies) or one with OpenBSD.
Bad regulations will make the last 3 options disappear. That is the sad reality.
> Have you read the EULA of most of the software you use ?
> Any of the open source licenses ?
Yeah, copyright licenses don't override the law. They only provide permission under copyright law. Nothing to do with liability. Liability disclaimers are put there because it's somewhere you're supposed to have read, but they're not actually do to with copyright and they only work because the law says it's okay to provide products without liability.
Now the law says it's NOT okay to provide products without any liability unless they're free. You may or may not still be able to negotiate liability individually as part of your contract negotiations, not sure.
If I sell a mango full of giant flesh eating fly larvae I'm liable. Even if I put a warning on the box saying I'm not liable for anything. Now, if I wrote on the box in big letters that there's a chance this mango could be full of giant flesh eating fly larvae, that has some chance of holding up in court. (let's ignore that fruits aren't sold in boxes)
If I sell you some software that's easily remotely hacked and I say on the box: not liable for anything, it won't stand. If I say prominently: warning: this software is known to be highly insecure and should never be connected to the internet, and you connect it to the Internet and get hacked, I'm pretty likely to avoid liability for that. You know these cases are judged individually on their merits, right? The judge will ask you in full seriousness: why didn't you obey the bright red warning on the front of the box? Are you completely illiterate?
> We ended up with a fairly acceptable ecosystem where you can either keep your ISP provided router, buy a very suspicious one on Aliexpress, or Nitrokey, Turris (both EU companies) or one with OpenBSD.
If you import a foreign good you're liable for any consequences of it not following regulations - obviously the exporter doesn't have to because they're in a foreign country, so the buck stops with you. You'll still have that option.
Same with open source thanks to the carve out. If you use OpenBSD, they're exempted from the regulation because they're volunteers. Buck stops with you.
Are you telling me that Nitrokey and Turris can't make secure products?
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I also have to wonder if you actually know what liability is. Liability means that when there's an accident, like a building collapses, or Facebook is offline for three hours, the case may go to a judge (and/or jury) who has to decide who pays the resulting financial losses. Which is basically the same as asking whose fault it was or whose problem it is to clean up.
There are general purpose rules for this which are not exclusive to software. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice but here are some examples: if a dam collapses because the concrete was of poor quality, it's the concrete company's fault. If the concrete was of the requested quality but it needed to be better, it's the engineer's fault for choosing the wrong concrete. If it collapses because they bought screws from the hardware store and they were a little weaker than specified, it may be the maker's fault but the liability is probably going to be on the builders or engineers for relying on a cheap part without testing it. If they paid the screw maker a lot of money to make screws specifically for the dam with specific characteristics, then the screw maker can be liable.
If Facebook is down for three hours because they used MongoDB open source for free, it's Facebook's fault, period, because of the carve out. If MongoDB worked as expected but it was the wrong choice for Facebook, it's Facebook's fault for choosing it. If Facebook is down because of a Cisco router crashed, it depends: some failure rate is normal in computer equipment (unlike concrete) but if it's excessive than Cisco may be held partially liable (Facebook still should've had redundancy). If Facebook is down because they made their entire company dependent on a single fritz!box home router, and that crashed, even if the crash is the router maker's fault, Facebook is still liable because they should have tested it and because they should have had redundancy in place. If they pay Cisco for a specific order that Cisco knows is going to be in a critical position at Facebook without redundancy, Cisco might be liable (this should be specified in their individually negotiated contract).
And the cyber security one: If Cloudflare gets taken offline by a botnet of Cisco routers, Cisco is almost certainly liable, and has to pay for all of Cloudflare's business losses, maybe unless security warnings weren't followed (e.g. management interface shouldn't be connected to the internet) or unless Cloudflare should have been able to handle the amount of traffic. If it's by fritz!boxes (home routers) the bar will be even higher for fritz - these must be secure in their default configuration when installed by an inexperienced user, though expert features behind a warning should have the same standard as Cisco.
And if your commercial software takes down Cloudflare, yes, you have to pay for Cloudflare's lost money - probably making you bankrupt - and rightfully so. Why do you think someone who shoots a gun in the air and hits an unmanned plane and crashes it should have to pay for the plane, but someone who does the equivalent on the Internet shouldn't? Which is why you shouldn't shoot guns randomly at planes and you shouldn't make software that takes down Cloudflare. You still haven't told me if this is a specific risk you're concerned about.