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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

Very nice.

You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence, but they do. Over the years I have heard of many good Open Source Projects coming out of France.

I sometimes wonder if it is because of French vs English Language were you hardly hear of their projects in English speaking Countries.

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I think an unsung hero in making open source broadly known and adopted in France is Framasoft [https://framasoft.org/en/], a non-profit association. They have since many many years an initiative to de-google internet and provide free and hosted alternatives and resources.

+1 on this, they had an amazing presence in the French community for 20 years and many of us own them our passion for FOSS.

More people on HN seem to know of PeerTube than know of FramaSoft, the group that's building PeerTube

The French have amazing technologists, I worked with many stunningly brilliant French men and women across 3D gaming, film and media production. However, culturally they end up in a little "French pod" when not working in France because they know how to and really enjoy vigorous debate. If one cannot hold their own in their free wheeling intellectualized conversation and debate style, one might end up feeling insulted and stop hanging out with the frogs. There also seems to be a deep cultural understanding of design that is not present in people, generally, from other nations. That creates some interesting perspectives in software interactive design.

> You (at least I) would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence

France has always been super heavy on open source. They even used to host Les Trophées du Libre, international open-source software competition. FramaSoft (i.e. PeerTube) and VLC are also French.

Isn’t VLC French also?

OCaml and early Prolog are from France:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Colmerauer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Institute_for_Research_... (INRIA)

Also QEmu and ffmpeg.

Also Docker.

Also Lichess.

Also Scikit Learn.

Two words: Fabrice Bellard

>would not think of France as having a good Open Source presence

You have not been paying attention.

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