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Comment by Lucasoato | Hacker News Reader

I’m looking with so much admiration what France has been building in this space, especially the latest gendarmerie transition into open source OS from windows.

The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost, despite the fact that is the most popular language in Europe.

Yes, I get that this is a way to preserve the French language and they have all the rights to do that (in the end, they’re the ones putting the effort in these initiatives) but imagine how faster these ideas could be shared and diffuse in Europe if French understood this. If all the countries in Europe just keep pushing their nationalist ideology instead of truly believing into a united and solid Europe Union, we won’t go any where.

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Hi (Sécurix developer), we wrote our documentation in English and in French: https://cloud-gouv.github.io/securix.

Maintaining both languages is hard but we will do our best.

Thanks for the amazing work, let’s keep pushing for independent EU-based technology!

J’imagine que c’est de plus en plus facile de le faire avec l’aide de l’IA!

That's quite a generous decision. Thanks a lot for doing your work in public and in multiple languages.

Thank you for your service! I hope you can cooperate also with other countries, I am specifically thinking of Canada here, given they're dual-language English-French. I'm convinced NixOS is the right way forward.

Securix is a great step forward in many ways, including for France, the EU, NixOS, and cyber security. Thank you!

> The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost

Interestingly, a French-speaking Canadian who has spent some time in France told me that his right to use the French language is better protected in Canada than it is in France. He thinks that this is a consequence of the reciprocality implied by having more than one official language: French speakers in Canada get the same rights as English speakers, so people are happy to grant rights in return for getting them, whereas in France everyone gets screwed and you end up with a situation in which a French person wanting to do a PhD on French history at a French university has to write their grant application in English.

Quebec gets weird with their french rules. Parents are not allowed to send their kids to English speaking schools if both of the parents did their own schooling in French.

Frenchman here. French companies and organization, in my experience actually really like the English language (at OVH for example, most official docs are in English), but I do think it makes sense for a government funded by people who speak mostly French (ie the French taxpayers) to do stuff in French, the language most of its citizens will be most familiar with.

Putting stuff in English will tend to exclude the less educated, or people who struggle to learn foreign languages.

EDIT: and actually, from looking at the README of https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix

> Ce README est en français mais le reste du code, les issuers et les PR sont en anglais.

The README is in French but the rest of the code, the issues (they wrote issuers, but that is a typo I suspect) and the PRs are in English.

So. :P

Italianman here, I totally understand and respect your point. I just wish this was a collectively funded initiative, English-first but open to all translations. I’d be so happy if my country understood this and invested in this as well, so kudos to France for leading the tech here!

Je t’assure que ce besoin qu’on certains français de montrer leur capacité de parler l’anglais, de nommer leurs entreprises avec des noms à connotation anglophone, etc. est considéré très gênant ici du Québec.

Oui, c'est bien connu que vous Québécois préférez la stratégie de l'autruche.

Tes interventions montrent que tu es un raciste intolérant. Je n’ai plus de temps à perdre avec toi.

Quel dommage.

> Yes, I get that this is a way to preserve the French language and they have all the rights to do that (in the end, they’re the ones putting the effort in these initiatives) but imagine how faster these ideas could be shared and diffuse in Europe if French understood this.

Isnt this just baked into the idea? The French are building an OS for internal use for their own interests.

If we then try to extend that or the Dutch OS to other countries we have the original problem of dependence.

> the latest gendarmerie transition into open source OS from windows

That was 18 years ago: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

‘United and solid EU’ doesn’t have to involve forcing everyone to use a someone’s native language. Ideally we’d have a common language that’s neutral and used for international communication only. In fact, we already have a working solution; Esperanto has existed for well over 100 years at this point, and continues to be a healthy, living language. People just don’t seem to care that much. It always seems to be either practicality or national heritage, never both at the same time. Yet the common ground has been there all along.

We could go back to using Latin as a common language. It is already far more widely understood than Esperanto.

The problem with invented languages is the same as with adding new standards https://xkcd.com/927/

I guess we could do with more weird third-path stuff with the Linux world, even if the reason for said weird stuff existing is the French having (le) NIH syndrome.

It's also great when an actual commercial organization with requirements gets into the Linux game, as they don't really yield to 'we could make that printer work but it would be against everything we stand for' style arguments that have cemented problems in Linux userland for decades.

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