Posted by bwb 1/26/2026
A Front for clandestine Operations? (Speculative Timeline)
- April 6 & 8, 1980: Sabotage and arson against Philips Data Systems and CII-Honeywell-Bull in Toulouse. Speculation: French State Operation. A move to protect national technological sovereignty during the "Plan Calcul" era.
- May 19, 1980: Arson attack on the archives of ICL (International Computers Limited) in Toulouse. Speculation: Continuation of the French State's "cleansing" of foreign influence.
- September 11, 1980 & December 2, 1980: Attacks against a computing firm in Toulouse and the UAP (Union des Assurances de Paris) in Paris. Speculation: American Operation? Possible retaliation or disruption of French administrative networks.
- January 28, 1983: Bombing of the new computer center at the Haute-Garonne Prefecture in Toulouse. Speculation: American Revenge. A direct hit against the French State's local administrative brain.
- October 26, 1983: Total destruction by fire of the Sperry Univac offices (a US multinational) in Toulouse. Speculation: French Revenge. A final "tit-for-tat" response targeting a key asset of the US military-industrial complex on French soil.
It's ongoing for a will with La suite numérique (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/).
- Tchap is a message app for officials, - Visio, based on LiveKit - FranceTransfert, I don't know what is it. - Fichiers => Drive - Messagerie => Email - Docs => A better Google Docs - Grist => Excel version of Google docs.
It aimed at "public worker", people working for the government.
They already did it for the Ministry of Education with [La Forge](https://docs.forge.apps.education.fr/). Used to be forgejo, now a GitLab instance.
This can go as far as we want )
Anecdotally, I recently found myself in the local government building of a small European town. They run several free digitalisation classes for small businesses.
The options? Introductory classes to:
- WhatsApp business
- Facebook and Instagram ads
- Gsuite
But now there are some (small) alternatives.
LIDL has its own cloud for retail.
And I believe T-Systems sells some cloud computing for goverments based on OpenStack...
Small steps, but steps.
I've seen these "EU digital sovereignty is around the corner!!" articles weekly for the past 10 years
The capital requirements needed to spin up a public cloud and the services that come with that are absolutely massive. It makes me think that cloud computing, despite the gigantic profits it brings in, is not sustainable on its own.
The only other companies I can think of that tried being/are trying to be _just_ cloud provider are Rackspace (which has been barely hanging on as the CSPs are eating their lunch) and Hetzner (who seem to be doing okay), but both of these companies lean more towards "hosting provider" (i.e. renting compute is their business) rather than "cloud provider" (i.e. providing platforms for many use cases).
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/membership/jitsi-meet-an-often-ove...
https://livekit.io/ https://www.clever.cloud/product/visio/ https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
https://jitsi.org/ https://www.opendesk.eu/en
As an aside I am surprised it has taken this long but seems inevitable now given the last 18 months.
https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
I wonder if the emoji will grow into its own set:
https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet/blob/main/src/fronten...
The reason why Google Docs somewhat managed to break this was 1. free, 2. multiplayer/easy to share.
One law about requiring the state documents to be submitted in open formats, editable in libre software... and the lock instantly breaks.
That's exactly what we need though, so I see that as a plus.
Relying on OSS in continental level is a blessing and a curse. It can scale very well to an homogenous basis but it might not be organised well in national and regional level due to poor economic motivation. The good scenario is a development of a modified Linux kernel, named like Europix, with a userland consisting of a full packet of OS apps, interoperable and secure in public and private level. The private companies can earn public contracts for support.
What I mean by this is e.g. you can already use Linux on a desktop and it's generally okay (or even good sometimes), however things like LibreOffice are absolutely unusable in terms of performance, functionality and user friendliness compared to e.g. Keynote or even Pages on macOS.
Multiple governments having to solve essentially the same issue on a global scale is a unique opportunity to save costs by working on open source together, and get funding and direction that's never been available to OSS before.
I'm not even an advanced Word / Google Doc user.
Are we gonna wait for 100 more years for it to be good?
LibreOffice is the actively developed fork.
There's a nice diagram on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Forks_and_deriv...
OpenOffice has been effectively dead for many years (though, maddeningly, Apache continues to publish it and squat the trademark); LibreOffice is the mainline where development continues.
Most of the time I deal with csv downloads for data, or the shit PDFs that I can only fill in with the Adobe reader on windows. I can't recall the last time I fired up OnlyOffice (better MS garbage compatibility) for anything related to work.
This doesn't mean that those tools are irrelevant, but significantly less needed, and less of a migration hurdle for many companies.
The bigger problem seems to be the cloud services - teams, OneDrive, sharepoint and all the account management stuff.
The problem is that the tech independence is being pushed by government who want more control - not less. (Not speaking specifically of France and this instance, but looking at the anti-encryption rules that the UK and Ireland are pushing)
From that standpoint, I imagine the "solution" here won't be to push an open source alternative, but a closed one that they to control.
What I'd really like to see is a pan-european payment processor, a European alternative to Visa/Mastercard.
A payment flow of 'scan code, confirm in banking app' is hard to beat and we're 95% there. And all you need is your own banking app, no shady payment processors required.
You lose some stuff like the credit part of the credit card (although virtually no one I know actually uses credit, only debit cards) and consumer protections (chargebacks), but I don't think those outweigh the extra costs at all.
I still need a credit card when I rent cars and sometimes for online payments. That is an issue.
