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Posted by bwb 1/26/2026

France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.(twitter.com)
819 points | 709 commentspage 3
jleyank 1/26/2026|
And they can strike back at corporate America by licensing the stuff under gnu licenses. Software that’s reasonably small, reasonably effective and portable. What a concept. If only the EU or UK had 5-10 hackers…
trelane 1/26/2026||
Even something already available off the shelf!

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/membership/jitsi-meet-an-often-ove...

Neil44 1/26/2026|||
One of my networking groups uses Jitsi. It's fine.
Nextgrid 1/26/2026|||
It's pretty awful to setup compared to the Livekit-based solution.
iso1631 1/26/2026||
Visio is more than just the software, it's a French run tool where the entire stack is provided at an enterprise/governmental level with various guarentees about availability, confidentiality etc.
concinds 1/26/2026||
Not so much "aiming" as doing it. The alternative already exists, is open-source, and used by 40,000 government users. By 2027 all government agencies will use it exclusively.
duxup 1/26/2026|
What is that option?
mcoliver 1/26/2026|||
Visio with live kit (part of lasuite) or opendesk with jitsi would be my guess.

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.

omnimus 1/26/2026||
My bet would be that "the standard" will be Heinlein Groups (company behind mailbox.org) OpenTalk (already better than Jitsy) and now they are doing OpenCloud as scaleable NextCloud alternative. The company behind the projects needs it for their own usecases, has stable business and they have decades of experience.
cocoflunchy 1/26/2026|||
Visio from https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
bsimpson 1/26/2026||
It's funny that it's such a blatant knock-off of Google Workspace - the repos even have the same names:

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...

omnimus 1/26/2026|||
It doesn't matter. Office suites are a commodity. Google suite is knockoff of MS Office at certain point in time. That's just the nature of digital - information want's to be free.
duxup 1/26/2026||
I feel like we would see a lot more movement if we’ve reached the commodity point…
omnimus 1/26/2026||
It's network effects / lock-in. There is a reason why people still use Microsoft Office and that is that surprising amount of industries have everything build around it. In my country anything law related is submitted in Microsoft Word. Academic texts? Microsoft Word. Communication with government? Microsoft Word.

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.

Nextgrid 1/26/2026|||
> blatant knock-off of Google Workspace - the repos even have the same names

That's exactly what we need though, so I see that as a plus.

mg794613 1/27/2026||
We're not replacing services. We're replacing our dependence on the USA.

Every choice comes with a cost.

With allies like the USA, you don't need enemies.

202508042147 1/26/2026||
This is great and definitely doable. It's the initial bit that's hard, people hate switching but then when they get used to it, they won't switch back.

What I'd really like to see is a pan-european payment processor, a European alternative to Visa/Mastercard.

BitwiseFool 1/26/2026||
I would love to switch away from Teams. Sadly the organizations I belong to do not want to pay for anything else.
avh02 1/26/2026||
was talking to a friend about this, there's wero but i haven't really seen it around (Germany).
severino 1/26/2026||
The problem I've seen with this is that Wero works with banking applications that require either Google Play or App Store. Which means that you may not need an American company for the payment itself, but you now need an American company in the device you have to use for the payment.
astrolx 1/26/2026||
I work at a French research institute and our Zoom contract ends soon so we get to switch to Visio. It's not too bad but quite tier below Zoom. Noise cancellation is not great, being browser based also comes with limitations, in half my meetings people don't manage to find the permissions to allow mic and/or webcam ...
ttoinou 1/26/2026||
Non-french might not realize that we have a huge free software community of france, made up in large part of communist state-funded scientists / researchers. They do a lot of cool stuff, you can see a few projects for example on Framasoft who has the explicit goal of un-Googling yourself : https://framasoft.org/en/ https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/

That said, having technical solutions isn't enough to replace USA / private solutions. The answer has to take into account the economical, social and political situation

nasretdinov 1/26/2026||
My hope is that all this push towards tech independence (not just from EU) will make the most "basic" tools open-source and they wouldn't suck as much as they do now.

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.

ergocoder 1/26/2026||
As much as I cheer for OpenOffice, it sucks. And it has been decades now.

I'm not even an advanced Word / Google Doc user.

Are we gonna wait for 100 more years for it to be good?

ptx 1/26/2026|||
The latest version of OpenOffice (4.1.x) is over a decode old, aside from security releases with "bug fixes and little enhancements", so it's not surprising that it hasn't improved in the last decade.

LibreOffice is the actively developed fork.

There's a nice diagram on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Forks_and_deriv...

Insanity 1/26/2026||||
Word also kind of sucks. My biggest gripe is that it doesn’t understand markdown input. And once you add tables to the word doc, it turns into even more of a mess to work with.
umanwizard 1/26/2026|||
OpenOffice? Do you mean LibreOffice?

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.

bananasandrice 1/26/2026||
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umanwizard 1/26/2026||
Yes, the name confusion is bad, I'm not really sure what this has to do with the topic though.
mhitza 1/26/2026|||
It also doesn't feel like the mid 2000s anymore, where offline word/excel are essential for most day to day work.

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.

leoedin 1/26/2026||
Yeah, I’ve been able to use desktop Linux without many issues in a corporate environment. The main issue was the web version of office being incomplete. If corporate IT teams embraced it, I bet most companies could be free of Windows without too much issue.

The bigger problem seems to be the cloud services - teams, OneDrive, sharepoint and all the account management stuff.

jbombadil 1/26/2026||
I hope so too, but don't believe that's the ultimate intent here.

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.

nasretdinov 1/26/2026||
I agree that it's not an intent. However hopefully it's going to be open-source, as is the case for most government work in the UK for example. One can dream I guess
skc 1/27/2026||
The irony of building 'sovereign' software on top of Windows and MacOS.

Without a hardware or OS pivot, this feels less like independence and more like empty posturing.

michaelsshaw 1/27/2026|
The French government has its own version of Ubuntu, used by law enforcent, and is supposedly slated to be used by all agencies in 2027.
tsoukase 1/26/2026||
"Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying Microsoft". Same for Oracle and AWS, until a year ago. Before the current insanity, Europe whould become independent like never. Now, it will take about a decade, IF the insanity continues in the next presidential terms.
tensor 1/27/2026|
This is great. With more users alterantives will improve. The one place I would LOVE to see more effort at an international standard is in operating systems.

And no just adopting Linux is not enough. It needs to ecompass the full breadth of Windows and MacOS and be as turn-key and good at integration as MacOS. The Linux ecosystem is just too fragmented and still caters too strongly to developers. A full stack international standard, including being able to deploy packaged priorietary software and drivers, would provide potentially real competition to Microsoft and Apple.

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