For a fraction of what these products cost France could fund open source alternatives.

Edit: I'm not saying they don't.

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004

Seriously, why are people still using twitter? It's owned by a Nazi supporter, is full of white nationalist racist posters, and seems a strange place to announce you are moving off of American tech.

It's wild to me that the first Trump Administration didn't teach this lesson. The "Just Trust me Bro" Foreign policy that has existed clearly only works if the person in power is trustworthy, and you have to carefully investigate any policy that is enforced by "trust". One of the most disappointing failures of the Biden Administration was that they didn't realize this.

The greatest failure of every other country was to get lulled into a false sense of security when the US Gov't shifted back to an at-all trustworthy foreign policy.

I've been recently researching if I could replace American cloud providers with something like OVH or Hetzner (the latter I occasionally use for VPS) and there is no fucking chance. It's great that 37signals and DHH can do it, and I have no trouble believing they have saved money, but for situations in which I operate, both startup and enterprise environments but where devs are scarce and teams small, it's simply not realistic.

... probably using whatng cartel web engines, and that would be ridiculous for sure.

This is the French government aiming to have all the government agencies use videoconferencing software that was developed internally by themselves.

So a huge waste of taxpayers money...

This is a pure ongoing cost to develop and maintain (more so than using an market product) while not getting any traction externally. The productive way to do this is to encourage private companies to develop these products and to support them with government contracts. There are not going to conpete with Silicon Valley if they don't create actual private competitors. Absolutely ridiculous approach but unfortunately typical of the industrial scale waste of the French government...

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