Posted by AareyBaba 5 hours ago
Home page for the entire suite (in French) with some screenshots: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
Code bases are on GitHub and they use English there: https://github.com/suitenumerique/
Dev handbook (in English): https://suitenumerique.gitbook.io/handbook
Not French and I can't say I personally tried deploying any of them, but I've been admiring their efforts from afar for a while now.
Grist https://www.getgrist.com/
A write-up of how the French gov uses it https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...
Does grist have forms?
It's really good. The typing experience "feels" right and the collaboration features work. I haven't played with the other solutions yet but I'm very excited if they are up to the same standard.
I deployed it with docker and it was relatively smooth. I had to play a bit with the OIDC but I'm pretty sure that was more a me issue than anything.
Not a very solid way to move away from American big tech :/
For open source code, there is no risk of confidential information being given to the US government (since there is no confidential information), and moving to another forge would be pretty simple if necessary.
Having private companies in the US becoming more involved with politics is fine for the US apperantly, but the EU just don't want to be involved.
It's time governments realize(d) that IT sector is as strategic as the Defense sector, which is usually/always given preferential treatment (e.g. Airbus, etc) and that they don;t have to be beholden to American tech behemoths. If this realization happened ~20 years ago, they might have stopped FB, Goog, Amazon, MSFT, etc. much earlier, and wouldn't be hand-wringing now trying to stop or delay the evil effects of social media.
I am pleased that AUS has banned social media for teens < 16yrs, and perhaps Finland is thinking the same route.
Already, China, Russia have their local tech companies supply their critical infra needs. Other governments should be wise enough to catch up, and not just to support + enhance local languages but to grow their critical ecosystem.
To me a really significant signal that they’re serious will be when there’s an official Linux version of Solidworks.
It’s remarkable to me that France has control over one of the premiere CAD suites but theyre entirely dependent on an American OS to use it.
There is always a connection between the military industrial complex of a nation and the state.
If France feels that it is an existential threat they will not let the design and maintence of their weapons be dependent on an operating system produced by a company based out of a country that has threatened them.
I'm not saying that this will happen. I'm saying that should this happen you know France is serious about eliminating dependencies on unreliable and threatening countries.
Weather or not they get Greenland, Trump and his supporters in the US administration have changed the world. Guy should definitely get Nobel prize for pushing decentralization.
Visio does seem built from scratch but I wonder if it's a temporary thing until element is feature complete with their move away from Jitsi.
You can find more about la suite on their website and the opendesk one (German project using mostly the same software). Unfortunately I don't have the links to hand here.
Visio (aka meet) began in parallel with Element's work on MatrixRTC and Element Call. Hopefully the two can converge, given they are both built on LiveKit.
In understand it's also the French word for Videoconferencing, but even still...
How much better could open source alternatives to Teams be in this moment if only 1% of what Europe paid Microsoft for Teams went to investing in open alternatives?
There's a chance to unlock tremendous value for society here.
Imagine if you could fix all the awful bugs making video conferencing software shitty for you! It's perhaps the most bug-plagued software out there in the world, with the highest number of complaints I have ever seen.
We've had a large detour away from open-source running the core of the internet, at least outside of web pages, but this sort of software feels like we're getting back to the 90's and earlier.
Vive la France!
Now they just need to change the name so it's not so obviously French, and invite collaboration from the other large EU countries. I wonder how many Dutch or German will think of "La Suite Numerique" as an EU-wide office suite.
German version is here, but unlike France they're mostly boosting already-existing German open source software (like Nextcloud and Open Xchange): https://opencode.de/en/home
I don't know how the Netherlands really fits into all of this, but I know they're one of the biggest funders of open source projects in general via NLnet. Seriously, their list of projects they've given money to is ridiculously comprehensive, you're going to struggle naming some that are not listed here: https://nlnet.nl/project/index.html
Why not? Plenty of French people speak English at a native level.
France does a few things right; scandinavian countries too (I include The Netherlands here, though they are not really scandiavians but in their decision-making, they are often a bit like a hybrid between France and Denmark or Sweden). Spain and Italy lag behind but sometimes, surprisingly, also do the right thing. The real troublemaker is ... Germany. For a reason nobody understands, Germany is like an US satellite in everything it does, but only ... half-hearted. Naturally, "the economy" is one reason (export centric country so it is readily blackmailable by the USA here) but even then you have to ask why german politicians have absolutely no pride at all. France has pride - that's good and bad but good in this context. (UK is more an US colony really after Brexit anyway, with Farage probably going to win - and cause more damage. Brits just don't learn from this.)
I don’t see what’s surprising about this. In the post-war period, most of Europe was hostile to German empowerment, from initial opposition to West Germany’s inclusion in NATO to later resistance to German reunification. The presence of tens of thousands of US troops in Germany also required more diplomatic communication and alignment to maintain status of forces agreements.
The status quo has only really changed in the last twenty years.
More to this point, the article points out that one of the drivers of all this is when Microsoft killed one of the emails an ICC prosecutor's email because the US administration sanctioned them:
> A decisive moment came last year when the Trump administration sanctioned the International Criminal Court’s top prosecutor after the tribunal, based in The Hague, Netherlands, issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an ally of President Donald Trump.
> The sanctions led Microsoft to cancel Khan’s ICC email, a move that was first reported by The Associated Press and sparked fears of a “kill switch” that Big Tech companies can use to turn off service at will.
Where do you get your information from? This is just plainly false. Heck, it runs afoul of the Constitution, so even if the government were to try something, it'd be smacked down real fast.
Which means it's time to look for alternative clients. I ws hoping for something like WeeSlack:
https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack
But all I found was:
https://github.com/btp/teams-cli
https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams
Are there really no good Teams clients? Doesn't have to plug in to WeeChat or be a TUI... But something?
That's just a pure lesson in pain.
Webhooks work, but proper bots are borderline impossible; at least without giving you the feeling that you'd rather pull your own teeth out with pliers.
But the available APIs still suck. For example there is none to just get all recent notifications. I don't know if teams itself has access to more and better apis? If not that would explain a lot.
Then begins the hunt through chats, meeting chats, group chats, channel chats and the notification pane (which doesn't show every type of notification!?) to find what it was.
Absolutely maddening.
Without threads, there is no breach of thread-etiquette.
When "channels" are so awkward, nobody uses them. Then there is no constant deluge of middle-age folks creating a Facebook out of work, needing to be reminded that the photos channel is for business-photos, not pictures of their kids.
When emoji support is limited, nobody has to police people pushing the boundaries of what emojis are appropriate.
The software is baffling. But I like it that way.
I'm not sure that's actually possible, you know...
Teams is supposed to be a professional workplace tool from one of the biggest software companies in the world, but it feels like something a high schooler coded up for fun. Weirdly Discord, a platform explicitly meant for gamers, is a more useful chat tool. I don't like Discord at all, but it's better than Teams.
Fine if you live near a datacenter.
In Sweden though, you go through France.
Not ideal.
Some engineers will facepalm super hard but won't be listened to, as usual, and we will enter the next cosmic age of self-inflicted suffering.
Teams isn't just mediocre, it's aggressively hostile to basic usability. The camera bar sits at the top of the window, directly blocking where you're supposed to position your camera for eye contact. Chat organisation is broken: you get duplicate groups because the order people were added matters somehow. Notifications phantom in and out. Reactions are buried in an activity feed. Search is useless. You can't reliably paste text without major formatting issues. The mobile app logs you out randomly and doesn’t tell you unless you manually check it. Desktop notifications don't sync with read state. Files uploaded to chat don't appear in the Files tab. The "new Teams" broke half the features that worked in classic Teams. Presence status is a coin flip. Audio settings reset themselves between calls. Screen sharing has a 50/50 chance of sharing the wrong window. The difference between a chat and a channel is arbitrary and confusing. You can't edit messages older than a few hours. Threading is bolted on and barely works.
Performance is inexcusable. Multiple gigabytes of RAM to display text messages and lag constantly on modern hardware. How do you make a chat application lag? It's rendering text, not computing fluid dynamics. Opening the application takes 30 seconds on an SSD. Switching between chats stutters. Typing has input delay.
The real problem isn't that Teams is terrible. It's that "it technically functions" has become an acceptable standard. When you've never experienced better, "it works" seems fine. But Teams is what happens when a monopoly position means you don't have to care about quality. Microsoft has unlimited resources and still ships this.
Even Skype for Business was more stable, and in Skype for Business you couldn't reliably select text. That's how low the bar is.
This. Opening a chat for the first time in the morning consistently takes 5-10 seconds. Opening subsequent ones takes 2-3 seconds. That is, if they contain plain text. If not, UI keps reflowing and jumping while thumbnails and silly gifs are loaded async, so you cannot even reliably click.
Sometimes, text copied from teams includes `[Sender Name, 2026-01-03, 21:51]` as a prefix—other times not. Sometimes you paste formatted text and it ends up pasted as formatted but inconsistent HTML, including (of course) text color of all things, rendering it black even with the dark theme, and thus unreadable. Other times you copy code, and there's two blank lines between each line when you paste elsewhere. It makes you cry, really.
Everything in Windows has input delay, ever since at Windows XP, it makes it infuriating to use.
My favourite one ( still happens ) is having to mute then unmute at the beginning of the conversation otherwise nobody can hear me. It was so common, with people fiddling with their headset, calling again etc that I eventually asked everyone exhibiting audio issues to start with this
Another interesting one is that if you’re not connected properly , you send messages , but never get notified that they never left, and are never notified that you’re not connected.
It’s also a resource hog and will eat your machine for breakfast.
The list goes on and on, it’s very surprising.
Likes to open new windows if you click a notification.
It is slow.
The search is not good at showing multiple results from the one chat. Why does it search all the other chats anyway...
Switching accounts constantly is a pain in the arse - I unfortunately have to use four accounts and one sub-account (member of some other org's team or something).
And the UI is terrible, huge balloons around everything. I want density but even at the densest setting it sucks.
Oh and it also fails to update online status. Often I click on a colleague who seems green and only then it updates and it turns out they've been away for 3 hours. Grrr
The company is falling apart so quickly they are going to have to pay up again before the end of the month.
But yeah, Microsoft licensing is impossible to understand.
The new Outlook app is horrible though.
Once I worked in a company with two brands after a fusion, and all of us had to use both Exchange and Lotus Notes. And I was almost forgetting SharePoint.
No more Words? Introducing a worse software than Words...
(1) They couldn't imagine anyone ever. losing their gloriously developed MS Teams.
(2) Since everyone knows MS Teams and sitting in meetings all day is the one most important thing to get stuff done, they went ahead and made MS Teams a "priority". F using anything else! Maybe if it doesn't release the audio input, it will be 50ms faster next call! That ought to be enough for you!
That's primarily why it sucks, and that seems to be Microsoft's standard operating procedure. Everything they put out is in the category of "does everything, but half-assed with a web of fragile "integrations" that break if you look at it funny."
Worse, it's all SharePoint all the way down. Every team (and private channel!) is a SharePoint site, every user's OneDrive in the same tenant is a personal SharePoint Site. Every M365 Group gets its own SharePoint site (and mailbox). Creating a Team also creates an M365 group, but not vice versa.
Heaven forbid you rename something in the stack or you are in for a world of pain.
It's also by design that way. SharePoint storage is expensive, and boy what a disaster it is to ever try and get your data out of it.
Yet, for some reason, companies keep buying it and keep using it, letting Microsoft suck them in and hold them there for eternity.
If you're starting a new company, never, ever, buy anything Microsoft. Just don't go down that road. It's not worth it.
Yeah, there is half assed stuff. But it’s not what most of the big corp uses anyway. So your little dev specific use case isn’t going to get much traction.
Teams does one thing well. It can do group chats and team calls. That’s most of what people use it for. And your corp gets a discount bundle.
Usually at big corp I haven’t seen a ceo actually schedule their own calls or deal with day to day bullshit. They have a whole team of staff for that.
I've spent a full day attempting to send a webhook in. Teams used to work like slack (a channel admin can create an endpoint; you post to it.) Microsoft deprecated that because it worked. It's now a maze of permissions and it silently fails with no error messages at all.
Scrollback regularly fails and also requires app restart.
I cannot insert images into a channel w/ a customer via drag and drop, but I can paste them by opening them in preview, copying the image, and cmd+v into the channel. I wasted 4 hours w/ support trying to figure out why I can't drag images into the shared channel before giving up. This is typical of the Teams experience.
I could go on. Besides facebook's tools, it is the worst piece of software I've used and a demonstration of monopoly power to distribute total garbage. Slack has issues, but it does reliably do the core thing.
Yup, we struggle with this. Seems to have to do with needing to pay for seats in order to have file-sharing allowed (but you can still paste Sharepoint/Onedrive links). Can't share files if there's even a single external person in the chat/channel. Forced us to buy another seat subscription. It's great!
1 - fails 2 - w/ no useful feedback to user; 3 - I couldn't get support to tell me why (fine, small account), but the customer with 900 licensed seats couldn't either
Fortunately, said customer has come to the realization of how very bad it is and is hopefully migrating to Slack.
A holy trinity if ever I have seen one.
- opening Sharepoint pages in Teams' half-baked browser;
- opening Word or Excel in Teams' own half-baked editor;
- Exchange integration is the calendar, period. Nothing else. The only thing actually usable.
Am I missing anything?
Each one of these actions is a stepping stone the world is taking as a direct consequence of U.S. political negligence. And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.
EU citizens have elected ineffective leaders for decades -- leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies. They have elected leaders who were until very recently heavily dependent on Russian energy.
As a result, EU dependence on US tech is near-total. I remember hearing a few months ago that companies in the EU still have to use Dun & Bradstreet (a US company) for routine government filings!
Some minor headlines about civil servants stopping their usage of office sound impressive but isn't really making a dent in Microsoft's bottom line. If and when Microsoft's revenues from the EU start dropping by double digits or more, I am sure they will contribute large amounts of money to make the US government more civil and normal than it's being today.
> And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.
As a software consumer, if this takes off, I don't see any reason I would want the course to be reversed. More adoption and support of open software and standards is beneficial for consumers. It might even get Microsoft and the rest of US Big Tech to actively compete for a change rather than relying on their near-total monopoly.
Remarkable how it is the politicans who should have been doing this when it doesn't get done, and how everyone is quick to complain if politicians meddle in what the private sector should have been doing. This is a recurring theme in a lot of debates. And I think it has to do with our need to blame someone but ourselves.
Yes, one could solve this through procurement rules that favor domestic or regional products. And there are sometimes procurement rules that state that domestic vendors should be preferred. But I have seen that in practice and it doesn't actually work. One one project I worked on decades ago the military was sourcing a system for "local administration". A company that was effectively bankrupt, had the weirdest OS I have ever used, and the worst office support systems I've had the misfortune of trying to use, was the only domestic candidate. Yes, it did check the boxes in the procurement process, but everyone knew it was never going to happen.
Interoperability, product maturity, familiarity, feature completeness, quality etc tends to win out.
I think we have to realize that this has almost nothing to do with our political leaders and everything to do with our inability to create software businesses in Europe. We need to figure that bit out. And perhaps this is the kick in the behind we needed to get our act together.
When we speak of the failure of EU politicians, it has been in removing the barriers in their own market to even develop successful technology companies given all the highly educated local talent (they have a larger population than the US!).
The lack of a single capital market, no single regulatory market, no single language market, hilariously wide variance in taxation/labor/corporate law, etc. is why the EU can never compete in each tech wave (from the transistor to mainframes to the PC to the internet to ecommerce to social media to smartphones to AI etc. etc.)
Trillions in tax revenue is missing from the successful companies that were never built and the income tax from high-paid employees that don't exist. The last 60 years of growth in the digital realm could be funding the EU's various rotting social welfare systems and instead be providing countries across the region with a higher standard of living. Instead they are stuck living off the tax receipts thrown off by dying industrial-age giants. Which China will soon kill.
This is absolutely a policy failure, and regardless of the historical reasons why we ended up here, to paint it as anything other than a policy failure is to not live in reality.
It's not like there are people out there on the campaign trail every election saying "if I'm elected, I'll ensure we build homegrown cloud alternatives". Nobody campaigns on issues like that. The reality is you have to choose between people who want to kick the immigrants out and people who don't, people who want to enact green policies and people who don't. People who want a European army and people who don't. These big issues are what people vote on, even if we care that there should be a homegrown cloud industry. I really do care, but it's not something I can do anything about at the ballot box
Not that I disagree in principle with most of the tech regulations; it does make sense to protect privacy and combat monopolistic abuses and so on.
But you also need to support your own tech industry at the same time, and the efforts there have been like quarter-assed at most.
Could you name which European nation this was?
I would genuinely be interested in knowing.
For example, they blame America for their own issue of lacking tech companies, despite Europe taking credit for having fewer work hours, more 'equitable' societies, etc.
They blame China for their own issue of lacking domestic manufacturing, despite their pride at having strong unions, supposedly good labor protections, and vacations.
They blame India for the bogey of 'buying Russian oil', instead of blaming themselves for being the LARGEST purchaser of refined oil products from India. As if India, one of the hottest countries on the planet, actually needs heating oil.
At this point, which country / region does Europe not blame? It's always someone else's fault. No one even thinks to look inside themselves.
Why would we blame the US for our own inability to build a viable software industry? Europe has been painfully aware for years that this is self-inflicted.
The reason there is now serious talk about reducing dependence on the US is not resentment, it is risk. Dependence used to be a convenience. It is increasingly a liability. Trust in long-term stability, rule continuity, and alignment of interests is no longer something we can assume. That changes the calculus, regardless of who is "at fault".
From the perspective of someone who works in software, I’m glad this conversation is finally happening. It’s not about assigning blame. It is about taking responsibility for capabilities we should never have outsourced so completely in the first place.
If this looks like blame from the outside, that’s a misunderstanding of what self-correction looks like.
What's not clear is if Europeans are actually willing to federalize/centralize power enough to make that happen. E.g. in foreign policy, a Europe with twenty different strategies and twenty different militaries will never be able to swing its weight around the same as the US*, even if the collective level of power is the same on paper. But Europeans are still focused so much on "my country wants to do X" that it seems like they'd rather be separate than strong.
* A strong military is almost always an important component of foreign policy, even when it's not actually used to do anything...because of the implication.
About 25% of EU parliament parties are against EU. Theyt are paid by the EU to tell how much they hate this institution.
There are no two countries in the EU who are aligned. Some of them are not completely out of synch (mostly the Nordics), some are in schizophrenia mode (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia mostly) where they eat most of the EU funds (relatively and in absolute terms) but hate it.
With such an institution, there is no real hope of having a strong position backed by competent people. Just look at ENISA and the disgrace this organization is in the era of cybersecurity.
We also had a EU-wide referendum about daylight saving. 5 M peopel responsed (a few percent of the population). It was the largest response in the history of the EU. And then it was trashed.
The mountains of EUR we burn is insane.
Correction: They're paid by the EU taxpayers. And as politicians, there's a chance their vociferation of hate towards the EU is just parroting the opinion their voters have towards the EU, which means they're doing their job as politicians, whether you like their opinions or not.
>some are in schizophrenia mode (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia mostly) [...] but hate it
Why is the EU treated like a sacred cow that people shouldn't be allowed to hate?
People's happiness with the EU is directly tied to their QoL and purchasing power and you don't need to be a scientist to see that the poorest people in the EU have been hit hardest by the energy price hikes caused by Germany's stupid anti-nuclear pro-Ruski gas decisions, the inflation caused by the ECB's excessive COVID money printing, the support of mass migration, and the EU's response to the war in Ukraine, leading to a massive decline in QoL and purchasing power, so of course they're not gonna be happy with the EU when their decisions negatively affected them.
The problem with the EU is that it pushes for blanket policies and solutions across the hugely diverse union, while different members get negatively impacted differently by each policy, some more some less, but the point is there cannot be a one size fits all solution that favors all EU members at the same time, leading to EU picking winners and losers with a widening inequality. So of course those drawing the short straw are gonna hate it.
Worth remembering that Hungary, Slovakia, et-al have loved the EU for many, many years after joining. It's not like they suddenly decided to hate the EU for absolutely no reason. So then let's examine and talk about those reasons, instead of calling them schizophrenic which doesn't solve anything and just breeds more animosity and extremism.
Yes I completely agree with you. The EU is enabling spending its citizens' money to criticize itself. If this is not a sick situation, I do not know what this is.
To be clear, I am all for a union of European countries *that all participate in the effort. We need this to stand against the US or the BRICS block, without a union we are a set of insignificant countries that have fought for the last two millennia.
If a country wants to participate, it means it will pay for everyone (with a net zero for everyone) and buy EU products. Otherwise thsi is sabotage.
> Why is the EU treated like a sacred cow that people shouldn't be allowed to hate?
It is not a sacred cow, it is currently almost useless when it comes to hard decisions. So it should change. But if a country is in, it is in - and not pump in monety and complains about the organization.
We can have rich's problems when we are rich. In times of crisis we need to be a hard barrier. Which we are not.
> you don't need to be a scientist to see that the poorest people in the EU
You count Poland as a poor country? With its economic growth that will overtake UK?
> So then let's examine and talk about those reasons, instead of calling them schizophrenic which doesn't solve anything and just breeds more animosity and extremism.
Who is "we"? If you are from the EU you can vote for your country to be represented by the correct people (who care about the region as a whole). Or vote for those who want to dramatically change it so that it fits to its role not only when everything is fine, but also in hard times.
Please do so.
All 3 countries benefit massively from being in the EU, particularly Poland, who is on track to become one of the largest EU economies.
In fact, every country in the bloc benefits immensely from being in the bloc. The UK is a good reminder that leaving only brings stagnation.
European countries are relatively small in the world stage. Think that Germany has the popularity of Chinese provinces. In trade negotiations the EU gets to play much tougher than any individual country would ever dream of, and free access to the whole bloc is a massive benefit.
Is it perfect? Obviously not. But more often than not, the downsides and inefficiencies come from the fact that individual countries still hold too much power, and have too many redundant bureaucracies with the bloc itself.
Poland has a steady grow and might leap the UK in the nearby future. UK does not have grow per Capita since Brexit. Hungary is poor because Orban is corrupt and corruption is bad for economy.
Most US Citizens are not voting on what you think they're voting on. Most are worried about things that affect their day-to-day life like cost of eggs, the cost of gas, taxes going up, my 401K going in the dumpster.
I live and breathe tech everyday. I see the dangers of it all around me. Day in and day out. You try and talk to people about how dangerous some of this stuff is. Unless people feel it somehow like having their identity stolen and they spend three years trying to fix it all? Nothing will ever change.
People are 100% immune to this stuff now. Its the old frog in boiler water analogy.
Happiness is reality minus expectations, and the future is not going to be as good as the past, based on available data, evidence, and trends Everything is downstream of that. The vibes might be bad, but they ain't gonna get better.
Financial Times: The consumer sentiment puzzle deepens - https://www.ft.com/content/f3edc83f-1fd0-4d65-b773-89bec9043... | https://archive.today/nFlfY - February 3rd, 2026
(some component of price increases has been predatory monopoly gouging covered extensively by Matt Stoller on his newsletter https://www.thebignewsletter.com/, but for our purposes, we can assume this admin isn't going to impair that component of price levels and inflation with regulation for the next 3 years)
This is what people who "vote their feelings" would assert. Most people think they are "sophisticated" and "educated" on these issues, both Democrats and Republicans. There is ample evidence that this is not the case for either.
Politics is completely driven by uncritical "just so" narratives. The people pushing the discourse never check or justify their assumptions with actual data. This is the real issue.
Which begs the question: does democracy still work when voters are so easily misled? I don’t believe that the current generation is fundamentally more or less intelligent than the previous ones. Is technology to blame for disseminating misinformation too rapidly for us to cope?
In the original structure, the public directly elected members of the House of Representatives. This chamber was meant to serve as the immediate voice of the population — responsive, numerous, and frequently subject to elections. It represented popular sentiment but was intentionally balanced by slower, more insulated institutions.
The Senate originally functioned as that stabilizing counterweight. Senators were selected by state legislatures rather than direct vote. This meant they were accountable primarily to the governments of sovereign states rather than transient public passions. The Senate therefore protected state interests, ensured continuity of policy, and acted as a brake on sudden shifts in national mood. The 17th Amendment, which later established direct election of senators, fundamentally altered this federal balance by shifting the Senate toward popular representation rather than state representation.
The presidency was also designed to be buffered from direct democratic selection. The Electoral College was not merely a ceremonial intermediary. Electors were expected to exercise independent judgment and represent state-level deliberation. The system assumed electors would be politically informed individuals capable of evaluating candidates beyond campaign popularity or mass persuasion. In theory, this created a safeguard against demagogues or candidates elevated purely through public excitement.
The vice presidency was structured differently from modern expectations. Originally, the candidate receiving the second highest number of electoral votes became vice president. This design forced cooperation between rival factions and ensured that dissenting political voices remained inside executive governance rather than entirely excluded from power. Although this sometimes created tension, it reflected a belief that competing perspectives strengthened stability.
Underlying these mechanisms was a broader philosophy: governance should incorporate public input while filtering it through layers of institutional judgment. The founders feared what they called “tyranny of the majority,” where temporary popular consensus could override minority rights, long-term national interests, or constitutional boundaries.
Advocates of restoring earlier structural features often argue that modern reforms unintentionally removed stabilizing mechanisms. They contend that direct election of senators nationalized political incentives, encouraging senators to prioritize national party platforms over state-specific interests. Similarly, modern expectations that presidential electors must follow popular vote outcomes arguably transformed the Electoral College from a deliberative body into a procedural formality.
From this viewpoint, reintroducing intermediary decision makers could theoretically slow political volatility, encourage more qualified candidate evaluation, and strengthen federalism by returning power to state governments. However, proponents of such reforms often acknowledge that intermediary systems would require strong transparency, accountability standards, and anti-corruption safeguards. Without those protections, layered elector systems could risk elite capture or reduced public legitimacy.
Critics of restoring these structures typically argue that expanded direct voting increased democratic legitimacy, voter participation, and political equality. They often contend that intermediary systems historically enabled exclusion and reduced accountability to the general population.
The debate therefore centers on a classic governance tradeoff: stability and deliberation versus direct popular sovereignty. The original American constitutional framework leaned toward stability through representation filters, while modern reforms have leaned toward expanding direct electoral influence.
~130M American adults have low literacy skills with 54% of people 16-74 below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. And they vote in some amount. Many may not be functional enough to be self aware about their level of education and sophistication, based on the data.
https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy
https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFou...
Are they? It seems to me like they’re worried about things like women having access to too much healthcare, too many non white people, and too many women leaders. They voted for a guy that wants to make the most expensive purchase of most people’s lives even more expensive:
Not to mention the enormous tax increases by way of getting rid of the expanded ACA premium credits.
Framing immigration reform as "racists think there are too many non white people" is what costs Democrats elections.
Maybe they say that but it's justification for their racist believes, which they still don't want to talk openly about. It just sounds better when someone invents some "benefits" of it. Like wild claims in an ad is helping the buyer justify their impulse shopping.
Immediately dismissing this as racism isn't going to help you understand it, or help the Democrats beat the Republicans.
The Irish used to be in a similar position like the people from South America today. Now they are seen as white but before WWI they weren't seen as white by the WASPs. And it's totally normal for some of the second or third generation immigrants to become racist against new immigrants. Rite of passage.
To your earlier point: Boston racism is now legendary (see Celtics fans)
Many of the most disgusting and radical Democracy hating people in Trumps inner circle are Catholics by the way. Go figure.
> When one-time Democrat Sam Negron headed to the polls to cast a ballot for Donald Trump in 2024, he did so with one thing on his mind above all - the economy.
> "I didn't like paying $7 for eggs," said Negron, a Pennsylvania state constable in the majority-Latino city of Allentown. "But basically it was all his talking points… making the US a strong country again."
...
> One poll, from Pew, suggested that 93% of Latinos who cast their votes for Trump rated the economy as their primary issue, with violent crime and immigration trailing far behind.
> Data from the new CBS poll shows that a significant majority of Latinos - 61% - disapprove of Trump's handling of the economy, while 69% disapprove of his handling of inflation. The vast majority said they judge the performance of the US economy through prices.
Did he just wake up from a coma?
Well it fucking is. But thinking that current king can fix it is a lunacy
You know what the most effective instrument of power is? Distance. The rich and powerful distance themselves physically from the people, so the demands, worries, accusations, questions etc can't reach them.
Maybe that was never a way to whatever ideal solution or policies might be possible in the future. But the only possible benefit of the current administration is that people's eyes get opened to the lunacy that's possible, resulting in a sort of mini-revolution that enacts changes that prevent the collusion and grift that are happening now.
The Trump administration doesn't have any real government improvements in mind. They're only play is to destabilize the current status of whatever's in their sights, blame Democrats or whoever else is convenient for the mess, and profit from the confusion. Example: The Republican party has always had financial conservatism as a main goal. When was the last time the national debt or deficit improved under Republican leadership? Another, healthcare: For all of the complaining that Republicans have done about Obamacare, why haven't they replaced it with something better yet since they've had full control of the government? They've shown that they don't actually care about good government.
What we got in the current administration wasn't any kind of secret before the 2024 election. People voted for it anyway because they're susceptible to the kinds of misinformation they were being fed. Trump's latest comments on his lack of commitment to peace, the cost of housing, and the well-being of the general population (just to name a few) make it clear that he doesn't consider them important; and Republican's fealty to him show the same of them.
What is the point in changing the messaging when racism and sexism are at the root of the problem?
For the record, I abhor my non federal level Democrat leaders, and vote Republican on the state and local level (because they are less crazy than the Democrats at this level).
Because it is in fact the messaging which is the problem, not racism or sexism. Why on God's green earth would you expect people to vote for a political class that openly hates them, as indeed posters here are kindly demonstrating? I can tell you from personal experience that there are a great many Trump voters who aren't racist or sexist in any way. They are friendly and helpful to all whom they encounter in life. But they believed (rightly or wrongly) that Trump would best represent their interests, so they voted for him. Excoriating them as Bad People (TM) is only going to convince them that they were right to vote for Trump, because they can observe that Trump's opposition hates them.
If your goal is to reduce support for Trump (or at this point his successor, since he can't be president again), then your #1 priority should be to work on messaging. It is the messaging of the Democrats that pushed so many people into Trump's arms, and unless that is changed it will do so again. Painting with the broad brush of "they're just racist" is not only intellectually lazy and untrue, it is actively harmful to the Trump opposition's cause.
Yes, of course, the reason Republican voters embrace the concept of deplorable is because the Dems are mean to them. That totally makes them noble and not in fact deplorable.
> It is the messaging of the Democrats that pushed so many people into Trump's arms
He got less than 50% of the vote, if the Dems are pushing so many people to Trump they are doing a crappy job of it.
Though I do agree that the Dems suck on messaging, it is not because they villainize Republican voters. It's because they don't focus their efforts on bread-and-button progressive priorities like labor and healthcare. They blew their wad on trans rights, which just isn't a great strategy to move a lot of voters to the polls.
I don't think anyone ever embraces being called deplorable, that seems like a strange take. If anything, being called deplorable would just make someone dislike the name-caller. Don't take my word for it, this is behavior exhibited by children and adults every day.
Or are you twisting up a reference where HRC called the right "a basket of deplorables" ?
There was a time right after the election [0] where messaging was being talked about, and it seems that effort tailed off as people got more emotional and angry, which I suppose isn't surprising.
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/22/democrats-woke-lang...
If your position is that racism and sexism are the root of the problem — which I am not contesting — how wise do you think it was for the Democrats to try running with a black woman?
The Epstein revelations show that pretty much everyone that could make it to the ballot list has skeletons in their closet. The only difference is that some of them manage to hide it better than others.
And there's levels of skeletons, but calling up a governor and asking them to find votes and baselessly casting doubts on elections and endorsing and freeing people who attacked the US government is not on the same level of everyone else's skeletons.
Your argument is coming up everytime when right-wing populists gain votes, and it's always a fatal trap. Merz in Germany claimed to beat the AfD (who is loved by Bannon and Musk and was loved by Epstein btw, all "wonderful" people), and it failed he barely made it to become chancellor. It also failed in the 90s during the first wave of racism in Germany after re-unification.
The US has spent tens of trillions defending Europe indirectly subsidizing social policies despite this the US has persistently been unpopular with Europeans because, obviously, they are a political target for domestic politicians (btw, you see this almost everywhere...if country A gives country B subsidies, you will almost always find that country A's people are virulently hated by a significant proportion of country B's population, the US was more unpopular than Russian before the Ukraine invasion in Germany...let me just repeat: a country which invaded Europe was more popular than a country which gave hundreds of billions a year in defence subsidies).
Acting as if xenophobia towards the US hasn't always been part of the European political climate is not based in reality. Europe has been trying to protect its own market for decades, unsuccessfully. What is more, there is very limited trade WITHIN Europe in certain industries because of the hurdle of national xenophobia and protectionism. Europe has made an industry out of failure and greivance...and, for some reason, part of this narrative is that no country contributes as much as Europe.
Reality? Iran...continued to break US sanctions for years so that failing European defence companies could sell their junk, investigations of Iranian politicians bribing EU parliamentarians. Russia...continued to break US sanctions after Ukraine invasion, had an extremely subservient relationship with Russia despite being repeatedly told by the US that NordStream 2 would lead to Ukraine invasion, former German president actually works for NordStream. On and on, the same mistakes being made all the time because there has never been any real strategy apart from extreme short-term political advantage to protect continued failure to generate social or economic gain in most of Europe (not all tbf, but the executive polling numbers that you see in some countries is incredible, you wouldn't think they have elections).
USA is not defending Europe from anyone.
As a counter-example, you cannot expect an LGBT person to vote for a right-wing conservative who advocates against their own rights, even if that candidate makes the "right call" on every other issue.
I can't think of a candidate that fits this description.
Historically, the right side was pro-monarchy. Then, you go extreme.
Almost as many people voted against the current US administration as voted for it, so although it is true that "so many US citizens do not see the ramifications", there almost as many who do (or some version of them).
And of course once you have gotten out of vendor lock in, you never go back. If you do go back to that vendor that locked you in before, because of some sweetheart deal, you make sure to set up all sorts of escape hatches so if you need to bounce quickly you can.
The vendor lock in of the EU to the US for so many things is being dismantled.
2) Continental Europe has shown a willingness to continue dependency on other countries in the face of far, far worse national behavior. NordStream 2 planned after the invasion of Georgia and was still under construction after Putin had invaded and annexed Crimea. Not "threatened" to do so, he had actually done it. There was a body count involved. So it's not too far off-base to think that despite all of the foolishness from the Trump administration, the US could seek some slack for its technology sector. It's not like you need Teams to keep your factories running and to avoid freezing to death in the winter, but that was the sort of integration with the Russians that Europeans were seeking to maintain while Putin was redrawing the map, at least until the Ukraine invasion, and even then, it took clandestine activity to permanently take NordStream offline.
People like Trump will almost certainly point at this and say that this shows Europeans to be allies of convenience, not true partners. People like him love to cry about double standards.
putin still has not gone to war, nor threatened to invade the EU yet to the point of international incident. the US has both sent politicians and other operators to try and fail at formenting rebellion in greenland against denmark, and has readied troops to invade
Russian agents are thought to have committed numerous acts, almost all of which could be considered acts of war, on EU/UK soil, or against EU/UK nationals
* Poisoning of the Skripals with a chemical warfare agent, one dead, 2018, Salisbury, England, UK [0]
* Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko with a radioisotope, one dead, 2006, London, England, UK [1]
* Vrbětice ammunition warehouse explosions, one dead, 2014, Zlín Region, Czechia [2]
* Jamming of GPS signals used by EU President Ursula von der Leyen's jet, 2025, Bulgaria [3]
* Arson of the Marywilska 44 shopping center, 2024, Warsaw, Poland [4]
* Shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over the Donbas, 2014, 283 dead, most of them Netherlands citizens [5]
* Sabotage of underwater telecommunications cables, railway lines, cyberattacks, probing airspace with armed aircraft, and on and on - just Google it, I don't have enough time to mention all of these.
... you were saying?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrbětice_ammunition_wareh...
[3] https://apnews.com/article/russia-europe-jamming-spoofing-gp...
[4] https://notesfrompoland.com/2025/05/12/poland-confirms-russi...
[5] https://www.britannica.com/event/Malaysia-Airlines-flight-17
It's a shame the Americans don't see the ramifications of their political decisions.
US will be Great like all Giants are - terrifying and alone ;-)
Its architecture is weird, with a proxy inside you can harden only by editing data inside a container that is volatyile by design (and has to be). There are numerous issues opened on that topic, Nextcloud response is "live with it".
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366633894/European-gover...
(0ct 2025)
Interestingly, there is also a NATO-Matrix app:
There are many small European startups who do not have infrastructure to take on large European multinationals as clients. A lot of EU labor laws have hard requirements at 50 and 100 employees so startups stay below those lines and remain tech lifestyle companies.
Now up to 24 official languages and still potentially growing in the future (although this is a bit of an overcount because some of them are mutually intelligible to various degrees, it's still a lot).
It's interesting to think that at the time of original ECSC treaty there were only four languages (French, German, Dutch and Italian). That's just about manageable, now it is a bit of an issue
Fengkou fēng kǒu 风口
n. wind tunnel; an area or sector where, for a period of time, all investors want to invest in. Everyone stands a chance to fly when there is favorable wind blowing from behind.
https://www.newconceptmandarin.com/learn-chinese-blog/chines...
Time to start a Drupal consulting firm again.
We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement. And economic damage really is the key to the heart of these United States of Three Corporations in a Trench Coat.
We’ve seen companies and CEOs paying millions in bribes to be close to the president. Now this aligns their financial interests with shifting our foreign policy. Not how it ought to work, but it’s the world we have.
We as consumers (and for that matter, aspiring businesspeople) all benefit when we have more entrants to the market that are challenging the existing monopolies. And to be honest I don't think the EU has the incentives to pull this off anyway, these are manufactured headlines around what's a minor blip in the vast coffers of American corporations. I'm sure zero alarm bells are going off in Redmond because some EU bureacrats wrote a headline around switching to a Django app built in a hackathon.
As a US citizen, it is incredibly in my selfish interest for the US to not be a shitty friend. Just as it is in our selfish interest to promote democracy, less corruption, and free markets.
While I agree with those things, morally, they are also in the pure self-interest of the United States.
They blame this on the people who lack merit, and didn't study hard enough to get their share of the highest profit margins in history. They want them to be punished. The people who actually do and make things, rather than shuffling things around, marketing things and sending emails.
It's no wonder that they hope for some sort of punishment to force people to flock to them. US Liberals offer working people absolutely nothing but mockery. The only reason they have a chance at getting back into government is because Trump's corruption will keep the people who voted for him from voting at all. MAGA (with fellow-travelers who voted for him while holding their noses, repulsed by the alternative) is falling apart over foreign wars, Epstein, and H1Bs, not any of the middle class lib objections. Democrats also will give you war, Epstein and H1B.
The midterms, and the next election, will be won by the side that has managed to disillusion slightly fewer voters to the entire democratic process. I'm sorry, but that still bodes well for the loudmouth strongman.
Everything America is doing right now is because America is precisely NOT taking corporate decisions. America is doing things to the international order that are directly fucking up American corporations. Only a committed social democrat can look at the populist right-wing chaos right now, and claim that's "Corporate" action. If anything, Corporations were more liberal than the population at large in America, and that's part of the reason why Trump's racist populism is so popular ... he's exploiting a backlash. Turns out America has far more nativists than you ever imagined.
But yeah, go ahead and call it "Corporations in a trenchcoat" because then you don't have to think about how Corporations have actually played the biggest role in promoting diversity in America. While government consistently goes sharply left and right based on whichever lunatic the American public elects next.
How can you abandon something that never existed. While US was among the better superpowers it never for a moment engaged in good faith. Trump just makes it naked and brutish.
I love that there is a lot more enthusiasm about OSS adoption within EU software devs, but at a population or government level there doesn't appear to be any coherent strategy to gradually replace US tech other than these knee-jerk headliner moves that don't move the needle much.
As a software consumer I would love it if there were open-first software standards adopted within this large of a population that would force US Big Tech to actually compete rather than rest on their monopoly power. But I am pretty skeptical and pessimistic about this actually being able to happen, given the historical failures of the EU.
I can only assume this is a comparison to the US
The world doesn't care about the US yard stick so much. Even less now than before. We in Europe don't care our economy is smaller than the US, that our cars are smaller etc.
Bigger is not always better
You have no equivalents for software. That's why all of your consumer and most of your official stuff runs on US software and cloud platforms, and why headlines like these are...headlines rather than just being normal.
Don't get me wrong -- as a US consumer, I would love for this to change and have EuroCloud or whatever. Hetzner isn't too bad. But it doesn't have the scale and service breadth that Microsoft, Amazon or Google bring.
So which is it? Does scale not matter, or are you unhappy with the outcome of ignoring it?
I have to do my patriotic duty to remind you that SAP is the 6th/7th largest software company in the world by market cap. I know not as exiting as notepad with AI but they do exist.
That said US software giants are a disease for democratic societies. If Europe wants software sovereignty we don't need "significant large software companies" we need a hundred medium sized ones that reflect the diversity of the dozens of nations on the continent. We don't need gilded age robber barrons owning the largest communications network shaping politics. We need a democratic genuinely market respecting solution, we don't need to emulate the techno-feudalism of the US or China.
Europe needs in fact to be more ambitious than to build its own Microsoft. We need a genuinely open ecosystem which is not going to have as its goal to extract value out of its users.
Sure, but can you be honest and admit that you don't have any of this yet? Just to take a simple thing like messaging, Europeans mainly use WhatsApp (US), FB Messenger (US), and Telegram (Russian) to communicate.
> SAP is the 6th/7th largest software company in the world by market cap
Okay I will give you that one. Market cap doesn't always equal ubiquity though; ask your non technical (or even most of your technical) friends what SAP does and you will get blank stares. Ask them what Microsoft does and you will usually get a reasonable answer that's not "Notepad with AI".
Because it's very hard to compete against monopolies when there are network effects. What you can do is regulate them. The US government has been working very hard in the last decades to prevent that.
Recommended: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
I don't think the thing holding back Europe's tech market is that the US encourages allies to not allow backdooring proprietary software, or the cries that it's unfair that the US doesn't strangle their own tech market with equally burdensome regulation. The problem Europe's tech industry has faced is that the EU killed it in the crib with regulations, and now there's more fear of "what if there are bad side effects in being successful" than there is fear of never being successful.
Yes, it'd be great if there was a thriving market of mid-sized EU tech companies working in a well-regulated and consumer friendly market. There just isn't, though. I'm generally a fan of Doctorow, but the idea that the EU is just a few hackers reverse-engineering a new client for teams/youtube/whatsapp away from that world is hard for me to see.
Apart from that it's hard to take statements from such an ignorant US centristic point of view about what europe is/has/has not seriously.
Let's see how things will play out for europe and how our souvereignty efforts will impact the US economy.
Yes of course I can be honest. We don't have any of that. But if I'd sketch out a genuine European future in software to me it would look something like this. You have technologies like Tim Berner Lee's Solid[1] and social protocols like Mastodon/Bluesky/etc owned as public infrastructure and operated by its people. You could imagine each region of Europe having its own sovereign digital space federated with individuals owning their data, a genuine network mirroring the region as it is.
The big problem with this isn't just technical, it's mental. The user of today anywhere is a consumer. It's like turning a serf into a citizen. I don't think this is a five year vision, it's more like a 50 year program. I think it's going to be a long time until we've convinced people that taking ownership of and participating in their digital life, being tinkerers, owners, netizens is vital.
Not sure if this is aimed at the immediate parent comment or mine, but I agree completely. US tech is developed due to the unique VC ecosystem, but in my opinion EU governments have lagged behind on setting up their own ecosystem (VC or otherwise) that would create equivalently sized and capable companies.
I also don't understand what the parent means by OSS being "owned" by the US. That ownership is not meaningful due to many/all of the licenses; and there are many meaningful EU OSS contributions.
In the case of ffmpeg, about a decade ago, I worked at a company who made substantial contributions to it, and employed many significant contributors. You guys live in fantasy land.
Linux is also an American thing. The benevolent-dictator-for-life of Linux lives in Portland, OR. Intel (also in Portland mostly) is one of the largest contributors, along with AMD. We can go on and on. this is obviously going to be the case when the main CPU vendors are American.
I don't think you and I use the same definition of open source software. Controlling the upstream is absolutely not equivalent to controlling the software, nor is being a majority contributor. These things are very obvious to anyone that regularly works with FOSS in a professional capacity.
On a side and more general note: "Global Innovation Index 2025"
"Europe hosts 15 economies ranked among the global top 25, including six in the top 10. Switzerland (1st) retains the global lead, followed by Sweden (2nd), the United Kingdom (6th) and Finland (7th). Thirteen out of 39 European economies covered moved up the ranks, marking a notable increase from nine last year.
Notable movers include Ireland (18th), Belgium (21st) and Norway (20th), which breaks into the top 20.
Eastern European economies also show solid momentum. Lithuania (33rd) leads globally for unicorn valuation and digital innovation – with leading positions in app creation, ICT use and Knowledge-intensive employment.Europe is also home to dynamic innovation clusters, led by Germany with seven clusters and the United Kingdom with four, including Cambridge and Oxford. However, European innovation clusters trail the US in venture capital strength."
<https://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2025/article_0009...>
Slack is a delight compared to Teams. And I'm not even alone in this, everyone is still using slack until it gets pried off our hands. So help me God anyone mentions Copilot one more time...
If the gov really took an expansive view of antitrust, it would break up software bundling and require ala carte pricing per app, defined as a single primary use case.
This will become all the more important as OpenAI/Anthropic start bundling all of their products together and putting existing SaaS out of business for no reason other than to get some crucial model or capability, companies have to buy the whole bundle.
There's already an extremely well known program called "Visio", namely Microsoft Visio, and it is included in many of the same Microsoft commercial office products that include Microsoft Teams. If you tell someone to switch from Microsoft Teams to Visio a lot of people will assume you mean Microsoft Visio and get rather confused.