France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

translation (and without twitter): https://www-numerama-com.translate.goog/cyberguerre/2167301-...

Silicon Valley type of companies grew to be giants by exploiting personal data of users without any regard for privacy and lax regulations. European companies can’t match them because of the regulations and privacy laws. It’s not the lack of talent or investment that is holding EU back.

I’ve worked at a couple monster corporations who spent a lot of time and money to move off of Google and Amazon, because they were paranoid about espionage, only to return a couple years later at even greater expense.

I doubt the French government will fare any better. They will end up spending hundreds of millions of Euros , maybe a couple billion, and have to return in a couple years. Especially with AI moats being built. AI is far too competitive. Every company will need to employ AI as a Goon ( see David Graber) to defend against all of the AI Goons going after them.

If only they'd taken their reliance on Russian natural gas so seriously.

Let's hope the alternatives they build are open source

Jami is read for the big time!

Link to the actual article: https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-...

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

Gee, if only there had been a European market leader in instant messaging, voice over IP and video chat in the 2000s already. Then we could just use that instead of Microsoft Teams.

I wonder if the EU will begin trying to recruit American software engineers. I’d love to move to France.

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.

Deleted tweet?

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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It's difficult to take an announcement like this seriously when it's posted on Twitter.