France and Germany are actually cooperating on most of these, like the word processor: https://www.techspot.com/news/107225-france-germany-unveil-d...

Plus, it's all open source, so the rest of the world is free to use it as well!

> It would be an even better move to allow those in Europe or indeed the rest of the world to also benefit.

Those initiatives are usually open source. It's just that many times, each country wants to make their own. But it's still better than staying with the TooBigTech monopolies.

France is funding a lot of open source projects. They may not be very sexy or trendy, but they are there.

It's good to differentiate truly independent tech from the unfortunately common government-pushed French-tech that are US-tech rewrapped.

e.g. Qwant is a re-skin of Microsoft Bing

It's a great move overall.

They do: https://github.com/suitenumerique It's used by, among others, the Dutch government: https://github.com/MinBZK/mijn-bureau

There's been some 'back and forth' or "progress and regress' about this.

Adoption of Free Software:

2012 Prime Minister circular — the most important formal turning point: Orientations pour l'usage des logiciels libres dans l'administration, signed on 19 September 2012. It explicitly gave guidance to public administrations on free software use.

2016 Digital Republic Law — reinforced the direction by encouraging public administrations to use free software and open formats.

2021 action plan for Free Software and Digital Commons — launched after the Prime Minister’s circular of 27 April 2021, with goals to increase awareness, use, publication of source code, and reuse across administrations.

2024–2026 LaSuite / Suite Numérique — current state-led open-source collaboration suite, presented by DINUM as a coherent set of open-source tools for public agents and positioned as part of the state’s sovereignty strategy

Rollbacks and proprietary deals

Microsoft “Open Bar” contract with the Ministry of Defence / Armed Forces — a major counterexample. The Senate records say the framework agreement started in 2009 and was renewed for 2013–2017 and 2017–2021, without publicity or competition, giving the ministry broad access to Microsoft’s catalog.

Criticism and replacement with UGAP purchasing — later reporting says the open-bar arrangement ended in February 2021 and was replaced by a convention via UGAP, but the ministry still relied on broad Microsoft licensing and associated services.

2025 education procurement for Microsoft — a public tender worth 74 million euros for the Ministry of Education and higher education services was attributed to Microsoft, showing that proprietary dependence continued alongside open-source policy.

2025–2026 public-private partnerships in sovereignty language — France and Germany announced a partnership with Mistral AI and SAP for sovereign AI in public administration, which is not a free-software rollback in the strict sense, but it is a clear example of the state pursuing sovereignty through private-sector partnerships rather than purely internal open-source development.

---

Conclusion:

Like anything in capitalism: it's a constant fight, permanent struggle. The big private companies will try to massively impact political life.

So, there IS in France this 'feeling', this consciousness, throughout the political landscape (mostly on the left and also a little bit on the right) that we need to have some sovereignty over our data, services, software, etc.

Every once in a while, a right-side political figure, who are basically ruling since 2000, (except from 2012-2017 where France had a social-democratic government and president) has a sparkle of dignity, decency, logic, and honesty towards the best interests of the country and leans towards Free Software adoption. But...the lobbies are always there to rollback each decision, or part of each decision, and gradually gain back their influence.