As an illustration of it: I have been working for two years on a new national project for the french state. Le Référentiel National des Bâtiments (for National Buildings Registry) which aim at creating and distributing a id key to every building in the country.
The goal is to make databases about buildings much more interoperable.
One key aspect is to have a precise list of all buildings includings recent constructions and demolition. It gets interesting because we recognize nobody in the country has the perfect list of buildings so we radically open the data to let governement agencies, cities, companies, citizens write directly in the registry. Think OSM or Wikipédia but for an official dataset.
This approach is very experimental for the french state and we are encouraged to test it and disseminate our learnings in other state branches.
That's a lovely idea. I have been working for large open data projects and secretive private data collections and they both fail in their own ways. Maybe the open-source gathering with a proper authority to lock down and shepherd data in case of dispute or vandalism is the golden middle way. Sort of like the BDFL concept: open for all, ultimately vetoed by a benevolent entity.
Since OSM is, among other things, a list of building, will there be exchanges between the two projects? Are the licenses of the two projects compatible?
Well, we have some connections with the community and we are discussing how to incorporate our buildings IDs in OSM. The other way around (OSM to national registry) seems more complicated for license reasons.
Last summer we tested the open approch by doing a "RNB Summer game". Basically, anyone could come on the map and send some error reporting, we had a score per player, per territory and a shared global score. The OSM community absolutely rolled ont the game :)
This is just for show, and facts won't follow. It's not the first time a French government vows to stick to Open Source. Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception.
A few days after that, a major state-owned institution (Polytechnique) announced it was migrating (including the email system) to MS Office 365. Even if it violates several laws and official decrees (it's a semi-military school).
Source (fr) https://cnll.fr/news/polytechnique-men-office-365/
The turmoil caused by the two contracts you mention also prove that the new normal has already shifted towards open source. It's a slow process, but it's undeniable that we are making progress.
These initiatives are only for show. I work in one of the biggest French goverment entity and no one uses this. We still very much use Microsoft products for virtually everything, and everything "sovereign" (Resana, Pline...) just doesn't work or isn't as convenient
Yes, I agree that some public organizations in France are making progress with Open Source. For instance, free software is now common in universities (with local variations). And overall I think there's a central influence of the DiNum ("Direction Numérique", the Digital Department of the French State) in this direction. But I don't see how this UN charter makes any difference.
There's progress, though not related to this charter.
And so slow that I would bet against "Open Source" becoming widespread in French schools within the next decade.
> Facts (and code) are following.
I'm sorry, but the current situation and the past experience makes it really hard to believe that facts will follow from this charter. At least facts matching the claim that the French government will be "Open by default: Making Open Source the standard approach for projects" (quote from the first point of the charter).
If "France endorses UN Open Source principles", it shouldn't just mean that it will publish some code. It should means that it intends to respect these principles, and that proprietary software becomes the exception within the French administration.
I can't believe this post is more than symbolic, because the French law already promotes Open Source and forbids non-UE proprietary software in many public contexts. But these laws are usually not applied. Why would a non-prescriptive charter do any better?
There's some aspects that make it a more nuanced situation:
- you won't see angry letters in the news about services sticking to open source after they chose to move in
- the reason the CNLL can point the finger at Poytechnique is because there are explicit directives. Not even having those would be way worse.
- "Most of the public money" : Open Source contracts won't be in billions of euros most of the time, especially as a lot of the money will go to internal hiring and only a slice to external contractors.
"Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception." → I've asked, twice, for the CNLL, the French Court of Auditors (Cour des Comptes) to work towards giving precise figures. This was rejected, but may reappear in a different form (given that the Court is currently running an enquiry on digital sovereignty - I hope, but I doubt, that they will be able to pull precise figures).
Everytime someone actually does something nice in this country, there will be a dozen nay-sayers complaining uselessly that it is not perfect while doing nothing of value themselves.
It always saddens me to see a country with so much too succeed being so impaired by its own citizens.
This comment didn't impair anything being done, though.
I totally agree with it. The EU could do something non-performative by it and its governments stopping issuing documents in proprietary Microsoft formats and use OSS only.
It is just how we express ourselves. We French are known internationally for complaining a lot, we know it and we even joke about it.
It doesn't mean that nothing gets done (and when it doesn't, it is not usually the reason). We are just not overly enthusiastic about it like Americans tend to be.
A way to see things is that in America, a 5/5 comment is great, 4/5 is acceptable, and anything less is crap. In France, 1/5 is crap, 2/5 is acceptable, and anything more is great. You just have to adjust your scale.
The reality is that millions of people work for the government, directly or indirectly, and that not all of these people have aligned incentives, the same constraints, etc.
The people pushing open source initiatives in the french public sector are very serious about it. It is also true that there is a lot of inertia. The consequence is that, while most of the large administrations, including those that don't have that much wiggle room for initiatives, still use big-name proprietary solutions, more and more open-source and open-data gardens spring around, and that they provide a strong base for new initatives, both public and private.
Two examples I personally used are dvf [1], a database and application showing real estate sales, which I used to check market prices when I bought my home, and publi.codes [2], a simulator and an open-source law-as-code repository, which is one of the cornerstones of a friend's private company.
Would I like more of France's administration to move to open-souce? Sure, but it's not going to happen overnight. In the meantime, I'm grateful for the core of people dedicated to push the case, bits by bits, and I know their effort is certainly not just for show.
It doesn't come from nowhere, though. It results in having had to tolerate the French bureaucracy, French lies, empty promises, and French way of (not) doing things for decades.
Uh, I know n=1, but I used to work in a public research lab in France for almost a couple years, and already back then (4-5 years ago) they used tons of FOSS. Zimbra, Mattermost, Gitlab, the works. So I don't think it's all just theater.
Then again, if your employees still need PowerPoint, I say let them have it for now. You cannot switch a single company to FOSS overnight, let alone the entire public sector of an industrial nation.
and its coming on the back of US and Trumps tarif shittalk..
there's also talk about moving away from american software giants, among government sections in my country. Recently one such section moved from AWS to Hetzner (saving money in the process)
i've also heard talk about making EU-based alternatives to the office suite, etc.
This makes total sense. When a country is creating public software, it should be open source by default. This is the only way to create trust. In the long run, open source and closed source government software will probably differentiate dictatorships from democracies
At first glance I thought this was hyperbole, but after reflection I'm not sure it's even an exaggeration. Too much critical infrastructure of power (voting, census, taxation, reporting, compliance) runs of software for us to accept anything less than full transparency from our governments.
Real question is whether this is just symbolic or if the French state will actually redirect procurement pipelines + vendor mandates around these principles. i'd be more impressed if this came bundled with policy teeth, e.g. requiring all software vendors to deliver open-by-default interfaces or pushing funding toward open infra maintenance. Otherwise it's hardly much more than a manifesto
It will take time but yes. There are already numerous case studies. Libre office is already running on more than 500k gov computers. Anecdotical story, as a researcher I worked with a few French PhD students and they tend to send me documents Libre documents and spreadsheets.
At this point Open Source doesn't mean anything anymore.
It is like everybody putting a "fat free" logo on highly processed junk food a few decades ago. Yes but what is fat exactly?
What really make me suspicious is there is now a very dense web of fake, captured foundations and non profits with a lot of money flowing through them. Most of them do not write any code of course and it is very hard to understand they purpose or what they do beyond "advocacy".
None of those Open Source advocates care about the most urgent problems like the fact that now almost every human has one of the most locked up system in its hand (yes I know about AOSP) or we can't trust the connected micro-controllers in our homes.
Instead they have as their top goal to fight things like climate change [0] (I wish)
Strangely postmarketOS (the ones trying to make possible that we don't have to trash those cellphones after 3 years) survives on €12656 in yearly donations, €11175 after banks fees [1]. So probably less than the monthly salary of most of those foundations executives and employees. Or probably the cost of one big Zoom meeting in the UN.
Also ask yourself why the FSF, GNU and RMS have been marginalized while Open Source became an UN level cause...
The poster child for this is the OSI rejecting the SSPL.
For anyone unfamiliar, the SSPL is a modification of the AGPL. It expands which source code you have to release, under certain circumstances. More specifically, if you resell the software as a cloud service, you have to make the entire service open source and not just the original software. (It has not yet been tested in court what constitutes the entire service.) This is awfully bad for the business models of several OSI members, which make money by reselling free software as a cloud service surrounded by proprietary stuff like management and load balancing.
In response to that, I don't trust the OSI and neither should you.
(There are reasons the SSPL is bad - mostly GPL/AGPL incompatibility. Not being open source isn't one. The OSI's rant applies just as well to AGPL as it does to SSPL, yet they recognize AGPL.)
While in many way software freedom won the server and workstation battle, we lost all the new battlefront which opened in the last two decades:
- Phones (the thing in the hand of almost every human now. And sorry LineageOS and GrapheneOS are quickly being marginalized now by things like Google Play Integrity)
- Javascript (yes it is a big problem [0])
- the Cloud
- IoT
The FSF was actually pretty good at identifying those issue early on but was overwhelmed and probably marginalized because they were right.
Notice that none of those new "Open Source" advocates really care about those ubiquitous issues.
We won some battles but lost the war.
The fact France endorses some UN Open Source principles really doesn't matter.
You might think caring about software freedom is almost fringe but look at:
- The US freaking out about all those Chinese devices and cyber attacks,
- The EU now freaking out about US big tech and the cloud.
I believe the best way to safeguard sovereignty and safety is for everyone be able to control as much as possible what is running on our "computers" and as close to you as possible. The FSF [1] has been consistent regarding those issue and doing something about it. But also some other folks like OpenBSD [2].
Very unclear to me what the goals of the UN and the OSI type foundations really is.
This does not surprise me. I've had the sense that the French government has been really forward in open source thinking since my interactions with ETAlab back in 2017. They were tracking some really bleeding edge civic tech stuff before anyone else was (including g0v.tw and the vTaiwan project)
France has an undeserved bad reputation for this stuff. As a french citizen, I'm amazed to see how easy it has become to do anything administrative online, with great tools such as France Connect that allows a single login method for any administrative tool.
Most things don't work, and "France Connect" is really bad (it doesn't even accept non-ascii letters for your name or surname! which is insane coming from an official initiative of the French Government; they should at least know how to use the French language). Anything from the department of education is also abysmal, mostly broken, and needlessly convoluted.
The one amazing thing that works is the taxes collection system. The French tax code is incredibly complex with hundred of special cases; yet the online system to declare revenues is perfect: super clear to use with excellent instructions, never broken (even at the end of a period where usage peaks must be insane) and with no errors.
I don't know who constructed this but it's proof that the French gvt can make good software when they really care (ie, when money's at stake).
C'est vrai pour les particuliers mais vas voir le côté entreprise de impôts.gouv.fr et tu vas pleurer. C'est des sous menus dans des sous menus, si t'as plus qu'une page ouverte a la fois ça te déconnecte de l'autre, ...
Sure, apart from paying your taxes with entirely pre-filled forms, accessing all your medical bills, upcoming reimbursments, communication with the public medical insurance and your full medical history from a single place, doing everything that needs to be done with the French equivalent of the DMV, paying fines, changing your address everywhere with one form when you move, getting a digital copy of your ids and driving licences with the same value as the official one in a couple of minutes, requesting official documents like your criminal record or birth certificate and getting them mailed to you and all of that with the same unique login, absolutely nothing works.
Do you happen to now if France has public jobs for software devs or is it more like a governmental agency (which I guess is also a public sector job but feels different)?
AFAK each agency/entity manages its staff and can hire accordingly.
For the big project, my mental image is a public call for proposal, followed by one of the bigger groups (e.g. Cap Gemini) coming up with an initial solution that gets deployed. From there it becomes a mix of the public agency staff doing the day to day operation and maintenance, potentially including small bug fixes and updates, and external contracting again for wider range feature additions or changes like system wide security compliance.
Like distributing an iOS app in France that uses encryption? What a pain in the ass that is.
The bureaucracy was painful enough that we just removed from the French App Store and when someone complains we tell them to write their representatives to stop with these misguided laws.
Excuse me, monsieur, do you have a license for that math?
You can't sell encryption in France if you haven't proved it actually is strong encryption and not a rot13 or something, which is actually a _very_ good idea.
Could the implementation be better? Knowing french admin, 100% yes, but complaining about the law itself is, in my opinion, misguided. This is an overall good law that doesn't came from nowhere.
Readit News
The goal is to make databases about buildings much more interoperable.
One key aspect is to have a precise list of all buildings includings recent constructions and demolition. It gets interesting because we recognize nobody in the country has the perfect list of buildings so we radically open the data to let governement agencies, cities, companies, citizens write directly in the registry. Think OSM or Wikipédia but for an official dataset.
This approach is very experimental for the french state and we are encouraged to test it and disseminate our learnings in other state branches.
Since OSM is, among other things, a list of building, will there be exchanges between the two projects? Are the licenses of the two projects compatible?
Last summer we tested the open approch by doing a "RNB Summer game". Basically, anyone could come on the map and send some error reporting, we had a score per player, per territory and a shared global score. The OSM community absolutely rolled ont the game :)
Good luck (and thanks)
Two months ago, the French government signed an "open bar" contract with Microsoft for the "Éducation Nationale" department. 152 M€, not for Open Source. Source (fr) https://www.april.org/nouvel-open-bar-microsoft-le-ministere...
A few days after that, a major state-owned institution (Polytechnique) announced it was migrating (including the email system) to MS Office 365. Even if it violates several laws and official decrees (it's a semi-military school). Source (fr) https://cnll.fr/news/polytechnique-men-office-365/
The turmoil caused by the two contracts you mention also prove that the new normal has already shifted towards open source. It's a slow process, but it's undeniable that we are making progress.
Yes, I agree that some public organizations in France are making progress with Open Source. For instance, free software is now common in universities (with local variations). And overall I think there's a central influence of the DiNum ("Direction Numérique", the Digital Department of the French State) in this direction. But I don't see how this UN charter makes any difference.
There's progress, though not related to this charter. And so slow that I would bet against "Open Source" becoming widespread in French schools within the next decade.
> Facts (and code) are following.
I'm sorry, but the current situation and the past experience makes it really hard to believe that facts will follow from this charter. At least facts matching the claim that the French government will be "Open by default: Making Open Source the standard approach for projects" (quote from the first point of the charter).
If "France endorses UN Open Source principles", it shouldn't just mean that it will publish some code. It should means that it intends to respect these principles, and that proprietary software becomes the exception within the French administration.
I can't believe this post is more than symbolic, because the French law already promotes Open Source and forbids non-UE proprietary software in many public contexts. But these laws are usually not applied. Why would a non-prescriptive charter do any better?
- you won't see angry letters in the news about services sticking to open source after they chose to move in
- the reason the CNLL can point the finger at Poytechnique is because there are explicit directives. Not even having those would be way worse.
- "Most of the public money" : Open Source contracts won't be in billions of euros most of the time, especially as a lot of the money will go to internal hiring and only a slice to external contractors.
Everytime someone actually does something nice in this country, there will be a dozen nay-sayers complaining uselessly that it is not perfect while doing nothing of value themselves.
It always saddens me to see a country with so much too succeed being so impaired by its own citizens.
I totally agree with it. The EU could do something non-performative by it and its governments stopping issuing documents in proprietary Microsoft formats and use OSS only.
It doesn't mean that nothing gets done (and when it doesn't, it is not usually the reason). We are just not overly enthusiastic about it like Americans tend to be.
A way to see things is that in America, a 5/5 comment is great, 4/5 is acceptable, and anything less is crap. In France, 1/5 is crap, 2/5 is acceptable, and anything more is great. You just have to adjust your scale.
That is simply wrong.
The reality is that millions of people work for the government, directly or indirectly, and that not all of these people have aligned incentives, the same constraints, etc.
The people pushing open source initiatives in the french public sector are very serious about it. It is also true that there is a lot of inertia. The consequence is that, while most of the large administrations, including those that don't have that much wiggle room for initiatives, still use big-name proprietary solutions, more and more open-source and open-data gardens spring around, and that they provide a strong base for new initatives, both public and private.
Two examples I personally used are dvf [1], a database and application showing real estate sales, which I used to check market prices when I bought my home, and publi.codes [2], a simulator and an open-source law-as-code repository, which is one of the cornerstones of a friend's private company.
Would I like more of France's administration to move to open-souce? Sure, but it's not going to happen overnight. In the meantime, I'm grateful for the core of people dedicated to push the case, bits by bits, and I know their effort is certainly not just for show.
[1]: https://app.dvf.etalab.gouv.fr/ [2]: https://publi.codes/
Then again, if your employees still need PowerPoint, I say let them have it for now. You cannot switch a single company to FOSS overnight, let alone the entire public sector of an industrial nation.
and its coming on the back of US and Trumps tarif shittalk..
there's also talk about moving away from american software giants, among government sections in my country. Recently one such section moved from AWS to Hetzner (saving money in the process)
i've also heard talk about making EU-based alternatives to the office suite, etc.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
At first glance I thought this was hyperbole, but after reflection I'm not sure it's even an exaggeration. Too much critical infrastructure of power (voting, census, taxation, reporting, compliance) runs of software for us to accept anything less than full transparency from our governments.
It’s turtles all the way down.
Deleted Comment
It is like everybody putting a "fat free" logo on highly processed junk food a few decades ago. Yes but what is fat exactly?
What really make me suspicious is there is now a very dense web of fake, captured foundations and non profits with a lot of money flowing through them. Most of them do not write any code of course and it is very hard to understand they purpose or what they do beyond "advocacy".
None of those Open Source advocates care about the most urgent problems like the fact that now almost every human has one of the most locked up system in its hand (yes I know about AOSP) or we can't trust the connected micro-controllers in our homes.
Instead they have as their top goal to fight things like climate change [0] (I wish)
Strangely postmarketOS (the ones trying to make possible that we don't have to trash those cellphones after 3 years) survives on €12656 in yearly donations, €11175 after banks fees [1]. So probably less than the monthly salary of most of those foundations executives and employees. Or probably the cost of one big Zoom meeting in the UN.
Also ask yourself why the FSF, GNU and RMS have been marginalized while Open Source became an UN level cause...
- [0] https://www.digitalpublicgoods.net/digital-public-goods-alli...
- [1] https://postmarketos.org/blog/2025/03/17/pmOS-budget-and-fin...
For anyone unfamiliar, the SSPL is a modification of the AGPL. It expands which source code you have to release, under certain circumstances. More specifically, if you resell the software as a cloud service, you have to make the entire service open source and not just the original software. (It has not yet been tested in court what constitutes the entire service.) This is awfully bad for the business models of several OSI members, which make money by reselling free software as a cloud service surrounded by proprietary stuff like management and load balancing.
In response, the OSI put out this official blog post seething with anger but not a single rational argument: https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l...
In response to that, I don't trust the OSI and neither should you.
(There are reasons the SSPL is bad - mostly GPL/AGPL incompatibility. Not being open source isn't one. The OSI's rant applies just as well to AGPL as it does to SSPL, yet they recognize AGPL.)
While in many way software freedom won the server and workstation battle, we lost all the new battlefront which opened in the last two decades:
- Phones (the thing in the hand of almost every human now. And sorry LineageOS and GrapheneOS are quickly being marginalized now by things like Google Play Integrity)
- Javascript (yes it is a big problem [0])
- the Cloud
- IoT
The FSF was actually pretty good at identifying those issue early on but was overwhelmed and probably marginalized because they were right.
Notice that none of those new "Open Source" advocates really care about those ubiquitous issues.
We won some battles but lost the war. The fact France endorses some UN Open Source principles really doesn't matter.
You might think caring about software freedom is almost fringe but look at:
- The US freaking out about all those Chinese devices and cyber attacks,
- The EU now freaking out about US big tech and the cloud.
I believe the best way to safeguard sovereignty and safety is for everyone be able to control as much as possible what is running on our "computers" and as close to you as possible. The FSF [1] has been consistent regarding those issue and doing something about it. But also some other folks like OpenBSD [2].
Very unclear to me what the goals of the UN and the OSI type foundations really is.
- [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html
- [1] https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/campaigns-summaries
- [2] https://www.openbsd.org/goals.html
Agreed and a case in point are those UN principles that bundle unrelated things together.
https://g0v.tw/intl/en/
https://info.vtaiwan.tw
The one amazing thing that works is the taxes collection system. The French tax code is incredibly complex with hundred of special cases; yet the online system to declare revenues is perfect: super clear to use with excellent instructions, never broken (even at the end of a period where usage peaks must be insane) and with no errors.
I don't know who constructed this but it's proof that the French gvt can make good software when they really care (ie, when money's at stake).
Sure, apart from paying your taxes with entirely pre-filled forms, accessing all your medical bills, upcoming reimbursments, communication with the public medical insurance and your full medical history from a single place, doing everything that needs to be done with the French equivalent of the DMV, paying fines, changing your address everywhere with one form when you move, getting a digital copy of your ids and driving licences with the same value as the official one in a couple of minutes, requesting official documents like your criminal record or birth certificate and getting them mailed to you and all of that with the same unique login, absolutely nothing works.
I mean, what have the Roman ever done for us?
For the big project, my mental image is a public call for proposal, followed by one of the bigger groups (e.g. Cap Gemini) coming up with an initial solution that gets deployed. From there it becomes a mix of the public agency staff doing the day to day operation and maintenance, potentially including small bug fixes and updates, and external contracting again for wider range feature additions or changes like system wide security compliance.
The bureaucracy was painful enough that we just removed from the French App Store and when someone complains we tell them to write their representatives to stop with these misguided laws.
Excuse me, monsieur, do you have a license for that math?
Could the implementation be better? Knowing french admin, 100% yes, but complaining about the law itself is, in my opinion, misguided. This is an overall good law that doesn't came from nowhere.
https://www.usgs.gov/products/software