UN has Open Source principles but it took a budget decrease to consider it for itself and it's still not approved...
idoubtit · 6h ago
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/
fermigier · 50m ago
"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).
makeitdouble · 5h ago
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.
gerdesj · 6h ago
Let's see what happens but I get that prior, demonstrable, actions are not conducive.
ErrorNoBrain · 6h ago
it's still a step in the right direction
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.
resource_waste · 5h ago
I have some quotes about French sentiment, and it basically revolves around their need to have national grandeur despite being a lesser power.
France is all fanfare and rhetoric. Its fun stuff to play with in our imagination, but the ground reality of the world is different.
edhelas · 51m ago
I have some quotes about US sentiment, and it basically revolves around their need to have national grandeur despite being a lesser power.
US is all fanfare and rhetoric. Its fun stuff to play with in our imagination, but the ground reality of the world is different.
-- A French
cjfd · 8m ago
Just switching country names does not really work. The US is the very curious case of a super power that attempts to become a third world country.
jeandejean · 4h ago
What's the ground for this? Where's grandeur in this declaration? Your comment tell us more about your disdain for France than anything else.
This is great because it stops giving users to services which don't respect privacy. If you don't know CryptPad which provides forms but also many editors including Office with end to encryption, try it at https://cryptpad.fr
fdefitte · 7h ago
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
hx8 · 5h ago
> 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.
dgfitz · 3h ago
There’s always holes. How can we know for sure the binaries running on the voting machines are compiled from the open source repo?
It’s turtles all the way down.
logifail · 3h ago
> How can we know for sure the binaries running on the voting machines [..]
As far as elections are concerned, give me paper ballots every day, and make sure you count them by hand with plenty of Mk I human observers present.
lblume · 2h ago
Could you not compile them on the voting machines itself? But yes, there is always going to be some level of trust involved, and the bar for manipulation seems to be lower than re: manual counting.
callc · 1h ago
Turtles all the way down. Can you trust your compiler?
Free and Open Technology for a Free and Open Society
canvascritic · 7h ago
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
RandomWorker · 7h ago
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.
jimbob45 · 5h ago
Oh then it’s dead. LibreOffice never Just Works™. Ideological changes like this only work if they’re painless for the hoi polloi.
resource_waste · 5h ago
LibreOffice UI is so awful I'm 90% convinced there is a Microsoft plant that actively disrupts progress.
I don't lurk the github, so I'm just assuming there are a few accounts that disagree with UI improvements just to kill time and fake debate.
But yeah that UI is just awful.
Further, you mention any UI issue on the subreddit and you get banned. Yeah...
Really a shame, Fedora + Google's Office Suite has been a near complete replacement for me. Although Sheets could be improved a bit.
weikju · 3h ago
> But yeah that UI is just awful.
As far as I can see, awful UI never stops people from using software that is "mandated" or "default". I mean have you seen Windows? MS Office? Web sites? Mobile apps??
victorbjorklund · 16m ago
But if they know the alternative is better. Everyone knows about ms office so they will complain/demand that instead. People put up with shitty software when they dont know about an alternative
pessimizer · 4h ago
I'm convinced this happens in a lot of projects. If you're e.g. Microsoft, you can pay a few people to contribute maliciously to a GPL competitor's coding and governance full time.
It's trivial to throw a million or two dollars at making sure some project ultimately goes nowhere (but survives), and that particular bugs don't get fixed or particular features don't get added. I've got no story to tell, and I've never heard solid evidence of it happening, but it would just be unbelievably tempting to do.
knocte · 5h ago
Talk is cheap, did you create any PRs for the suggested changes?
Notice how they say “No PR” on every single repo ? So for sure no PR was open.
Putting a bit more energy, you are redirected to a whole other system which I have never seen anywhere else (and in this case; unique doesn’t mean good). After 5 minutes of trying to navigate what is probably the least intuitive software forge I ever had the displeasure to witness, you understand that clearly these guys live in a different UI/UX bubble than the rest of us.
hamandcheese · 2h ago
Seems like they use gerrit. A lot of larger projects use gerrit for their code review. It is different, yes, but many prefer it over GitHub's "pull request" paradigm which really sucks for high velocity contributors.
throw10920 · 4h ago
This is bad faith. You are not obligated to contribute any sort of code to point out problems in an open source project.
When I go to a restaurant and order a steak, and it arrives and tastes awful, the waiter does not have the right to say to me "if you don't like it, cook it yourself". The chef does not have the right to say to me "tell me exactly what I did wrong, since you're claiming you're an expert on steaks".
No. Anyone can complain about a thing, and the fact that they haven't tried to fix the code themselves is utterly irrelevant.
gbear605 · 1h ago
The difference is that at a restaurant you’re paying for it. If you show up at a soup kitchen and complain that it wasn’t seasoned just right, that’s fully on you.
fdefitte · 7h ago
I think it's more a guideline principle for public software, for exemple apps that are used by citizens to declare taxes, renews IDs...
patcon · 7h ago
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)
Big smokescreen, they only open the most trivial software. "France Identité" the virtual ID card has been closed source since day 1 and also happens to use Play Integrity.
somat · 6h ago
Compare to the US Open Source Principles where things become public domain by default.
I'd love to see a coordinated drive to get most off the world onto opensource and off Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android as well as databases etc. American tech companies are making billions off these products that really are simple and could be replaced.
II2II · 5h ago
> American tech companies are making billions off these products that really are simple and could be replaced.
The trouble is that simple concepts are not necessarily simple to implement. Tuning software for performance (e.g. to handle a large user base), security, and maintenance are all resource intensive. Then you have to consider that large user bases have diverse needs, which results in more complex software. Then there are the largest hurdles of all, training people in the use of new software and interoperability during the transition.
resource_waste · 5h ago
What a time to be alive to see Android on that list.
fdefitte · 7h ago
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.
azemetre · 6h ago
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)?
makeitdouble · 5h ago
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.
leesalminen · 6h ago
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?
aborsy · 5h ago
Some apps have refused to distribute in French store for this reason, such as Syncthing apps Mobius and Synctrain.
ximm · 37m ago
What are the UN Open Source Principles? Can anyone share a link to the original document? I could not find anything relevant on Google.
andy99 · 8h ago
Curious to know if this extends to LLMs and if so how they would define open source. Specifically it would be nice to see repudiation of Meta's "Open" BS by a nation state.
Cette licence permet d'utiliser, reproduire, modifier et distribuer librement le code avec attribution, mais impose des restrictions pour les opérations dépassant 700 millions d'utilisateurs mensuels.
Interesting they only mention the 700 million users thing and not the other restrictions on use. Personally I could regard the prohibition against basically Google and Microsoft using it to be a minor transgression, it's the larger list of unacceptable uses that's the big problem.
They're just those eight guidelines. Not particularly precise, with intent mattering more than any definition. This isn't a policy, just a goal.
bbarnett · 8h ago
I wouldn't call data "source", whether a book, a sound track, video, etc.
In my view of the world, the code to train, the software to run, that's open source joy.
Now... should the trained, and vectored data be free? Maybe so.
But I bet this UN thing doesn't cover that.
andy99 · 8h ago
I didn't call the data the source and in the past have explicitly argued that training data is not necessary to exercise the freedoms normally associated with open source.
Llama models have usage restrictions that go against any mainstream definitions of open source.
bbarnett · 7h ago
The model is part of the data, agreed?
Anyhow, I wasn't trying to put words in your mouth, simply stating my thoughts. And I focused on data because I see OSS code everywhere, so presume there is no issue there.
wyldfire · 5h ago
I would love to see more public funds going towards open source. Even if it were directed to private companies' cloud CI services, it would be a great boon. Many projects have to balance how many build/test configurations with the available CI resources.
No comments yet
dodongobongo · 6h ago
“Various companies use the US government to bully other countries, but they also use license audits as a reaction to projects that move to open-source software.”:
I hope this sets a strong precedent for open source public software.
pmarreck · 6h ago
It was a subtle but satisfying (at least for me personally) moment in Tron: Legacy (2010) when Sam Flynn, the heir to ENCOM, breaks into the company HQ and releases their latest OS to the darknet for free, essentially forcibly-open-sourcing it as a protest against excessive corporate greed.
mepian · 6h ago
Leaking the source code is not forcibly-open-sourcing it, as multiple Windows leaks show.
godelski · 7h ago
Does anyone know what Mercedes-Benz is doing? I can see why many of the others are on the endorsement list but this one seems out of place. I'm not a car nerd though so I'm sure there is something I'm really missing and be interested in learning about.
richiebful1 · 6h ago
They have an entire webpage/associated github repository. It doesn't seem like they've published anything terribly well-known, but good on them for releasing some tooling
I remember knowing someone who worked in banking (completely non-technical role) telling me in 2011 I think about how a team doing work for him had lifted some code from a Mercedes Benz project and he was telling me how surprised he was that they could just do that.
godelski · 6h ago
Thanks! I wish the page had linked to this!
pabs3 · 5h ago
Wonder when there will be a French equivalent of or funding for the Sovereign Tech Agency.
As an American, this sort of brings back into question for me thoughts of, "What should constitute a public utility in a Capitalism society?" Upon doing some cursory research (so cursory that I'm afraid to provide links), it occurs to me that I was maybe under a false impression that there _are_ any nationwide public utilities in the first place. We basically have:
* The Federal Reserve
* The Interstate Highway System
* The Postal Service
* Homeland Security
* Medicaid/Medicare (does this even fit the list?)
* Other entitlements I'm also not sure fit this list
Did I leave anything major out? But getting to the point, I think the question is relevant because in order for something like this set of principles to take hold in the US I think we'd essentially have to kill certain classes of software in the private sector. Can you imagine the sorts of craziness that would ensure if the US government tried to adopt LibreOffice? Maybe it could happen at the state or municipal level, but we can't even agree that the government should own any of the power lines.
hx8 · 5h ago
Federal Aviation Administration keeps the skies a public utility.
Federal Communication Commission keeps part of the wireless communication spectrum open to the public.
National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management keeps some public land available for everyone to use.
The Library of Congress.
National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service probably satisfy "Public Utility" as much as Medicaid.
Federal Emergency Management Agency would be another stretch, but not something I would consider an entitlement program.
twodave · 5h ago
Yeah, these examples are all challenging in that they tend to represent more governance/funding than infrastructure. Out of both of our lists I think the USPS, highways, parks and land are the most infrastructure-related things. Of course these are all sort of weak analogues since software services are their own animal, but the fact that it’s a choice between governance, funding or a pittance of infrastructure projects I suppose makes the point.
derektank · 6h ago
You forgot NIST, which incidentally would probably be the appropriate agency to handle management of open source software
wyldfire · 6h ago
> Did I leave anything major out?
You've limited your list to federal services. But state and local governments provide plenty more "public utility in a Capitalism society", don't they? Schools, fire protection, police for example.
pawanjswal · 4h ago
Big move by France, leading the way in open source with real global impact!
ksec · 6h ago
I cany see anywhere how they define open source? Because I am sensing it is pretty much GPL or even AGPL only.
MilnerRoute · 8h ago
I'm always hoping to see more coverage of this initiative to drive Open Source adoption both within the United Nations and globally...
No, there is no official French announcement (yet).
johnea · 7h ago
Thanks for your reply!
nashashmi · 8h ago
What business and role can the UN have to get into open source solutions?
JumpCrisscross · 7h ago
> What business and role can the UN have to get into open source solutions?
The UN has a nine figure IT budget for starters.
ambicapter · 7h ago
These are principles, aka standards, not solutions.
johnea · 7h ago
Governance?
bookofjoe · 4h ago
One word: Minitel
jart · 5h ago
The government getting interested in open source should terrify us all. The UN formally defining principles for what it means is a soft form of regulation that's only going to get more authoritarian over time. Traveling down this road, we're going to find ourselves living in a world where you're only allowed to share software if (1) you're working for a corporation, or (2) you're working for the government. Because (1) and (2) will have their lives managed and regulated and won't do anything they're not told to do. Anyone who wants to be a hobbyist who writes code of their own free will and shares it on GitHub just for fun will be criminalized, just like anyone today who wants to do farming just for fun is criminalized. Once they make these principles part of the law, it'll grow like the tax code, and be enforced. You used C and didn't write documentation? You're outlawed! Believe me when I say the government is not here to help. Code is speech and there'll be no freedom left the day our right to share what we've written in our preferred language in our own preferred way is taken away.
rlpb · 4h ago
I don’t see how these principles could lead to people being restricted in the way you suggest.
otagekki · 4h ago
Really? It is up to them if they want to use what I wrote. Why would I get fined or jailed for not writing documentation? Good luck trying to prove any wrongdoing. If you want support feel free to hire me to do that, or just do it yourself, pretty much like big tech is doing right now with open source
jart · 4h ago
Read "Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front" by Joel Salatin to learn about what the government did to farmers. The simple truth is you won't even have the ability to ask to be hired, because it will be illegal to demonstrate your skills in the first place.
otagekki · 15m ago
I haven't read that book, but asked for a summary.
Honestly, I cannot see software being regulated the same way as food industry is, for the very simple reason that software can trivially cross borders (legally or not) while food cannot. Regulating that industry to prevent any progress by erecting bureaucratic barriers in a given country will just kill the industry in that country and make it thrive elsewhere where it's less regulated. As a result, the regulation-freak country will lose any of its competitive advantages due to lesser efficiency.
Doing this on a global scale requires "CFC-ban"-levels of global coordination which I cannot see happening in the world we live in today. Just look at how global CO2 reduction and climate change is being handled today at the global scale.
throw__away7391 · 4h ago
This comes across as more than a little bit fanciful, nevertheless I agree with the sentiment. There's an awful lot of people on the sidelines with their eyes on gaining control over software with intentions that are not at all reflected by what they state publicly. We do not need some political body to come "help", they have no understanding of what makes this work in the first place and nothing of value to contribute.
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/
- 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.
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.
France is all fanfare and rhetoric. Its fun stuff to play with in our imagination, but the ground reality of the world is different.
US is all fanfare and rhetoric. Its fun stuff to play with in our imagination, but the ground reality of the world is different.
-- A French
This is great because it stops giving users to services which don't respect privacy. If you don't know CryptPad which provides forms but also many editors including Office with end to encryption, try it at https://cryptpad.fr
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.
As far as elections are concerned, give me paper ballots every day, and make sure you count them by hand with plenty of Mk I human observers present.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
I don't lurk the github, so I'm just assuming there are a few accounts that disagree with UI improvements just to kill time and fake debate.
But yeah that UI is just awful.
Further, you mention any UI issue on the subreddit and you get banned. Yeah...
Really a shame, Fedora + Google's Office Suite has been a near complete replacement for me. Although Sheets could be improved a bit.
As far as I can see, awful UI never stops people from using software that is "mandated" or "default". I mean have you seen Windows? MS Office? Web sites? Mobile apps??
It's trivial to throw a million or two dollars at making sure some project ultimately goes nowhere (but survives), and that particular bugs don't get fixed or particular features don't get added. I've got no story to tell, and I've never heard solid evidence of it happening, but it would just be unbelievably tempting to do.
Notice how they say “No PR” on every single repo ? So for sure no PR was open.
Putting a bit more energy, you are redirected to a whole other system which I have never seen anywhere else (and in this case; unique doesn’t mean good). After 5 minutes of trying to navigate what is probably the least intuitive software forge I ever had the displeasure to witness, you understand that clearly these guys live in a different UI/UX bubble than the rest of us.
When I go to a restaurant and order a steak, and it arrives and tastes awful, the waiter does not have the right to say to me "if you don't like it, cook it yourself". The chef does not have the right to say to me "tell me exactly what I did wrong, since you're claiming you're an expert on steaks".
No. Anyone can complain about a thing, and the fact that they haven't tried to fix the code themselves is utterly irrelevant.
https://g0v.tw/intl/en/
https://info.vtaiwan.tw
https://www.usgs.gov/products/software
The trouble is that simple concepts are not necessarily simple to implement. Tuning software for performance (e.g. to handle a large user base), security, and maintenance are all resource intensive. Then you have to consider that large user bases have diverse needs, which results in more complex software. Then there are the largest hurdles of all, training people in the use of new software and interoperability during the transition.
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?
Also, https://opensource.org/ai/endorsements shows code.gouv.fr in the list.
https://huggingface.co/apple/OpenELM
https://opensource.org/ai https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy
In my view of the world, the code to train, the software to run, that's open source joy.
Now... should the trained, and vectored data be free? Maybe so.
But I bet this UN thing doesn't cover that.
Llama models have usage restrictions that go against any mainstream definitions of open source.
Anyhow, I wasn't trying to put words in your mouth, simply stating my thoughts. And I focused on data because I see OSS code everywhere, so presume there is no issue there.
No comments yet
https://lwn.net/Articles/1013776
I hope this sets a strong precedent for open source public software.
https://opensource.mercedes-benz.com/projects/
https://www.sovereign.tech/
* The Federal Reserve
* The Interstate Highway System
* The Postal Service
* Homeland Security
* Medicaid/Medicare (does this even fit the list?)
* Other entitlements I'm also not sure fit this list
Did I leave anything major out? But getting to the point, I think the question is relevant because in order for something like this set of principles to take hold in the US I think we'd essentially have to kill certain classes of software in the private sector. Can you imagine the sorts of craziness that would ensure if the US government tried to adopt LibreOffice? Maybe it could happen at the state or municipal level, but we can't even agree that the government should own any of the power lines.
Federal Communication Commission keeps part of the wireless communication spectrum open to the public.
National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management keeps some public land available for everyone to use.
The Library of Congress.
National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service probably satisfy "Public Utility" as much as Medicaid.
Federal Emergency Management Agency would be another stretch, but not something I would consider an entitlement program.
You've limited your list to federal services. But state and local governments provide plenty more "public utility in a Capitalism society", don't they? Schools, fire protection, police for example.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/04/2350224/the-un-ditc...
https://unite.un.org/news/osi-first-endorse-united-nations-o...
Is there other access to the French announcement?
That Mastodon link: social.numerique.gouv.fr, isn't viewable for me...
https://github.com/jwilk/zygolophodon
No, there is no official French announcement (yet).
The UN has a nine figure IT budget for starters.
Doing this on a global scale requires "CFC-ban"-levels of global coordination which I cannot see happening in the world we live in today. Just look at how global CO2 reduction and climate change is being handled today at the global scale.