OuiChat
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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Every 2-3 years, the French government announces that they released a brand new homemade app that will replace some bigtech because sovereignty or whatever bureaucratic bullshit communication they fancy at the moment. Then they issue a BIG contract to an IT consulting company to develop the thing, who get tons of money to send junior devs to release a buggy tool that no one will ever use because migrations cost a lot. This new app will die like the others.
It's made by the DINUM, not an outside consulting company. And the product made by the DINUM (Tchap, France Connect …) are still in use.
All this instead of just hiring a few senior devs to contribute to any of the number of existing open source projects that are already infinitely better than any new thing they will come up with.
the french do make some great stuff tho like cryptpad or mobilizon - the problem is usually always the same tho. it's in french and they only give half a shit about their french users, anyone else is considered an obstacle.
heck i've been playing dofus for 20 years and the non-french community is always shafted. always.
This was long overdue.
Microsoft Office should be next.
They already developed alternatives for Microsoft Office:
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/docs as an alternative to word
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/grist as an alternative for excel and data management (much better than excel in my opinion)
It's open source, actively developed with Germany and the Netherlands (as I'm writing this post the last commit to doc was 49min ago) and self hostableby any administration or company who want to do it.
not an english word in sight. must have super potential for becoming a new standard to replace ms office.
If you were not a troll you would have seen that all the technical documentation about how to contribute and how to host an instance in the repository is in English. The code is well documented 100% in English.
It make sense however that pages for users is in French, since it's been developed for French users. If you want Geraldine, the secretary of the tax office in Trifouilly les Oies to use it, you need to address her in French.
To be fair, I find the idea of a government outsourcing IT needs to entities under the sovereignty of foreign governments kind of fundamentally problematic to begin with.
It's opensource ! https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
It's open source and they have documentation for self-hosting it !
uhhhh on github :(
... What's wrong with GitHub?
The software that's made to escape Microsoft's ecosystem is being hosted on Microsoft's GitHub.
Can't tell of sarcasm or serious, damn Poe's law.
Underrated comment
Stop replying on U.S. companies for technologies that provide the backbone of our governments!
Once these countries leave, they'll never go back. And then the rest of us get better alternatives to this enshitification model.
Munich went open source / Linux a couple of years ago, ditching Microsoft. Using a big budget to convert everything and support employees etc. It was a huge act.
...Then they went back to Microsoft in yet another huge act, using a big budget. And then never revealed the budget for the last one. Which is really weird, considering its public money.
edit: just wanted to say that when idiots get power, there is always a way back. No matter how obviously stupid that would be
Seriously, enshitification is the only thing US companies do well these days. They just dig deeper moats around their walled gardens because they’re too greedy to make decent products that people actually want.
Enshittification, AI slop and fascism are America's greatest exports. And that's not even a joke.
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Also improves Teams/slows the enshitifcation. It's harder to make the product bad when it's hardly a monopoly.
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Why do european tech companies need to call their products the same name as already established american products. Don't they google the names before they make the decision?
It's the French common name for this, visioconférence. Why would they care about Microsoft products for this?
Visio is an outdated spreadsheet name, in English.
Visio is the new video conferencing software, in French.
France leads the world, it is up to everyone else to worry about conflict with France, not the other way around. /s
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Trump is amazing. He literally destroys anything he touches and still get rewarded for it. Just wow.
Edit: Destroys casinos and hotels. Gets rewarded a tv show. Destroy multiple brands. Get rewarded the presidency. Destroys so many American lives. Gets rewarded the presidency a second time. Destroys the United States and it's ties with it's allies. Gets rewarded with untold billions.
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They could just use https://www.opendesk.eu/en and join the German D-Stack https://gitlab.opencode.de/dstack/d-stack-home
Nah, a little healthy competition is good for growth.
Kind of funny considering that Visio is the name of another Microsoft product.
ETA: I'm not defending Microsoft's usage of the term 'Visio' here. The French use of that term makes a lot of sense, and Microsoft has an annoying tendency of using and copyrighting very common terms like 'Word' or 'SQL Server'. And France (or the French government) should be allowed to use it for their video conferencing software. I'm just smiling at the idea of some people opening Microsoft Visio by mistake and trying to figure out how to make a call through a diagramming app.
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Good on them, but I Wonder why they can't just build on top of something open source like Nextcloud.
It already has the majority of the Office-365 suite
Because the French government is hell bent on saving money, but they don't care about anyone's privacy at all. I wouldn't be surprised if they are building a privacy nightmare system here. Having said that, at least they are removing Microslop, and anything that could potentially hurt Microslop in any way, shape or form, is a good thing.
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Now replace Windows with Linux, and fucking invest into not needing to use American-controlled CPUs as every single one of them contains a backdoor.
I don't understand why governments trust official matters in the hands of closed source software and suspicious hardware. Even China uses a special version of Windows 11 in public computers, this is nuts.
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