Once these countries leave, they’ll never go back. And then the rest of us get better alternatives to this enshitification model.
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.
We grow pretty good weed too, that isn’t nothing.
Not exported overseas though.
I think enshitification is a product of public traded companies promising infinite growth, not necessarily a problem of US only companies.
It’s also a consequence of low taxes on capital gains and corporate profits.
When those taxes were higher it made more sense to reinvest the profits back into your own company. You’d build a reputation and a structure that would pay out you and your family for a hundred years.
Now the dream is to build up a company just enough to sell it to some megacorp and cash out asap, with you and your family living off of investment money that only increases over time.
While I would love to see them never going back, here in Germany, all it takes is some corrupt politician taking a huge bribe from a lobbyist and swoosh, they are back to Microslop.
Edit: Knowing our little corrupt fuckers in charge in German politics, the bribe probably doesn’t even have to be mediocre.
Once these countries leave, they’ll never go back.
Look up LiMux and the massive Microsoft deal that followed.
No, please stop with this garbage misinformation. Microsoft made a (suspected) under the table deal with the Munich government at the time to setup a Microsoft office in Munich if they switched back to Windows.
That’s what the news reported on endlessly. That’s the narrative that keeps getting falsely repeated over and over, and no one ever checks the BS stories they spread.
The rest of the story didn’t make headlines, where the new incoming Munich government said “hell no!” (prob in German) and continued the Linux rollout.
Today the environment is a mix of Linux and Windows, but they already have a large focus on FOSS software.
Despite the astonishingly stupid decision to roll their own in-house distro (LiMux), the program was massively successful, with Linux users filling only 40% the number of tickets the Windows users did.
Edit: I’m correcting something I said, they didn’t “continue the Linux rollout” as they had already covered most of their systems. The current status is a mix of Windows and Linux, because they vetoed the rollback to Windows in 2020.
That deal that totally had nothing to do with Microsoft relocating their headquarters closer to Munich
The Bavarian state government is still entirely in Microslop’s pocket
Im not an expert on this, but it seems like Ms was worried that success of Limux would be the drip that starts the trickle so to speak. It made sense for them to do whatever it took to patch that leak.
Things have really changed since then though. Valve has been very successful in a Linux end user environment, and Eu is becoming disenfranchised from the US rather than Microsoft specifically.
I think Munich’s motivations were financial, but Frances will be ideological.
With these things in mind, the calculus has changed. That doesn’t necessarily mean France won’t fail, but id be surprised if Microsoft pursues them in the same way.
Don’t listen to that other commenter. They’re wrong about the Munich LiMux story. It keeps getting repeated but it’s not correct.
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.
and fucking invest into not needing to use American-controlled CPUs as every single one of them contains a backdoor.
China has been working intensely for at least 2 decades to catch up, and they are still about a decade behind!
Netherlands has ASML which is a huge advantage for European independent manufacturing, but even with that it’s an insanely expensive investment to make a realistic competitor to AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom etc. because they have loads of patents that are hard to avoid, and they have decades of know how. This is not even accounting for the software infra structure that would have to be built almost from scratch.
Chip production is a global enterprise, and even USA isn’t independent anymore. They depend on ASML and TSMC for their most popular products in AI, Smartphones, servers, laptops and desktops. And more and more Arm is taking over from Intel/AMD.What we may be able to do would be using Arm and have TSMC help us with manufacturing. But to make such a project succeed is not an easy thing, we had European computer companies in the 70’s and 80’s that were heavily subsidized by governments that dominated home markets for several European countries, and they essentially all failed against international competition.
So what we risk if we were required to use a European product funded by EU/European governments would be to have to use an overpriced under-performing technology, that would be a millstone around the neck of all of Europe, making Europe not catch up, but instead fall further behind.they have loads of patents that are hard to avoid
China doesn’t care about patents of outsiders.
Seems to me that it’s time for the rest of the world to invalidate US IP and go from there.
And the rules based international order has been exposed as the wink during a handshake deal. Who cares about patent law?
He is talking about software. A fucking video conferencing tool not controlled by American tech is no ASML level investment.
We could at least start with this
American-controlled CPUs
Ignorance, mostly. It’s sad but Chinese leaders seem to listen to their experts, while EU leaders listen to CEOs, and of large companies only.
… Pretty much every CPU contains backdoors, not just american ones. The Chinese government does the exact same thing as the American government. They are two sides of the same coin but the Chinese government seems more competent and efficient unlike the US government.
Even if the hardware doesn’t have backdoors, the firmware often will, which you also can’t get around with software.
The tier after that is software which also has a lot of back doors, luckily, you can run Linux and open source software. That is the best you can do. Really the only thing you can “trust” not to have backdoors is MCUs because those backdoors are much more likely to need physical access.
Sadly, our entire tech world is built on backdoors and intentional security flaws to enable easier debugging, recovery, and compliance with government law enforcement after the sale.
Here’s my guess, and I could be completely wrong.
All the governments use 2 sets of computers. The first, is a closed network used only internally. Open source, connected as a network, but NOT connected to outside neteorks. This uses closed source OS that they themselves develop. No backdoors. Highly secured.
The second set is what you know. Windows 11, backdoors, easily spied on. Intentionally left open, because that’s their way to spy on the other countries.
They leave this open, to let themselves be spied on, so that they can spy on the other side. Neither side realizing they’re both doing the same thing, and both sides just getting mostly useless info.
Then, to throw off the trail of it being useless info, they occasionally allow a juicy bit of info into their windows computer. Just so it’s not obvious that this isn’t the real info.
I have zero evidence, and came up with this theory after reading your comment. So I could be very wrong.
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.
Microslop can cry about it.
It’s also a French word that means video conference (as a shortened form of visioconférence).
This is only a part of france’s “LaSuite” (very original name guys), that seemingly will replace every equivalent american service.
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
They generally work pretty well (demo on the site) and are a mix of homegrown solutions and rebrands of existing projects like matrix. All of them are open source.
And all their videos are on Peertube!
!lasuite@tube.numerique.gouv.fr
Unfortunately source code is still hosted on GitHub…
And the apps have docker for easy setup! I was expecting something very convoluted and not suitable for tinkerers. What’s good/bad is that the the apps seem to be deployed independently. Would love to have single user for everything. Need to read a bit further to see how it’s done
I guess they’re all cloud tools? Or is there something I can install in my laptop?
They should have called it “du coup” for that authentic frenchness.
I’d also accept Honhon
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
I don’t know on what it’s based on, but it’s open source and audited.
It’s based on LiveKit.
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.
Anything to ANYTHING to get away from MicrSlop, Google etc. is huge. HUGE!
I’ve called them Gooplesoft now.
Check out Mistral if you want a good nonUS AI.
Nice, replace Microslop Windows too pls.
I still don’t understand why half of the US still support a president that is doing a long term damage
Shows the importance of having a proper primary process. Biden fucked up and dropped out of the race way too late for any democratic candidate to have time to build up hype and momentum. Just being the VP shouldn’t make one an automatic default candidate. Harris did pretty bad during the Primary back in 2020, she just was not popular and didn’t inspire enough people to go vote.
Harris could have won, when she first announced, and then picked the left candidate for VP, her popularity skyrocketed, then cratered as she embraced the policies that had just killed the Biden campaign.
A democrat cannot win on “we’re going to be Republicans, but more competent”.
Which is exactly what dems are planning when they fund ICE, but ask that the gestapo stop wearing masks.
Harris did pretty bad during the Primary back in 2020
Harris actually dropped out months before the primaries in 2020. She was something like 16th most popular candidate at the time she withdrew. She was a pretty unpopular AG in California at the time and likely would not have even won her own state primary.
Why *less than half
It’s a bit more complicated but essentially only a third support him, a third oppose, and a third are either too stupid to know what side to choose or too lazy to do anything. In my opinion it’s this third camp that are the worst of the worst. At least the Trumpers are doing what they think is right, these guys are just lazy and willing to just let anything happen to them as long as they can watch Netflix and buy Funko pops.
That’s great. I wish Visio/Vizio were not such common names for software and hardware. We done did those already. Do something else.
Francio?
Franctario!
Cornholio
Visio and W…
They need to open up naming to public vote.
Cally McCallface
Lol, replacing one o365 product with one named identically to another o365 product, classic.
Came to comment this. I know there are only so many letters, and so many combinations of 4-8 of them, but can we quit naming new things with the name of an old thing?
Finding any details about France’s Visio is going to be a cluster.
Visio is [the shorthand of] what the french call a video call
visioconférence
Nah, you can always come up with new combos. They could have named it ‘squonchy’ or ‘flurgled’, for example.
Can’t they invest in standardized SIP solutions? Linphone is already French.
This “find out” phase is gonna go on for a long, long time.
The “find out” will take forever. France just decided that a “sovereign server” can be AWS or any US big-tech providing the physical server is located in France.
France has also signed a contract with Microsoft (“sovereign” solution again) for the national health data hub, even as a parliament investigation had MS France GM stating MS can’t guarantee the data won’t leak to the US!
Most political leader are grossly ignorant on anything IT.Most political leader are grossly ignorant on anything IT.
And corrupt.
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.
Why not jitsi meet? Isn’t better to use an already “established” opensource conferencing tool?
They could just selfhost their instance.
They’ve been building an entire open source suite of software tailored to their needs. If I had to guess, Jitsi isn’t performant enough for large (100+) user meetings in a way they can scale easily. It’s a great tool, but it seems better geared towards smaller loads. Video conferencing at scale is a pretty big challenge.
Between this, their new Docs platform and some Matrix-based chat platforms, I think this is something they’ve put a fair bit of thought into how they want to build. Overall, it’s a cool initiative, but I think it’s pretty clear that it’s open source as a means to be transparent as a government organization rather than to form a platform for broad use by everyone. They do have some self-hosting instructions on their GitHub though.
Jitsi is owned by a Campbell, California based firm called 8x8. Source: I worked for them during the acquisition.
Though admittedly avoiding US origin open source is unlikely to be possible. The thing they are using seems to be based on another package with a similar issue.
