France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

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.

Let's see what happens but I get that prior, demonstrable, actions are not conducive.

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.

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.

> 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.

Free and Open Technology for a Free and Open Society

I don’t see how these principles could lead to people being restricted in the way you suggest.

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

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.

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.

I think it's more a guideline principle for public software, for exemple apps that are used by citizens to declare taxes, renews IDs...

> 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.

What a time to be alive to see Android on that list.

so do it?

if you’d love to see it then do it?

Please don't. If you take government money, then you accept government control.

https://www.comparia.beta.gouv.fr/modeles compares models and Llama different licenses are not mislabeled as "open source".

Also, https://opensource.org/ai/endorsements shows code.gouv.fr in the list.

They're just those eight guidelines. Not particularly precise, with intent mattering more than any definition. This isn't a policy, just a goal.

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.

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)?

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?