Comment by input_sh

Your position is fantastic because it immediately puts to death all of that nationalistic nonsense about the EU becoming "anti-American" by enforcing privacy laws on US Big Tech etc, when in fact they are just protecting their citizens' rights against unethical business models regardless of origin. I might be naive, but your company to me represents a win for free/open software and cross-country collaboration.

That being said, I should ask: to what extent do you see being US-based an advantage or a problem in the current state of things? For example, in regards to exports controls, or any other such thing that may potentially limit your business scope depending on $current_admin.

wow it reminds me of Microsoft Access, a great piece of software in terms of rapidly building an application!

Does grist have forms?

Kudos, Grist is great ! Super features, quite seamless only the UI could be more modern (or user stylesheet customizable) if you get to it.

Tchap (the chat part of the suite) is indeed a fork of Element. Unfortunately they haven't funded upstream development for many years (otherwise both Element and Tchap would be much much better!)

Visio (aka meet) began in parallel with Element's work on MatrixRTC and Element Call. Hopefully the two can converge, given they are both built on LiveKit.

If the move away from American big tech is for practical reasons rather than political, there is no harm in using GitHub. The worry with using an American firm is that the US government could force the company to handover confidential information, or shut down access.

For open source code, there is no risk of confidential information being given to the US government (since there is no confidential information), and moving to another forge would be pretty simple if necessary.

The other commenter nailed it down. But I want to add that removing dependance on US companies is not some kind of spiteful act. It's purely down to both privacy and reliability.

Having private companies in the US becoming more involved with politics is fine for the US apperantly, but the EU just don't want to be involved.

Maybe they have local copies as well, and just figured they might as well take GitHub’s free bandwidth and social networking features.

This is probably just the first big step (communications) in a series of big steps.

React is also from US, no?

I remember seeing some projects by the French government on their self-hosted Gitlab. Maybe these are just public mirrors of their private repos?

> Already, China, Russia have their local tech companies supply their critical infra needs. Other governments should be wise enough to catch up, and not just to support + enhance local languages but to grow their critical ecosystem.

As a European, I agree. Zooming out a little, though, this whole decoupling process of entire economies (which has been well underway for a while) is going to increase the probability of armed conflict as the repercussions of military engagement will be lower.

I agree with this totally. But while they certainly talk the talk I’m not totally convinced that European governments will actually walk the walk and follow through on this.

To me a really significant signal that they’re serious will be when there’s an official Linux version of Solidworks.

It’s remarkable to me that France has control over one of the premiere CAD suites but theyre entirely dependent on an American OS to use it.

Germany has https://www.opendesk.eu/de and https://www.sovereign.tech/programs/fund. both mentioned on HN

Well I would definitely prefer to use globally popular established solutions like Zoom and Teams and the English language and America as a reliable democracy.

Weather or not they get Greenland, Trump and his supporters in the US administration have changed the world. Guy should definitely get Nobel prize for pushing decentralization.

Zoom isn't buggy I wouldn't say. It's really good.

This one made me laugh , thanks ! I wish there was some kind of slashdot like ´funny’ tag

That website is specifically to explain it to French audiences.

German version is here, but unlike France they're mostly boosting already-existing German open source software (like Nextcloud and Open Xchange): https://opencode.de/en/home

I don't know how the Netherlands really fits into all of this, but I know they're one of the biggest funders of open source projects in general via NLnet. Seriously, their list of projects they've given money to is ridiculously comprehensive, you're going to struggle naming some that are not listed here: https://nlnet.nl/project/index.html

> Gotta give them props for all the English. I know that can't have been easy.

Why not? Plenty of French people speak English at a native level.

> Used each month by more than 500 000 staff, in 15 ministries and many administrations.