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.
We do support the foundation: https://www.numerique.gouv.fr/sinformer/espace-presse/dinum-...
Yup, DINUM does support the Matrix Foundation, which is appreciated in terms of helping keeping Matrix itself alive and independent.
However, this doesn't help support the folks improving & maintaining Element (either its clients or servers), which is the actual upstream product that Tchap is dependent on. Just like donating to the W3C doesn't help improve Firefox, if you were operationally dependent on a Firefox fork.
It really has been a huge disappointment the extent to which governments using open source projects for mission critical work go out of their way to avoid financially supporting them.
How much better could open source alternatives to Teams be in this moment if only 1% of what Europe paid Microsoft for Teams went to investing in open alternatives?
If French trademark law is even remotely close to US trademark law, it can't be applied to videoconferencing because you can't apply a trademark that is just the term for the category of product that is covered.
So for example, I can't trademark "Apple" for my apple orchard. But I can trademark it for my computer company. Similarly, MS likely has chart visualization tools covered by "Visio" in France, but not telecommunications software.
Trademarks aren't granted to a company for unrestricted use. They're granted for specific use. Like I can't found a computer company, get Apple trademarked, and then buy an orchard, use Apple for the orchard, and then sue every apple orchard for saying "XYZ Apples" in their name. It remains restricted to a specific use that was included in the initial application for TM.
Oh I thought you said that you were doing custom features for the French government in a comment a few months ago. I must have misunderstood, sorry.