This is just for show, and facts won't follow. It's not the first time a French government vows to stick to Open Source. Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception.
A few days after that, a major state-owned institution (Polytechnique) announced it was migrating (including the email system) to MS Office 365. Even if it violates several laws and official decrees (it's a semi-military school).
Source (fr) https://cnll.fr/news/polytechnique-men-office-365/
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.
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.
This makes total sense. When a country is creating public software, it should be open source by default. This is the only way to create trust. In the long run, open source and closed source government software will probably 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.
The government getting interested in open source should terrify us all. The UN formally defining principles for what it means is a soft form of regulation that's only going to get more authoritarian over time. Traveling down this road, we're going to find ourselves living in a world where you're only allowed to share software if (1) you're working for a corporation, or (2) you're working for the government. Because (1) and (2) will have their lives managed and regulated and won't do anything they're not told to do. Anyone who wants to be a hobbyist who writes code of their own free will and shares it on GitHub just for fun will be criminalized, just like anyone today who wants to do farming just for fun is criminalized. Once they make these principles part of the law, it'll grow like the tax code, and be enforced. You used C and didn't write documentation? You're outlawed! Believe me when I say the government is not here to help. Code is speech and there'll be no freedom left the day our right to share what we've written in our preferred language in our own preferred way is taken away.
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.
Real question is whether this is just symbolic or if the French state will actually redirect procurement pipelines + vendor mandates around these principles. i'd be more impressed if this came bundled with policy teeth, e.g. requiring all software vendors to deliver open-by-default interfaces or pushing funding toward open infra maintenance. Otherwise it's hardly much more than a manifesto
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'd love to see a coordinated drive to get most off the world onto opensource and off Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android as well as databases etc. American tech companies are making billions off these products that really are simple and could be replaced.
> 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.
This does not surprise me. I've had the sense that the French government has been really forward in open source thinking since my interactions with ETAlab back in 2017. They were tracking some really bleeding edge civic tech stuff before anyone else was (including g0v.tw and the vTaiwan project)
I would love to see more public funds going towards open source. Even if it were directed to private companies' cloud CI services, it would be a great boon. Many projects have to balance how many build/test configurations with the available CI resources.
Curious to know if this extends to LLMs and if so how they would define open source. Specifically it would be nice to see repudiation of Meta's "Open" BS by a nation state.
Cette licence permet d'utiliser, reproduire, modifier et distribuer librement le code avec attribution, mais impose des restrictions pour les opérations dépassant 700 millions d'utilisateurs mensuels.
Interesting they only mention the 700 million users thing and not the other restrictions on use. Personally I could regard the prohibition against basically Google and Microsoft using it to be a minor transgression, it's the larger list of unacceptable uses that's the big problem.
I didn't call the data the source and in the past have explicitly argued that training data is not necessary to exercise the freedoms normally associated with open source.
Llama models have usage restrictions that go against any mainstream definitions of open source.
Anyhow, I wasn't trying to put words in your mouth, simply stating my thoughts. And I focused on data because I see OSS code everywhere, so presume there is no issue there.
France has an undeserved bad reputation for this stuff. As a french citizen, I'm amazed to see how easy it has become to do anything administrative online, with great tools such as France Connect that allows a single login method for any administrative tool.
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)?
AFAK each agency/entity manages its staff and can hire accordingly.
For the big project, my mental image is a public call for proposal, followed by one of the bigger groups (e.g. Cap Gemini) coming up with an initial solution that gets deployed. From there it becomes a mix of the public agency staff doing the day to day operation and maintenance, potentially including small bug fixes and updates, and external contracting again for wider range feature additions or changes like system wide security compliance.
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?
“Various companies use the US government to bully other countries, but they also use license audits as a reaction to projects that move to open-source software.”:
It was a subtle but satisfying (at least for me personally) moment in Tron: Legacy (2010) when Sam Flynn, the heir to ENCOM, breaks into the company HQ and releases their latest OS to the darknet for free, essentially forcibly-open-sourcing it as a protest against excessive corporate greed.
Does anyone know what Mercedes-Benz is doing? I can see why many of the others are on the endorsement list but this one seems out of place. I'm not a car nerd though so I'm sure there is something I'm really missing and be interested in learning about.
They have an entire webpage/associated github repository. It doesn't seem like they've published anything terribly well-known, but good on them for releasing some tooling
As an American, this sort of brings back into question for me thoughts of, "What should constitute a public utility in a Capitalism society?" Upon doing some cursory research (so cursory that I'm afraid to provide links), it occurs to me that I was maybe under a false impression that there _are_ any nationwide public utilities in the first place. We basically have:
* The Federal Reserve
* The Interstate Highway System
* The Postal Service
* Homeland Security
* Medicaid/Medicare (does this even fit the list?)
* Other entitlements I'm also not sure fit this list
Did I leave anything major out? But getting to the point, I think the question is relevant because in order for something like this set of principles to take hold in the US I think we'd essentially have to kill certain classes of software in the private sector. Can you imagine the sorts of craziness that would ensure if the US government tried to adopt LibreOffice? Maybe it could happen at the state or municipal level, but we can't even agree that the government should own any of the power lines.
Yeah, these examples are all challenging in that they tend to represent more governance/funding than infrastructure. Out of both of our lists I think the USPS, highways, parks and land are the most infrastructure-related things. Of course these are all sort of weak analogues since software services are their own animal, but the fact that it’s a choice between governance, funding or a pittance of infrastructure projects I suppose makes the point.
You've limited your list to federal services. But state and local governments provide plenty more "public utility in a Capitalism society", don't they? Schools, fire protection, police for example.
This is just for show, and facts won't follow. It's not the first time a French government vows to stick to Open Source. Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception.
Two months ago, the French government signed an "open bar" contract with Microsoft for the "Éducation Nationale" department. 152 M€, not for Open Source. Source (fr) https://www.april.org/nouvel-open-bar-microsoft-le-ministere...
A few days after that, a major state-owned institution (Polytechnique) announced it was migrating (including the email system) to MS Office 365. Even if it violates several laws and official decrees (it's a semi-military school). Source (fr) https://cnll.fr/news/polytechnique-men-office-365/
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.
Big move by France, leading the way in open source with real global impact!
This makes total sense. When a country is creating public software, it should be open source by default. This is the only way to create trust. In the long run, open source and closed source government software will probably differentiate dictatorships from democracies
> 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
The government getting interested in open source should terrify us all. The UN formally defining principles for what it means is a soft form of regulation that's only going to get more authoritarian over time. Traveling down this road, we're going to find ourselves living in a world where you're only allowed to share software if (1) you're working for a corporation, or (2) you're working for the government. Because (1) and (2) will have their lives managed and regulated and won't do anything they're not told to do. Anyone who wants to be a hobbyist who writes code of their own free will and shares it on GitHub just for fun will be criminalized, just like anyone today who wants to do farming just for fun is criminalized. Once they make these principles part of the law, it'll grow like the tax code, and be enforced. You used C and didn't write documentation? You're outlawed! Believe me when I say the government is not here to help. Code is speech and there'll be no freedom left the day our right to share what we've written in our preferred language in our own preferred way is taken away.
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.
Real question is whether this is just symbolic or if the French state will actually redirect procurement pipelines + vendor mandates around these principles. i'd be more impressed if this came bundled with policy teeth, e.g. requiring all software vendors to deliver open-by-default interfaces or pushing funding toward open infra maintenance. Otherwise it's hardly much more than a manifesto
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.
Oh then it’s dead. LibreOffice never Just Works™. Ideological changes like this only work if they’re painless for the hoi polloi.
LibreOffice UI is so awful I'm 90% convinced there is a Microsoft plant that actively disrupts progress.
I don't lurk the github, so I'm just assuming there are a few accounts that disagree with UI improvements just to kill time and fake debate.
But yeah that UI is just awful.
Further, you mention any UI issue on the subreddit and you get banned. Yeah...
Really a shame, Fedora + Google's Office Suite has been a near complete replacement for me. Although Sheets could be improved a bit.
Talk is cheap, did you create any PRs for the suggested changes?
I think it's more a guideline principle for public software, for exemple apps that are used by citizens to declare taxes, renews IDs...
I'd love to see a coordinated drive to get most off the world onto opensource and off Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android as well as databases etc. American tech companies are making billions off these products that really are simple and could be replaced.
> 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?
This does not surprise me. I've had the sense that the French government has been really forward in open source thinking since my interactions with ETAlab back in 2017. They were tracking some really bleeding edge civic tech stuff before anyone else was (including g0v.tw and the vTaiwan project)
https://g0v.tw/intl/en/
https://info.vtaiwan.tw
I would love to see more public funds going towards open source. Even if it were directed to private companies' cloud CI services, it would be a great boon. Many projects have to balance how many build/test configurations with the available CI resources.
Please don't. If you take government money, then you accept government control.
Compare to the US Open Source Principles where things become public domain by default.
https://www.usgs.gov/products/software
Curious to know if this extends to LLMs and if so how they would define open source. Specifically it would be nice to see repudiation of Meta's "Open" BS by a nation state.
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.
Cool, thanks!
Interesting they only mention the 700 million users thing and not the other restrictions on use. Personally I could regard the prohibition against basically Google and Microsoft using it to be a minor transgression, it's the larger list of unacceptable uses that's the big problem.Agreed. If you feel the need to report inconsistencies, the source code is here: https://github.com/betagouv/ComparIA
It's actually targeting Apple since both Google and Microsoft have their own models.
I'm a little confused by the context of this since I don't speak French, but it seems like you're unfamiliar with the OpenELM family of models.
https://huggingface.co/apple/OpenELM
that looks like a dinosaur now
OSI's OSAID is complete and utter bullshit. Look to Debian if you want a real definition of open source AI.
https://opensource.org/ai https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy
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.
I didn't call the data the source and in the past have explicitly argued that training data is not necessary to exercise the freedoms normally associated with open source.
Llama models have usage restrictions that go against any mainstream definitions of open source.
The model is part of the data, agreed?
Anyhow, I wasn't trying to put words in your mouth, simply stating my thoughts. And I focused on data because I see OSS code everywhere, so presume there is no issue there.
France has an undeserved bad reputation for this stuff. As a french citizen, I'm amazed to see how easy it has become to do anything administrative online, with great tools such as France Connect that allows a single login method for any administrative tool.
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)?
AFAK each agency/entity manages its staff and can hire accordingly.
For the big project, my mental image is a public call for proposal, followed by one of the bigger groups (e.g. Cap Gemini) coming up with an initial solution that gets deployed. From there it becomes a mix of the public agency staff doing the day to day operation and maintenance, potentially including small bug fixes and updates, and external contracting again for wider range feature additions or changes like system wide security compliance.
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?
Some apps have refused to distribute in French store for this reason, such as Syncthing apps Mobius and Synctrain.
“Various companies use the US government to bully other countries, but they also use license audits as a reaction to projects that move to open-source software.”:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1013776
I hope this sets a strong precedent for open source public software.
It was a subtle but satisfying (at least for me personally) moment in Tron: Legacy (2010) when Sam Flynn, the heir to ENCOM, breaks into the company HQ and releases their latest OS to the darknet for free, essentially forcibly-open-sourcing it as a protest against excessive corporate greed.
Leaking the source code is not forcibly-open-sourcing it, as multiple Windows leaks show.
Wonder when there will be a French equivalent of or funding for the Sovereign Tech Agency.
https://www.sovereign.tech/
Does anyone know what Mercedes-Benz is doing? I can see why many of the others are on the endorsement list but this one seems out of place. I'm not a car nerd though so I'm sure there is something I'm really missing and be interested in learning about.
They have an entire webpage/associated github repository. It doesn't seem like they've published anything terribly well-known, but good on them for releasing some tooling
https://opensource.mercedes-benz.com/projects/
Thanks! I wish the page had linked to this!
As an American, this sort of brings back into question for me thoughts of, "What should constitute a public utility in a Capitalism society?" Upon doing some cursory research (so cursory that I'm afraid to provide links), it occurs to me that I was maybe under a false impression that there _are_ any nationwide public utilities in the first place. We basically have:
* The Federal Reserve
* The Interstate Highway System
* The Postal Service
* Homeland Security
* Medicaid/Medicare (does this even fit the list?)
* Other entitlements I'm also not sure fit this list
Did I leave anything major out? But getting to the point, I think the question is relevant because in order for something like this set of principles to take hold in the US I think we'd essentially have to kill certain classes of software in the private sector. Can you imagine the sorts of craziness that would ensure if the US government tried to adopt LibreOffice? Maybe it could happen at the state or municipal level, but we can't even agree that the government should own any of the power lines.
Federal Aviation Administration keeps the skies a public utility.
Federal Communication Commission keeps part of the wireless communication spectrum open to the public.
National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management keeps some public land available for everyone to use.
The Library of Congress.
National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service probably satisfy "Public Utility" as much as Medicaid.
Federal Emergency Management Agency would be another stretch, but not something I would consider an entitlement program.
Yeah, these examples are all challenging in that they tend to represent more governance/funding than infrastructure. Out of both of our lists I think the USPS, highways, parks and land are the most infrastructure-related things. Of course these are all sort of weak analogues since software services are their own animal, but the fact that it’s a choice between governance, funding or a pittance of infrastructure projects I suppose makes the point.
You forgot NIST, which incidentally would probably be the appropriate agency to handle management of open source software
> Did I leave anything major out?
You've limited your list to federal services. But state and local governments provide plenty more "public utility in a Capitalism society", don't they? Schools, fire protection, police for example.
I cany see anywhere how they define open source? Because I am sensing it is pretty much GPL or even AGPL only.
I'm always hoping to see more coverage of this initiative to drive Open Source adoption both within the United Nations and globally...
https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/04/2350224/the-un-ditc...
Thanks for the slashdot link, which also links to the UN:
https://unite.un.org/news/osi-first-endorse-united-nations-o...
Is there other access to the French announcement?
That Mastodon link: social.numerique.gouv.fr, isn't viewable for me...
If it doesn't work due to JS being off, try this tool:
https://github.com/jwilk/zygolophodon
Disclaimer: I work for code.gouv.fr.
No, there is no official French announcement (yet).
Thanks for your reply!
What business and role can the UN have to get into open source solutions?
> What business and role can the UN have to get into open source solutions?
The UN has a nine figure IT budget for starters.
These are principles, aka standards, not solutions.
Governance?
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