It's... an admirable goal, but it pretty much remains to be seen if "France"[1] follows through.
Previous attempts to "ditch Windows" have not ended that well. Munich in 2003, the entire Federal German government in 2009, Munich again in 2013, Munich again in 2021, and so on. Most common end-result: back to Windows.
Breaking points are typically the lack of an "Office 2016" compatible suite, lack of "Adobe PDF" tooling, and a mishmash of legacy apps. The latter seems trivially addressable by a "Remote Desktop/RemoteApps" environment, but there are definitely issues, mostly surrounding printing and clipboard handling.
All of that can be solved, but definitely requires more funding and, crucially, coordination, beyond "Open Source Cures All."
[1] Oh, I just love it when an entire culturally-diverse region gets lumped in together, or, when, as in this case, ~6M French government employees are treated as a homogeneous group.
Munich is a bad example - they were effectively „bought out“ by Microsoft by investing hugely into the local economy in the form of offices and employees. It was also two parties that kept flip flopping with different priorities.
Linux itself had some hiccups but was fine from what I recall.
Yeah, let me dispute that. They were, at least on three occasions, forced to roll back due to "citizen sent me X and can't open it" and/or "sent Y to citizen and they can't open it" concerns.
Mind you: these issues still persist in a fully Microsoft/Adobe "solution environment", but less so than in the "disregard all and move to Linux" situation.
And to be perfectly clear: that's all unacceptable. But it adds another, say, EUR 2B to the equation.
I've never seen a user replace all their comments with
"[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}"
making it impossible for others to read their original comments. If this now becomes a trend I feel like there may be a need to change the rules around editing.
I agree. Sometimes people replace their comment text with "[deleted]" or ".", which is already abusive when the comment has replies. But this is the worst case I've seen of someone rage-editing to gut a thread.
I've restored the penultimate content of each of the posts that they overwrote that way. There remain 5 (including the GP) which just say "Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted [etc.]" but that is because they were posted that way and never actually said anything else—which is a whole other level of abuse in its own right.
@dang doesn't work - I only saw this by chance. If you want guaranteed delivery you need to email hn@ycombinator.com!
I agree that keeping the threads readable is a priority, and if we have to we'll change the rules and/or standard practices. Hopefully we won't have to though.
Earlier attempts were mostly about money and ideology. Now its a question of security, thanks to one 'clever' 'businessman'.
So thanks to his _great_ efforts, it might actually work out this time.
I'm... not so sure? The French government has, widely seen, 6M employees. Given retail pricing of EUR200/seat/year (and they definitely have a better arrangement), that's 1.2B, and I'm not sure that's enough to provide an identity management plus office apps plus file storage solution? And at 10% of that? Absolutely forget it...
All of that came about without them spending anything. So the extra is just to fix bugs and do integration work. StarOffice (LibreOffice ancestor) existed in the 90s—I used it and it was fine for government work.
You posted this text in 5 separate places. Worse, you edited 7 previous comments by gutting their original text and replacing them with this same tantrum. That's abusive.
I'm not going to ban you for this because everyone goes on tilt sometimes, but please don't pull a trick like that on HN again.
I've restored the text of the 7 edited comments to what it was before you vandalized them. I've also canceled the downvotes on those posts because I agree with you that the downvotes were unfair. (At least I think I do - I didn't read them closely and don't know the context.) I hope the latter feels at least a little bit like a good faith gesture, because that's how I'm intending it.
(The 5 comments that only ever said "[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}" remain downvoted and flagged since obviously they were against the site guidelines.)
It's really cheap to run FOSS on commodity PCs in the twenty first century. Hetzner is very reasonable in the cloud more recently.
It's not a binary switch either, you build the platform bit by bit every year and roll it out to more and more workers. Four dimensional thinking, that could have succeeded already, a decade plus ago.
Sure a few components would have to be written in the meantime. Just a few million a year would be a huge boost to gaps in FOSS.
You’re saying a government couldn’t take open source building blocks and run.. office apps with basic security and.. file storage? For $100M a year? This could be done with a 30 person team
30 people managing the hardware? Sure, if you get good deals on the hardware itself, the employees stay healthy, and you have everything so centralised you don't need multiple people on call.
Centralising things to that level and supporting the users of the entire government structure of a country the size of France -- one of the countries the sun _never_ sets on -- while it's transitioning from decades of Microsoft dependency to an open source ecosystem? Heh, no.
The claim above of 30 is not particularly important, the point is to lean on the community. Millions a year would get you incredibly far. Many are already helping for free.
24/7 linux webservers existed already by the late nineties.
"Helping for free" doesn't cut it when dealing with governments. Even if everyone had gone the Linux route 20 years ago we'd still have an entire ecosystem of commercial businesses selling and operating it; imagine what Red Hat would look like with Microsoft actually out of the picture.
We'd have just as many consultancy firms and layers of beuraucracy without Microsoft, and France wouldn't be operating their entire government IT stack, all the way down to individual workstations, that much cheaper than it is now.
The difference is that because of open-source there would be competition in those services. And they could take any of it in house at a discount with reasonably priced govt workers. IOW, they'd have choices instead of handcuffs.
They'd be in better situation on all counts. It pays to think ahead to the future and remove dependencies. Where do you want to be in five years? Still in an abusive relationship?
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying, If your mythical 30-person teams were achievable, a lot of major US 'cyber'security firms would be in major trouble. Pop-quiz, hotshot: what does Citrix (market valuation: USD 16.5B), technically, have over your team (market valuation: USD 0B)?
Munich led to "all of Schleswig-Holstein" in Germany. 44,000 Exchange mailboxes replaced with Open-Xchange. 25,000 Windows+Office desktops replaced with Linux+OpenOffice.
I have truly no idea what this is all about. OAuth login issues aside (which have been a thing on-and-off for a while now, and I hope they fix soon), Claude's performance and responses have been entirely stable for me for like, forever.
Different people have completely different experiences as they perform different tasks, that shouldn't be difficult to understand. It's a bit like the purported degradation of quality of Google search. It is still excellent for me but I don't doubt that others are experiencing it.
Same for me. I have been max200 for like 10 months, i think my usage is reasonable, and i never seem to get the quality throttling that gets complaints daily. I assume they are targeting certain piggies at the Claude buffet, who then squeal the loudest.
As far as I can tell, the people affected are primarily those using their Claude code tokens for openclaw or similar and burning as many tokens as possible
Other than that the graphs look good, I don't have much to say about the code (not a Python person), but I think the approach is great, mostly because I like using custom-generated SVGs for visualizations myself as well.
The only downside I've experienced is that it's pretty much impossible to get data-dependent interactions (tooltips and clickable links that vary based on section) to work reliably: additional Javascript has gotten me to like 80% on desktop, but not on mobile.
> the way he went about it — the accusatory tone, the refusal to compromise or even acknowledge that others might simply have honest differing opinions
...is entirely familiar and not a recent phenomena. He dismissed me as a "BIND company shill" during an IETF meeting in... 2008(?) for pointing out some (minor) implementation issues I saw with DNSCurve.
Sure, any wannabe-but-not-entirely-educated World Leader would love to own Greenland.
And why not? It's strategically located, rich in natural resources, and...
Until, well, you actually visit the place and realize that 95% of its surface area is pretty much inhabitable and its population centers are pretty much indefensible, on account of being, well, fishing villages.
Previous attempts to "ditch Windows" have not ended that well. Munich in 2003, the entire Federal German government in 2009, Munich again in 2013, Munich again in 2021, and so on. Most common end-result: back to Windows.
Breaking points are typically the lack of an "Office 2016" compatible suite, lack of "Adobe PDF" tooling, and a mishmash of legacy apps. The latter seems trivially addressable by a "Remote Desktop/RemoteApps" environment, but there are definitely issues, mostly surrounding printing and clipboard handling.
All of that can be solved, but definitely requires more funding and, crucially, coordination, beyond "Open Source Cures All."
[1] Oh, I just love it when an entire culturally-diverse region gets lumped in together, or, when, as in this case, ~6M French government employees are treated as a homogeneous group.
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