This is a really great project from both the French and German governments.
I think state-funded open source solutions to digital platforms is a fantastic opportunity to get away from the big tech walled gardens. Of course, there is always the risk that this becomes unmaintained in the future, but the community at least can take over. But until then, it's a nice platform and a nice contribution to the community.
Hey everyone! I'm the PM working with the Docs team. Thanks a lot for the kind words, we're as excited as you to be working on such a cool project. We didn't expect to get posted so soon on HN. We still have a lot to do in terms documentation and reusability. But we'll be working a lot on that next week. We'll keep you posted here. Again thank you everyone!
Not a Docs question, but I recently came across Grist and I see that Grist is actually listed as a project under la Suite Numerique. On the other hand, Grist Labs (getgrist.com/about) claim to be the developers, are based in the US (NYC), and I couldn't see any mention any EU collaboration on their website. What is the connection here? How does it differ from the governance and funding model of Docs?
I love that you guys are building a suite of next-gen tools rather than just recreating LibreOffice. Seems really smart to me!
AFAIK, there are lots of contributions from developers in the French government to the Grist open source repository. We also deploy it, we have instances running in various government agencies.
For Docs, we bootstrapped the repository ourselves on top of Django, Next.js, BlockNote.js, Y.js and many others. We welcome contributions!
Yes, there are lots of PR listed here : https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/pulls?q=is%3Apr+labe...
> The French government agency ANCT Données et Territoires has also made significant contributions to the codebase.
From the Grist-core readme : https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core
Do you have plans to add structure to the document collection? E.g. group documents into projects, put documents into order and hierarchy (docs holding chapters, sections). I would really like a system that lets you have projects with a document per chapter or section and has a chapter/section outline on the left panel of the document editor.
Comments and custom styles would also be great.
Hey! Yes we do, we plan to release sub-docs before the end of the month. That will allow you to create trees of docs (with as many child / grand-child as you want) all inheriting the user rights of the parent.
One of the things that I rely on with a collection of docs is a usable "full text search". The demo atleast only searches on the titles which only goes so far. It would be very useful for this project to have a proper search solution.
Hi, thanks for the project and contributing a nice European alternative to Outline. I had a few questions relating to Docs as it seems a nice alternative I want to integrate in our company.
- Is it a project funded directly by the Governments or by the NGI funds?
- Is there an extensibility via plugins or other in the future thought for integrations ?
- Is the ProConnect the only way or can one use a self-hosted OIDC or another IdP to login?
Hey! Thanks for your interest. It's directly funded by the governments. BlockNotejs (the library doing the editor bit) received some funding from NGI. And now France and Germany are sponsoring the project (and also Yjs) No plugins plans for now. You can use your self-hosted OIDC, when you run the project locally you'll see a Keycloak as first screen. Let us know if you get it running docs@numerique.gouv.fr would love to hear your feedback as a reuser.
Great work by the Suite Numerique team!
Are you guys looking at adding localization support for languages beyond French as well (eg. English, German)?
It would be a great alternative to multiple disjointed OSS offerings like Mattermost or Appflowy.
Also, I found the DIPT to be fairly intruiging. How much inspiration did the org get from Gov.uk, and are there some resources, papers, or books you could point to about the DIPT initiative?
Indeed, Docs is already available both in English and German :)
AFAIK we took a lot of inspiration from Gov.uk and 18F/USDS (RIP), at least for digital services. You can look at https://beta.gouv.fr/
Hey! Thanks! Yes we do plan to support more languages, we want the project to be usable by the many. Translations are here : https://crowdin.com/project/lasuite-docs (just added turkish tonight ;)
Have you considered integrating Zulip into your chat solution? It's leagues ahead of any other product in the space.
Did you consider building on top of some existing open source solutions like Docmost, Appflowy, or AFFiNE?
Hey, we dedided to take an approach where we build on top of libraries like BlockNotejs, Yjs, HocusPocus but build our own wrapper around it in Django and Next.js. This allows to iterate really fast and to catter our own need (we are large organizations we don't have the same as startups or SMEs). Contributing and sponsoring allows us to make improvement that help the whole collaborative software category.
I really like the idea of shifting the business model for office software. Instead of the current model—where companies develop a tool, lock users into their ecosystem, and profit by bundling software with hosting and storage—we could move to a model where different providers compete to offer the best deployment solutions. This would foster competition based on factors like pricing, encryption, customer support, server location, and integration flexibility, rather than simply forcing users into long-term subscriptions.
That’s why I’m glad to see governments supporting Open Source alternatives to proprietary office software. Paying recurring subscription fees for low-maintenance tools like MS Office feels out of touch—especially when Microsoft once offered a one-time purchase model before shifting to SaaS to maximize profits. This change has made it difficult for individuals and businesses to retain long-term ownership of their tools without being tied to costly and recurring fees. The same trend has played out across the software industry, from design tools like Adobe Creative Cloud (which replaced one-time purchases with a mandatory subscription model) to communication platforms like Slack and Zoom, which lock companies into ongoing costs while limiting interoperability with other solutions.
> we could move to a model where different providers compete to offer the best deployment solutions.
The Matrix project lead talked at FOSDEM about an issue with this model [0]: a pure market approach to this just doesn't offer any way to fund upstream development.
Luckily the public sector ought to be a an arena where we can solve this problem by being englightened consumers instead of just buying from the provider that provides the most service per dollar. But that enlightenment does require some education.
JFrog is doing very well financially with an excellent self-hosted offering
Large organisations had access to subscription software long before modern SaaS, and chose to use it. In the 1990s Microsoft offered an Enterprise Agreement that operated in this manner. Support is also something that large organisations value and are happy to subscribe to.
Microsoft still offers one-time purchase for Office by the way - Office 2024 was recently released.
I love this. Open source projects often suffer from a combination of a funding crisis and maintainer burnout. I think state funded open source projects are a wonderful idea!
By investing in open source projects, governments can create more efficient, transparent, and innovative digital services. If anything I’m sure it’ll save tax payers money on expensive licenses paid to a company in another country.
It's also about risk management from the government's perspective. You don't want to be beholden to a potentially hostile foreign corporation for tasks as essential as managing your own documents. Compared to how much money they already spend on American SaaS, Investing a few million euros in open-source alternatives could be seen as cheap insurance.
This tool is part of a WIP complete suite of tools for public agents called "La suite numérique".
Ah this makes sense, I was going to comment that "docs" was not really a suitable name.
What is the correct full name then? lasuite docs (judging from the logo, that seem to be the brand part)? docs numerique (from the URL)?
numerique.gouv is like digital.gov. Kind of a whole ministry.
La Suite Docs is better yes.
adding to this, it seems to me like most of the projects are yet to be open sourced. the github currently has docs and their video conferencing tool (which also looks great): https://github.com/suitenumerique
All the projects are already open sourced actually, but admittedly all don't have documentation as good as docs or meet. Still a wip :)
Cool! Are they under a different GitHub org? I couldn't find grist or tchap
The open-source project Grist Core (https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core) is developed in the United States, with contributions from some French gov tech team.
Some of the projects are on this org https://github.com/numerique-gouv/ but there are way more projects that the suite numerique there
Tchap is based on Matrix and Element, https://github.com/element-hq
Tchap looks neat as a Slack alternative, but it seems like it's still only for government workers.
Tchap is just Element/Matrix with some gov specific features.
We use Mattermost at work, and apart from the mobile app being a bit shit, and search being kind of useless, it's easily as good as Slack. In some ways it's better, e.g. you can use proper Markdown in messages instead of Slack's Mrkdwn abomination that doesn't even allow links.
I wish they would improve search though; it's kind of a critical feature in a company.
? I put Slack into non-rich-text-editor mode and use standard markdown link syntax dozens of times a day
Well maybe they've added that in the past 2 years but certainly 2 years ago you could only add links using rich text mode.
search is the #1 feature I use in our corporate slack (huge, huge instance).
without search it's useless.
sounds exactly like slacks search, except slack also doesn't find exactly what you put in sometimes... (think the indexing isn't very fast because sometime a day old message is impossible to search for)
That said, calling the video conferencing capability "Visio" is à la banane.
"Visio" is French slang for a videoconference meeting. Open to suggestions for a project name that better reflects its purpose and vision.
How about "Vidja" -- the .fr domain seems to be available, the top google hit is for an IKEA floor lamp, and it is generally a silly English mispronunciation of "video" (you kids and yer vidja games...) :)
I love the effort that is going on here. I'm just curious about some of the efforts taken here. The Docs seems like a good approach to just build it, but really wondering what the motivation behind building another video chat platform was instead of using and improving rather mature OSS solutions like Jitsi.
Visio is a Microsoft Office app: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/visio/flowchar...
This is awesome!
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Or maybe the target of tools developed by the French government is France. Not everything has to make sense worldwide. I would be happy to see the target expanded beyond just France, but there’s no need to be snarky about it not being the case right now.
Great point! this will be addressed and fixed within the week.
Huh?
The linked site is https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs which has the commits, readme, code comments, and issues in English.
The github description links to https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/ which is available in English, French and German.
The comment I replied to was linking to this:
What, chinese?
Or maybe not. Maybe Europe needs to focus first on building local software. Even in 2025, French devs are fare from fluent in English.
Real question, not a rhetorical one.
There are already quiet a few softwares that claim to be Notion alternatives or seem to be:
- AppFlowy: https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy
- AFFiNE: https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE
- SiYuan: https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan
- Trillium Next: https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes
- AnyType (only clients are source available): https://github.com/anyproto/anytype-ts
https://getoutline.com mentioned in the submission title
Count me as a biiig proponent and user of TriliumNext, it's in my mind and experience the most capable note taking and organising app there is, but I don't think I nor any of its developers would call it a "Notion alternative".
The future continues to be AGPL
And Docmost - https://github.com/docmost/docmost
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The beauty of democracy is that a single person doesn't make the decision for everyone else.
I think an open source Notion for 2€ is an absolute bargain, so there is that.
People would do the same if curl was publicly funded, that doesn't mean it would be a bad idea.
Hey. A few developers from the team are on HN and will be happy to answer any questions here!
We also made a small scratchpad you can use to test collaboration features, if it doesn't get too flooded :) https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/a3f0becc-f2b7-45be-a5e5-...
What led to the choice of using Blocknote over other editor packages? Would love to read about the decision making and comparisons between all the editors you considered. Also interested in any other write ups about choosing packages (ex: I see you using hocuspocus which I think is from another editor - TipTap) and why you landed on your particular tech stack.
Maintainer of BlockNote here (and contributor to HocusPocus). I can't speak for Docs as to why they chose BlockNote, but can answer some of your questions. BlockNote is actually built on top of Tiptap - but designed to take away the heavy lifting. As powerful as they are, to build a Notion-like editor on top of Tiptap (or Prosemirror) still requires quite some engineering firepower. We've built BlockNote to come "batteries-included" with common UI components and a simpler API to make it easy for you to add a modern, block-based editor to your app.
That's very cool, as a happy user of TipTap this is the first I've heard of BlockNote - excited to check it out. I've also built a few modest things on top of TipTap and felt a slight "tower of babel" unease, would you mind saying a bit about what BlockNote takes from TipTap which couldn't be accomplished with Prosemirror alone?
This comes from a place of pure curiosity, I don't actually believe this strata of editor packages is in any way inherently bad!
Hey! Not a developer but here are a couple pointers. As Yousef says below, the text editing bit is hard. We wanted to be build fast and BlockNotejs makes it easy, you get the block stucture, the slash command, you can style your editor and extend with custom blocks. The BlockNotejs team researched the live editing space thoroughly so we could just follow the tracks: BlockNotejs, HocusPocus, Yjs. We "just" had to build the wrapper around with authentication, docs permissions and search and boom you have Docs!
Really cool to be able to test this directly, thanks for setting it up.
I found something I would qualify as a bug: if you click on the right of any text, the cursor is placed at the beginning of the line, where I would expect to have it at the end.
What's your stance on accessibility? Is that something you even consider?
Notion is particularly terrible here, so this could be a great alternative for people / organizations who need that.
It's not only considered, it's a an actual goal to be 100% usable by everyone. It's already the case for some of La Suite projects. Not quite there yet right now for some others, but it will be.
And I agree, lots of popular, proprietary solutions should do better in terms of accessibility. I believe open-source helps in that regard, as in many others.
Here in La Suite we have some wcag-geeks in the team and regularly include some of our users with disabilities for feedback.
https://react-spectrum.adobe.com/react-aria is used in most La Suite projects. Also we have one frontend developer focused on accessibility and few auditors. We always prioritize accessibility
Looks really nice. I looked at the readme on github and selfhost section mentions it is only for testing. Why? What is the difference?
Looking at how much infrastructure needs to be spun up, I don't really see this as a good solution for personal note taking. If you use the Docker environment, you spin up 10 or more containers... including KeyClock. I get that this is intended to by hosted by a company or an organisation, but plenty of people are using Notion just as individuals.
Most people would be better of with Obsidian, Bear, Notion or even Apple Notes.
We're working on an "IDE for notes/tasks" [1] in the space of Notion and so on where you can easily self-host the sync backend with a single binary.
The idea is that you can choose between cloud or self-host (and "eject" at any time to switch between the two if you ever change your mind). We hope that might be a good balance between some companies or individuals wanting to self-host but still making it accessible when you don't know how any of that works, which indeed can get complicated fast.
That looks VERY AWESOME. Really looking forward to try it :)
This looks really cool, signed up for early access. Any plans to have an import from notion feature? I’ve used notion for personal note taking and manually moving over would be a big time sync at this point. But I’d love to have a self hosted solution.
I’d love to try this out - I signed up for beta access. Looking forward to giving it a shot!
I see you can @ people. Does that mean you can get notifications when you've been @-ed? Also, is there the ability to comment on documents? For me these are two killer features to leave a Notion or Confluence.
This looks neat! Will the self-hosted binary function in air-gapped environments?
Absolutely. There is no phone-home of any kind.
Yep, should work!
do you plan to have a mobile app?
would you implement database function like in Notion?
Is it a full feature todo app or just noting down tasks?
would be a killer app if it has 3 Yes
1. Planned, but our first focus is the web app (plus desktop Electron)
2. Yes. We have a bunch of default views like table, kanban, photo gallery, and calendar. You can also create your own views with a JS plugin, like this silly example of spinning globe view: https://x.com/wcools/status/1898828593255346287
3. Our aim is a full feature todo app. But we won't have every feature on day 1.
looks neat. Like Acreom, but with better collaboration capabilities.
Also going to sign up.
Love your site. Looks great. Lots of visual appeal. Not the same cookies cutter Tailwind theme that seems to be present everywhere.
This is an internal tool (which was open sourced) made by the French government digital service to be used by French government employee on French government infra. I do not think it is trying to be a better solution for individuals. It’s trying to be a better solution for gov employees.
If we can spin up the 10 containers with a single docker compose command on a $5/month VPS, this really doesn't seem like too much for an individual.
And the best part: this is MIT licensed. If it's actually difficult to set up, build a nice web UI that makes it easy and you've got a product.
I'm not worried about the cost, you can probably run all of it in the closet on a Raspberry Pi, it's the complexity. What do you do when part of this inevitably fail, how do you get your data back out, where is the data? In Minio, in Postgresql?
Our primary target is indeed larger organizations but we're working on one-click deployment solutions and an all-in-one container.
Honestly it's a reasonable set of dependencies:
* Postgres for permanent storage
* an OIDC identity provider so you don't have to make your own password system
* Redis for caching
* S3-compatible object storage (so you don't have to reinvent file uploads)
* The app itself
What would you rather them do? Waste time reinventing the wheel for no reason? If you have the IDP and object storage setup already figured out you can get away with just the app, postgres, and redis.
That's a typical tech answer. Do you really want to spin up 10 images for note taking for yourself? From a product standpoint that's not sensible and wastes way to much resources.
Are you sure? It’s a collaborative note taking application which is designed to support large groups.
A similar project we collaborate on has Helm charts as an option. “Are you mad? You run an online archive with how many pods, come again?” You may say.
“When said archive can handle a continent’s load and scale almost indefinitely, you engineer things differently”, I’ll answer.
Also, nobody will probably make this comment, if the said application was built by a private company and was not open source.
Good thing this is a server app and not an end-user product, then.
Why do I care how many images it's spinning up? That's an implementation detail - I just copy/paste a docker-compose configuration.
you usually don't need a collaborative product when taking note for yourself
The closest we get is something like USDS, which then gets hijacked in to DOGE.
Open source software built and supported by a national government is inspiring. Are there more examples of this I'm not aware of? I hope so.
The UK has Government Digital Services (GDS), which has built and open sourced all the good bits of gov.uk: https://github.com/alphagov
It’s been happening pretty consistently in France.
The cops are rolling their own distro :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
I think it’s wise. Not idea if it’s good
Open source repositories of the Dutch government:
I have a scraper that covers open source govtech I keep meaning to tidy up...
Ghidra is a fine example from the US government.
there was 18f too :(
It really feels like we are in a time where EU countries are taking front and center on the world stage with cool, progressive and unified stuff, and the US is in the ally snorting crack. Saying this as a disappointed American. But yeah…really cool to see governments collaborating this way.
It's not like the US wasn't warned about this repeatedly for decades, and yet we chose this.
Having both the Notion-like UI and the real time collaboration is exciting! So much stuff has been either/or, and it made it hard for me to find a good alternative.
I really appreciate how Notion is basically "what if Google Docs but you can actually organize your information". The collaborative components feel really powerful.
I do kind of wish that something that was more ... Wiki-flavored would show up though. I like confluence, it's just mega slow!
What about markdown based tools that focused on the linking part, e.g. Haptic or Logseq, is that wiki-flavored enough?
You should take a look at Outline (mentioned in the title). https://www.getoutline.com/
All features aren't available in the community edition …
Right, but the vast majority are – include those they are talking about.
The reality is nowadays few documents need desktop publishing features. Because seldom if ever become paper documents.
Also the average back office author knows a tiny fraction of Microsoft Word or Excel features.
Give them means to type in text, add pictures and collaborate. Templates for beautification. That’s all what is needed.
This has been known for ages. Alas Microsoft has a grip on governments and large orgs we know little about. CERN is an example.
> nowadays few documents need desktop publishing features. Because seldom if ever become paper documents.
I rarely read paper, but I find professionally designed documents much easier to read on my screens. It's such a relief to open a PDF of a professionally designed book, for example, after reading screenfuls of html.
Agreed. Here I invoke the wisdom of groff old timers and of younger CSS developers: where the latter stops being useful when a professional looking pdf must be generated?
I can prepare a decent looking document, or spreadsheet, with LibreOffice styles (CSS) without particular effort. With Docs should not be much different.
Have seen official government Word documents with formatting in need of assistance. Teams at very large firms share Word documents, via email, forth and back debating about revisions of text and numbers. Publishing was only the necessary last step.
In most cases authors use the bare minimum of functions to get the job done. Professional looking is something else instead. I don’t know where Docs stands here.
"Simple collaborative editing without the formatting complexity of markdown"
It is incredible that nowadays Markdown is considered "complex".
What's complex for most users that do not spend their days into an IDE is not seing what's your prose is going to look like and they've been use to that for a couple decade. For us it kind of made sense to support markdown + giving giving a minimalistic toolbar for users who don't know how to md. Also, you can do a lot of things in BlockNotejs you can't unless you code html and css in md (colors, blocks etc.)
Well I think that most of our users have never typed a "[" character... So for them, Markdown is definitely complex :)
Outline is also open source (or at least “source available”): https://github.com/outline/outline
All features aren't available in the community edition …
Do you have a reference to the differences? I can't find it on their website nor on GitHub.
https://www.getoutline.com/pricing, what missed back in the days was the multi-organization management
I just cannot understand the appeal of these browser based note taking apps. Notion, Obsidian, Outline? Is it the collaboration feature? Why not just use Google Docs or equivalent?
For notes, I don't see the appeal of having a browser interface. I just put my notes in a text file. No protocol, just search for text strings or text tags. If I need hierarchical organization, I use directories. What am I missing out on?
> What am I missing out on?
1. Non-technical colleagues.
2. Easy and real-time collaboration.
3. Slickness, mixing of multi-media, etc. This is related to 1.
Not arguing against your preference, just answering the "why".
I am currently in the process of switching from using Obsidian to manage local markdown notes/files to using Notion for at least my personal project tracking. I have 2 reasons.
1. Notions "Databases" are easier to use, edit, and manage than any similar setup I could figure out locally. And they have inbuilt integrations so you can sync things like Github/Gitlab/Jira, etc directly into your docs. I highly recommend setting up a personal project inside Notion to try it out.
2. Less important but still useful, the collaboration is good to use with my partner. We can have shared household notes/saved info/tasks/etc all in one place very easily using it.
Have you tried TriliumNext? It doesn't have collaboration for editing but sharing is built in,
It lets you structure your notes in a way that's reminiscent of object oriented programming (you've got templates to define types, inheritance of attributes to instantiate and specialize them, etc). I have hierarchies of hundreds/thousands of notes that for all intent and purposes are as good as Notion's Databases
> I just cannot understand the appeal of these browser based note taking apps. Notion, Obsidian, Outline? Is it the collaboration feature? Why not just use Google Docs or equivalent?
Google docs is also browser based? And obviously not foss or self-hostable.
Are you saying "why does Google have docs app in addition to a note taking app?" (Google docs vs Google Keep, Microsoft Word vs Microsoft OneNote etc?)
I'm saying that there are already collaboration tools like Google Docs or whatever. I don't see how managing notes in such a tool beats having some text files. Working with a browser kind of sucks for write operations. It's fine or even good for reading. But writing into a browser goes through obscure layers so that, what? it can go into a database? Files on disk solve this issue. Grep over files or even a more robust index of searchable data solves the findability problem. There can be other sidecar tools to support discoverability, but I'm just focused on the HCI/UX of a browser for text entry and editing, and find it really poor compared to a text editor with files that you control and can run other tools over.
But google docs is also a web browser app?
Yes, I'm saying that if you need collaboration, sure, but if all you want is personal note management then I don't see the appeal over plain text files.
I don't see the appeal of having a browser interface.
Browser level access allows for multi-device multi-context (personal/work) access.
Also google docs/drive is deeply unusable when trying to organize mental spaces.
> I don't see the appeal of having a browser interface. I just put my notes in a text file.
Great until you need an image or more than the simplest table, as examples.
Hmm, I find it easy enough to open a link or even embed an image in a text editor.
I mean, when one text document gets to long, moving sections elsewhere and linking to them.
How do you embed an image? ASCII art?
Docmost is another open source option https://www.docmost.com
It feels like notetaking/wiki software have gotten a resurgence in the last few years. Not that it was ever not a thing, but like a new generation of people realized wanted to build new tools for it.
Personally, I think the variety of tools is very interesting, and while I like Obsidian and plain markdown file, I do love to see different options in the space with hosted options and different capabilities.
Notion feels like it's got this serious range from individuals up to teams at large enterprises. It's incredibly flexible and configurable and I have to assume that's a big part of it, but it was so interesting to watch it eat away at other things like Confluence over the years. My perspective is probably skewed (and I know Confluence and other are probably still massive and dominant), but I'm surprised such a simple concept is getting so much more software. Or actually, that's probably why it's a space with so much software.
If you're familiar with the space, ever heard anything that ticks all these boxes:
(a) git versioned
(b) CRDTs
(c) WYSIWYG but Markdown (esp GFM)
(d) front matter + markdown able to be SSGd
(e) comfortable UI for not-devs
(f) native (Swift) MacOS app, else Tauri/Electron self-hosted client+svc
(g) if online, OIDC / SAML SSO
Appears this can be cobbled leveraging Obsidian plugins, but unstable due to git vs. CRDT issues. And there are a few "CMS" for SSG stacks that almost but not quite meet this.
Dev of the Obsidian Relay plugin [0] here.
We support most of this (you'll need to also use Obsidian Git), but haven't released OIDC (please reach out of you need it!).
very interesting, I'm looking for something like this, will check it out. In my obsdian vault, I keep a lot of code snippets and even entire python scripts. Do you see your method as being perhaps an alternative to dedicated github repos for tiny personal projects, replacing a million little repos? And at the same time having notes in the same repo?
Have you solved the git repo index problem, Ive found that large vaults cause a problem and require occasional cleanup:
```bash git gc --prune=now # Garbage collection
git repack -ad # Repacked objects, optimizing repository storage ```
Qownnotes. Syncs with cloud for multi device.
I’m also a bit surprised by this, but it really seems like there’s a growing need, maybe as a way to handle information overload or keep up with the ever-faster pace of learning and change.
When I started Typemill.net years ago, my focus was actually on ebook publishing. But over time, I noticed that a lot of small businesses were looking for lightweight tools for documentation, note-taking, and similar content. So, I naturally shifted to documentation and small knowledge bases.
For a long time, this space was pretty much dominated by big enterprise tools like Confluence on one side and Evernote on the other. But now, with tools like Obsidian, BookStack, Docmost, Outline, and others, there’s finally a broad range of modern solutions that fit different needs and sizes. I think that’s a great step forward...
Anyone know the system requirements?
I got bit by notion when I assumed my recent i7 would be enough for it to keep up with my typing speed, but after a few pages of notes, notion uses 100% of a core and input lags considerably....
Wonder how good this is at resolving merge conflicts:
> Offline? No problem, keep writing, your edits will get synced when back online
Have been burned too many times in college.
person 1: is updating doc
person 2: is updating doc
person 3; updating doc
(( doc reaches a dozen pages ))
person 3 loses internet connection but everyone else continues working
Person 3 adds and edits a handful of pages while offline while #1, #2 keep chugging along.
#3 internet is restored and now the system attempts to merge in their changes and sync changes from #1, #2. At the same time, #1, #2 receiving updates from #3
Now chaos ensues as the system is throwing a shit ton of errors and old changes getting reverted. Immediate showstopper.
Not so fun times. And a lesson learned.
I love that this is funded by the French&German government. Go Europe! Wonderful to see. My only wish is that other EU governments (my own included) would invest even more into projects like this.
Hey! The Netherlands joined recently. Let’s hope more countries follow
Anyone knows if there is something like that with heavy focus on privacy? basically decentralized offline first, end2end encrypted collaborative note taking/knowledgedb is something iam looking for.
For e2ee you might want to have a look at CryptPad (https://cryptpad.org). You can test it on the free instance https://cryptpad.fr
You'll have plenty of doc types with full end to end encryption, including for your drive.
We plan on getting e2ee as we have the military are interested in using it. From what we investigated there will be some tradeoff feature wise (attribution of edits will be harder for example). Happy to receive some help on that front.
A while back this was posted on HN - https://github.com/docmost/docmost/
No, but the French and German governments just gave you an excellent code base to start from!
From the top of the readme:
> without the formatting complexity of markdown
Really, markdown is complicated of all things?
For non technical people used to WYSIWYG, yes?
That's a nice shot, that probably is not going to change much. This is a neat alternative for Notion if you are small company, but with strong IT team that will maintain installation (all the boring stuff from updates to backups).
If you are 20 person startup then Notion will cost you around 200 Euro per month. Having Docs installation will be cheaper? Will 200 Euros cover the expenses? I am afraid the math is not on the Docs side.
First question that any bigger organization will ask is: how SSO will work, what is the integration with our company LDAP, etc. If they hear that well, install Docs for yourself and figure out integration by yourself no manager would agree to use Docs, as from his or her perspective it is cheaper, less risky to go with something like Notion. It is also true even with gov administration or public universities, they also operate within IT infrastructure and they gladly take something free, but it must integrate with that IT infrastructure. If not, this is not an option.
Hey there! Thanks for the comment. I have to disagree with you. For government and large legs it makes less and less sense to just pay for licences. If you pay per user it becomes a huge chunk of your budget AND you have no control on your IT nor the budget to hire people. In the context we live and especially in Europe it also make no sense to opt for an American vendor who has to give access to US gov if asked to. And for small orgs I don’t see why there’d be no large mutualized instance that everyone can use for a reasonable price that pays for the ops team running it + server expenses.
It would be fascinating if it could add LaTeX support!
It seems vaguely planned: https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/issues/724
Outline has LaTeX fwiw, and is BSL licensed – so you can host it yourself without issue.
I like almost everything from this project, even the documentation and development is being done in the open, with design docs like this: https://www.figma.com/design/qdCWR4tTUr7vQSecEjCyqO/DOCS?nod...
Does this provide database functionality like seen in Notion?
I'm always disappointed by note-taking tools calling themselves a Notion alternative when they do not provide an alternative to Notion and are instead just another note-taking tool with a simple UI.
If you want to be a Notion alternative provide the things that make Notion great, e.g. the database functionality. It's okay to be a simple colaborative notes tool, but that is not a Notion alternative.
As far as I know, the database part is handled by Grist, listed on the suite of tools this note app is part of.
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr
Of course, it's not a replacement to Notion yet.
I'm actually not talking about how they handle the database but instead the Database feature of Notion, which is more of a advanced table for the user that can be turned into a Kanban, timeline, calendar, etc. It's one of the main advantages Notion has over other note-taking tools.
Sorry, my comment was not clear. The database of La Suite is Grist. Notes is part of La Suite, a broader project. https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr
Yup, this is my biggest question too. I'd love to switch to this but I definitely need my relational database features.
It's a little like products that brands themselves as a "Jira replacement". Yes, you got the basic functionality down, but so does a hundred other projects. You're not really dealing with the hard problems or the advanced features. Maybe in the future yes, but a replacement... a potential future replacement maybe.
Tbf Jira's "hard problems" are really things that shouldn't be done in the first place, like the insane configurability. Just ends up in a mess.
The problem with Jira is that it's enterprise software that's put in place by people that don't actually have to use it.
Hey! Docs’s PM here.
IMO Notion really made an awesome job with real-time, collab features (comments, suggestions) and useful AI actions. So much, people only see databases ^^.
For now we’ll be focusing on these. That’s already plenty ^^ Further down road we’ll if we manage to take on databases.
Craft has collections for tables of data, also has a variety of other data modeled things like TODOs: https://www.craft.do/
Sadly that tool seems to be subscription only? And it does not have an Android version even though they are on iOS.
Not really a database, but I've made a prototype integration of Docs with IronCalc: https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/pull/466
This could also take the form of a custom block that you could embed in a text document.
Why am I starting to believe that france is now more culturally shited towards being a new super power in this multi polar world instead of USA.
Seriously , I never used to really think about france that much , but Emmanuel Macron correcting trump on live air really made me trust france more as a non US citizen.
I would hardly decide to trust a politician based on a 5 second quip on live TV.
Yea I agree , fair point. Though I think , I would probably study more about france's current system to trust it more but that requires efforts and in general a sense of direction (like which country / politician to even start reading to start to generate trust from reason )
I was more about talking trust from intuition which can then create that sense of direction.
I thank you for creating this comment. I gotta read more about macron to see if he's really how I felt from my intution.
When it comes to the use of cutting edge technology to further the goals of the people at large, France has been a leader for some time. As for why you're just noticing now, perhaps the time has come for the rest of us to do the same.
That was funny, but as a Frenchman I don't hold too much hope. Our far right, supporting both Trump and Putin, has been gaining steam with each passing election for the past 20 years.
Hopefully the circus currently taking place across the pond is enough to deter some from voting for them, come 2027?
20 years. That's step 1, Demoralization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQPsKvG6WMI
That was very interesting, Russia switched from pushing "marxism-leninism" to general reactionary ideas, which seem to take better in our current age.
I'd add that they also found powerful allies in western oligarchs, who have a vested interest in the dismantling of the state for personal gains.
The far-right is a symptom of what is happening in France. Fix the problems and the far right will disappear.
Unfortunately, that would mean that the politicians from the last 20 years need to do a mea culpa on quite a few things and that will never happen so the far right will eventually get in power.
Don't blame the players, blame the game.
> The far-right is a symptom of what is happening in France.
They are having the same outcomes using the same tactics all over the world. It's not dependant on the country.
That's what I hope too. Trump's failure could be our far-right failure to win the 2027 elections.
That's been the Democratic Party's strategy for decades: Don't confront them and the Republican candidate, Trump in particular, will 'shoot themselves in the foot'.How is that working? On their part, it's just cowardice and laziness.
There is no way you will win, no way they will stop, unless you fight (politically and socially) and defeat them.
This very much. Defeat them and then actually address the growing inequalities and social issues, to curb discontent. Otherwise it's back to square one in the next election.
I don't trust our neoliberal politicans (Dems or Macron here in France, whatever his party is called today) to do the right thing. If they get reelected it will be more mostly pro-buisness politics with a dash of mildly progressive policies, when it's convenient.
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Putin has always been "for peace" - meaning, give Ukraine to him, and he'll stop trying to take Ukraine over :)
(and if he still has war fighting capability left, attack the next country going west in ~5 years)
What the fuck are you even talking about?
Putin broke his peace treaties 27 times and just refused Ukraine's last one. Russia was the one starting the whole fucking war in the first place.
How is CAF funding terrorists and drugs?? Stop spreading nonsense, and please never vote again, seeing how you are completely brainwashed.
Macron’s approval ratings must be below 3% by now. If he had any backbone, he’d resign immediately.
You made me look : it's about 27% [1], which is of course not great, but actually not that bad _for him_, _in the past few years_.
The political landscape is completely split in 3 thirds in France at the moment, and people stay firmly in their lanes.
It would need an incredibly popular décision to bring anyone from the left or far right to approve of him.
[1] https://www.latribune.fr/la-tribune-dimanche/politique/barom...
Thanks for actually looking things up instead of dreaming things up. This reminds me of Trumps claim that Zelensky is a hugely impopulair dictator, whereas in fact his approval ratings far exceed Trumps and he is very much legally chosen.
Misinformation is a disease.
That said, I was also expecting smaller numbers, mostly based on how comedians are routinely roasting him about his latest declaration on Russia.
So there is, at the same time, an "oh, god, he's trying to use Russian fearmongering" effect that is just too big for comedians not to use ; and, somehow, a "rally around the flag" effect where people thinks he's actually on to something.
I would love to know if someone has studied the effects of comedians on misinformation. Hyperbole and exagérations are par for the course when making jokes - I just don't know if people are starting to take comedians both seriously (as you should) and literally (as you should not.)
If you trust E.Macron, I have a nice bridge to sell you. Trump is a liar, but so is Macron.
France's government is working on a law to force the messaging providers to implement a backdoor that would break E-to-E.
Macron has promised to end homelessness before being elected. It never happened. He was supposed to stop the rise of the far right, the far right has never been higher.
He was suppose to simplify France's bureaucracy to help entrepreneurs and trim the fat so that we stop burdening the new generation with crippling debt. The debt has literally exploded under his presidencies, crime is on the rise and Islamism terrorism as well.
His political capital in France has vanished. His party does not control the parliament nor the senate. His own prime minister is not from his party and as such will not implement Macron's agenda.
Macron is more interested in pushing the interests of the EU or Ukraine than those of France itself.
In France, the president is the one who sets the agenda in terms of foreign policy and that is what Macron is focusing on. On the rest of the issues that France is currently facing, he basically has no say on it.
He is basically a lame duck president who has less than 2 years left and can never run again.
There's a lot to things to blame Macron for, but your post is an incredibly bad faith caricature. Like, this:
> He was suppose to simplify France's bureaucracy to help entrepreneurs and trim the fat so that we stop burdening the new generation with crippling debt. The debt has literally exploded under his presidencies
Was Macron supposed to magic Covid out of existence? The "whatever it takes" approach he took was the best possible policy for preserving the economy, and exploding debt was the cost.
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Sorry mate. hackernews's open source alternative thread is definitely not the right place for this comment. It would have been greater on a hackernews's more political thread and point out the france open sourcing efforts in that point.
Do you want me to delete this comment? I totally would if you want.
Don't delete it, he's trying to restrict your free speech.
Don’t delete it, I don’t mind, and I don’t want to discourage anyone’s free speech, that includes mine, too (so please deal with my thoughts).
All I’m saying is that only because French and German government paid for this piece of open source software, maybe next time look in the mirror and ask yourself first:
Is this really about Macron vs Trump?
Instead of looking at this as me restricting your free speech, this is an intervention and I encourage you to not see Trump and Macron in everything.
> real hacker news discussion
I say that this isn't really productive, and I would argue that the French government's involvement played a big part in this trending on HN in the first place.
Maybe focus less on what others are doing and more on backing your own views with actions. For instance, you could just ignore this comment and the thread altogether. No one’s forcing you to read the replies, after all.
>Why am I starting to believe that france is now more culturally shited towards being a new super power in this multi polar world instead of USA.
Because you are reading a lot of destabilisation propaganda online. I recommend you cut your news and social networks consumption a little bit.
The fact that you are beginning to trust FRANCE over something that MACRON did, no less, speaks volumes.
It is completely reasonable to see France in that light given recent history of the US - a man who should be in prison for insurrection is the head of the executive.
> a man who should be in prison for insurrection is the head of the executive
I'm no France-lover (hugs from north-east of Spain), but I think this sums up things pretty well. Someone who would have been jailed in any other democracy, is now the head of government, somehow.
Given France's experience with democracy and how hard it is to keep, and America's lack of experience (as a country and democracy), makes me trust France a lot more today.
Being Spanish you know very well that our current president should also be in prison. So I will trust your word.
Exactly!!!
This was the exact sentiment I was trying to capture.
Along with the fact that a lot of american politics simply doesn't make much sense to me following it. So that also helps.
the fact that france's president put his stance forward and corrected american's president's blatant lie also contributed just a little in my ignorant tiny world bubble to really considering about france as a more trustworthy country and then reasoning from it to concluding it as true.
There might be many other countries as well who are more trust worthy than france , but certain events which put them in spotlight would be required for the normies like me to find it.
I mean... I'm not sure we're doing much better. Sarkozy got sentenced for jail time (commuted to house arrest) and there are still people who would vote for him if he ran for president again.
May I clarify my comment.
Trust was maybe a different word , maybe hope is the correct word ? (but doesn't everybody trust hope)
But I trust the people who can make me hope for a better future by actively not submitting to those people who are actively trying to reduce my hope in better future.
There is absolutely no denying that what Trump has done , has absolutely made many people really hopeless. Such levels of incompetency at a presidential level just feels weird. Its as if nobody is seeing how absurd things are , when you connect everything.
Maybe its me , but this presidency feels like a chaos to me as an outsider / foreigner.
America , as it is right now , is a failed state.
I don't understand , don't we trust countries based on their stability and their stance. Such level of open defiance is what makes me trust france that they are more likely to stand to facts than ahem america.
To be honest , maybe I am being too gloom / sad over america. It feels like the world is shifting towards a russo-american , european , chinese influenceced multi polar world.
What america really hated russia was for are just past wars , but britain and france also had these but they collectively became allies after world war.
May I ask , where in my total arguments , am I sounding unreasonable? I thought it doesn't matter where you read the news , I was able to reason to a pessimist outlook of the trump presidency.
Everything is a propaganda , propaganda literally means something along the lines of sharing your ideas.
Listening to propaganda isn't bad , but blindly advocating for it without reason is bad and dismissing other opinions without reason to fulfill your bias is bad.
If you can really counter my reason , then hey , I can be glad that I don't have to be sad about USA.
Also , I watched a video somewhere that we have a limited amount of (he said "fucks" but in the sense of I give a fuck) things you can care and you have to use it wisely.
I really was giving too much care about USA but I have stopped caring now since its not my country anyway and what power do I really have? Maybe it might be my own fault / I read some things without really applying my own reason.
I am sorry if it offends people but this is my honest opinion America has fallen in my eyes. And there is nothing I can do to change that , so why even care about america?
Why do you put spaces before commas? It's unnecessary and makes your writing obnoxious to read.
Seconded, it’s really irritating
Noted. Mostly I try it to create space / distinguish the comma, I think It has been ingrained in me for quite some time. I think I misunderstood the rule of space after comma to include it before comma as well.
I am European. I know who Macron is. I know what he does. If one sees Macron as something other than someone who is willing to sell out his country for his masters, that seems unreasonable to me. If the hope of Europe is put on someone like Macron we know that Europe is hopeless. (I think it is)
Care to elaborate on what you mean by "his masters"?
I think Europe is hopeless. It’s an old continent full of old people who have a deeply vested interest in maintaining the status quo. What Europe needs is a revolution of the young, but demographically that is impossible to happen. The old are willing to sell the young cheap if it means their pensions get increased by 0.1%. That is the source of all the problems in the continent, everything stems from that. From out of control immigration to skyrocketing rent prices.
Choosing the lesser evil doesn’t cut it. You are still choosing and being complicit with evil. Siding with evil is Wrong. Relativism is a disease. Evil is evil.
Space goes after the comma, not in front of it.
For more Free Software developed within the French public sector, check https://code.gouv.fr/sources/#/awesome
I’ve been looking for something like this that also has a Whiteboard feature (think Miro) to deploy self-hosted at a small business.
It has taken me these places:
Obsidian - has whiteboard, but not collaborative. Sync plugin cannot be self hosted. Open source sync doesn’t have user management.
Affine - ditto. Also not completely open source.
Logseq - ditto. Some text editing features require advanced knowledge of databases to use (ie writing query) making it difficult to deploy to non-technical staff.
Excalidraw - whiteboards only.
I am building Docmost (Open-source alternative to Confluence and Notion).
We have integrated support for Excalidraw, Draw.io and Mermaid diagrams; Plus real-time collaboration.
This looks really good.
For a while I've been searching for a note taking app that
* Allows more than one user editing the same page at once
* Is accessible on a mobile device (either app or mobile browser)
* Can be at the very least viewed in read only mode if disconnected from the internet
The last point is the most important to me and frustratingly has been the most elusive for me to find. For now I use Notion with the hopes they implement it eventually. I can't consider switching to a self hosted alternative without the last point.
Both Google Keep and Google Docs meet your requirements, depending on whether you want small notes or big notes.
What's wrong with those?
Have you seen https://www.craft.do?
Apple Notes?
There is also HedgeDoc (https://hedgedoc.org/). I found it useful for (1) collaboration, and (2) being able to write in the Markdown syntax w/ side-by-side rendering. (Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31645045)
It seems that the editor is supported by ProseMirror.
Kudos for their work!
Yep! Docs is using our editor BlockNote (https://www.blocknotejs.org) which builds upon Prosemirror (and we're also proud to be sponsors of Marijn from Prosemirror who's done an amazing job, indeed)
This got me genuinely interested - until I cloned the project and saw the docker-compose file.
Minio + Celery + 4-5 services just for the main app + Keycloak?
I'm sorry, but this isn't something that "anyone can run".
This is something that requires a beefy server and someone who can manage microservice architectures with 10+ services.
I'm not sure why all of those services are requirements for the app.
I don't know why you need an S3 provider and a federated identity manager to run something that looks like Notion.
I don't know why you need to split the app into 5 microservices.
And I honestly don't think that all of this overhead is needed.
I'll give Docs another look if it decides to trim some of this bloatware.
I like this! One note: I think the README would also benefit from having a (crowdsourced?) list of providers that offer (or will soon offer) Docs as a hosted offering. Many users of collaborative editing tools aren't sophisticated enough to actually host an instance.
Gives Etherpad vibes!
I was going to post this exact same comment. I was obsessed with Etherpad when it came out and to this day, reminisce about it whenever I fire up a Google Doc. Can’t wait to try this.
For my data engineers, some similes: basic note taking apps like Joplin are like a data warehouse. Notion is like a data lake. What we need is something like a data lakehouse. Hopefully this might be it.
Obsidian! It's a lot cheaper than databricks.
Upon reviewing the Docker Compose, I noticed a large number of containers. Although this could be seen as negative feedback, I view it as a challenge and make time to address it as a self-hoster.
Was just thinking how my team can get off current Notion lock in, this looks promising. Might be able to contribute as well, being a Django shop.
Cool! Let us know how it goes would love to see you in the contributors :)
I'm intrigued by the decision to call it "Docs".
In any other circumstance it would be a clear trademark infringement on Google Docs. It's literally the same product with the same name, it has an extremely similar logo and almost exactly the same typeface in its logo.
But since this is a government project between France and Germany, maybe governments are allowed to ignore trademarks? Or Google wants to stay on their good side because of all the fines, so the last thing it's going to do is sue them for trademark infringement?
I've never seen a legal situation like this before.
I guess that's the "problem" with generic product names. There's also Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Microsoft Calendar etc. - Docs is not different than that.
"Docs" isn't that generic. It's not even a word in the dictionary. It's the plural of an abbreviation. Nobody called a word processor "Docs" before Google did.
If you say "open Calendar", I don't know if you mean Apple or Google or Microsoft. If you say "open Docs", I know it's Google and only Google.
This is no different than if the project called itself "Word", which would be equally confusing with Microsoft.
Neither Docs nor Word are genericized. They're both totally valid trademarks. Which is why naming this project "Docs" would be immediately shut down if any private organization tried it. And I've never heard of governments infringing private trademarks before, so I'm curious what's going on here.
Docs and Word are both generic words that need a qualification like Google Docs or Microsoft Word. Otherwise they could be Open Docs or Open Word (not sure if that exists, maybe Libre Word?).
Same with Books. It could be Google Books, Facebook, or Open Books.
KWord is a thing, and the only reason it's not still under active development is because enthusiasm for development dried up after the acrimonious KOffice/Calligra split. In fact, it was the only part of the KOffice suite that was allowed to keep its name after the split.
And there's also AbiWord, which is still under active development.
Or speaking of which, all the gazillion office suites with Office in the name.
isn't "Google Docs" the trademark https://about.google/brand-resource-center/trademark-list/ ?
That doesn't matter. It's about similarity and consumer confusion.
E.g. you can't launch an ice cream brand called "Haagen" or called "Dazs", even though the trademark is for "Haagen-Dazs".
Yeah if you want a strong trademark on your product, don’t call it "Docs"
Not sure how its different from self hosted outline?
Love this! Would be interesting to know why they chose Django. Will support by giving my upvote!
> Offline? No problem, keep writing, your edits will get synced when back online
I'm sold.
How does it compare to Anytype? (less clunky and unintuitive I hope?)
On the test account: "Error 429: too many requests".
Outline is open source.
It's Business Source License
From my understanding, all features are not open source, for example organization management aren't open-source, which limits its adoption in large institution …
Yeah, but BSL license
why everyone ends up using yjs as their choice of CRDT framework. aren't there better alternative or it is just following the popular choice?
C'est cool ça comme projet!
- Pas mal non? c'est Français! :)
Great idea, but Django as back-end is a very bad choice.
No? What makes you think that
Looks like an amazing alternative to Dropbox Paper
How does it compare to nextcloud?
> Run it locally - Running Docs locally using the methods described below is for testing purposes only. It is based on building Docs using Minio as the S3 storage solution but you can choose any S3 compatible object storage of your choice.
> Prerequisite
> Make sure you have a recent version of Docker and Docker Compose installed on your laptop:
See, this is the issue. If you want adoption, you can't assume that users are familiar with this.
You should start with a dmg for Mac users.
we don't need an FOSS self-hosted alternative to X. We need a FOSS alternative to the cloud/hosted model such that there's distinction between the two, everything is everywhere for everyone, free. Fediverse, but better. But we're not even at Fediverse ;)
personally prefer affine.pro. selfhosted is enough for me
Love the concept, but if the core developers don't rely on direct relationships with non-government customers, then I assume this software is unlikely to meet my needs as a startup founder (or the need of most other readers here on HN).
Governments make perverse customers with needs and incentives that don't align with other regular users and customers, in my experience. So the lack of a paid hosted version of Docs is concerning to me in terms of their priorities, quality, and the future product focus of this otherwise promising (and much needed) app.
Tldr: being customer-focused and having a product led organizational culture is unlikely if you're building for government.
Dark mode?
But outline is opensource?
Actually some Outline feature aren't, which could be quite limiting when deployed in a large organization or institution
Which format are they using to write/store the notes? Is it another Markdown dialect?
The notes are stored in Y.doc format because we use Yjs for our collaboration server. https://docs.yjs.dev/api/y.doc
It's based on https://www.blocknotejs.org/
And this again is based on prosemirror. So for better math support you would have the option of using https://benrbray.com/prosemirror-math/ .
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> Having had to deal many EU regulations and see their negative impact on small businesses for no sizeable beneficial outcome to the average EU citizen
Because you didn't give any concrete examples the fact you couldn't see any "sizeable beneficial outcome to the average EU citizen" could easily be because of your own ignorance as far as I'm concerned.
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I kind of despise that too, but in this case it kind of makes sense, the submitted project is a collaboration effort by German and French governments, so talking about various EU governments spending their time and effort on FOSS kind of makes sense, although I also disagree with most of the points parent brought up, FWIW.
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Their thirst to regulate everything and everyone like they did with GDPR and the gatekeeper legislation?
The EU has been a massive force of good for consumer rights
As a programmer maybe we weren't meant to just be able to have a "thirst" to store "everything and everyone's" data forever. Just implement the GDPR deletion and the data export batch.
And the AI Act with the FLOPs limit?
Or the Cybersecurity Act increasing liability for selling software complete with a box-ticking exercise to force money into consultants?
Or the DSA creating loads of bureaucracy for "algorithmic" content when almost everything is an algorithm?
What's the comparative?
The US is restricting nvidias ability to ship GPU's because they're worried about AI. At least the EU's stance is: open, voted on and clear.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/us-govt-restricts-shipment...
Well, I consider software liability a good thing. Question is how to achieve this goal. Of course it's sad when a bureaucracy answers this with the only means a bureaucracy has: A box-ticking exercise.
This. Most EU regulations are common sense and/or don't apply to small companies.
Have a privacy policy, don't collect unnecessary user data, encrypt data properly, don't use cookies to track people outside what is needed for your website to function, and allow your users to access and delete their data. You should have already done that before GDPR, and if you did not, you're the reason we need the law.
Agreed about your points, not so much about paper drink straws.
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I just believe that regulation should be standardized. Like all my documents can be in this one european locker (I am not sure if it exists) where filing for regulation can be made really really easy. I don't hate regulation , I just hate friction , if we can really remove the maximum amount of friction in regulation as we can without meaningfully removing the purpose of regulation , then we are talking!
(I live in India and its called digilocker here , it still has a lot of issues and isn't that useful for corporation but I did hear something about digilocker for corporation regulations as well)
Reducing friction is the EU's raison d'être, near everything it does is to facilitate trade between members. From the single currency to harmonized labor laws, without forgetting the mandated switch to USB-c.
And United States still has regulations. Chevron doctrine is not a thing in Europe and European institutions do not get captured by NIMBYs when industry wants to build a railroad, a house or an apartment complex. There are no hundreds of governmental organizations demanding you impact assessments and environmental studies.
For crying out loud, as an American you cannot work on your own house, since a lot of labour is licensed (electrical work, etc) and taped in red.
The regulation Americans talk of in disparaging way is always the regulation that shifts and allows consumer/user surplus.
In the US you can work on your own house, including electrical and plumbing (including natural gas and propane lines, I think). For minor repairs like replacing a switch or receptacle, I don’t think a permit is required. For more substantial changes a permit is generally required and as is an inspection. Supplies for doing all kinds of residential construction work are readily available at retail establishments that normal people visit regularly.
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Do you believe this to always have been the case or only since Nov 2024?
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There's a hosted test instance with pre-existing test account:
https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs?tab=readme-ov-file#te...
Logging in just works. Easy to try it out there.
The official French hosted instance requiring some French-specific stuff seems pretty normal. Likely specific to that instance's authentication system, not the Docs software itself.
How come are you incapable of following trivial instructions to run it locally? This website is called hacker news, not technically challenged user news.
I stopped reading at "AGPL". I appreciate the intent but this stuff is impossible to use in practice. Even governments need partners who would likely be hesitant to run it because of that.
It is MIT licensed not AGPL, explicitly to make it easy to use for anyone. AGPL only applies if you want to use MinIO as your object storage
Thanks for clarifying. They just removed the mention of AGPL due to the confusing nature of it. https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/commit/c85224af425261...
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How does AGPL work in the context of a non-compiled language like Python? Honest question.
yes, make better notes of meetings, make meetings a pleasure, make bureaucracy a dream job
Or just stop paying for notion.
Personally, even if this software wouldn't be 1:1 capable of replacing the established players, it still feels like a good idea. With how much people (rightfully) complain about how open source is underfunded and with how often we're forced into borderline exploitative dealings with the established players in the market (the likes of MS Office, Adobe products, Atlassian products, even some Oracle stuff), funding the development of open alternatives (even if done with some comparatively small amount of taxes) seems like a good idea, as long as everyone in the government isn't incompetent.
For example, if we had governments with strong tech departments that could fund helping the development of LibreOffice, then suddenly even if someone wants to use MS Office, that's still a bargaining chip to get a better deal because there's a viable alternative. Or to develop something like OpenProject, Kanboard etc., alternatives to the likes of Jira, that might be enough for many out there, while also possibly benefitting from community contributions. People love to complain about how Jira supposedly sucks, so that'd be a good opportunity to step up and make something "better". Or using open source technologies like PostgreSQL or MariaDB/MySQL for developing their own internal systems instead of always forking over a bunch of cash for Oracle or MS SQL by default.
If you want a government that's cost efficient, then invest in making it be so, treat the software landscape as an investment opportunity - spend some money now to save a bunch of money later. The same way how an app can be a home cooked meal, some software could be a public utility.
Notion is not an example of delightful software and it is very much one of the most reproducible apps ever. I don't know how they managed to make it fashionable amongst startups, but it's certainly not because it's an innovative product.
I also have to disagree here.
What Notion has built is amazing.
When leadership tells us our job is to replace Microsoft Office. I say it's not
This is Libre Office's job. While I truly admire this community’s work. If I ever get anywhere close to their level I’ll consider myself lucky. They do important work and I hope they continue for may years .
I’m not trying to replace Microsoft Office because work has changed.
As it came online, it became collaborative.
What’s replacing Microsoft isn’t perfectly similar alternatives to text editing, spreadsheets and slides which are tools that were made for formatting more than content editing.
These were meant to be printed to be shared.
What’s actually replacing Microsoft Office are tools like Notion.
Nowadays content is created in real time with 4, 6 or more pair of hands typing at the same time. ⌨
The way we actually replace Microsoft Office is by building products that follow the change in usage like Notion has been doing.
That’s what we need to do as an opensource community.
Adopting Notion won't do in times like we're living as states (hell, all of us!) we need strategic digital autonomy.
The product of our collaborative work is knowledge, we can't have it siphoned because it's sitting on an American server.
Notion has been leading the content over form revolution for a while now.
But revolutions are our thing right ?
We like to start them, but it's way more fun when they spread to the whole continent
Want to join us or support us with a little GitHub https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs
> Notion is some kind of Kanban board, isn't it?
No, it’s not. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it has a Kanban board.
It’s a proprietary cloud-based wiki with support for every more or less mainstream feature (multimedia, databases, AI integration, collaboration, etc.). It’s a bit sluggish and doesn’t have a good mobile story, but if you don’t mind the proprietary aspect, it’s otherwise a polished product.
Notion has a very flexible data model. We use it mainly for documents, but it also can contain databases, which can be viewed as kanban boards, timelines, etc.
https://www.notion.com/blog/data-model-behind-notion
It's really nice to have one place to go for all kinds of content, but that content can link within itself, @mention other pieces of content, etc.
It can (and does) turn into a huge mess if you let it, of course. But that's down to team culture.
It's much more generic than that. It's highly flexible and intuitive hierarchical information organization software. At least that's how I'd describe it.
The innovation isn't the organized structures themselves either, but rather the intuitive non-technical interface for rapidly and concurrently updating both the information and structure. You can build a lot of Jira-like features but it doesn't dictate much of how you do that.
It does have a highly customizable Kanban view of their more generic database structure where each object is itself a page which can be filled with anything and everything else Notion has to offer (including more databases). Databases can have many views, structured as calendars, tables and a couple other forms I don't use, and each view can have its own set of filters, etc.
It kinda looked at Jira+Confluence and asked "what's the simplest fundametal software which can be used to build everything they have to offer"
Notion is a wiki. It’s like Confluence but good.
Maybe they have tickets and boards as well? Even better!
You misunderstand what notion is
> Does notion work offline-first yet?
It does via a desktop application.
> very much one of the most reproducible apps ever.
It isn't. The proof is simple: there aren't many reproductions that *tick all the boxes*. And no, "a directory of markdown files" isn't even close, it ticks two, maybe three of the dozens of boxes that notion ticks.
Joplin (my daily driver) and obsidian (can't get to like it) are closer, but certainly not there - though these alternatives tick some boxes that notion doesn't tick. Edit: But most of all, what "boxes notion ticks" very much depends on your (teams) needs and usage. A feature you may deem unimportant or even an anti-feature may very well be what keeps a lot of people on notion because no alternative has it.
The closest I have seen and used is appflowy. In some areas it ticks boxes that notion doesn't. But it's also "0.x" version software: self-admiddetly not 1.x stable software. And this has been in the makings since nov 2021, so over three years. Over three years of development to get to a point that it's on-par-ish with Notion.
If it takes a team three years to reproduce "the most reproducible app", it's clear that this app isn't that reproducible at all. And that's just reproducing features (amongst witch UX and UI). Reproducible also includes familiarity: It's almost a no-brainer to get a team on notion and to have management pay a pro licence. It's much harder, to impossible, to do this with [insert any alternative].
Funny how someone can invent a word such as Jirafied and most of us know exactly what that means.
The other thing Notion has that’s tough to replicate is the network effects. Enough “influencer” type people use it that there’s a pretty rich universe of readymade and shareable templates and workflows available for other users. These can be replicated in similar applications, but that takes work.
The fact that it got popular with productivity influencers seems pretty key to its initial and sustained popularity, even if it’s performance and the general clunkiness of its interface is frustrating.
Y Combinator. They gave it away to all of them. This is how you become popular with startups.
I have no interest in defending Notion or anything but... have you actually used it? It's not even close to a "simple notepad app." I mean, that's what it started off as, and you can use it that way, but "simple notepad app" is ludicrously wrong.
No, they use it because it was cheap and useful, and switching tools to something newer that's actually better has to not just be better, it has to be so much better as to justify the time and costs required to port a bulky knowledge base from one platform to another.
It's really just standard "voluntary lock-in": any knowledge system you decide to use locks you into that knowledge system simply because you're going to be generating tons of content in it, which may at some point need to be migrated, and the longer you use it the more of a hassle that'll be.
And if it feels a bit gross (it's not, really, it's just what happens when someone has a good sales pitch) they're not holding your content hostage like some other platforms *cough*zendesk*cough*.
Isn’t this exactly why accelerators like Y Combinator exist? To provide all the necessary things that aren’t your startup?
I haven't found one that does what Notion does. I genuinely want to get off their AI training grounds but cannot. Your comment reeks of condescension because you are not the target user.
Obsidian is on a fundamental level a very different app to Notion (you already mentioned the web app, databases, ...). It is also not even close to being "hackable to the core", it is not open source. That title belongs to Emacs.
Thanks for the recommendation.
Anytype seems worth checking out too. No affiliation, just tried out a bunch Of these and this is one that stood out. Appflowy looks well rounded too.
https://anytype.io/
>Bring projects, wikis, and teams together with AI. The AI workspace where you achieve more without losing control of your data
This is always a major red flag for me.
Odoo is powerful but a hideous ui and ux, which bloats the platform.
I feel like if Odoo foxed this it could be incredibly useful
It depends on what subset of Notion you use. Nothing (including Notion) is perfect for me. I'd like to build my own eventually, but I'm currently using Obsidian which doesn't hit your "works in the browser" requirement.
One option, which is open source and self hosted, is Trilium[sic], found at https://github.com/zadam/trilium It's open source, so if it's close to what you want, you might be able to adjust it to meet your needs.
Other commercial options include Realm, Tana, and Craft. With varying degrees of "AI".
I really like the UX of Tana for building out graphs of pages with properties, but it's slow to start up, doesn't support math, etc. So it's mainly a UX example for me.
Google Docs isn’t near the same as Notion. Not even close.
Notion treats information as a repository and keeps things indexed, searchable, and has some ways to automatically sort things, has ability to seamlessly create different types of documents and weave them together and so much more that Docs lack.
Docs doesn’t even have native markdown support last I checked
Nuclino?
please name some open source (or lower priced) alternatives that support: comments on documents, database functionality to a similar level, publishing websites, scripting for properties. I'm very curious!
Heh. I remember back in the comp.lang.perl.misc days, where newbies would show up and ask "What's the best IDE for Perl development" and all the longtime greybeards would reply "Unix".
When it came out, block-based editing and always-on wysiwig were novel, and Notion was definitely more delightful than the existing “internal wiki” software category (Confluence etc.)
Notion's data model is incredible, actually. You can embed almost anything into it, and make it work across your knowledge base.
Databases work like spreadsheets, and you can embed pages inside them, too. In fact, every row is a potential page, if you want.
While I prefer Obsidian for my technical (public and private) knowledge bases, life organization, and specific help pages I create for relatives live in Notion, and it works really well. Being able to script and formulate things allows great flexibility.
What I'm not very comfortable yet is "ejecting" from Notion, since the data model is so convoluted, what they give you as a package is not very convenient, yet.
Evernote had the best mechanism, giving you an XML file and an official XSLT to read/verify/transform what they give you. However, Evernote feels very underpowered when you start to use formulae and automation across your database.
> are you a notion employee?
What I do is clearly written in my profile. Tangentially, do somebody has to be employee of $CORPORATION to like $CORPORATION.$PRODUCT?
Banal is boring, boring is good. If they can do useful and novel things with banal and boring things (which they can from my experience), it's doubly good.
They give a Markdown and CSV version of the stored data, which is not that bad, IMHO. Still doesn't beat Evernote on that regard, though.
As with all tools, Horses for Courses, YMMV & moreover, Caveat Emptor.
Several companies have tried to "reproduce" Notion and have failed. I don't like or use Notion but that is just extremely ignorant of the USP behind it. Dunning–Kruger much?
Germany has an interesting history with Open/LibreOffice. Multiple attempts that ended up going back to Windows, but with fresh attempts that are ongoing:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/04/germanys_northernmost...
There have been some similar attempts over the years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Mass_deployments
Some larger than others, some attempts at having more negotiating power, others as a cost cutting measure, others yet as just exploration of what's doable.
I'd say that LibreOffice is fine for my needs - not great in all respects, but functional. I don't even have MS Office or use Google Docs on any of my devices right now.
Maybe we're beyond native software for things like Office suites already. I can see the benefit for always-online multi-user applications that combine text editing with project planning, wiki-like functionality, documentation base and whatnot. Few write office documents to just have them sit on the local hard drive.
The few times I need to use LibreOffice, it's just to export as PDF and send somewhere. That doesn't seem to be the workflow of the future.
> ... seems like a good idea, as long as everyone in the government isn't incompetent. For example, if we had governments with strong tech departments that could fund helping the development of...
The US had two very strong and competent tech departments -- 18F and USDS.
They got doge'd -- dismantled and coopted, respectively.
All those competent departments. Dismantled on a whim. It is unbelievable. How many billions of investment dollars are wasted that way, spent during many years to organize such departments efficiently?
18F and USDS were actually relatively cheap in the grand scale of government software procurement.
This will be a controversial take here on HN: I'm not too excited about governments getting directly involved in the development of software, let alone open source. With possibly a few exceptions (internal software for national agencies, etc.), it is way outside their area of expertise. I think it would be better to pay a vendor like Redhat or SuSE or Cannonical to do it. And, the gov't can write the support contract such that for X EUR per year they get Y competent developers to work on LibreOffice, or whatever they like.
This is hilariously ignorant, especially when it comes to France.
There are a ton of open source government projects from various agencies and contributing universities - from the government SSO (https://github.com/france-connect) to the Covid contact tracing and health pass management app (https://gitlab.inria.fr/stopcovid19) to the tax code to the unemployment app to a million other things (https://code.gouv.fr/sources/#/awesome). And all of them are good, usable, and (almost always) with permissive licenses.
Why hire an external vendor that has to add a profit margin, and lose the competency when that vendor changes for the next contract, or become a hostage to them? You literally can only lose.
> it is way outside their area of expertise
You realise that when governments write software, they just hire software developers, and designers, and project managers like any other organisation does, right?
They're not just asking around in parliament "so who has dabbled in python?" or what have you.
The governments fund projects which are of public interest. They don't actually have development teams in-house.
This is much like the EU funding open source projects of public interest through grant calls.
It's exactly what we want: to fund individuals who's interests align with the public. In fact, it would be great if there were a browser which matches this criteria: publicly funded and designed for the average citizen (as opposed to designed to maximise ad revenue).
> I think it would be better to pay a vendor like Redhat or SuSE or Cannonical to do it.
We don't want governments to fund for-profit corporation. These corporations typically have interests opposite to end-users. E.g.: less digital rights, less digital autonomy, more vendor lock-in, and solidifying their position of power.
In an ideal world, you'd have none of these type of organisations, but much smaller teams and individuals working on individual projects which can inter-operate.
I have worked on open-source software that was government/university funded. It's not uncommon in Europe. And yes, typical death-by-committee issues exist, but there is something to be said for a piece of software that holds people's data and is not outright owned by one government, corporation or random group of cats.
I don't know about the US, but I can see some crucial user data software suites moving to an open-source model where nobody has absolute power over or ownership of the data.
How to get such a multi-player project organised efficiently without burning through a load of money and time is another matter...
Not controversial just ignorant. Various governments have been participating or creating open source for many years now
I'd much rather have my government finance open source software for citizens to use than whatever tech behemoth of a foreign country.
I’d quite like good software to be squarely within their area of expertise
Why do you think software is outside the area of expertise of government?
But wouldn't a DAPP solution would solve even more problems.. faster? What am I missing?
Vendor lock-in is risky and expensive for large corporations and governments, both of which tend to move slowly. I find it completely legitimate that a government would create a tool that's useful to its workforce and helps to avoid vendor lock-in. Insomuch as it's created by the government, it's released as open source.
Most companies and people aren't going to want to maintain the VMs and/or infrastructure to run their own platforms, so they have the option to continue using SaaS offerings like Notion.
> Of course, there is always the risk that this becomes unmaintained in the future
We can't even be certain that Notion won't be acquired, deprecated, or poorly maintained in the future. Risks exist on both sides.
> We can't even be certain that Notion won't be acquired, deprecated, or poorly maintained in the future.
At this point, I feel like we can be pretty sure the combination of "Huge VC investments + for-profit startup" will with 99% certainly eventually lead down the road of enshittification, either by acquisition or by going public. At least based on most previous "internet" startups with that combination.
Not sure why you're being downvoted... This is exactly where the incentives lead the VC-funded companies. Unless they can be extremely profitable by charging money for their product of course, but I don't think Notion can pull this off. The market is just not there, imho.
It's not even cheap.
Anyone remember Evernote?
It happened to Coda.
I couldn't upvote you more than once.
I agree wholeheartedly with your point.
Government-funded open source like this, creating alternatives is a good idea. Taxes put to good use!
Yes yes yes and yes Public Money Public Code!
How does it work when gov outsources major tech to the private sector?
When universities, libraries, government and open-source community could unite and, perhaps most crucially, find a benevolent dictator for life that could shepherd the herd of cats with all noses in one direction instead of getting bogged down in academic or governmental committee mud, we might have Nice Things that are not in the hands of any one party but owned by all (i.e. the tax payer, and volunteers).
Those projects could truly be owned by the public and not solely corporations or government. Clearly data is the big thing, and I don't want to have to trust a government or corporation with access to all of it.
In reality, having been part of some of these projects, they often get bogged down by getting all parties and funding organised, in other words, death by committee.
Speaking from experience, in Germany people refuse to learn any new software and are quickly overwhelmed if 1 thing is different from what they are used to. Open source government solutions are good and all, people will only use them if forced to by law though. Public offices are one of the reasons our digitalization is really far behind.
That is what grants are for! The government(s) get the exact software they want by a whole field full of folks that know how to make those changes.
Docs actually thanks to the open source grant system we have in Europe. The hard part in a project like Docs is the text editor. We built Docs on top of [Blocknotejs](https://www.blocknotejs.org/) an [NGI funded](https://ngi.eu/funded_solution/blocknote/) library. NGI (Next Generation Internet) and NLNet has been doing an amazing job funding thousands of projects and we are seing the amazing results today. NGI is a program of the European Union
Nice. Wonderful! This needs to spread as far and wide as it can.
I haven't thought about this a ton - but am I wrong that it sounds crazy and inefficient for the government to essentially compete with private industry?
It feels like a colliding of worlds and a cannibalization that doesn't make sense to me. Like - if the government launched a messaging app competitive with WhatsApp and it drew users away from WhatsApp and it had better encryption ... Would that actually be better for the economy of this country? Something seems off about it to me.
No, it doesn't.
First, you create the tools you need with the money your people give you. Then, you give back the tools you created to the public and/or everyone who needs them.
You keep your data in your own data center, use the tools which squarely fills the needs of your workers and people, and you share its maintenance with the outside users.
It's a win-win-win (country, its workers, people in the world). WWW is developed the same way, Europe's open data repository Zenodo (https://zenodo.org) is built the same way, alongside countless science tools.
We shouldn't be afraid of governments doing cool things. Heck, most if not all supercomputer centers in the US and around the world are government funded, and free for scientists.
Moreover, the project is licensed MIT to enable to be "taken and ran with it" by private sector. From the README.md:
> While Docs is a public driven initiative our licence (sic) choice is an invitation for private sector actors to use, sell and contribute to the project.
> We shouldn't be afraid of governments doing cool things
Yes! And you'd be surprised by the kind of talent we're able to attract. People want cool stuff to be built by the public. After all its also their money that's being spent. But you need to provide the right environment for their talent not to go waste and thats not easy.
> And you'd be surprised by the kind of talent we're able to attract.
I know. I work with some of them at a national HPC/Supercomputer center.
The environment is super important, too. You’re spot on at that regard.
Why “licence (sic)”? It’s the correct spelling.
I know it's the correct spelling for UK English, but US uses license. I just wanted to make sure that I copied it verbatim, that's all.
In a universe where the French government drops a perfect replacement for Notion and causes Notion to go out of business, this is still a net positive for society in the same way that things like Linux existing is a net positive for society.
One should not focus on the economic sphere as the be all and end all. We can just have improvements be distributed to everyone sometimes! We can just do good things through coordinated efforts and entirely sidestep the economy to get the good things.
All the people who were working on Notion now can go get some on the job training to learn to farm.
Why don't we just do this for everything? You can go read a bunch of political and economic philosophy about that.
In the short term a free open source govt alternative may be a net positive for society. I don't think it is in the long run. Government projects like these are not likely to really push the state-of-the-art forward. This project even advertises itself as a FOSS Notion alternative. Do government-sponsored clones encourage or stymie innovation? I think the latter.
Every week we read in the news that the EU struggles with entrepreneurship. That our tech industry is languishing. That the EU gets out-competed by the US on software and by China on everything else. Europe should be making industry-leading apps. Europe should produce software startups that make products that get used worldwide. EU subsidized clones of popular American products feels like admitting defeat.
I'm obviously biased because I'm also working on a product in this space. But if Notion developers must become farmers because innovation no longer pays that is a loss to the world in my book.
There are plenty of projects pushing the state of the art forward.
A very specific example: basically all interactive theorem proving tooling is built in public research halls. This has allowed Compcert, a C compiler with “no bugs”[0] to exist.
The Compcert case is interesting because private funding is also involved. Public state research can still pull in private funds! We are not entirely throwing in the towel!
[0] “no bugs” here means “we have defined a spec for C, and this compiler is guaranteed to compile your C code along the spec we defined, so long as your program terminates”. There’s some hand waving around a theorem prover’s own validity but all Compcert bugs have been “we misewrote a chunk of spec” varietals
What part of this project would stop you or someone else from "innovating" and making it "state of the art"?
After all, it's licensed under the MIT License, and the readme explicitly states that it can be contributed to, and that in fact they encourage it.
Certainly not. I don't believe progress is always good. But subsidies should be reserved for ambitious projects that push the state of the art forward. For those projects that realistically will not get funded commercially. CERN, for instance.
Because when innovative software isn't made inside the EU then Europeans will simply use the best products made elsewhere.
Government projects today, you mean.
The government could act like an immortal mega corp if it had the authority to do so. Such as pushing out competition via loss leaders. And as a bonus, with the government, every program can be a loss leader.
The funding potential for this pattern is constrained today, which is why government projects that compete with private industry are generally terrible. But, clearly, the money is there to be captured by this segment out of government funding generally, if the government is allowed to enter business directly.
The solid argument I see against allowing such actions is a slippery slope towards the above. Slippery slope arguments aren’t always correct, of course, but they aren’t always wrong either; they just point out a risk. Depending on one’s risk tolerance, it is wise to avoid slippery slopes when you can’t quantify just how steep it is.
I can't think of too many apps that I use that are truly FOSS.
Databases, compilers/interpreters, web servers, operating systems...but apps? (Other than gnu/bad command line tools of course)
I think the main problem is lock-in. If you can't get your data out you can't leave. This is true for open source and for commercial products alike.
If you own your data and if you have the option to self-host you can always opt out of updates you don't like.
Maybe you are not building something in the sector but do you have any idea of how shitty collaborative work is for public agents ?
The possibility of data being sifoned back to the US if they use american cloud services has millions of public agents not being able to collaborate online.
Some of them try to provide on premise versions of the software but Microsoft want you so bad to pay for 365 or teams that they are willing to maintain only super old versions.
I spoke with a guy reponsible for 100k public agents who told me his only choice is to host Sharepoint 2011 (in 2025 !)
So maybe Docs is not as innovative as Notion but hey, we need as efficient as we can public servants. And we will do that by providing modern tools they can use online with their colleagues.
+ When we think of Microsoft we think about the Office Suite but in lot of cases they do the authentication with Active Directory. Go luck doing interoperability or SSO accross agencies when all of them rely on closed source code and are locked in by vendors...
We're actually solving with OIDC identity federation called ProConnect.
Agree, but rather than farming, I think it will enable developers to focus on more complex and interesting problems. Or spot a need in the market (doesn't have to be complex) and quickly solve new problems people are willing to pay money for.
Outcompeting only works if a software company is truly unable to pivot or outperform open source tools sponsored by the government.
The same thing can be said by free tools given away by big tech, like vscode. Here, microsoft operates actually quite similar to the government. There is no way a new company can create a competitor to vscode and charge money for it anymore. This pushes people to solve other software problems, rather than doing something else entirely. I don't think we'll be at the limit of economic value we can generate by writing new software just yet, if such a thing even exists.
> All the people who were working on Notion now can go get some on the job training to learn to farm.
This would only work if the government replacement would be more efficient than Notion (in the sense that the French government employs less people for a product of the same quality).
If it feels hard to reason on, it might be a hint... Sales people provide value. Maybe a sales person would have told this project to focus on being an alternative to Notion or Google Docs, as they are different apps/use cases.
The only reason why they might need less developers is because they are a copying an existing product, so less R&D. There is no reason to assume that the teams behind Notion, Outline, Google Docs ... are less effective than the French Government.
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The annoying thing about pure ideologies is that they're unattainable. This turns out to be convenient for ideologues though, who insist we just have to clap louder.
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Well there are/were many ‘real’ communism implementations of closed societies. While you’re right that there are no ‘free markets’ experiments, just some bad Crony Capitalism.
> compete with private companies on the free market
It’s not a free market as soon as Gov’t start using text dollars. It’s also. It competition when one entity has zero risk and endless capital to spend on a project.
If a corporation did this, they’d be accused of being anti-competitive, not fostering competition.
On the other hand, government run service has worked on pretty well for the mail and it did not lead to communism.
Can they be automated with AI?
There's so much here to discuss that we could only ever touch on the surface level, but let's give it a go.
Let's first start with what I understand to be the premise- that private industry and governments are two worlds (ie your worlds colliding idea). Let's explore this from the other side: Private industry should never compete with the government.
We don't need bottled water- tap is fine, and it competes with government water.
Commercial radio and TV stations should not exist in countries that have a public station.
Doctors and nurses should never work in private clinics where government offers medical services, or supplementary insurance should not exist.
Back to government, though. Government should do what's best for the citizenry. It might make a public bridge to compete with a commercial ferry service. Or it might mean offering cheap Internet to compete with exploitive ISPs.
Proprietary software like this is an effective tax on the citizens, but a commercial one. Governments can fund a public alternative for a small amount of money. Why not?
> if the government launched a messaging app competitive with WhatsApp and it drew users away from WhatsApp and it had better encryption ... Would that actually be better for the economy of this country? Something seems off about it to me.
I'm curious to know why that seems off. If you're a "free market" proponent, you usually are because you want people to have access to "the best", as that's what competition is supposed to bring out.
And if a government manages to come up with a better Whatsapp (whatever that means), and users starts to change, then clearly the alternative is better, as proven by users moving over, so then even someone who wants free markets would believe that this is a good outcome, if I understand things correctly.
But instead it sounds crazy to you, it seems. It would be interesting to hear more about why you feel this is crazy. To me it sounds like a good idea for users, which I guess is what I care more about.
Being dependent on foreign companies is a security issue. The economic value is more subtle and indirect but it is there
It's also not a reliable source of funding as some European open source projects have learned.
Can you provide a source / examples?
Your example of WhatsApp is a perfect one for me to say: yes, I would much rather use for my private messaging an open source, publicly founded solution, than a solution which Mark Zuckerberg controls for his own private gain.
I get your point, and I agree to some extent, but I also don't think it has to be black and white. I don't really trust the French government to fund such projects long-term, but at the same time private companies create and end services all the time (looking at you Google). So within those parameters, this doesn't seem like a bad thing.
And regarding the economy, my understanding is that there's been a push in the French government (and in Europe to some extent) towards more independent services (the recent behaviour of US big tech are not helping for sure). If the government is going to generate some tool for its internal use, I sure would prefer if they open sourced it at the same time.
Finally for the WhatsApp alternative, if France or Germany or whoever else started an open source WhatsApp competitor with better encryption, I definitely think it would be good for European citizens: one less dependency on Meta. Why wouldn't we want that?
It doesn't need to compete, not really. There are many bodies of government. National governments, local, state wide, and from many different countries. These all need software, often doing more or less the same. If they would pool their resources to pay development of useful software, theoretically it could overcome a tragedy of the commons and create really useful software cheaply. This increases productivity and thus economic growth.
It may compete with private software for a while, but not that much: companies will find a way to add value to existing open source software or create new propositions. Building out the boring and useful foundational stuff collectively will just move the bar on what is exciting and new software, or what are better takes on existing software. Companies will be creatively seeking out ever more complex problems to tackle once the government builds out the basic tooling.
And ideally, that is what private companies should be good at: quick to pivot, creative and innovative problem-solving.
Of course, that requires governments to play nice and enable companies to leverage their tooling too, and - perhaps a bigger problem - take responsibility for competent governance of the most important projects and manage their adoption well.
I don’t think in this case they’re really trying to compete - they just need something better than any of the open source solutions available and are then open sourcing that. I doubt they’re going to get into the business of hosting public instances or marketing to businesses.
It wouldn’t make sense to rely on a foreign closed source company if they want to do anything serious with this IMO.
> am I wrong that it sounds crazy and inefficient for the government to essentially compete with private industry?
The Internet is a strong and definitive counterpoint to this claim, IMO.
If the government didn’t create the open internet, we would all be living in AOL style walled gardens right now.
For many on facebook, this is indeed the case. FB is just AOL for GenX and Boomers.
> if the government launched a messaging app competitive with WhatsApp
Done, but for public workers. https://tchap.beta.gouv.fr
These tools are not yet for citizens, but for workers.
Tchap is based on Matrix for those who wonder and can't read french
IMO there are a few interesting things to unpack here. Going to put your WhatsApp comparison aside because I don’t think it’s actually applicable.
When it comes to software these governments are already shelling out X amount of money (which they don’t with WhatsApp, hence putting it aside). If they can make a comparable product they themselves own with X * 0.5 money it’s a clear win. Even if it’s X * 1.5 money to begin with while they create the software then decreasing over time as the software stabilises it’s still a win.
There’s an additional economic factor as well. For any country that isn’t the US licensing off the shelf software means transferring money directly to the US economy. Creating your own homegrown version keeps that money in your country, paying for employees that will themselves contribute to the economy. Without making the thread overtly political, this is something a lot of countries are thinking about more and more recently.
Things like this aren't about economic growth, they're about reducing the reliance on foreign services
Why is it better that 5 private companies make the same product and compete against each other in marketing? Why should the government buy a product from them, and spend lots of money to tailor it to their needs, without even owning the finished product?
Where do governments get their money from? Taxes on economic activity. The more economic activity the government performs itself, the less opportunity there is to raise tax revenue.
Take this through to its logical conclusion and you have the government owning farms, making food, making its own steel, building its own cars, etc. with a corresponding loss of revenue-raising activity in the real economy.
Government can and does tax its workers and suppliers.
In a bubble, there is no revenue raising difference between a government owned economy and a private economy with equal production.
Realistic differences come down to comparative disfunction of management (IMO, best considered in terms of which is worse).
The government isn't in the business of consuming tax revenue. Its mission is to most efficiently serve the needs of its constituents.
Government services help everyone and raise the floor of the standard of living. Someone is now free to go write and do SOMETHING else and sell that.
By your logic, we should get rid of libraries since more economic activity would happen if everyone had to buy their own books.
> Where do governments get their money from? Taxes on economic activity.
That may be true of local/state governments, but it isn't true for currency-issuing governments like the US. I'm not as familiar with the EU monetary system as I haven't read as much into it.
Software licenses are certainly a major expense for all levels of the Danish government. (Cloud infrastructure, too, increasingly.)
They've started complaining, especially since prices have been going up, but while there's rumbling underground, we've yet to see any real movement away from Microsoft.
Actually, open-source product and code can totally be deployed or reused by private actors to make money of it
There is this thing called balance. The middle road. Yin Yang. Entities keeping each other in check.
Private industry can always build on open source as well. The just work on the parts that don't involve reinventing the wheel.
The big tech billionaires got there by taking the same money from the government and keeping the ownership. If the government money keeps the ownership in the hands of "we the people" then that sounds good to me.
You’re right. That’s economically inefficient, but apparently seems to be the only way to create models that compete with the bigs. IMHO this repo will die within few years, and that’s both a pity and a waste of public money.
It may or may not die within few years (I'm placing my bets on the optimistic side), if it delivers value today, and the alternative is a cost prohibitive walled garden unsuitable for sensitive data, then it's well worth it cost in public money already.
Do you any idea of how much collaborative suites cost to government every year? 10's if not 100's of millions! They have millions of public servents. The investement to build Docs is a drop of water in the the ocean in comparison.
Guys, pls say that government-funded open source projects are fine, otherwise prepare to get downvoted just because it is.
I think this is quite right. The government should get out of the business of building roads and giving them away for free.
If they were privately owned, they would be priced appropriately and we would not have all the problems with traffic congestion.
Is this a parody comment? Hard to tell on this website to be honest.
It's insane yes. What an incredible waste of tax dollars.
When your health sector is being shaken down by foreign monopoly for software licenses whose prices increase for no reason, making your own word processor suddenly doesn't seem very different to training your own doctors.
The world would be much better without much of what American venture capital has created over the past twenty years. Ad tech mass surveillance, Uber eating labour protections, "Unicorn" worshpping monopolization of basic utilities.
Thankfully it's tax euros!
>It feels like a colliding of worlds and a cannibalization that doesn't make sense to me. Like - if the government launched a messaging app competitive with WhatsApp and it drew users away from WhatsApp and it had better encryption ... Would that actually be better for the economy of this country? Something seems off about it to me.
The economy works best when anyone does what is supposed to: the Government sticks to maintaining order, defending the country, public healthcare, public education. The companies are producing goods and services.
Governments trying to undercut businesses isn't doing any good to the economy. There will be less money, less jobs.
This argument could be made for healthcare, postal services, and even emergency services. Thankfully in Europe we don't agree with that view. Entrepreneurship is an important engine for innovation, but it doesn't mean our collective representation cannot fund projects which serve the whole community if we see fit.
Many Americans think public healthcare competes with private hospitals and insurance companies. A criticism of public education in the beginning was that it would put (private) schools out of business. All we're talking about here is where the line is.
Are they undercutting businesses or creating new ones? Running and supporting an instance of a suite of open source tools can be a business.