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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
As geopolitical tensions abound, France is going all in on its strategy to stop using foreign software vendors, announcing plans to move departments to homegrown Visio.
France’s David Amiel, minister for the civil service and state reform, is expected to issue a mandate to all government departments in coming days, to cease using US videoconferencing products like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, in favour of French-developed Visio. The government says it will be used in all Government departments by 2027, according to reporting from Euronews.
France has long telegraphed its determination to gain control over it digital infrastructure, and its strategy to favour homegrown vendors over their US counterparts. All this as digital sovereignty is becoming a burning issue in Europe.
Back in 2020, Brussels-based GAIA-X was formed to align with the EU’s Digital Strategy to enhance Europe’s competitiveness in the digital economy while safeguarding data and digital infrastructure from external influence. The Gaia-X European Association for Data and Cloud AISBL is composed of members from industry, research organisations, and government bodies. GAIA-X is backed by European governments, particularly Germany and France, according to the OECD.
As for France, this latest move is designed, says Amiel, to “end the use of non-European solutions and guarantee the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool”.
Visio is part of France’s Suite Numérique, a digital suite of sovereign tools for civil servants, and is hosted on another French company’s sovereign cloud infrastructure, Outscale (a Dassault Systèmes subsidiary). French start-up Pyannote supplies the AI transcription and diary tools. Just last summer civil servants were ordered off WhatsApp and Telegram and told to use Tchap, a messaging service created specifically for them.
The French Government says it could save up to €1m a year in licensing fees through the switch to Visio, but that appears to be a side bonus, as the real goal is to cut its reliance on foreign providers for its critical digital infrastructure.
“This strategy highlights France’s commitment to digital sovereignty amid rising geopolitical tensions and fears of foreign surveillance or service disruptions,” Amiel said.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 03, @02:41PM (21 children)
"The French Government says it could save up to €1m a year in licensing fees through the switch to Visio, but that appears to be a side bonus, as the real goal is to cut its reliance on foreign providers for its critical digital infrastructure."
Because the domestic supplier is cheaper? Doubtful.
(Score: 2, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 03, @02:47PM (20 children)
>Because the domestic supplier is cheaper? Doubtful.
For sure... if this rolls out at a nationwide scope - they'll be spending €1m a year in support / lost productivity for people asking the name of the new program to launch, nevermind the actual cost of development / maintenance / user feedback meetings / product enhancement steering committees...
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(Score: 5, Informative) by PiMuNu on Tuesday February 03, @03:44PM (19 children)
>Because the domestic supplier is cheaper? Doubtful.
Spend on a foreign supplier is "lost" money. Spend on a domestic supplier is investment.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 03, @04:08PM (18 children)
When I visited Europe in 1989, I was bowled over by the size of the translations industry. People to translate documents. People to change money from different countries. All that effort which (mostly) doesn't have to happen in the U.S.A.
Diversity in software is good. Localization in software is good. But, so is interoperability and standards.
The first thing I suspect will happen with Visio is that it won't interoperate, or won't interoperate well, with Teams, WhatsApp, et al. That will spawn yet another jobs program for people who build the interconnection plug-ins or whatever they use to get these digitally sovereign applications to work with each other.
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(Score: 5, Touché) by Revek on Tuesday February 03, @04:12PM
Sounds like a feature not a bug.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 03, @04:30PM
it won't interoperate, or won't interoperate well
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Tuesday February 03, @04:56PM
> with Teams, WhatsApp, et al
It's 2026 and calendars do not have a standard protocol. Google, M$, Apple all have a different interface for just booking the damn meeting. In what universe do you think the video call will interoperate!?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by zocalo on Tuesday February 03, @05:01PM (5 children)
As for the software itself, Visio is apparently open source under the MIT license, and built on open source components. I'm drawing a bit of a blank on standards compliance/interoperability, but since the EU does deal with other countries that probably will still be using Teams, Zoom, WhatsApp, etc. I suspect there will need to be some kind of compatability layer developed to allow for interoperability, if it doesn't exist already. So, what's not to like? The EU continues to reduce its reliance on the US, and - unless you have an issue with the MIT license - everyone hopefully gets the benefit of an open source alternative to systems provided by the likes of Microsoft and Meta, both of which seem to be as much in the pocket of the US government as the US likes to claim many Chinese companies are in the pocket of the CCP (if you take recent stories at face value).
One possible issue I can see here is that surely Microsoft has a trademark on the name "Visio" as a piece of computer software. Different type of app, sure, but project names have been changed over less.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 03, @05:13PM (4 children)
> You seem to be assuming that 35 years of progress in machine translation, not to mention the "AI revolution", hasn't gutted the EU's natural language translation industry.
Not at all, that's why I stated the year (37 years ago) - the € gutted a huge industry as well, for those who use it. My sister in law retired early from a job in medical transcription for similar reasons: Dragon Naturally Speaking and friends gutted her industry 25ish years ago.
My point is that sovereign video conferencing apps will be a return to the national fragmentation of things. I suppose if you're nostalgic for standing in line at Thomas Cook because you met a girlfriend that way once, you might want to see it return - but I don't think most people do. Anyway, this won't be bringing that feature of the fragmented world back - this will just be complicating people's daily lives for the sake of local control.
>I suspect there will need to be some kind of compatability layer developed to allow for interoperability
And that may be the ultimate benefit of this move, iff the presence of all these diverse video conferencing tools finally forces open, stable standards to emerge so they can interoperate properly. But, like somebody said about calendar app standards: I haven't seen that working anywhere near properly yet, even though it's the kind of thing we _could have_ solved back in Palm Pilot days or even earlier.
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(Score: 1) by arubaro on Tuesday February 03, @06:02PM (1 child)
> My point is that sovereign video conferencing apps will be a return to the national fragmentation of things. I suppose if you're nostalgic for standing in line at Thomas Cook because you met a girlfriend that way once, you might want to see it return - but I don't think most people do. Anyway, this won't be bringing that feature of the fragmented world back - this will just be complicating people's daily lives for the sake of local control.
Given that the option at this moment is to depend in USA companies, i think it is worth the move.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 03, @08:04PM
>Given that the option at this moment is to depend in USA companies, i think it is worth the move.
I would agree. The Visio announcement seems to be a very "France-centric" statement - it would be better if it were more of a pan-European effort.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by zocalo on Tuesday February 03, @09:14PM (1 child)
Frankly, I'm not seeing too many negatives with this. It's open source, claimed to be GDPR compliant, challenges the privacy raping monopolies of Microsoft, Meta, etc., and enables each country (or company) to establish and manage their own infrastructure as they see fit. Like Mastodon for social media, it has the potential of a federated approach to video conferencing and allowing easy interaction between systems, but also has the same challenge; gaining traction against the entrenched forces of Teams/WhatsApp/Zoom. Still, if more EU governments start taking it onboard - and the US is certainly making that a prudent option at the moment - then that might not be such a stretch. The very best case would be if they publish and promote the standards and encourage, or even assist, the open source community to develop their own clients and tools (as they no doubt would) - in that scenario we might even be able to start returning at least some control of the Internet back to the users and away from the current handful of .COM megacorps.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 03, @09:27PM
>we might even be able to start returning at least some control of the Internet back to the users and away from the current handful of .COM megacorps.
Dream on, Don. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 2) by Deep Blue on Tuesday February 03, @06:53PM (5 children)
Really, what does interoperate? Messaging apps will interoperate in EU, because of the Digital Markets Act, and there could be something similar coming for video conferencing as well, i mean if they follow through with this sort of things. Yes, i agree it is dumb that calendar interoperation rules have not been set also.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 03, @08:06PM (4 children)
>Messaging apps will interoperate in EU, because of the Digital Markets Act
When? And how well? It's pretty astounding how poorly iOS and Android inter-operate for simple things like MMS.
>if they follow through with this sort of things.
Das ist die große Frage.
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(Score: 2) by Deep Blue on Tuesday February 03, @08:45PM (3 children)
You mean the iMessage thing? I wouldn't call that MMS, even if MMS standard allowed propietary stuff on it.
But apparently they are supposed to be compatible already, though i'm having a real hard time to find any good details of when, which services etc. but according to an EFF article from 2022, even the voice and video calls are supposed to be interoperable at some point. I don't know, haven't read the DMA and even if i did, i probably would not understand the legalese anyway.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 03, @09:18PM (2 children)
>apparently they are supposed to be compatible already
All I know is that my wife has Android friends and iOS friends, and when they try to share stuff - especially media like photos and videos - across the iOS - Android divide, they all bitch about how 'this works with my other friends,' but not those friends on the other kind of phone.
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(Score: 2) by Deep Blue on Tuesday February 03, @09:44PM (1 child)
The DMA does not concern people and services outside EU. Meta specifically limits the compatibility to EU areas only.
Still I think the incompatibility with the phone messages comes from the iMessage, which does not use standard MMS messages, and Android which has those RCS messages, if enabled, and not MMS or SMS. Apple wants to keep the iPhone users locked in their system, so it will not allow for compatibility with their propietary protocol and does not want to support RCS, unless mandated (which i think DMA is now doing), so here we are.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 03, @09:54PM
Compatibility across open standards has been possible for media sharing for 30+ years, as you say: here we are.
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(Score: 3, Touché) by ledow on Wednesday February 04, @12:33PM (2 children)
Yes, because I can video call to any and all Whatsapp users from Teams seamlessly with no third-parties, no middle-men, no setup, no accounts, etc. today...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday February 04, @01:36PM (1 child)
What magic sauce do you have?
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(Score: 3, Touché) by ledow on Thursday February 05, @11:05AM
Sarcasm.