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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: 5, Touché) by zocalo on Tuesday February 03, @05:04PM (9 children)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by turgid on Tuesday February 03, @05:19PM (8 children)
What became of Jitsi Meet? I used it during the pandemic. It's FOSS. You can even host your own server, apparently.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Touché) by epitaxial on Tuesday February 03, @06:29PM
Sounds like something a dozen ogg vorbis listeners would use.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Deep Blue on Tuesday February 03, @06:46PM
They dropped anonymous rooms so i dropped Jitsi meet. It was a nice thing to just whip up a room and communicate away, but what can you do.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Tuesday February 03, @07:03PM (1 child)
Jitsi Meet is alive and well.
It works in a browser on several OSes including Linux.
It works as an app on Android and probably other systems as well.
It's my preferred online conferencing app.
Its public server is free for small meetings, and you can host your own server if you have the bandwidth, in which case it is also free, even for large meetings.
You can instead pay to use Jitsi's public servers for large meetings, and then the money you spend goes to support jitsi's development.
Mostly, it just works without much friction.
if I were France, I'd just localise jitsi and call it France's online conferencing app. France could set up its own jitsi servers for government use if it wanted to.
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Thursday February 05, @05:07AM
How is Linux meant to be an OS, considering that Android uses the same kernel?
Were you thinking of the GNU/Linux OS, or GNU for short?
The Jitsi public server requires running proprietary software to host a meeting, as you can only login with a "google" or a "github" account, therefore it clearly isn't free.
It appears to be possible to host it yourself to avoid that requirement, but as it's extremely bloated and has cursed dependencies, I would recommend hosting Galene instead; https://galene.org/ [galene.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 03, @08:22PM (1 child)
>What became of Jitsi Meet?
What became of Tox? I used it around 2014-15 - it worked great.
What became of PowWow? That was a voice chat app from the mid 1990s by a John McAfee company: "At first, the company described itself, especially on its web site, as a 'Native American' company run by Native Americans." "Many of the features found in contemporary instant messaging programs were first introduced in PowWow." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_(chat_program) [wikipedia.org]
These (above) are rhetorical questions:
In late 2000, Tribal Voice announced PowWow will end on January 19th, 2001 because it couldn't attract new users.
On July 6, 2015 an issue was open on the project's GitHub, where a third party stated[11] that Tox Foundation's sole board member, Sean Qureshi, used an amount of money in the thousands of US dollars to pay for their college tuition... In the project's blog the development team has announced their "disassociation" with Tox Foundation and Qureshi in particular, and further addressed the issue.[14] This situation caused many prominent contributors to cease Tox-related activity.
In 2018, the Jitsi project was acquired by 8x8 from Atlassian. 8x8 continues to support the open-source community while using Jitsi technology to power its own commercial products... hard niched, lack of mainstream users.
----
This is the problem with PGP e-mails, and every other "special" communication protocol out there - plenty of them work, and work well, but only work if all communicating parties are using them.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Thursday February 05, @08:14AM
In 2018, the Jitsi project was acquired by 8x8 from Atlassian. 8x8 continues to support the open-source community while using Jitsi technology to power its own commercial products... hard niched, lack of mainstream users.
Correct, but specifically that was Jitsi and not Jitsi-Meet. The two are different products even if they are often confused due to the naming. Jitsi was a proper standalone SIP client. If I recall correctly, it was written in Java. However, it was acquired and killed off by 8x8 which uses the domain to host Jitsi-Meet which is a web app.
You can (or at least could once upon a time) download, install, configure, and run your own instance of Jitsi-Meet for people on your team to use. However, few know that and far fewer have done that. Instead they confuse it with the web-base service which 8x8 runs and that is linked to proprietary surveillance engines through needing to log in via Google, MSFT, etc. Or at least that was still the case a while back. YMMV.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @12:06AM (1 child)
> What became of Jitsi Meet?
Or Jami for that matter. Jami is peer-to-peer, no server needed. Part of the Gnu universe (with versions for all common OS's).
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday February 04, @11:43AM
Or Jami for that matter. Jami is peer-to-peer, no server needed. Part of the Gnu universe (with versions for all common OS's).
Yes, Jami [jami.net] can do peer to peer. It can also use SIP, just like Blink [icanblink.com] and others can. So the two could connect to each other or other SIP clients. In that way, France would do well to build out SIP support in either one as well as to set up multiple SIP servers or encourage businesses or schools to set up their own.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.