Technology

Seriously, enshitification is the only thing US companies do well these days. They just dig deeper moats around their walled gardens because they’re too greedy to make decent products that people actually want.

Microslop can cry about it.

It's made by the DINUM, not an outside consulting company. And the product made by the DINUM (Tchap, France Connect …) are still in use.

All this instead of just hiring a few senior devs to contribute to any of the number of existing open source projects that are already infinitely better than any new thing they will come up with.

and fucking invest into not needing to use American-controlled CPUs as every single one of them contains a backdoor.

China has been working intensely for at least 2 decades to catch up, and they are still about a decade behind!

Netherlands has ASML which is a huge advantage for European independent manufacturing, but even with that it's an insanely expensive investment to make a realistic competitor to AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom etc. because they have loads of patents that are hard to avoid, and they have decades of know how. This is not even accounting for the software infra structure that would have to be built almost from scratch.
Chip production is a global enterprise, and even USA isn't independent anymore. They depend on ASML and TSMC for their most popular products in AI, Smartphones, servers, laptops and desktops. And more and more Arm is taking over from Intel/AMD.

What we may be able to do would be using Arm and have TSMC help us with manufacturing. But to make such a project succeed is not an easy thing, we had European computer companies in the 70's and 80's that were heavily subsidized by governments that dominated home markets for several European countries, and they essentially all failed against international competition.
So what we risk if we were required to use a European product funded by EU/European governments would be to have to use an overpriced under-performing technology, that would be a millstone around the neck of all of Europe, making Europe not catch up, but instead fall further behind.

I don't know on what it's based on, but it's open source and audited.

Because the French government is hell bent on saving money, but they don't care about anyone's privacy at all. I wouldn't be surprised if they are building a privacy nightmare system here. Having said that, at least they are removing Microslop, and anything that could potentially hurt Microslop in any way, shape or form, is a good thing.

tech companies

The French government is not a tech company.

Visio is an outdated spreadsheet name, in English.

Visio is the new video conferencing software, in French.

France leads the world, it is up to everyone else to worry about conflict with France, not the other way around. /s

It's the French common name for this, visioconférence. Why would they care about Microsoft products for this?

It's open source and they have documentation for self-hosting it !

They already developed alternatives for Microsoft Office:

https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/docs as an alternative to word

https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/grist as an alternative for excel and data management (much better than excel in my opinion)

It's open source, actively developed with Germany and the Netherlands (as I'm writing this post the last commit to doc was 49min ago) and self hostableby any administration or company who want to do it.

They've been building an entire open source suite of software tailored to their needs. If I had to guess, Jitsi isn't performant enough for large (100+) user meetings in a way they can scale easily. It's a great tool, but it seems better geared towards smaller loads. Video conferencing at scale is a pretty big challenge.

Between this, their new Docs platform and some Matrix-based chat platforms, I think this is something they've put a fair bit of thought into how they want to build. Overall, it's a cool initiative, but I think it's pretty clear that it's open source as a means to be transparent as a government organization rather than to form a platform for broad use by everyone. They do have some self-hosting instructions on their GitHub though.