Kind of funny considering that Visio is the name of another Microsoft product.
ETA: I’m not defending Microsoft’s usage of the term ‘Visio’ here. The French use of that term makes a lot of sense, and Microsoft has an annoying tendency of using and copyrighting very common terms like ‘Word’ or ‘SQL Server’. And France (or the French government) should be allowed to use it for their video conferencing software. I’m just smiling at the idea of some people opening Microsoft Visio by mistake and trying to figure out how to make a call through a diagramming app.
It’s also a French word that means video conference (as a shortened form of visioconférence).
Gosh, someone should tell the Microsoft teams team that Microsoft teams for business and Microsoft teams for personal and Microsoft teams for students are also using the same names and make communication difficult. They should get a copilot team on it
Microslop can cry about it.
I doubt they will care that much. But it will create a bit of confusion, at least for since in the short-term.
And because of that confusion they will have a trademark complaint
In that case we’ll call it Frisio, French Visio.
sounds like something they buried 20 years ago. next msbob bobot
Why not jitsi meet? Isn’t better to use an already “established” opensource conferencing tool?
They could just selfhost their instance.
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.
I was wondering the same, but this does make sense.
At the same time, it might also make sense to build on top of existing FOSS tooling rather than building new, but I suppose that depends on where the bottlenecks are and if stuff like proprietary codecs might be involved
Jitsi is owned by a Campbell, California based firm called 8x8. Source: I worked for them during the acquisition.
Though admittedly avoiding US origin open source is unlikely to be possible. The thing they are using seems to be based on another package with a similar issue.
This “find out” phase is gonna go on for a long, long time.
The “find out” will take forever. France just decided that a “sovereign server” can be AWS or any US big-tech providing the physical server is located in France.
France has also signed a contract with Microsoft (“sovereign” solution again) for the national health data hub, even as a parliament investigation had MS France GM stating MS can’t guarantee the data won’t leak to the US!
Most political leader are grossly ignorant on anything IT.Most political leader are grossly ignorant on anything IT.
And corrupt.
Hope it’s public code if it’s paid with public money! Replacing it with proprietary software would be leaving one abusive relationship straight into another.
Looks like this is it, but it’s called “Meet” here:
This looks suspiciously similar to element call
Element is open source, so I would be very unsurprised to learn it’s an Element fork.
E: TechCrunch says “TChap” is based on Matrix (unfortunately in a security vulnerability article):
MIT license unfortunate
Beautiful. Trump is causing the US to lose its grip on the world in yet another way.
Apparently a rebranded LiveKit, which is developed by an US American company…
No, Visio is based on BigBlueButton, and it is to interface with Tchap, which is an internal Matrix server for France’s gov agents.
EDIT: Ah! Yes, apparently LiveKit is involved in the integration with Tchap. My bad, you seem to be right!
Ouch. More to follow, so stay tuned.
Now replace Windows with Linux, and fucking invest into not needing to use American-controlled CPUs as every single one of them contains a backdoor.
I don’t understand why governments trust official matters in the hands of closed source software and suspicious hardware. Even China uses a special version of Windows 11 in public computers, this is nuts.
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.they have loads of patents that are hard to avoid
China doesn’t care about patents of outsiders.
He is talking about software. A fucking video conferencing tool not controlled by American tech is no ASML level investment.
We could at least start with this
American-controlled CPUs
matters in the hands of closed source software and suspicious hardware
Here’s my guess, and I could be completely wrong.
All the governments use 2 sets of computers. The first, is a closed network used only internally. Open source, connected as a network, but NOT connected to outside neteorks. This uses closed source OS that they themselves develop. No backdoors. Highly secured.
The second set is what you know. Windows 11, backdoors, easily spied on. Intentionally left open, because that’s their way to spy on the other countries.
They leave this open, to let themselves be spied on, so that they can spy on the other side. Neither side realizing they’re both doing the same thing, and both sides just getting mostly useless info.
Then, to throw off the trail of it being useless info, they occasionally allow a juicy bit of info into their windows computer. Just so it’s not obvious that this isn’t the real info.
I have zero evidence, and came up with this theory after reading your comment. So I could be very wrong.
Ignorance, mostly. It’s sad but Chinese leaders seem to listen to their experts, while EU leaders listen to CEOs, and of large companies only.
Isn’t Visio tradermarked?
This is only a part of france’s “LaSuite” (very original name guys), that seemingly will replace every equivalent american service.
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
They generally work pretty well (demo on the site) and are a mix of homegrown solutions and rebrands of existing projects like matrix. All of them are open source.
They should have called it “du coup” for that authentic frenchness.
I’d also accept Honhon
And all their videos are on Peertube!
!lasuite@tube.numerique.gouv.fr
Unfortunately source code is still hosted on GitHub…
Sadly they don’t allow anyone to follow their instance, so finding their videos and interacting isn’t possible. But at least it’s a step.
You can follow from PieFed 🙂
Source code: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
Once these countries leave, they’ll never go back. And then the rest of us get better alternatives to this enshitification model.
Once these countries leave, they’ll never go back.
Look up LiMux and the massive Microsoft deal that followed.
