As an illustration of it: I have been working for two years on a new national project for the french state. Le Référentiel National des Bâtiments (for National Buildings Registry) which aim at creating and distributing a id key to every building in the country.
The goal is to make databases about buildings much more interoperable.
One key aspect is to have a precise list of all buildings includings recent constructions and demolition. It gets interesting because we recognize nobody in the country has the perfect list of buildings so we radically open the data to let governement agencies, cities, companies, citizens write directly in the registry. Think OSM or Wikipédia but for an official dataset.
This approach is very experimental for the french state and we are encouraged to test it and disseminate our learnings in other state branches.
This is just for show, and facts won't follow. It's not the first time a French government vows to stick to Open Source. Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception.
A few days after that, a major state-owned institution (Polytechnique) announced it was migrating (including the email system) to MS Office 365. Even if it violates several laws and official decrees (it's a semi-military school).
Source (fr) https://cnll.fr/news/polytechnique-men-office-365/
This makes total sense. When a country is creating public software, it should be open source by default. This is the only way to create trust. In the long run, open source and closed source government software will probably differentiate dictatorships from democracies
Real question is whether this is just symbolic or if the French state will actually redirect procurement pipelines + vendor mandates around these principles. i'd be more impressed if this came bundled with policy teeth, e.g. requiring all software vendors to deliver open-by-default interfaces or pushing funding toward open infra maintenance. Otherwise it's hardly much more than a manifesto
At this point Open Source doesn't mean anything anymore.
It is like everybody putting a "fat free" logo on highly processed junk food a few decades ago. Yes but what is fat exactly?
What really make me suspicious is there is now a very dense web of fake, captured foundations and non profits with a lot of money flowing through them. Most of them do not write any code of course and it is very hard to understand they purpose or what they do beyond "advocacy".
None of those Open Source advocates care about the most urgent problems like the fact that now almost every human has one of the most locked up system in its hand (yes I know about AOSP) or we can't trust the connected micro-controllers in our homes.
Instead they have as their top goal to fight things like climate change [0] (I wish)
Strangely postmarketOS (the ones trying to make possible that we don't have to trash those cellphones after 3 years) survives on €12656 in yearly donations, €11175 after banks fees [1]. So probably less than the monthly salary of most of those foundations executives and employees. Or probably the cost of one big Zoom meeting in the UN.
Also ask yourself why the FSF, GNU and RMS have been marginalized while Open Source became an UN level cause...
This does not surprise me. I've had the sense that the French government has been really forward in open source thinking since my interactions with ETAlab back in 2017. They were tracking some really bleeding edge civic tech stuff before anyone else was (including g0v.tw and the vTaiwan project)
France has an undeserved bad reputation for this stuff. As a french citizen, I'm amazed to see how easy it has become to do anything administrative online, with great tools such as France Connect that allows a single login method for any administrative tool.
I'd love to see a coordinated drive to get most off the world onto opensource and off Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android as well as databases etc. American tech companies are making billions off these products that really are simple and could be replaced.
Curious to know if this extends to LLMs and if so how they would define open source. Specifically it would be nice to see repudiation of Meta's "Open" BS by a nation state.
Big smokescreen, they only open the most trivial software. "France Identité" the virtual ID card has been closed source since day 1 and also happens to use Play Integrity.
“Various companies use the US government to bully other countries, but they also use license audits as a reaction to projects that move to open-source software.”:
I would love to see more public funds going towards open source. Even if it were directed to private companies' cloud CI services, it would be a great boon. Many projects have to balance how many build/test configurations with the available CI resources.
This is great because it stops giving users to services which don't respect privacy. If you don't know CryptPad which provides forms but also many editors including Office with end to encryption, try it at https://cryptpad.fr
Truly hope that catches on, and not only for the « datalab » (incubation startup-like inside the gov doing cool stuff).
As a citizen, if only the first rule could become true for new and existing online public services such as « URSSAF », « Les Impôts » and « AMELI », that would be a great step forward (but I guess that will never happened as the hugh consulting firms developing these won’t have the same view on the matter)
Software is sort of like real estate. It costs to maintain otherwise depreciates in value so you must be judicious with your investments. Unlike real property there’s not such a resale market, so you probably must be even more judicious.
It’s quite a thing for anyone to commit to software maintenance. The idea of open source that there will always be volunteers that reduce the fees you pay for maintenance is not a certainty.
Software is sort of like real estate. It costs to maintain otherwise depreciated in value so you must be judicious with your investments. Unlike real property there’s not such a resale market, so you probably must be even more judicious.
It’s quite a thing for anyone to commit to software maintenance. The idea of open source that there will always be volunteers that reduce the fees you pay for maintenance is not a certainty.
It was a subtle but satisfying (at least for me personally) moment in Tron: Legacy (2010) when Sam Flynn, the heir to ENCOM, breaks into the company HQ and releases their latest OS to the darknet for free, essentially forcibly-open-sourcing it as a protest against excessive corporate greed.
Does anyone know what Mercedes-Benz is doing? I can see why many of the others are on the endorsement list but this one seems out of place. I'm not a car nerd though so I'm sure there is something I'm really missing and be interested in learning about.
Is this the same country where it takes 15 years of litigation to figure out whether a GPA violation should be treated as a contract breach or copyright matter?
As an American, this sort of brings back into question for me thoughts of, "What should constitute a public utility in a Capitalism society?" Upon doing some cursory research (so cursory that I'm afraid to provide links), it occurs to me that I was maybe under a false impression that there _are_ any nationwide public utilities in the first place. We basically have:
* The Federal Reserve
* The Interstate Highway System
* The Postal Service
* Homeland Security
* Medicaid/Medicare (does this even fit the list?)
* Other entitlements I'm also not sure fit this list
Did I leave anything major out? But getting to the point, I think the question is relevant because in order for something like this set of principles to take hold in the US I think we'd essentially have to kill certain classes of software in the private sector. Can you imagine the sorts of craziness that would ensure if the US government tried to adopt LibreOffice? Maybe it could happen at the state or municipal level, but we can't even agree that the government should own any of the power lines.
The government getting interested in open source should terrify us all. The UN formally defining principles for what it means is a soft form of regulation that's only going to get more authoritarian over time. Traveling down this road, we're going to find ourselves living in a world where you're only allowed to share software if (1) you're working for a corporation, or (2) you're working for the government. Because (1) and (2) will have their lives managed and regulated and won't do anything they're not told to do. Anyone who wants to be a hobbyist who writes code of their own free will and shares it on GitHub just for fun will be criminalized, just like anyone today who wants to do farming just for fun is criminalized. Once they make these principles part of the law, it'll grow like the tax code, and be enforced. You used C and didn't write documentation? You're outlawed! Believe me when I say the government is not here to help. Code is speech and there'll be no freedom left the day our right to share what we've written in our preferred language in our own preferred way is taken away.
France Endorses UN Open Source Principles
(social.numerique.gouv.fr)612 points by bzg 18 May 2025 | 215 comments
Comments
The goal is to make databases about buildings much more interoperable.
One key aspect is to have a precise list of all buildings includings recent constructions and demolition. It gets interesting because we recognize nobody in the country has the perfect list of buildings so we radically open the data to let governement agencies, cities, companies, citizens write directly in the registry. Think OSM or Wikipédia but for an official dataset.
This approach is very experimental for the french state and we are encouraged to test it and disseminate our learnings in other state branches.
Two months ago, the French government signed an "open bar" contract with Microsoft for the "Éducation Nationale" department. 152 M€, not for Open Source. Source (fr) https://www.april.org/nouvel-open-bar-microsoft-le-ministere...
A few days after that, a major state-owned institution (Polytechnique) announced it was migrating (including the email system) to MS Office 365. Even if it violates several laws and official decrees (it's a semi-military school). Source (fr) https://cnll.fr/news/polytechnique-men-office-365/
It is like everybody putting a "fat free" logo on highly processed junk food a few decades ago. Yes but what is fat exactly?
What really make me suspicious is there is now a very dense web of fake, captured foundations and non profits with a lot of money flowing through them. Most of them do not write any code of course and it is very hard to understand they purpose or what they do beyond "advocacy".
None of those Open Source advocates care about the most urgent problems like the fact that now almost every human has one of the most locked up system in its hand (yes I know about AOSP) or we can't trust the connected micro-controllers in our homes.
Instead they have as their top goal to fight things like climate change [0] (I wish)
Strangely postmarketOS (the ones trying to make possible that we don't have to trash those cellphones after 3 years) survives on €12656 in yearly donations, €11175 after banks fees [1]. So probably less than the monthly salary of most of those foundations executives and employees. Or probably the cost of one big Zoom meeting in the UN.
Also ask yourself why the FSF, GNU and RMS have been marginalized while Open Source became an UN level cause...
- [0] https://www.digitalpublicgoods.net/digital-public-goods-alli...
- [1] https://postmarketos.org/blog/2025/03/17/pmOS-budget-and-fin...
https://g0v.tw/intl/en/
https://info.vtaiwan.tw
https://www.usgs.gov/products/software
https://lwn.net/Articles/1013776
I hope this sets a strong precedent for open source public software.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/04/2350224/the-un-ditc...
This is great because it stops giving users to services which don't respect privacy. If you don't know CryptPad which provides forms but also many editors including Office with end to encryption, try it at https://cryptpad.fr
As a citizen, if only the first rule could become true for new and existing online public services such as « URSSAF », « Les Impôts » and « AMELI », that would be a great step forward (but I guess that will never happened as the hugh consulting firms developing these won’t have the same view on the matter)
It’s quite a thing for anyone to commit to software maintenance. The idea of open source that there will always be volunteers that reduce the fees you pay for maintenance is not a certainty.
It’s quite a thing for anyone to commit to software maintenance. The idea of open source that there will always be volunteers that reduce the fees you pay for maintenance is not a certainty.
https://www.sovereign.tech/
* The Federal Reserve
* The Interstate Highway System
* The Postal Service
* Homeland Security
* Medicaid/Medicare (does this even fit the list?)
* Other entitlements I'm also not sure fit this list
Did I leave anything major out? But getting to the point, I think the question is relevant because in order for something like this set of principles to take hold in the US I think we'd essentially have to kill certain classes of software in the private sector. Can you imagine the sorts of craziness that would ensure if the US government tried to adopt LibreOffice? Maybe it could happen at the state or municipal level, but we can't even agree that the government should own any of the power lines.