Notion is not an example of delightful software and it is very much one of the most reproducible apps ever. I don't know how they managed to make it fashionable amongst startups, but it's certainly not because it's an innovative product.

Germany has an interesting history with Open/LibreOffice. Multiple attempts that ended up going back to Windows, but with fresh attempts that are ongoing:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/04/germanys_northernmost...

> ... seems like a good idea, as long as everyone in the government isn't incompetent. For example, if we had governments with strong tech departments that could fund helping the development of...

The US had two very strong and competent tech departments -- 18F and USDS.

They got doge'd -- dismantled and coopted, respectively.

This will be a controversial take here on HN: I'm not too excited about governments getting directly involved in the development of software, let alone open source. With possibly a few exceptions (internal software for national agencies, etc.), it is way outside their area of expertise. I think it would be better to pay a vendor like Redhat or SuSE or Cannonical to do it. And, the gov't can write the support contract such that for X EUR per year they get Y competent developers to work on LibreOffice, or whatever they like.

But wouldn't a DAPP solution would solve even more problems.. faster? What am I missing?

> We can't even be certain that Notion won't be acquired, deprecated, or poorly maintained in the future.

At this point, I feel like we can be pretty sure the combination of "Huge VC investments + for-profit startup" will with 99% certainly eventually lead down the road of enshittification, either by acquisition or by going public. At least based on most previous "internet" startups with that combination.

Anyone remember Evernote?

It happened to Coda.

Yes yes yes and yes Public Money Public Code!

Docs actually thanks to the open source grant system we have in Europe. The hard part in a project like Docs is the text editor. We built Docs on top of [Blocknotejs](https://www.blocknotejs.org/) an [NGI funded](https://ngi.eu/funded_solution/blocknote/) library. NGI (Next Generation Internet) and NLNet has been doing an amazing job funding thousands of projects and we are seing the amazing results today. NGI is a program of the European Union

No, it doesn't.

First, you create the tools you need with the money your people give you. Then, you give back the tools you created to the public and/or everyone who needs them.

You keep your data in your own data center, use the tools which squarely fills the needs of your workers and people, and you share its maintenance with the outside users.

It's a win-win-win (country, its workers, people in the world). WWW is developed the same way, Europe's open data repository Zenodo (https://zenodo.org) is built the same way, alongside countless science tools.

We shouldn't be afraid of governments doing cool things. Heck, most if not all supercomputer centers in the US and around the world are government funded, and free for scientists.

Moreover, the project is licensed MIT to enable to be "taken and ran with it" by private sector. From the README.md:

> While Docs is a public driven initiative our licence (sic) choice is an invitation for private sector actors to use, sell and contribute to the project.

In a universe where the French government drops a perfect replacement for Notion and causes Notion to go out of business, this is still a net positive for society in the same way that things like Linux existing is a net positive for society.

One should not focus on the economic sphere as the be all and end all. We can just have improvements be distributed to everyone sometimes! We can just do good things through coordinated efforts and entirely sidestep the economy to get the good things.

All the people who were working on Notion now can go get some on the job training to learn to farm.

Why don't we just do this for everything? You can go read a bunch of political and economic philosophy about that.

There's so much here to discuss that we could only ever touch on the surface level, but let's give it a go.

Let's first start with what I understand to be the premise- that private industry and governments are two worlds (ie your worlds colliding idea). Let's explore this from the other side: Private industry should never compete with the government.

We don't need bottled water- tap is fine, and it competes with government water.

Commercial radio and TV stations should not exist in countries that have a public station.

Doctors and nurses should never work in private clinics where government offers medical services, or supplementary insurance should not exist.

Back to government, though. Government should do what's best for the citizenry. It might make a public bridge to compete with a commercial ferry service. Or it might mean offering cheap Internet to compete with exploitive ISPs.

Proprietary software like this is an effective tax on the citizens, but a commercial one. Governments can fund a public alternative for a small amount of money. Why not?

> if the government launched a messaging app competitive with WhatsApp and it drew users away from WhatsApp and it had better encryption ... Would that actually be better for the economy of this country? Something seems off about it to me.

I'm curious to know why that seems off. If you're a "free market" proponent, you usually are because you want people to have access to "the best", as that's what competition is supposed to bring out.

And if a government manages to come up with a better Whatsapp (whatever that means), and users starts to change, then clearly the alternative is better, as proven by users moving over, so then even someone who wants free markets would believe that this is a good outcome, if I understand things correctly.

But instead it sounds crazy to you, it seems. It would be interesting to hear more about why you feel this is crazy. To me it sounds like a good idea for users, which I guess is what I care more about.

Being dependent on foreign companies is a security issue. The economic value is more subtle and indirect but it is there

Your example of WhatsApp is a perfect one for me to say: yes, I would much rather use for my private messaging an open source, publicly founded solution, than a solution which Mark Zuckerberg controls for his own private gain.

I get your point, and I agree to some extent, but I also don't think it has to be black and white. I don't really trust the French government to fund such projects long-term, but at the same time private companies create and end services all the time (looking at you Google). So within those parameters, this doesn't seem like a bad thing.

And regarding the economy, my understanding is that there's been a push in the French government (and in Europe to some extent) towards more independent services (the recent behaviour of US big tech are not helping for sure). If the government is going to generate some tool for its internal use, I sure would prefer if they open sourced it at the same time.

Finally for the WhatsApp alternative, if France or Germany or whoever else started an open source WhatsApp competitor with better encryption, I definitely think it would be good for European citizens: one less dependency on Meta. Why wouldn't we want that?

It doesn't need to compete, not really. There are many bodies of government. National governments, local, state wide, and from many different countries. These all need software, often doing more or less the same. If they would pool their resources to pay development of useful software, theoretically it could overcome a tragedy of the commons and create really useful software cheaply. This increases productivity and thus economic growth.

It may compete with private software for a while, but not that much: companies will find a way to add value to existing open source software or create new propositions. Building out the boring and useful foundational stuff collectively will just move the bar on what is exciting and new software, or what are better takes on existing software. Companies will be creatively seeking out ever more complex problems to tackle once the government builds out the basic tooling.

And ideally, that is what private companies should be good at: quick to pivot, creative and innovative problem-solving.

Of course, that requires governments to play nice and enable companies to leverage their tooling too, and - perhaps a bigger problem - take responsibility for competent governance of the most important projects and manage their adoption well.

I don’t think in this case they’re really trying to compete - they just need something better than any of the open source solutions available and are then open sourcing that. I doubt they’re going to get into the business of hosting public instances or marketing to businesses.

It wouldn’t make sense to rely on a foreign closed source company if they want to do anything serious with this IMO.

> am I wrong that it sounds crazy and inefficient for the government to essentially compete with private industry?

The Internet is a strong and definitive counterpoint to this claim, IMO.

If the government didn’t create the open internet, we would all be living in AOL style walled gardens right now.

> if the government launched a messaging app competitive with WhatsApp

Done, but for public workers. https://tchap.beta.gouv.fr

These tools are not yet for citizens, but for workers.

IMO there are a few interesting things to unpack here. Going to put your WhatsApp comparison aside because I don’t think it’s actually applicable.

When it comes to software these governments are already shelling out X amount of money (which they don’t with WhatsApp, hence putting it aside). If they can make a comparable product they themselves own with X * 0.5 money it’s a clear win. Even if it’s X * 1.5 money to begin with while they create the software then decreasing over time as the software stabilises it’s still a win.

There’s an additional economic factor as well. For any country that isn’t the US licensing off the shelf software means transferring money directly to the US economy. Creating your own homegrown version keeps that money in your country, paying for employees that will themselves contribute to the economy. Without making the thread overtly political, this is something a lot of countries are thinking about more and more recently.

Things like this aren't about economic growth, they're about reducing the reliance on foreign services

Why is it better that 5 private companies make the same product and compete against each other in marketing? Why should the government buy a product from them, and spend lots of money to tailor it to their needs, without even owning the finished product?

Private industry can always build on open source as well. The just work on the parts that don't involve reinventing the wheel.

The big tech billionaires got there by taking the same money from the government and keeping the ownership. If the government money keeps the ownership in the hands of "we the people" then that sounds good to me.

You’re right. That’s economically inefficient, but apparently seems to be the only way to create models that compete with the bigs. IMHO this repo will die within few years, and that’s both a pity and a waste of public money.

I think this is quite right. The government should get out of the business of building roads and giving them away for free.

If they were privately owned, they would be priced appropriately and we would not have all the problems with traffic congestion.

It's insane yes. What an incredible waste of tax dollars.

>It feels like a colliding of worlds and a cannibalization that doesn't make sense to me. Like - if the government launched a messaging app competitive with WhatsApp and it drew users away from WhatsApp and it had better encryption ... Would that actually be better for the economy of this country? Something seems off about it to me.

The economy works best when anyone does what is supposed to: the Government sticks to maintaining order, defending the country, public healthcare, public education. The companies are producing goods and services.

Governments trying to undercut businesses isn't doing any good to the economy. There will be less money, less jobs.

AFAIK, there are lots of contributions from developers in the French government to the Grist open source repository. We also deploy it, we have instances running in various government agencies.

For Docs, we bootstrapped the repository ourselves on top of Django, Next.js, BlockNote.js, Y.js and many others. We welcome contributions!

> The French government agency ANCT Données et Territoires has also made significant contributions to the codebase.

From the Grist-core readme : https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core

Hey! Yes we do, we plan to release sub-docs before the end of the month. That will allow you to create trees of docs (with as many child / grand-child as you want) all inheriting the user rights of the parent.

Hey! Thanks for your interest. It's directly funded by the governments. BlockNotejs (the library doing the editor bit) received some funding from NGI. And now France and Germany are sponsoring the project (and also Yjs) No plugins plans for now. You can use your self-hosted OIDC, when you run the project locally you'll see a Keycloak as first screen. Let us know if you get it running [email protected] would love to hear your feedback as a reuser.

Indeed, Docs is already available both in English and German :)

AFAIK we took a lot of inspiration from Gov.uk and 18F/USDS (RIP), at least for digital services. You can look at https://beta.gouv.fr/

Hey! Thanks! Yes we do plan to support more languages, we want the project to be usable by the many. Translations are here : https://crowdin.com/project/lasuite-docs (just added turkish tonight ;)

Hey, we dedided to take an approach where we build on top of libraries like BlockNotejs, Yjs, HocusPocus but build our own wrapper around it in Django and Next.js. This allows to iterate really fast and to catter our own need (we are large organizations we don't have the same as startups or SMEs). Contributing and sponsoring allows us to make improvement that help the whole collaborative software category.

JFrog is doing very well financially with an excellent self-hosted offering

numerique.gouv is like digital.gov. Kind of a whole ministry.

La Suite Docs is better yes.

All the projects are already open sourced actually, but admittedly all don't have documentation as good as docs or meet. Still a wip :)

Tchap is just Element/Matrix with some gov specific features.

We use Mattermost at work, and apart from the mobile app being a bit shit, and search being kind of useless, it's easily as good as Slack. In some ways it's better, e.g. you can use proper Markdown in messages instead of Slack's Mrkdwn abomination that doesn't even allow links.

I wish they would improve search though; it's kind of a critical feature in a company.

"Visio" is French slang for a videoconference meeting. Open to suggestions for a project name that better reflects its purpose and vision.

Or maybe the target of tools developed by the French government is France. Not everything has to make sense worldwide. I would be happy to see the target expanded beyond just France, but there’s no need to be snarky about it not being the case right now.

Great point! this will be addressed and fixed within the week.

Huh?

The linked site is https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs which has the commits, readme, code comments, and issues in English.

The github description links to https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/ which is available in English, French and German.

What, chinese?

Or maybe not. Maybe Europe needs to focus first on building local software. Even in 2025, French devs are fare from fluent in English.

Real question, not a rhetorical one.

The beauty of democracy is that a single person doesn't make the decision for everyone else.

I think an open source Notion for 2€ is an absolute bargain, so there is that.

People would do the same if curl was publicly funded, that doesn't mean it would be a bad idea.

Maintainer of BlockNote here (and contributor to HocusPocus). I can't speak for Docs as to why they chose BlockNote, but can answer some of your questions. BlockNote is actually built on top of Tiptap - but designed to take away the heavy lifting. As powerful as they are, to build a Notion-like editor on top of Tiptap (or Prosemirror) still requires quite some engineering firepower. We've built BlockNote to come "batteries-included" with common UI components and a simpler API to make it easy for you to add a modern, block-based editor to your app.

Hey! Not a developer but here are a couple pointers. As Yousef says below, the text editing bit is hard. We wanted to be build fast and BlockNotejs makes it easy, you get the block stucture, the slash command, you can style your editor and extend with custom blocks. The BlockNotejs team researched the live editing space thoroughly so we could just follow the tracks: BlockNotejs, HocusPocus, Yjs. We "just" had to build the wrapper around with authentication, docs permissions and search and boom you have Docs!

It's not only considered, it's a an actual goal to be 100% usable by everyone. It's already the case for some of La Suite projects. Not quite there yet right now for some others, but it will be.

And I agree, lots of popular, proprietary solutions should do better in terms of accessibility. I believe open-source helps in that regard, as in many others.

Here in La Suite we have some wcag-geeks in the team and regularly include some of our users with disabilities for feedback.

https://react-spectrum.adobe.com/react-aria is used in most La Suite projects. Also we have one frontend developer focused on accessibility and few auditors. We always prioritize accessibility

That looks VERY AWESOME. Really looking forward to try it :)

This looks really cool, signed up for early access. Any plans to have an import from notion feature? I’ve used notion for personal note taking and manually moving over would be a big time sync at this point. But I’d love to have a self hosted solution.

I’d love to try this out - I signed up for beta access. Looking forward to giving it a shot!

I see you can @ people. Does that mean you can get notifications when you've been @-ed? Also, is there the ability to comment on documents? For me these are two killer features to leave a Notion or Confluence.

This looks neat! Will the self-hosted binary function in air-gapped environments?

do you plan to have a mobile app?

would you implement database function like in Notion?

Is it a full feature todo app or just noting down tasks?

would be a killer app if it has 3 Yes

looks neat. Like Acreom, but with better collaboration capabilities.

Also going to sign up.

Love your site. Looks great. Lots of visual appeal. Not the same cookies cutter Tailwind theme that seems to be present everywhere.

I'm not worried about the cost, you can probably run all of it in the closet on a Raspberry Pi, it's the complexity. What do you do when part of this inevitably fail, how do you get your data back out, where is the data? In Minio, in Postgresql?

That's a typical tech answer. Do you really want to spin up 10 images for note taking for yourself? From a product standpoint that's not sensible and wastes way to much resources.

All features aren't available in the community edition …

Agreed. Here I invoke the wisdom of groff old timers and of younger CSS developers: where the latter stops being useful when a professional looking pdf must be generated?

I can prepare a decent looking document, or spreadsheet, with LibreOffice styles (CSS) without particular effort. With Docs should not be much different.

Have seen official government Word documents with formatting in need of assistance. Teams at very large firms share Word documents, via email, forth and back debating about revisions of text and numbers. Publishing was only the necessary last step.

In most cases authors use the bare minimum of functions to get the job done. Professional looking is something else instead. I don’t know where Docs stands here.

Do you have a reference to the differences? I can't find it on their website nor on GitHub.

Have you tried TriliumNext? It doesn't have collaboration for editing but sharing is built in,

It lets you structure your notes in a way that's reminiscent of object oriented programming (you've got templates to define types, inheritance of attributes to instantiate and specialize them, etc). I have hierarchies of hundreds/thousands of notes that for all intent and purposes are as good as Notion's Databases

I'm saying that there are already collaboration tools like Google Docs or whatever. I don't see how managing notes in such a tool beats having some text files. Working with a browser kind of sucks for write operations. It's fine or even good for reading. But writing into a browser goes through obscure layers so that, what? it can go into a database? Files on disk solve this issue. Grep over files or even a more robust index of searchable data solves the findability problem. There can be other sidecar tools to support discoverability, but I'm just focused on the HCI/UX of a browser for text entry and editing, and find it really poor compared to a text editor with files that you control and can run other tools over.

Hmm, I find it easy enough to open a link or even embed an image in a text editor.

Dev of the Obsidian Relay plugin [0] here.

We support most of this (you'll need to also use Obsidian Git), but haven't released OIDC (please reach out of you need it!).

[0] https://system3.md/relay

Qownnotes. Syncs with cloud for multi device.

I'm actually not talking about how they handle the database but instead the Database feature of Notion, which is more of a advanced table for the user that can be turned into a Kanban, timeline, calendar, etc. It's one of the main advantages Notion has over other note-taking tools.

Tbf Jira's "hard problems" are really things that shouldn't be done in the first place, like the insane configurability. Just ends up in a mess.

The problem with Jira is that it's enterprise software that's put in place by people that don't actually have to use it.

Sadly that tool seems to be subscription only? And it does not have an Android version even though they are on iOS.

Yea I agree , fair point. Though I think , I would probably study more about france's current system to trust it more but that requires efforts and in general a sense of direction (like which country / politician to even start reading to start to generate trust from reason )

I was more about talking trust from intuition which can then create that sense of direction.

I thank you for creating this comment. I gotta read more about macron to see if he's really how I felt from my intution.

20 years. That's step 1, Demoralization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQPsKvG6WMI

The far-right is a symptom of what is happening in France. Fix the problems and the far right will disappear.

Unfortunately, that would mean that the politicians from the last 20 years need to do a mea culpa on quite a few things and that will never happen so the far right will eventually get in power.

Don't blame the players, blame the game.

That's what I hope too. Trump's failure could be our far-right failure to win the 2027 elections.

You made me look : it's about 27% [1], which is of course not great, but actually not that bad _for him_, _in the past few years_.

The political landscape is completely split in 3 thirds in France at the moment, and people stay firmly in their lanes.

It would need an incredibly popular décision to bring anyone from the left or far right to approve of him.

[1] https://www.latribune.fr/la-tribune-dimanche/politique/barom...

There's a lot to things to blame Macron for, but your post is an incredibly bad faith caricature. Like, this:

> He was suppose to simplify France's bureaucracy to help entrepreneurs and trim the fat so that we stop burdening the new generation with crippling debt. The debt has literally exploded under his presidencies

Was Macron supposed to magic Covid out of existence? The "whatever it takes" approach he took was the best possible policy for preserving the economy, and exploding debt was the cost.

Sorry mate. hackernews's open source alternative thread is definitely not the right place for this comment. It would have been greater on a hackernews's more political thread and point out the france open sourcing efforts in that point.

Do you want me to delete this comment? I totally would if you want.

> real hacker news discussion

I say that this isn't really productive, and I would argue that the French government's involvement played a big part in this trending on HN in the first place.

Maybe focus less on what others are doing and more on backing your own views with actions. For instance, you could just ignore this comment and the thread altogether. No one’s forcing you to read the replies, after all.

It is completely reasonable to see France in that light given recent history of the US - a man who should be in prison for insurrection is the head of the executive.

May I clarify my comment.

Trust was maybe a different word , maybe hope is the correct word ? (but doesn't everybody trust hope)

But I trust the people who can make me hope for a better future by actively not submitting to those people who are actively trying to reduce my hope in better future.

There is absolutely no denying that what Trump has done , has absolutely made many people really hopeless. Such levels of incompetency at a presidential level just feels weird. Its as if nobody is seeing how absurd things are , when you connect everything.

Maybe its me , but this presidency feels like a chaos to me as an outsider / foreigner.

America , as it is right now , is a failed state.

I don't understand , don't we trust countries based on their stability and their stance. Such level of open defiance is what makes me trust france that they are more likely to stand to facts than ahem america.

To be honest , maybe I am being too gloom / sad over america. It feels like the world is shifting towards a russo-american , european , chinese influenceced multi polar world.

What america really hated russia was for are just past wars , but britain and france also had these but they collectively became allies after world war.

May I ask , where in my total arguments , am I sounding unreasonable? I thought it doesn't matter where you read the news , I was able to reason to a pessimist outlook of the trump presidency.

Everything is a propaganda , propaganda literally means something along the lines of sharing your ideas.

Listening to propaganda isn't bad , but blindly advocating for it without reason is bad and dismissing other opinions without reason to fulfill your bias is bad.

If you can really counter my reason , then hey , I can be glad that I don't have to be sad about USA.

Also , I watched a video somewhere that we have a limited amount of (he said "fucks" but in the sense of I give a fuck) things you can care and you have to use it wisely.

I really was giving too much care about USA but I have stopped caring now since its not my country anyway and what power do I really have? Maybe it might be my own fault / I read some things without really applying my own reason.

I am sorry if it offends people but this is my honest opinion America has fallen in my eyes. And there is nothing I can do to change that , so why even care about america?

This looks really good.

"Docs" isn't that generic. It's not even a word in the dictionary. It's the plural of an abbreviation. Nobody called a word processor "Docs" before Google did.

If you say "open Calendar", I don't know if you mean Apple or Google or Microsoft. If you say "open Docs", I know it's Google and only Google.

This is no different than if the project called itself "Word", which would be equally confusing with Microsoft.

Neither Docs nor Word are genericized. They're both totally valid trademarks. Which is why naming this project "Docs" would be immediately shut down if any private organization tried it. And I've never heard of governments infringing private trademarks before, so I'm curious what's going on here.

That doesn't matter. It's about similarity and consumer confusion.

E.g. you can't launch an ice cream brand called "Haagen" or called "Dazs", even though the trademark is for "Haagen-Dazs".

And this again is based on prosemirror. So for better math support you would have the option of using https://benrbray.com/prosemirror-math/ .

I kind of despise that too, but in this case it kind of makes sense, the submitted project is a collaboration effort by German and French governments, so talking about various EU governments spending their time and effort on FOSS kind of makes sense, although I also disagree with most of the points parent brought up, FWIW.

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And the AI Act with the FLOPs limit?

Or the Cybersecurity Act increasing liability for selling software complete with a box-ticking exercise to force money into consultants?

Or the DSA creating loads of bureaucracy for "algorithmic" content when almost everything is an algorithm?

This. Most EU regulations are common sense and/or don't apply to small companies.

Have a privacy policy, don't collect unnecessary user data, encrypt data properly, don't use cookies to track people outside what is needed for your website to function, and allow your users to access and delete their data. You should have already done that before GDPR, and if you did not, you're the reason we need the law.

I just believe that regulation should be standardized. Like all my documents can be in this one european locker (I am not sure if it exists) where filing for regulation can be made really really easy. I don't hate regulation , I just hate friction , if we can really remove the maximum amount of friction in regulation as we can without meaningfully removing the purpose of regulation , then we are talking!

(I live in India and its called digilocker here , it still has a lot of issues and isn't that useful for corporation but I did hear something about digilocker for corporation regulations as well)

And United States still has regulations. Chevron doctrine is not a thing in Europe and European institutions do not get captured by NIMBYs when industry wants to build a railroad, a house or an apartment complex. There are no hundreds of governmental organizations demanding you impact assessments and environmental studies.

For crying out loud, as an American you cannot work on your own house, since a lot of labour is licensed (electrical work, etc) and taped in red.

The regulation Americans talk of in disparaging way is always the regulation that shifts and allows consumer/user surplus.

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Thanks for clarifying. They just removed the mention of AGPL due to the confusing nature of it. https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/commit/c85224af425261...