France's homegrown open source online office suite
github.com619 points by nar001 9 hours ago
619 points by nar001 9 hours ago
Great to see this on HN. fyi, La Suite is an umbrella project built by DINUM in France that started several years ago, mainly to enable people in the public administration to use more independent tools. It's built in-house, often on top of other open source technologies. E.g.: Matrix powers chat and LiveKit powers Visio (which was recently featured on HN as well when they announced it's rolled out to replace Zoom / Teams, etc [1])
I'm fortunate to be collaborating with them as their Docs product is built on top of our open source BlockNote text editor (https://www.blocknotejs.org).
Docs specifically started as an international collaboration with Germany [2] to explore how different EU countries can collaborate in building sovereign workplace solutions (several other countries including NL have shown interest as well).
They're actively supporting us, and related projects like Yjs (https://yjs.dev) by sponsoring feature development.
I'm sure many of the team members will follow along here as well! Happy to answer any questions.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294 [2] https://www.zendis.de/en
I had a question since there's growing interest in open source adoption for digital sovereignty purposes in Europe; I produce open source software for civil servants as well (for mass appraisal/property tax valuation specifically), and I was wondering if you could offer any advice about how to best meet the needs of/approach European governments (both local and national) about open source collaboration? Do they prefer to develop their own things in house, or do they like to work with community projects?
In our case, they started building on top of our project and then reached out, so not sure I can share any lessons on this. With that said:
- I think administrations in the EU are (slowly but steadily) adopting "Public Money, Public Code" policies and looking more seriously at open source
- Note that policy / strategy on this depends a lot per country / local administration / project etc. I think most governments don't actively develop in house - France is quite the exception in this
- There are a number of conferences that might be relevant (FOSDEM for example just finished)
- We also benefitted from EU grants (e.g.: NLNet) to bootstrap our work and the early research phases
> "Public Money, Public Code" policies
For those who want to know more: https://publiccode.eu
I think it definitely depends on the country, there isn’t a one-size fits all answer to this for the countries in the EU.
Even in this example, the French are building this in-house, but the Germans are repackaging this into their suite. And the Netherlands is on their way to do the same.
So the approach would be different depending on which country you approached.
My advice to you would be to follow government events like Hackdays to get yourself in front of people who can point you in the right direction
Cool. I'm already in touch with a handful of civil servants in both Germany and the Netherlands, so I'll do as you say and look for more government led initiatives, and I'll follow up with my existing contacts. Which countries do you think are the most interested in this sort of thing so far?
Do these administrations still purchase licenses for software or do they just create open source maintained by government employees? How much are they willing to pay? Because people in Europe are notoriously paid less so I am curious of the financial aspect. Also curious about the logistics of ownership and support...
Glad to be working as part of this initiative too!
Hi! Congratulations to you and Yousef. And I am lucky enough to be in a position from learning from both of you.
Anyone think what they might about La Suite, but blocknote is a solid product!
I'm a little confused. You said LiveKit powers Visio. But isn't Visio a CAD and drawing app inside of Microsoft Office?
Visio here is most likely a shorted "visioconférence", the French word for video conference, or online meeting.
It's the name of a french-developed open video conferencing software[0]. See the 1st prize result in TFA...
The description of the Docs project, at least on the OP page, is interesting:
"A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales. Built with Django and React."
An office suite's 'docs' component is usually a word processor and people sometimes try to (mis)use it for the functions you actually list - i.e., you can try to use Word as a wiki, linking pages somehow, but it's not nearly as efficient as a purpose-built wiki.
Based on the quote description, it looks like your project inverted the thinking: Is word processing not a/the primary function? Are the other functions truly prioritized - e.g., is the wiki somewhat as efficient as MediaWiki?
I think that the point of the project is more:
“Content over form” so you don’t really need all the formatting options of something like Word when you are just trying to write meeting notes.
They are definitely trending more towards a wiki, but it is still early days for this whole experiment. Though, many of the municipalities in the French gov are using it for their day to day work so it is clearly useful in some capacity. I don’t have numbers, but it’s definitely respectable
Think of Docs more of a modern, kind of Notion-style collaboration tool. It's not meant to be a Word replacement for full-scale document authoring (I believe La Suite will work with LibreOffice for that, but might be wrong here). The product vision is that Docs should focus on "Content over Form"; i.e.: make it easy to create well-structured documents (content), as opposed to Word which makes it easy to change every little visual detail of your document (form).
In addition, there are some advanced integrations with other products in La Suite. For example, video calls made in Visio can be automatically AI-transcribed and presented in a Docs document, etc.
Thanks. I think your vision is much more useful for most day-to-day work for most people. It's interesting that a new office suite would aim in that direction.
I almost never use word for exactly that reason. I don’t want to spend half an hour normalising my headings and fonts and margins. I want to focus on content and logical structure.
I much prefer Google Docs over word for this reason too.
I was writing a datasheet really and it’s really surprising how there isn’t ia straightforward solution. Confluence wasn’t expressive enough, while getting Word to apply consistent styles across tables, margins, headings etc is such a pain.
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That's the hacker spirit!
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Real hackers care about open source software.
Real hackers don't necessarily care about open source software. Closed source offers more low hanging fruit attack vectors.
Hacker, as in capable… not as the media redefined term
Was referring to an actual hacker who does look for holes in systems not the 60s idealist version of a hacker as someone who plays nor the media evil shadowly character.
I was referring to a hacker as Stallman would've used the term. This sorta stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture
> Richard Stallman explains about hackers who program:
> What they had in common was mainly love of excellence and programming. They wanted to make their programs that they used be as good as they could. They also wanted to make them do neat things. They wanted to be able to do something in a more exciting way than anyone believed possible and show "Look how wonderful this is. I bet you didn't believe this could be done."
Okay this is nowhere near an "Office suite". It is a cloud collaboration suite with a glorified markdown editor and with some extra utilities around. Almost nobody buys stuff like Google Docs and Microsoft Office for this reason.
From my experience using open-source collaboration groupware like Nextcloud, their solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow. Only thing that got somewhere near of the commercial offering is OwnCloud's Infinity Scale (OCIS) which is written in Go. It is no surprise since OwnCloud is indeed running an open-core business and you cannot use their binaries in businesses. OpenCloud is the "open-source" fork but they are already in legal trouble with OwnCloud due to industrial espionage claims.
If European governments are serious, the amount of money they _guarantee_ should be in the degree of tens of billions of Euros. Not fun 10k hackaton projects. The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it. And yes it will probably cause whatever current party to lose elections, independence has a price. It is high.
Genuine question: why do you consider it to be nowhere near an "Office suite"? It seems to me it fits the definition given by Wikipedia [1]. I guess it is less advanced than Google Workspace or Microsoft Office but it would cover all of my needs at work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_software#Office_s...
Google Docs is a document editor (opening/saving Microsoft office compatible documents, with layout, etc), not a wiki/markdown editor. The La Suite Docs seems a product more similar to Atlassian Confluence.
> Google Docs is a document editor (opening/saving Microsoft office compatible documents, with layout, etc), not a wiki/markdown editor. The La Suite Docs seems a product more similar to Atlassian Confluence.
In the last 10 years I've been spending much more time at the office consulting and editing confluence and web pages (sharepoint / mkdocs / readme and other markdown based resources) than the cumulative time spent on word, excel, powerpoint and pdf documents. I imagine it is the same for a significant portion of the population.
Also, libreoffice is already a thing and nobody edits office365 documents using the web versions except when their employer can't/don't want to pay the license for the full version or the client is not vailable on their OS (linux users). Libreoffice doesn't have that problem, you only really need storage with sharing facilities, not featurefull web clients for your docs.
> (opening/saving Microsoft office compatible documents, with layout, etc)
Not being Microsoft Office®-compatible does not make something not an office suite. In that case, there is (by design) only one Office® suite in the world
> not a wiki/markdown editor
I was wondering if you meant WYSIWYG editing as opposed to markdown editing, but then you say
> La Suite Docs seems a product more similar to Atlassian Confluence
which is WYSIWYG (the best web-based wysiwyg editor I've ever used, in fact; even if I'd never choose it for being a vendor lock-in that has shown they want to own your data by removing the self-hosted options, maybe with exceptions for giant enterprises idk but at least we had to migrate and it wasn't fun)
so then what are you saying? What makes an 'office suite' an office suite to you?
For layouts and opening docs from other suites, it seems they rely on OnlyOffice, as listed on the marketing page of their Google Drive equivalent [1]. OpenDesk from ZenDiS (German counterpart to this project, also collaborating on La Suite) seems to rely on Nextcloud and Collabora Online for that [2]. Collabora and OnlyOffice are also present in Lasuite Drive's development environment [3].
Docs and Drive aren't the only products in this suite: they also provide alternative for Meet, Chat, GMail or Sheets. I have no doubt that Microsoft and Google products offer more features but my point still stands: a lot of employees (like myself) need productivity tools but only need the core features.
[1] https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/fichiers
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesk
[3] https://github.com/suitenumerique/drive/blob/46c9730d1b6d5c4...
Work being done in offices is changing over time. I find myself writing less documents for printing and more for collaborating and sharing directly.
Even though many formal processes still require printable PDFs, we are slowly migrating to something paperless, or at least not paper-centric.
Spot on this is what we aimed for. Office tools were meant to be printed to be shared. Or at least exported. When you think of it it’s really bad for information security. On the plus side doing everything in the browser manipulating jsons is you get to do way better real time collab and can include a lot more interactive content.
Even when using google docs, I dropped the paper format, and at that point it's better to edit/read in a richer editor like Confluence which has better support for interactive widgets, expand zones, code blocks, etc. It's also been better at navigating a tree of documents.
Google docs is still great when you need to make something you mean to print, it just tends to not be that often anymore.
I even use markdown shortcuts to format in google docs nowadays.
markdown is superior in every way.
whatever doesn't map 1:1, imo just trash it.
if you can't do your work using markdown, you should be fired.
if i'm downvoted it is by people who deserve to be fired.
If you scroll a little further down, you'll see that it lists components of an office suite as:
- a word processor - a spreadsheet application - presentation software
This doesn't look like it has any of these
Have you considered that “office suite” has drifted in meaning since Microsoft Office was introduced and things like:
- chat
- video calls
- notion
Might now be more important to an office than word processing or presentation software?
Maybe those those things may be more important, depending on the office, but IME, that isn't what people usually mean when they say "office suite".
All _your_ needs at work.
All of this goes out the window when you're dealing with a government bureaucracy that has hyper specific document formatting requirements.
This is a real foundational need of nearly every business at some point. Every court system and government agency has their own rules and they need to be tracked and followed perfectly. There are whole sub-industries around dealing with this for legal documents in MS Word.
You don't need to raise taxes for this, literally just stop wasting money on licensees once the open source projects are ready. It's not a "let do it in 3 months" thing, this will take at least a decade.
These projects will always need funding indefinitely if they are going to do it.
People always want more and it will never be finished.
“Once ready” they’ll save (somewhat) on licenses, what about paying for it during the years it will take to build it, while it’s not ready?
When any random company makes a Build vs. Buy decision the question is “is this a core competency?” Most companies use a package from MS or GOOG because it’s unlikely that they’ll be so good at productivity software that it’s (A) worth distracting themselves from their actual job and (B) good enough. The same caveats apply here.
No, suggestion those caveats show that you are out of touch with what is at stake. This is about digital sovereignty, not saving money. It’s about not relying on the US. The US is literally forcing our hands here.
Honestly it's probably a good idea for governments to self host and self support anything that's important.
>Microsoft Used China-Based Engineers to Support Product Recently Hacked by China
https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-sharepoint-hack...
Open source alternatives, audited by international teams could be much more trust worthy than closed sourced black boxes.
That explains why Android was not affected by Pegasus and Apple was.
You forgot the /s
I suppose the assumption is that every HN reader follows headline hacking news, which is valid but still I did a double-take at the comment.
> once the open source projects are ready.
so likely a decade or more of double spending in the meanwhile.
that's 2 election terms in France for context. Good luck making the political parties agree to this.
This likely won't need billions of Euros to implement and will be an earmark in the budget. My point being it's not such a grandious project, from a continental perspective.
My initial thought was: why not fork LibreOffice and spend the extra dev time closing the gap between what it is and what they need?
But after some thought, I feel a cloud collaboration suite makes more sense as big orgs often run on online-first solutions like Sharepoint. So they can tick the essential boxes by being an online collaboration suite, and fill in formatting features later.
Though your points on speed and architecture do make me wonder if Python was their best choice...
> why not fork LibreOffice [...] But after some thought, I feel a cloud collaboration suite makes more sense
LibreOffice has a cloud version :). From what they presented at T-Dose like 10 years ago, it's basically an instance of the software running on the server, cut up into tiles and displayed on a webpage as zoomable image using Leafletjs, the same way that google maps worked before switching to vector graphics 15 years ago. Clicks and other input events are presumably emulated on the server and the resulting display update is sent back to the client, a bit like VNC but using a map library
> OpenCloud is the "open-source" fork but they are already in legal trouble with OwnCloud due to industrial espionage claims.
Can you expand on this or source this? I'm quite interested in OpenCloud, and haven't heard anything about this. I searched for a few keywords (espionage, legal, lawsuit), which only lands your comment on top.
Let young people get fantastically wealthy in a low friction business environment and you'll get all the enterprise grade homegrown software you need.
Interestingly neither their GitHub nor the La Suite front page (translated) actually mention "office" - that's what the OP titled it.
From the FAQ:
> With Docs our job is not to replace Microsoft Office
https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-...
Also: like when switching from AWS to EU provider, the goal is not feature parity. Not only it is costly to implement, but also a reason why so many features are in AWS or Office is to ensure vendor lock-in due to feature comparisons.
Learning to do more with less is a feature, not a bug.
Europe is a little bit busy bleeding money for defence if you hadn't noticed. There's only so many 50bn EUR it can conjure up for something
Scaling horizontally is significantly cheaper than the additional engineering cost required to build these applications in statically typed languages, especially in developed nations like France.
The real bottleneck lies on the database side, but it is rare for an average organization to actually hit its limits. Don't think at Microsoft scale if you aren't them.
Server costs actually matter quite a bit at the scales of the incumbents in this space. Also, speed can be an important part of UX. Scaling horizontally won’t help if the engine itself is slow enough that there is noticeable lag even with just a single document getting edited by a dozen people.
you know le suite is a success, when random americans complain about it :)
good for the french, they made the right choice.
Or maybe the solution must be one rooted in reducing taxes. Make investing extremely attractively, and stop relying on taxes to solve everything.
I do not agree, I don't want EU to turn to US. Taxes should be on a level to support the welfare state.
Which it can’t. There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states
The welfare state can not exist in world where the government is against population growth. You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare. We need an exponential curve of population to maintain it, especialy when its at european levels. Mass immigration of uneducated people from low income countries doesnt cover the gap, especially when the government extends welfare to them.
This is all a fact.
With how many statements of fact you make, you are pretty wrong. There's not one of them being right. We have enough productivity that a minuscule part of the population can produce and distribute the basic needs for every human on earth. There's literally humans that can't find jobs to do because we don't educate them well enough to go and offer services that other humans need. Not only that, we try to say that they don't deserve enough pay to supply their basic needs.
And yes, I'm talking about teachers and medics. We don't have enough of either, because we don't pay them enough compared to their workload. Those things we will always need, in great quantities to support our population. Greater quantities than engineers, architects, researchers, etc. but guess where everyone flocks because it pays more?
- https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/250330/978924151...
- https://ipsnoticias.net/2022/10/el-mundo-necesita-69-millone...
A welfare state that was genuinely targeted to serving basic needs of the population would look vastly different from present-day France and other comparable countries. Take a look at Singapore; last I checked, it was not known as a place where people might be at risk of starving. The underlying problem is that people expect the welfare state to solve issues of social marginalization, which are actually the result of fraying social capital as opposed to a mere lack of resources. Welfare states make these issues actively worse, not better.
For instance, when every employer (including those that may be only marginally successful to begin with) is expected as a matter of law to extend onerous labor protections against firing and laying off to each and every worker,[0] this results in marginal workers (who may have been socially marginalized originally for reasons of ethnic heritage and the like) being completely excluded from the market, which makes their plight even worse. (Except for forms of "gig work" or informal employment, of course - which in practice function to sidestep the most onerous regulations to some extent.) A very relevant issue in present-day France.
[0] And to fund those costly welfare programs through payroll contributions that are levied on employees and employers alike - which is its own issue and often amounts to exploitive, confiscatory taxation for the most marginal workers.
> You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare.
I'm curios what do you mean by this. Could you provide some examples of such policies or propaganda campaigns?
Legalizing abortion, unneeded regulations that require car seats at later ages which disincentivize more children for lack of car space, zoning that removes green space and side walks in favor of car infrastructure, expensive education and health insurance (family premiums are insane compared to individual), incentivizing two worker house holds through tax policy.
Health insurance? Are you sure you are talking about welfare states and not America? Which welfare state has expensive education and health insurances?
cracks fingers
The last sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a post that collapses if poked gently with a stick.
"The welfare state cannot exist without exponential population growth."
Sounds mathy, but is wrong. Welfare states do not require exponential population growth. They require a sufficient ratio of contributors to dependents, plus productivity. Those are not the same thing.
Exponential curves + limited resources = ecological faceplant. No serious economist argues that infinite demographic growth is a prerequisite for social insurance. What they talk about instead are levers: labor participation, productivity, retirement age, automation, taxation structure, and yes, migration.
"Government policy makes 4+ child families rare."
Prosperity itself lowers fertility. Governments can nudge at the margins, but they are not mind-controlling people out of large families. Most people stop at one or two kids because time, money, energy, housing, and sanity are finite.
"Mass immigration of uneducated people doesn’t cover the gap."
Ah, bundling multiple claims into a single blur. Efficient, but sloppy. Refugees are not permanently "uneducated"; education and skills are state-dependent, not genetic properties. (Except if you are one of those right-wing grifters that think only white people are capable of intelligence, and maybe east asians. Those people get a hearty fuck you from me, that is not worth discussing at all). Early years cost money; later years often don’t. But you know what, the same is true for children.
Fourth argument: "Extending welfare to immigrants makes it worse."
This assumes welfare is a static pot rather than a system designed to convert non-participants into participants. Welfare states don’t exist just to reward contributors; they exist to stabilize societies over time. Cutting people off doesn’t magically turn them into productive workers. Quite often it does the opposite.
Now, let's zoom out a bit for the real category error here. Modern welfare system are intergenerational risk-sharing mechanisms, not growth cults.
"This is all a fact."
Sure thing buddy
> Refugees are not permanently "uneducated"
But why import uneducated immigrants when you could import educated ones instead? The Canadian model has been a resounding success on that front and European countries should copy it. (And no, the "brain drain" argument doesn't really hold water. The successful migrants/expats tend to go back to their homelands after a while and become a much needed force for progress there, if there's even the slightest scope for actual improvement.)
You're mixing up refugees and economic migrants, which makes the argument collapse immediately.
Refugees are not "imported." They are people fleeing war, persecution, or state collapse under international law obligations that Europe helped write. You don't get to say "we'll take the engineers, but not the bombed-out schoolteachers." Treating asylum like a points-based talent visa is a category error, not a policy preference.
The brain drain argument absolutely does hold water. Systematically pulling scarce doctors, engineers, and academics out of low-income or fragile states weakens those societies. Some people return and contribute, yes, but many don't, and many return to systems too damaged to absorb their skills. That's not controversial. It's well documented in development economics.
What's being presented as "common sense" here is really a value judgement: that human worth should be ranked by immediate economic utility to the receiving country. That's not a fact, and it's not how real migration systems actually work.
If the goal is serious policy discussion, collapsing refugees, migrants, education, and prosperity into a single slogan doesn't get you there. It just makes the world simpler than it is.
One more point about the word "import," because language matters in how we think about policy.
Describing people as being "imported" frames migration as a centrally planned, top-down process, rather than as a response to war, persecution, economic collapse, or climate pressure. It shifts attention away from those underlying causes and toward the idea that governments are deliberately "bringing people in" as if they were interchangeable inputs.
That framing makes it easier to talk about migrants in abstract, instrumental terms, sorted by usefulness rather than understood as people reacting to circumstances, and it tends to oversimplify how migration actually works in practice, which is far more reactive and constrained than intentional or engineered.
Being precise about language helps keep the discussion grounded in reality rather than drifting into metaphors that flatten complex human movement into something it isn't.
Statistics differ, but refugees granted protection range from a single-digit percentage of recent immigration into France to about ~15% or so (other countries have a somewhat larger share, including other European countries). It's true that many people tend to conflate proper refugees and economic migrants to whom a points-system might apply, but this is a general problem with how migration policy is discussed on all sides of the political spectrum, not something that's original to my comment.
Want to admit more refugees without endangering social cohesion? Then you should make sure that you're also carefully selecting your economic migrants as best you can. It's not a matter of assigning different human worth to each, but of simultaneously abiding by legal obligations towards actual refugees that are binding for the country, and also trying to do the absolute best you can for the highest amount of people who might be wanting to expatriate to it for different but nonetheless valid reasons - without unduly burdening that country and society in the process.
"Prosperity itself lowers fertility"
This is not true. Women entering the workforce instead of having babies earlier in life lowers prosperity. In our society women working during those early years creates more prosperity (two incomes) but those who are very rich like Musk has no issue producing a big stable of kids.
I don't believe that there is a single case in world history where increased family income did NOT reduce the number of children per family. Likewise with improvements in child mortality.
That is obviously not true. You don’t even define what a welfare state is or when a country stops being a welfare state.
Can you define it then? What point does it start and what point does it stop being a welfare state.
It is a very abstract term. It is like ”democracy”. Yes, you can clearly say that North Korea is not a democracy. But US? Well, depends on who you ask.
Same with welfare state. Which countries do you count as non-welfare states? And when do they stop being a welfare state? Let’s take Poland as an example. When do they stop being a welfare state? If they lower the unemployment payments, will they stop being a welfare state?
And at what timescale do you think Poland will stop existing because of demographics?
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This is just derailing the topic from a french office suite into some sort of political statement about immigration. Looking at this green account's other two comments, it's all troll...
Let’s take Poland. They are a welfare state. They don’t have open borders for illegals. Not sure what you are talking about. Let me guess you are American who never set foot in Poland and just assume it has open borders?
> Which it can’t.
The welfare state for corporate interests is alive and well though, and costs much more.
(2025) "Corporate Welfare in the Federal Budget" -- https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/corporate-welfare-feder...
(2024) https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2024/07/16/100-years-of-risi...
> There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states
Okay? Let's get rid of that much more expensive type of welfare then!
As if we have "real capitalism" - not even on a scale of local bakeries any more. Even the small businesses often are just a shop owned by a corporation. Not that I'm against some level of concentration, a lot of economic activity requires it. A lot of products are too expensive and require a certain scale to be viable at all.
What is the goal of economic activity anyway? For the few to live well, while the majority struggles? By "struggle" I don't mean that the majority already lives in the streets, to me it is enough that they have to be afraid. Of getting sick, of losing the job, of anything bad happening. I saw myself how a single unfortunate event could spiral out of control, and a guy making a lot of money in enterprise sales ended up alone, broken, and sick in the streets. I count all those having to fear such a development as part of the "losers", even if they are still making money and living in their house now. That fear, suppressed or not, should not be necessary, and it influences stress levels and decisions, consciously or not.
I mean, you are also right with your message, and I actually agree.
The flow of money around and away from too many people should not be happening. Being part of the economy should be easy for the majority, and real "welfare" should only be necessary for the sick and otherwise temporarily or fully disabled.
If a lot of normal people need welfare, something is not right.
But then you need an economy that provides those easy options to participate and get enough of a share.
You also need a system where an unfortunate event (or some) does not put you into an unescapable downward spiral, and provide a way back into the economy.
The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 47% of the total gross wage (EDIT this was corrected, the original figure stated on Wikipedia is much higher and it's wrong).
The French state spends 57% of all French GDP [2]. For context, this is higher than what the Soviet Union spent in the years before the communist regimen felt (41% to 47% during the 1980s [3]).
How much taxes shall we pay to "support our independence"? Will I be allowed to keep at least 10% of what I earn, or am I supposed to give it all to the state to live in this wonderful Socialist utopia?
And here you are, asking to increase taxes even more. The only way out of this madness is a civil war. We are past any sanity left.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_France
[2] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/government-at-a-glance-...
[3] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/display/book/9781557755186/ch05...
EDIT: The wikipedia page is indeed wrong: "The overall rate of social security and tax on the average wage in 2022 was 82% of gross salary". This was the tax wedge of these 2 contributions, not the average tax on wage as the Wikipedia page states. Average tax on gross wage in France is 47%. The worker then has to pay VAT and other fees/taxes from the remaining 53%.
Unfortunately you (and of course the wikipedia page) misunderstood the OECD document [1], which says:
"In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax wedge, compared with 77% of the total OECD average tax wedge."
Note how it says "of the total tax wedge" not "of their salary.
The tax wedge itself is 47.2% in 2024 in France. This is indeed high by international standards but nowhere as high as you claimed.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
82% tax wedge is not the same as taxes, or even the contribution of an individual.
Also nobody is talking about taxing income even more.
I do agree however with the sanity part, although I think of a whole different subset of people than you.
Effective tax rate is what you should be looking at. The most efficient tax rate is one that describes a exponential saturation, where it starts growing faster once it reaches the point where you have too much wealth.
None of what you've just said can be verified by looking at any of the references you just posted. However having just read through that wikipedia page, I realised that there I'd be paying almost half the income tax I pay living in the UK.
So yeah, thanks I guess. Now I really really want to move to France.
> https:[...]?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Considering the number of replies here saying "source does not contain claim" / "that is a misinterpretation of what it says"... LLMs are still autocomplete functions. Exceptionally good ones, but they don't reason. And they kiss your boots unprompted. Beware of whatever opinions this thing is justifying to you
Your wiki link contains only a single random reference to that number, and the page it links to justify it doesn’t exist.
> The French state spends 57% of all French
That figure is pretty tired. In France, the pension scheme is counted as public spending. In neighbouring countries, the very similar, mandatory, pension schemes count as private.
The comparison makes little sense if you don't compare equivalent spending scopes, and equivalent service provided. If health care was to privatized, for instance, I'm pretty sure we would be worse off, but that number would go down.
> The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary
This figure, on the other hand, is straight up made-up bullshit. I dare you to find a salary that reaches 82% on URSSAF's salary simulator [1]. The OECD report quote is:
> In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax wedge
82% of the State's tax base are from income tax and social security contributions. That doesn't mean peopole are taxed 82% of their income.
[1]: https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-ne...
> That figure is pretty tired. In France, the pension scheme is counted as public spending. In neighbouring countries, the very similar, mandatory, pension schemes count as private.
That "very similar" does a lot of heavy lifting for you. Your neighboring Swiss pillars 2 and 3 and not similar at all - they are neither financial pyramids that depend on population growth, nor are they subject to some arbitrary "points adjustment" bullshit (a retiree takes out exactly what they put in without any shenanigans from politicians or "Agirc-Arrco board of directors").
> If health care was to privatized, for instance, I'm pretty sure we would be worse off, but that number would go down.
Care to elaborate why French middle class (we are on HN after all, not on Jacobin) would be worse off on Swiss health care model, for example?
> That "very similar" does a lot of heavy lifting for you.
The critical point if my claim is whether or not they are mandatory. Pillar 2 is mandatory for employees. Whether employees are forced to fork their cash to the state or to a private management company doesn't change the scheme or the benefits you get, but it changes OP's number.
There's plenty more to say about the way pension schemes are set up, their benefits and drawbacks, but that's unrelated to my point.
> Care to elaborate why French middle class (we are on HN after all, not on Jacobin) would be worse off on Swiss health care model, for example?
I'm going to talk about the French as a whole here. The key metric to me is the share of money collected that is paid back to beneficiaries. In private insurance systems, it is usually between 75% and 90%. The french assurance maladie is between 96% and 99% [1].
[1]: https://www.securite-sociale.fr/dossiers/quels-sont-les-cout...
How did you arrive at 82% of salary being taken by taxes and social security? I read the Wikipedia article but I don’t how the numbers would add up to 82%.
[2] You include pension, healthcare and education in this number. What would be the equivalent number in, say, the US if you were to include all this?
> What would be the equivalent number in, say, the US if you were to include all this?
Isn't it the point OP is making - France has much higher taxes compared to US because the state provides pensions, healthcare and higher education and US don't?
Man, life must be easy when you can't read and just get to make things up online. Especially when things such as the URSSAF's simulation tool is like, freely available online: https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-ne... giving you a copy of a pay slip with detailed amounts of where your money goes.
Someone making 2500€ gross will take home 1885€ per month after taxes and contributions. On which you can add a 20% VAT. Even should you want to operate in incredibly bad faith and add employer contributions, it would only amount to 3175 in total. For fun, I tried to figure out what would be needed for someone to have 82% of their salary going away into taxes. It is physically impossible to go anywhere above 55%, the math just stops scaling. Even taking employer costs into account, the max will be 65%. This all starts happening when you have the lowly gross salary of about 30 000€/month, something that I'm sure you're being paid right now to complain about to much about it.
Hell, even the damn link you're posting shows that you can't read:
> In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax wedge, compared with 77% of the total OECD average tax wedge
What the fuck do you think tax brackets cover, ponies ? And acting offended about it like it's some unacceptable thing when the OECD average is... 5 percentage point lower ?
> 82% of the average gross salary in France is indeed taken by the state,
You literally can't read.
> In other words, in France the take-home pay of an average single worker, after tax and benefits, was 71.9% of their gross wage
> his means that an average married worker with two children in France had a take-home pay, after tax and family benefits, of 83.1% of their gross wage
Now, there are ways to solve these expenses, they involve cutting all pensions. I'm sure you'll be okay with letting your parents, and mine, die, right ?
> even should you want to operate in incredibly bad faith and add employer contributions,
How is that bad faith? It's basic common sense to count that together. Total cost is what matters to employers. You can't compare different countries either if you don't hacks like this that try to confuse the workers about how much they are paying.
e.g.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Payroll_...
taxes in Denmark are presumably several times higher than in France?
The subject is not employers, don't get sidetracked. I don't particularly give a shit about employer's costs either.
The initial claim is "82% of wages go to taxes", which is inaccurate, a lie and a bad faith argument.
Well, life isn't that easy then, because you failed to comprehend URSSAF's simulation tool.
On a €2500 gross salary you take home €1651 (which is a very low salary in France very close to the minimum salary). But I guess you think the gross salary is what the company, by law, has to say they pay you, instead of what the total cost for the company of your salary.
See, in France, even if you are getting close to the minimum salary, the state is taking 33% of the cake for themselves. This is for people that earn very little. For people that earn average salaries of €2669 liquid (€5000 gross for the company), the French state takes 47% of the cake.
It's a normal mistake for people that don't actually have to support the costs themselves. Once people actually start a small business or pay more attention to their own wages and how much is being taken away, they figure out how it actually works.
>It's a normal mistake for people that don't actually have to support the costs themselves. Once people actually start a small business or pay more attention to their own wages and how much is being taken away, they figure out how it actually works.
No, thank you, I am quite well versed in the concept of superbrut, and actively pay more than a SMIC in taxes every year: you won't play that game with me. Va jouer, comme on dit.
They're employer _contributions_ to the system. They're the price you pay for a healthy, well educated working population.
You don't get to claim it as "it would be your salary", because we both damn well know you'd never pay that back into the salary should it go away. We've had the experience every time, with tax writeoffs on SMICs, VAT lowered to 5.5% which led to zero jobs created and no changes in employment conditions, etc. You might even be old enough to remember the MEDEF's "1 million jobs" pin, where they created... 20k. Cool. The reality of things is, you as an employer cannot be trusted to not fuck over employees, especially the weakest and most vulnerable of us all.
Once again, your own damn links prove that 1/ France isn't that far off the OECD average for taxation and 2/ actually does better in not slapping in a bunch of unrelated crap in taxes.
> They're employer _contributions_ to the system
No, they are the taxes you pay that are not shown on your payslip.
> They're the price you pay for a healthy, well educated working population
Yes, you as a worker pay it.
> back into the salary should it go away
It would be trivial for the government to make sure it does.
> "The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary"
This might be the most insane comment I've ever seen on this forum.
What in the hell are you talking about? Did you actually read that first link, completely fail to understand a single word of it, and then the number 82 just magically fell out of the sky?
Having tax reduction as a primary goal is terrible for society, because taxes are the primary mechanism for converting money from rich people into services for everybody, particularly poor people.
> taxes are the primary mechanism for converting money from rich people into services for everybody
Even California billionaires would rather leave the state than pay the 5% wealth tax. All to provide “services” that are generally superfluous or tied to corrupt kickbacks.
Stop relying on ~investors~ [the business oligarchy] to solve everything
They're being asked, in this case, to solve a problem that business has already shown able to solve. More competition will also solve that oligarchy problem too.
No, more competition does obviously NOT solve oligarchies. It is what we see RIGHT NOW. It is OUT THERE NOW. Oligarchs buy up competition and either incorporate their ideas or make them disappear if they threaten their established business models.
Why are you keep repeating this myth?
The only relevant player who might break up oligarchies before they become to powerful is the state they operate in.
A small note: in 2026, classic office suites shouldn't even exist in my opinion, so if the EU were to create a glorified R/Quarto, essentially a LaTeX wrapper with some basic calculation capabilities added, it would be infinitely better than any office suite.
My personal setup is Emacs/org-mode, using babel for the rest; I use Python with Polars, Plotly, and very occasionally SymPy just to avoid using Maxima if I'm already in Python. I see no reason at all to use LibreOffice, MS Office, or anything similar. This is what's actually needed. Billions should be invested in IT training, not in copies of software from another era designed to let untrained secretarial staff use a desktop.
You use emacs so why should anyone else need MS Word? A large number of people use word processor software because it has advantages over typewriters or handwriting for their purposes rather than because they lack training in something more esoteric.
To be fair ms word is rooted in a world paper once ruled and the paper/document metaphor is becoming increasingly less relevant.
I used to use it all day every day and now i use it once a year maybe (often for government related things, coz theyre often the only ones still asking me to fill out and sign PDF forms).
Most office functions are better supplanted with a decent cms, spreadsheet, email and something to let you create forms for people to fill in.
It’s like you aren’t even interested in reinforcing Microsoft’s moat at all!
Sometimes I really like a spreadsheet. I found out at work that spreadsheets all have map / reduce now. That's fun. If there were a spreadsheet interface that was secretly R under the hood and tricked me into understanding R that would be neat.
> solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow
True as it may be that they are slow, I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages.
> The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it.
You do you, but increasing taxes to build products to replace products built by private enterprise sounds like a 180 degree opposite of what Europe needs to prosper.
This is pre MAGA thinking. Investing in strategic industries that otherwise pose systemic risk to European economies wouldn’t be our first choice, but it’s now necessary.
It’s called mercantilism. It was thoroughly refuted hundreds of years ago.
Yes, but apparently the biggest players now abuse their comparative advantage positions. So, we are back to mercantilism to the detriment of all humanity.
> I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages.
Depends which ones. Python? Definitely a source of slowness.
Is this not a discussion about a web application? Order of magnitude matters. If Python is slower than Rust by 2 orders, but faster than IO by another 2 orders, are you not haggling just to shave off a few dimes on your 100 dollar bill?
> Definitely a source of slowness.
I would first blame the programmers, the design and lack of specialty offloading before blaming any programming language. Well designed web calls scale nearly linearly with usage and usually poor design or programming is the source of slowness. You can always trade language complexity for speed but assuming it is the cause of all perceived slowness is a poor man's view.
It is the same story every time again, first it was java, which has so many large scale projects most people won't even know it's running things they use, now it's apparently python who is to blame for all slowness on the web. When the next JIT or scripted language comes along which is not someone's favourite pet that will get the blame.
Python is slow, though, and so was java compared to other compiled languages of its time. Sure, it might not matter much if you're mostly doing database calls. If you're not, though, then yes, it's the languages fault if your app is slow. You can try to make it faster, but it's gonna be marginal gains. Or, you could just switch to another language and get a 100x speedup for free.
I also denounce the notion that trading language complexity for slowness is the case. Python is already complex, and there's some language and frameworks that are actually quite a bit easier to use for web backends. Like java, or dotnet. It just makes no sense to use python for this usecase, even if you ignore the slowness.
But that's not completely true, there is one very good reason to use python. Your devs know it. But, that doesnt say anything about the language itself.
Hard imagining well designed web app bottlenecked by server-side processing that is not offloaded to database, or done via bindings to libraries written in compiled languages.
> True as it may be that they are slow, I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages.
Yes it is. It's the same reason desktop GUI apps are now slower than Windows 95-era apps that were written in C.
It’s building infrastructure, which should lower costs in the long term. Seems like a good use of money from where I’m sitting.
> You do you, but increasing taxes to build products to replace products built by private enterprise sounds like a 180 degree opposite of what Europe needs to prosper.
Shhh, don't tell them.
(Kidding, of course.)
The best solution is skin-in-the-game, for-profit enterprise coupled with rigorous antitrust enforcement.
Companies will go a million times faster than open source. They're greedy and will tear the skin off of inefficiencies and eat them for lunch. That's what they do. Let the system of capitalism work for you. It's an optimization algorithm. One of the very best.
But when companies get too big and start starving off competition, that's when you need to declaw them and restore evolutionary pressure. Even lions should have to work hard to hunt, and they should starve and die with old age to keep the ecosystem thriving.
> The best solution is skin-in-the-game, for-profit enterprise coupled with rigorous antitrust enforcement.
Don't we have enough examples showing that this simply cannot work long-term, because the for-profit enterprises will _inevitably_ grow larger than the government can handle through antitrust? And once they reach that size, they become impossible to rein in. Just look at all the stupid large american corporations who can't be broken up anymore because the corporation has the lobbying power and media budget to make any attempt to enforce antitrust a carrier killer for a politician.
I think it's very myopic to say that corporate structure is the "best solution".
No a bad thing if you desire the corporate power to eventually become the main force shaping the world :)
> to make any attempt to enforce antitrust a carrier killer for a politician
Any example of a politician carrier killed by an attempt to enforce antitrust?
Biden.
Him putting Lisa Khan in charge of antitrust enraged the tech oligarchs, who then all went MAGA and bought Trump the election.
> went MAGA and bought Trump the election
Didn’t Harris actually raise and spend more than Trump on that election?
Yeah but the tech spend was way more effective. Elon took over Twitter.
It seems like you have an unfalsifiable belief. If one side raises more money and wins, it because of the money. If one side raises more money and loses, it is still the money because the other side spend it more effectively.
