Every week we read in the news that the EU struggles with entrepreneurship. That our tech industry is languishing. That the EU gets out-competed by the US on software and by China on everything else. Europe should be making industry-leading apps. Europe should produce software startups that make products that get used worldwide. EU subsidized clones of popular American products feels like admitting defeat.

I'm obviously biased because I'm also working on a product in this space. But if Notion developers must become farmers because innovation no longer pays that is a loss to the world in my book.

A very specific example: basically all interactive theorem proving tooling is built in public research halls. This has allowed Compcert, a C compiler with “no bugs”[0] to exist.

The Compcert case is interesting because private funding is also involved. Public state research can still pull in private funds! We are not entirely throwing in the towel!

[0] “no bugs” here means “we have defined a spec for C, and this compiler is guaranteed to compile your C code along the spec we defined, so long as your program terminates”. There’s some hand waving around a theorem prover’s own validity but all Compcert bugs have been “we misewrote a chunk of spec” varietals

After all, it's licensed under the MIT License, and the readme explicitly states that it can be contributed to, and that in fact they encourage it.

At the very least, it works as a bargaining chip when it comes to negotiating contracts with the private sector.

If you develop an in-house tool, you have very predictable user numbers so you can go on-prem versus cloud for the compute and save ~10x on that side.

You also have the benefit of being second, the other guys already did the hard work of UX research etc. and your in-house team just needs to replicate a slightly complicated CRUD app.

The one significant roadblock I can see is being able to put together the right team for the job. But cost-wise it has to be a no-brainer that in-house is cheaper.

They are putting their resources into the development of a product that can be universally shared and used. There is no favored party.

Also, I completely disagree with the "ambitious projects". I actually would favor the government let all the risky ventures to private enterprises and focused only on tried-and-true developments and make them universally available to its citizens.

why it would need to be state of the art? it needs to be stable and 'good enough'. This isn't rocket science, nor quantum mechanics - this is literally a glorified CRUD app that focuses on documentation.

Well, if a government project can easily push you out, then you're not really a state-of-the-art.

> EU subsidized clones of popular American products feels like admitting defeat.

Governments need to think long-term. And one danger of relying on something like Notion is vendor lock-in. You can't easily migrate your data out of Notion, with all the rich content preserved (edit history, text comments, etc.)

EU can try to mandate a common interoperability standard, but it takes years and the end result always ends up being behind the state of the art.

The government could act like an immortal mega corp if it had the authority to do so. Such as pushing out competition via loss leaders. And as a bonus, with the government, every program can be a loss leader.

The funding potential for this pattern is constrained today, which is why government projects that compete with private industry are generally terrible. But, clearly, the money is there to be captured by this segment out of government funding generally, if the government is allowed to enter business directly.

The solid argument I see against allowing such actions is a slippery slope towards the above. Slippery slope arguments aren’t always correct, of course, but they aren’t always wrong either; they just point out a risk. Depending on one’s risk tolerance, it is wise to avoid slippery slopes when you can’t quantify just how steep it is.

Right now, I can't fix that one small bug in Notion that keeps bothering me. I have to raise an issue and hope that they add the API required to do that. In the case of open source base produced by the government, I can make a small (perhaps paid) add-on with that functionality.

But it works fine for infrastructure where competition is not only rare, but often is counter-productive, like for sewer and water delivery. Can this include software infrastructure? Maybe.

I've kind of lost hope when it comes to commercial services and proprietary apps. They're sadly all sooner or later enshittified. We need something different, not by promises but by design (FOSS).

> EU subsidized clones of popular American products feels like admitting defeat.

I think it's a fresh and needed take on the financing of our common digital infra.

Databases, compilers/interpreters, web servers, operating systems...but apps? (Other than gnu/bad command line tools of course)

And I’m a Mac user!

If I look at my phone, it's possible that I have more apps installed via F-Droid than through Google Play

The possibility of data being sifoned back to the US if they use american cloud services has millions of public agents not being able to collaborate online.

Some of them try to provide on premise versions of the software but Microsoft want you so bad to pay for 365 or teams that they are willing to maintain only super old versions.

I spoke with a guy reponsible for 100k public agents who told me his only choice is to host Sharepoint 2011 (in 2025 !)

So maybe Docs is not as innovative as Notion but hey, we need as efficient as we can public servants. And we will do that by providing modern tools they can use online with their colleagues.

+ When we think of Microsoft we think about the Office Suite but in lot of cases they do the authentication with Active Directory. Go luck doing interoperability or SSO accross agencies when all of them rely on closed source code and are locked in by vendors...

We're actually solving with OIDC identity federation called ProConnect.

Outcompeting only works if a software company is truly unable to pivot or outperform open source tools sponsored by the government.

The same thing can be said by free tools given away by big tech, like vscode. Here, microsoft operates actually quite similar to the government. There is no way a new company can create a competitor to vscode and charge money for it anymore. This pushes people to solve other software problems, rather than doing something else entirely. I don't think we'll be at the limit of economic value we can generate by writing new software just yet, if such a thing even exists.

This would only work if the government replacement would be more efficient than Notion (in the sense that the French government employs less people for a product of the same quality).

How many sales people does this project need? It’s not zero because grants etc but let’s not kid ourselves.

I think this project will never spend as much money as notion on devs. Like ever.

I will grant that there’s a good idea around “well notion was doing operations for everyone at once so people don’t need as many tech/ops people ”. I’m hopeful that hosted variants pop up to help with this. I’m also hopeful that we can figure out how to make stuff easier to host when high availability is not a requirement.

So maybe we end up net more operators, and less sales people and devs. That’s kind of interesting!

The only reason why they might need less developers is because they are a copying an existing product, so less R&D. There is no reason to assume that the teams behind Notion, Outline, Google Docs ... are less effective than the French Government.