France says non to Office 365 and Google Workspace in school The French minister of national education and youth has said that free versions of Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workspace should not be used in schools – a position that reflects ongoing European concerns about cloud data sovereignty, competition, and privacy rules. In August, Philippe Latombe, a member of the French …
If only there was a way to specify in which location your Office 365 tenancy resides...
which location your Office 365 tenancy resides
That's only part of the problem. It's the 'free' element that they're not happy about.
It's actually illegal to sell something for less than cost in France, except during prescribed sales periods because it is considered to create 'unfair competition.'
It's illegal to do in the UK & US too. See Predatory pricing
Of course, it might as well not be on the statue books given that it's only enforced selectively when somebody is interfering with a politicians business. One law for them, etc.
There's a difference between predatory pricing, and selling a few items as "loss leaders" to entice people into a shop. The latter is pretty commonplace in UK supermarkets, where something basic like milk or bread is sold below cost, in the expectation that people will buy other items while there.
Ah, well France has a long running battle going on between farmers and supermarkets. Especially regarding milk. They want to be paid fairly for what they do, the supermarkets want to flog it cheaply (and not absorb any of the difference themselves).
I think my organic semi skimmed is currently €1,50 a litre. But since I live rural, I'm aware of all of the behind-the-scenes stuff that makes milk happen.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/resale-price-maintenance-advice-for-retailers/resale-price-maintenance-advice-for-retailersResale price maintenance (RPM) is where a supplier requires a retailer not to resell the supplier’s products below a specified price. RPM can be imposed directly or indirectly, for example through restricting the prices retailers can advertise products at.
Recommended resale prices (RRP) are not RPM if the retailer can still resell at whatever price it wants to.
However, RPM can occur if RRPs are combined with threats or incentives such that RPM is being imposed indirectly.
So it's ok to list an RRP as a recommendation.
As often, the law on RPM is decades behind the reality. Here are some commonplace scenarios that the RPM law doesn’t cover, arguably much more common than your grandfathers RPM:
Amazon have rules for their 3rd party sellers, that you can’t sell anywhere else at a lower price than you are selling on Amazon. If you do, they throw you off their platform. This isn’t some secret handshake, this is literally in their Ts and Cs publically available. And somehow, it’s legal in both UK and EU.
Not just Tesco, but most supermarkets require that their suppliers supply to them at a lower price than their competitors. They require audited invoice evidence of the prices the supplier offers to other sellers…..which is bonkers. But they do it.
Commission: many retailers operate sale-or-return on a Commission basis. The supplier agrees an indicative retail price, and say 40% margin. But if the retailer runs a 25% off sale for Black Friday, the supplier gets a price cut, retrospective. They have no say in the matter.
libreoffice?
at least it is on-premise and don't send your anything anywhere automatically.
i know it may be a bit poor, feature-wise, in comparison to options by the big corps, but in this case it is academic use so maybe it is enough for the purpose.
or if it cannot fit completely in the academic ecosystem, maybe encourage usage in the school <-> student <-> parent loop or even school <-> school loop... and for the school <-> education authority / government loop just continue to use the big name thing - and replace it with LO if, ever, it becomes feasible.
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Thanks for your answer. I see now on the Libre Office web page
LibreOffice Online is a server service built from the main LibreOffice project code, which provides display and collaborative visual editing of a range of document types in a web browser. It does not include any form of file system. To be fully functional, it has to be integrated with file access and authentication provision from an underlying stack of software.
For anything more than casual use it also needs to be deployed with due consideration for load balancing and other scaling issues. As such, LibreOffice Online can be considered an enabling technology for the public cloud of ISPs or the private cloud of enterprises and large organizations, when integrated - for example - with an enterprise file sharing or a groupware solution.
I stand educated.
So yes, the French Dept of Education, could spend some money and set up a cloud based collaborative document editing system.
Provided they are not cheap about the technical support it would require, and pay attention to security issues.
But I wonder why they announce they are prohibiting Google Docs or MS Office 365, without announcing some already definite plans for what they will do instead. The article ends with the speculation that Google and MS will make some promises and then their paid products will be schoolchildren compatible.
It always possible that time and money saved by using those US-based paid services could be invested in an even more profitable way - but not guaranteed.
If you want to take that important question seriously, there is a serious answer, but it might not be what you hoped.
X is Baidu + WeChat. The largest search market in the world by GDP, China, is really vaguely aware of Google. It does most of its day-to-day tasks including payment, messaging etc on WeChat. China has achieved this by Balkanising the internet using the Great Firewall.
If the EU *wants* a sovereign search engine, with sovereign “OpenOffice” (Europeanised, of course), and sovereign social media platforms, it absolutely can make its own. But the cost is a Balkanised internet and economy. It has to be enforced. Chinese users don’t hanker after WhatsApp, they think the ease and lifestyle useability of WeChat for payments etc puts the rest of the world in the Stone Age. They view us, very much like we viewed the Soviet Union in the seventies and eighties.
Also, if AirbusGoogleDocs and AirbusSearch really did have 99% dominance in EU market…..what possible levers does EU have to require Google to keep GoogleDocs open/exportable with AirbusDocs? You can’t threaten them with losing the EU market, if they’d already lost it.
Also, this is a bit more subtle, but e-commerce owners spend *a lot* of money maintaining compatibility with Google search specifically. People don’t look at it that way, but that’s what it is. It’s called SEO. Nobody wants to rank on DuckDuckGo, they want to rank on Google. SEO is search-engine-neutral in principle, but very much not in practice. Every time Google change their algorithm, most online businesses adjust their website SEO. For exactly that reason, if you in the EU want to find anything from a Chinese supplier, search on Baidu not Google. None of the Western search engines index anything of value within China, because Chinese business owners optimise their sites for Baidu ranking.
And that’s how the internet gets Balkanised, even *without* official firewall.
If the EU *wants* a sovereign search engine,
then there is Qwant. French I think. Better than any search engine out there : the first answer is nearly always a Wikipedia entry, and not some random company in some random place on Earth that happens to sell something vaguely related to my search. Try-it, and you'll never look back.
Baidu is an online shopping portal. WeChat is social media.
I have been "educated" that Libre Office now has in-Browser extension and also offers software for cloud servers (is that right?). If so that's a handy solution, provided that the school system in question is prepared to pay the systems and technical specialists. Leave aside the ROI value of that - just note that it is possible.
How would that be Balkanization comparable to China's great firewall? I don't see it.
Bigger picture……
.pGoogle’s largest business, by far, is the advertising it supports on its search engine. That supports e-commerce. Baidu is the direct equivalent (and no, it’s not just an online shopping portal, that’s totally wrong). If what you’re interested in is Google’s business interests in Google docs, or a Microsoft Office alternative, that’s not Baidu.
WeChat isn’t just social media in the way westerners understand it. It pervades middle-class urban Chinese life *much* more than that. Most don’t have email addresses, only WeChat. It’s how they pay for most things- equivalent of Apple Pay, but much more prevalent. Most *don’t have debit cards*. It’s their equivalent of Tinder, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, too. They use it as an NFC bonk-to-activate as electronic locks for their cars and houses. You need it to reserve a table at a restaurant, and to book a timeslot to enter a supermarket during Covid. Without it, you just don’t exist.
Balkanisation: assume “EU adopts LibreOffice” (whatever that means). How are you going to exchange documents and spreadsheets with companies based in the USA, South America, Africa, India etc? Because, those companies are all going to be using Microsoft Office. If “EU adopts LibreOffice”, Microsoft are going to *deliberately* break compatibility with LibreOffice, and shut any open document exchange standard. Because they have absolutely nothing to lose within the EU (they would no longer have any profit to make there), so there are no legal sanctions the EU can possibly impose. But Microsoft would have everything to lose in the rest of world by maintaining compatibility.
So *how are EU going to do business with the rest of the world*? Day 1, what are you going to do? If you are an EU exporter, your Peruvian customer or Indian supplier says “sorry, I just can’t see your contract to sign it, I can’t read LibreOffice documents, I only have MS Office365, like everybody else”.
EU citizens would *survive*, it can grow beetroot and cabbage on its own, and make its own Renault Megane. But it would be totally isolated in the world.
“EU adopts LibreOffice” (whatever that means). How are you going to exchange documents and spreadsheets with companies based in the USA, South America, Africa, India etc?
[...]
If you are an EU exporter, your Peruvian customer or Indian supplier says “sorry, I just can’t see your contract to sign it, I can’t read LibreOffice documents, I only have MS Office365, like everybody else”.
This is an argument to make a subjective pre-set opinion. We use LO on a daily basis, and still communicate very much with the rest of the world on a daily basis. Including e.g. US government. Fact is that LO has the export possibility to save to different file formats, including MS formats. Office365 does have the option to open Open Document files (albeit less good, this probably being revenue driven company decision, but still). However, more important: it is a commonly accepted standard that documentation you mention (including contracts) are never word processing documents but pdf. Maybe even for the simple reason that contracts, well, might be better if it still carries the content the sender wants? And yes, sure, give the argument that pdfs can be changed too. But that is what is real life situation now, today. Furthermore, it was decided considerable time ago that pdf is the documentation and storage format. (And then e.g. FDA still keeps using XFA pdf, but hey ;).
So EU citizens would *survive*, it can grow beetroot and cabbage on its own, and make its own Renault Megane. But it would be totally isolated in the world.? Nope, I don't think so, and common business (and additional) practice today already shows that is an argument to proof your individual, pre-set opinion without real life reference. (And do you think the Renault Megane is worse than the Pinto? ;)
No. LibreOffice *cannot* save to “MS file formats”.
What LibreOffice can save to, is a currently agreed open file format, that MS has agreed on an ongoing basis to support. Agreeing to do so, is a result that countries like the EU threaten to exclude it from business opportunities if doesn’t. But once EU exercise the nuclear option, that leverage is gone.
Microsoft would *immediately* change its file format. And all of your Windows installations would be nuked from orbit. All of them, EU-wide, simultaneously. MS has no legal or moral obligation to help the customers of its competitor. To the point where, if Microsoft management failed to do so, the board would be immediately be sued by its shareholders and removed.
You have a very protected view of the world, if you think PDF would still be an option available to any person within the EU, after such an aggressive action. Adobe is a US-headquartered company. PDF would also be taken off the table for the EU, in the same week after .docx went. And again, even if Adobe didn’t want to do that, US Department of Commerce would come in and tell them they had to. You’d lose *everything*. In one week. No Google, no Microsoft. But also no SAP, no Oracle. All hated US megacorps….but just try running your company when your accounting and customer management software is all automatically and simultaneously de-licensed to comply with US sanctions.
Like I said, beetroot and cabbage are nice this time of year.
My initial statement was Balkanisation a’coming. OP says “no way, where’s the Balkanisation, we’d still have access to everything”. I point out why “what goes around, comes around”. Now OP says “hoorah! We don’t want none of your steeenking IT anyway. Balkanisation good!” And there you go.
Digital sovereignty *is* Balkanisation. By definition. Or did you think you would get sovereignty, and the other guy wouldn’t? Joey needs to learn to share.
And…..thar she blows!
You may not like Twitter. I don’t. And indeed Musk may be burning the entire place down with fire. But the simple fact is: today they closed all offices in EU, without notice, and fired all EU staff. Their main crime was the Brussels Twitter execs decided to comply with the EU Digital Services Act.
So Musk fired, not just the execs, but terminated all staff. Now, I guess it’s logically possible that Musk intends to keep serving in the EU, and instead he personally is going to do all the Digital Services Act paperwork…..but somehow I doubt it, don’t you? I reckon Twitter will be offline for EU by Monday. I’m 100% sure there will be so many “we hate Twitter, hurrah for EU Balkanisation” comments on forum.
And ditto ditto for Facebook and Google pullout, which….I guess might take another 90 days, because they like sticking with the letter of the law?
No. LibreOffice *cannot* save to “MS file formats”.
Hmmm. Remarkable. Doing it right now... BTW did you ever look into the content and dir structure of e.g. docx? You do know it is just xml right?
Microsoft would *immediately* change its file format.
Wow, I suppose you proved something amazing here: that politicians are actually visionary...
You have a very protected view of the world, if you think PDF would still be an option available to any person within the EU, after such an aggressive action.
I would say you have a rather aggressive view of the world. I just pointed to the situation as it is in the real world, today. Might perhaps hurt, but I do advise to try. However, thinking with you: there is more than Adobe out there as e.g. the plethora of pdf viewers shows, and if Adobe would decide to change their stance on use of pdf, well, then the world moves on to a different format like e.g. open XML.
You’d lose *everything*. In one week. No Google, no Microsoft.
Hurrah! Break out the champagne!
But also no SAP, no Oracle. All hated US megacorps….
O dear. You do know SAP is German right?
Like I said, beetroot and cabbage are nice this time of year.
Indeed, and much healthier than chlorinated chicken or wimpy beer that is like sex in a canoe!
Umm, you do realise that the EU is bigger market than the US these days, so the likelihood of any multinational throwng a hissy fit and refusing to do business with them is on a par with Mr Putin withdrawing all his troops and volunteering to pay compensation out of his own wallet.
Which is zero.
Despite the fact that there appears to be no hard line between his own wallet and the Russian treasury.
No, I don’t realise that, because it isn’t true. US GDP is $23tn, EU only $16tn.
But that’s hardly the point. Total US exports to the EU are only $240bn. For an average US-based company, losing *all* exports to EU is equivalent to losing their domestic market in a rather small US state. Utah, actually, is the dividing-line. Your big mistake is to confuse your value to internal to yourself, with your value from the point-of-view of others.
Since this article is about Microsoft, let’s use their figures, as an unusually global company. Their total revenue is $170bn, of which 60% is domestic USA. In fact, just 15% is EMEA, the only split they give). But let’s take a moment to consider that includes EU *plus*…a G7 country (U.K.), a G20 country (Switzerland), an entire additional continent (Africa), an entire additional subcontinent with the highest per capita GDP on the planet (Middle East, where Qatar can afford to spend $200bn on a football tournament), and nine other countries. It’s dubious where EU revenue on its own struggles above 7% let alone into double figures %.
No, I do *not* think Microsoft board meetings allocate much more than the AOB at the end of the weekly meeting to “EU issues”
Possible social responsible business plan: An insurance style pool of support contracts for educational premises. Where the premiums are the consideration
They get the consideration, and pay centrally for support contracts from the open source vendors themselves and have some on the road techs ideally in local hubs
Keeps cost down for schools, keeps money rolling to the open source houses that offer support contracts, and a pool of knowledge of wider open source rather than piecemeal solutions.
Hell they could even put courseware available for the kids to learn infrastructure, networking and coding skills.
Could it work?
"French public procurement contracts require "consideration" – payment."
So there's a nice shiny new version of Orifice 297 or whatever, launched. It's precisely the same as the free educational version except for one clearly defined additional "feature" to differentiate it. Price is 1 cent per seat per year or 1 euro for a lifetime subscription.
Firstly, the geopolitical context, summarised in this article from Marianne (a nowadays left-leaning French political magazine):
https://www.marianne.net/agora/tribunes-libres/les-conditions-a-la-souverainete-numerique-de-la-france-vouloir-pouvoir-et-devoir
Secondly, this:
> However, the company in July announced Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty, a service that will allow public sector customers to use Microsoft cloud services in a way that's consistent with policies.
..is neither here nor there as, once again for anyone who hasn't read Schrems I and II, the issue is primarily not one of data protection but one of non-compliance with the European Charter of Fundamental Rights (CFR), as this note from the French government explains:
https://www.francenum.gouv.fr/guides-et-conseils/pilotage-de-lentreprise/stockage-des-donnees-en-ligne-cloud/cloud-pour-les-tpe
In that context, France has a "secure cloud" standard, SecNumCloud (https://www.ssi.gouv.fr/uploads/2014/12/secnumcloud-referentiel-exigences-v3.2.pdf) which applies to most public sector projects and to many private or public-private ones, and which is, frankly, strongly recommended for anyone in the EU space (not just France) who is serious about compliance and security.
If you put the data protection issue aside (as that alone should be stopping people using Office 365/Google Workspace in the EU, but somehow doesn't seem to be), this comes down to the continuing battle that France is fighting - to protect its home grown industry from MUCH larger corporations around the world using their sheer size to kill off competition, but without any actual financial assistance (as doing that would end up being counter to EU state aid rules too).
Problem is, France doesn't appear to be as attractive to corporations to set up shop and become "the next Microsoft" as the USA is, so this battle will continue forever, as their home grown companies don't generally scale to Microsoft-sized entities.
If they use Libre Office and Libre Office Online (the server software) then they are just paying for the infrastructure and technical support - so it's not exactly like an exact replacement for the others.
But nobody should underestimate the cost of the infrastructure and technical support which must include good security. Easy to imagine how cutting corners could end up being very expensive.
Tens of thousands of 12 year old students homework being held for ransom - that would be a bruising experience for any politician who had to take the blame.
> as their home grown companies don't generally scale to Microsoft-sized entities.
This applies equally to the UK...
Part of the rationale for the Single Market was to create a significant protected market/trading block, although not protected to the extent we are seeing with China's walled garden, in which home grown businesses could grow and be better able to compete with the US HQ'd multinationals...
“Protecting your home-grown industry” is *stupid*. It’s the sort of thing Trump believes in.
If your only approach is to say “hey, those foreigners make this, we should too”, then you are doomed. You will always be outcompeted by others with a comparative advantage. And that doesn’t actually depend whether you are China, EU, USA, Brexit Britain, or the Falkland Islands.
The only way to succeed in the world is: identify the things that you either do *better* than anyone else, or are *first* to, and do exactly those things. Everything else, you find the *best value* source for the goods or services, wherever it may be in the world, and you buy that. Best value does include quality and logistics issues. But it does not include “jobs for our boys”.
One would hope that medical students don't put PII* into there course notes irrespective of the cloud provider or even if it is written on a bit of paper**. There is no reason to.
"This 58 year old Male presenting with headache" is enough to give the medical context, no need to put in anything more, and it would be frowned upon (ie student disciplinary) to do so.
*Patient Identifiable information
** As a medical STUDENT their handwriting should be legible, after graduation all bets are off.
"There is no reason to."
University staff and students literally squirrel inappropriate data into any IT storage system available to them. The only rhyme or reason given is "for backup".
Email is commonly used to route copies of sensitive data despite explicit instructions against it. Students learn this from the example of senior academics and Medics. Universities don't discipline this sort of behaviour.
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The DNUM is tryng to hire a Microsoft 365 Project Manager who will be responsible for "the operational management and implementation of one or more technical projects, particularly in the context of the transition to Office 365".
But I suppose the proper bribes payments have been done?
I would be more than happy to ditch Microsoft/Office 365 but Europe doesn't have a comparable product. In fact, Europe doesn't have a product at all.
Apart from the obvious things like OneDrive, Sharepoint and Exchange Microsoft offers things like MEM and PowerAutomate which are very handy and can save a lot of resources.
It is obviously a serious national security issue if 30 kids' essays on 'Wuthering Heights' are held, encrypted on servers in the US.
If your data is properly encrypted you can host it in Beijing.
Nationalist data rules are just a way of building digital walls and carving up the internet, blocking data at national boundaries so that governments can spy on it and prosecute people over it. Such idiocy will eventually be used to end the global internet.
As we are moving to Chinese style politics and a Soviet economy in the West, it probably doesn't matter what kids do at school nowadays. They may as well write in exercise books. They haven't got much of a future in undeveloping Brexit Britain.
You don't have to look very hard on UK websites to see how the British version of English is gradually being supplanted by American English. The reason for this is obvious -- you use American applications so we 'own' you. The French are a bit more sensitive about this, they can't stop foreign loan words from permeating their language but they can try to keep the core intact.
As for 365, I've seen several replies here that work from the assumption that without 365 you can't do business, if indeed exist. This just isn't true. I personally loathe these products because every time I get accustomed to them they're changed, ostensibly to add more features but invariably to add more customer lock in. I get along quite nicely without them, thank you. Schools don't need them and they only need the cloud for convenience, its not a must have sort of feature.
US vs UK spelling on UK websites….
You are assuming it is autocorrect from e.g. MS Word. And that’s quite possible.
But the other key thing you need to consider is Search Engine Optimisation. If you sell T-shirts that come in three colours, red/white/blue, and you’d like Google to index it *properly*, such that people wanting red T-shirts come to your website, but people wanting teal T’s don’t…..you’ll quickly find Google just *won’t*. Because as far as Google is concerned, the property which Apparel might have, is called *color*, not colour.
If you decide to title your T-shirts with “colour”, prepare to waste lots of otherwise unnecessary time putting in meta-tags. OTOH if you title them as “Color” prefer to field lots of queries from annoyed customers with too much time on their hands, explaining that you are selling in the U.K. and please could you correct the speeling. So it’s all good.
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