Calligra and LibreOffice already exist though. I am not against this in principle but couldn’t they have invested in an existing FOSS project?
While both of those are great software. Unless I’m not aware of something they aren’t cloud/network based office suites like Google docs and office 365.
It seems this is an alternative to office software where you can work simultaneously and share documents in the same cloud/network.
I don’t think there is an alternative to office 365 and Google docs at this point that is open source. So this seems like a great project and I’ll definitely be considering it for our company.
There is nextcloud and others you can self host at least.
What about Collabora Online? It integrates nicely into Nextcloud, but I am not sure about pricing for business use.
https://www.collaboraonline.com/collabora-online/
Guide for self hosting: https://collabora-online-for-nextcloud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install/
Thanks I’ll definitely check that out. I’ve seen some posts about it working on Synology Nas devices so that’s very interesting.
There’s onlyoffice for cloud based office
Onlyoffice seems a little slack on the security and updates. I saw the warnings in the desktop package, have they made sure the online offerings are secure?
Can either of those do collaborative editing? I usually think of that feature when I think of Google Docs
Really glad to see the EU adopt more open source software as a way to combat the centralized control some of the american software companies have over the space.
What does this do over what the collabora tools in Nextcloud do?
As someone in and from the US, good. Private companies are far to prevalent in public institutions all over the world. Something as basic and fundamental as word processing should not be controlled by a small select few huge international companies.
Dont know why we need another foss office but im certainly not going to complain.
It’s just for the French civil service, right?
Is this just for EU citisens or can Americans like me use it?
Foss, just deploy and enjoy
Don’t know what a Foss is
I was going to make a joke but honestly it’s refreshing and a good sign that Lemmy is starting to get used by people who don’t know what FOSS means now. Welcome.
Nice to see Lemmy is not just a place for complete nerds!
FOSS is free and open-source software. In simple terms, it is any program for which the source code (i.e. the actual code that forms the program, its entire backbone) is available for anyone to see and modify as they see fit, without any technical or legal limitations.
This is normally seen as very positive, because everyone with the knowledge of respective programming languages can inspect the program to see it doesn’t do anything malicious, and everyone can change the program to their needs. Also, the original creator of the program does not have power to put any limitations on its use, like introducing payment requirements, or deleting important features, because everyone can immediately spawn a version of the program that doesn’t have these changes, while still having the rest.
FOSS (free and open source software) is software that is completely open source and is free for everyone to use. It’s much harder to enshittify, and if it ever does people can fork (make a copy, and make their own changes to the software).
In case you didn’t understood by now, it’s free open source software
free and open source software
Free open source software
If I can copy and paste with thought having to install the offline plugin, then I’m in.
It looks closer to the markdown style of formatting though, and I doubt it has page formatting, or other more advanced formatting, or extensions, or a large selection of fonts. Honestly, even though docs has pageless formatting now, most people don’t use it when they should, making everything unnecessary harder to read, so this will be better in that regard at least. This is probably good enough for 95% of what people use Docs for, but I wouldn’t call it a replacement.
I haven’t used it because I don’t have a French government account, so correct me if I’m wrong about any of that.
We should actually use an opensource, decentralized and private alternative instead of relying on another centralized service
See Fileverse for example: https://fileverse.io/
Why distributed? Having your data tied to a blockchain seems unnecessarily complicated, and it essentially puts your data at risk if the bulk of the community moves to the next hot thing.
We really need to decouple storage from the apps themselves. Whether you use distributed storage, local storage, or something commercially backed like S3 should be a choice separate from the app you use to view and edit your data.
I self-host Collabora (online version of LibreOffice; OnlyOffice is another option), and my data lives on my NAS, but it could just as easily live on S3 or some distributed data store.
I self-host Collabora (online version of LibreOffice; OnlyOffice is another option), and my data lives on my NAS, but it could just as easily live on S3 or some distributed data store.
Oh this is interesting. Any pitfalls you could talk about before I go popping this up myself?
It’s pretty easy if you use NextCloud with the AIO image, but if you’re doing anything fancier than that, strap in because there aren’t many decent tutorials.
(Not op) Its distrubuted so you don’t lose your content if something happens to one location.
Just browsing the landing page, it looks like the blockchain part offers proof of ownership and strict access controls without having to use a centralized service, which is needed in some form if it’s distrubuted.
I imagine but haven’t seen that it might handle payments for having things be distrubuted as well, which would have meant having to include credit cards otherwise which would complicate things like micro payments to any given person hosting your content.
Edit: also this is the kind of thing that should use an S3 compatible API so you don’t get locked in as you said. It’d let you move the data between providers effortlessly.
Its distrubuted so you don’t lose your content if something happens to one location.
Right, but you’ll lose your content if enough people lose interest in the network. That’s absolutely a thing in the crypto world where things move fast. Relying on the network effect to secure your data sounds… sketchy.
which is needed in some form if it’s distrubuted
Sure, and the easiest way to do that is w/ public key cryptography, sign your encrypted stuff and you can always prove ownership. A blockchain gives you that, but it’s hardly necessary to have consensus around that.
include credit cards
It probably uses some cryptocurrency. Lots of cryptocurrencies work well for micropayments (e.g. LiteCoin, Monero, or even Bitcoin w/ the lightning network).
I just don’t see the need for a blockchain here. Bittorrent has been doing content-based addressing for ages, and it doesn’t need a blockchain, you just ask for the data at a given hash and you get it. Or you can use IPFS. If everything is properly encrypted, you’re good to go!
What the blockchain does offer is a way to pay for storage. So the more you pay, the more likely your data is to still be there after some time as people leave the network and nodes drop and whatnot. All in all though, it seems really risky to put anything important on it, and you might as well just pay for a storage provider from a legal entity that you can sue if things go poorly (and maybe two, so you’re not screwed if goes bankrupt or whatever).
I was looking at it more, and it does use IPFS for the data storage (files and the collaboration chats etc), as well as Arweave, which I’d never heard of until today.
Checked out the site on mobile, and it was unresponsive to any of my clicks.
Well this software is more intended for administrative staff working for the government, so I don’t think that decentralisation is their goal here.
I agree but having two major countries using this might be a good move for more efforts from nations. I know Canada still uses all M$FT platforms and recently moved to EXO.
Purpose built projects like this would be easy for public servants to adopt and adapt their workflow.
I wish we did with more open source and local software. My school in Canada has some agreement with Microsoft so we have to use everything from them.
The school mail used for all accounts is hosted by outlook
The databases are all azure
The 2fa app on our phone to boot the school computer has to be Microsoft (even gave me shit because I am root…)
Teams
We had a whole course for a year on how to use word.It’s a public school. Obviously with this most students will move to the USA for higher pay, we are literally subsidizing the USA education.
The school board here uses Google, and Microsoft… I emailed their board and the province’s privacy commissionaire asking why. I grew up with an agenda, and that shit worked better than using a website and email for JK/SK aged kids.
What do folks think of cryptpad?
Thinking ofmore like planning on switching from proton after CEO bullshitI personally really like Cryptpad. I haven’t heard of Fileverse, so I’ll check it out. Cryptpad is the closest thing I’ve found to a drop-in Google Suite replacement.
I’ll look into that one too, I didn’t know about it
Which bullshit are you talking about? I might have missed it and my search didn’t bring much on it
edit: I think i found it: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40123727/17360792
Short version to save others a click: Proton’s CEO tweeted an endorsement of Trump’s FTC pick, going on to praise how apparently the Republicans are now the party for the “little guys” and crediting the ongoing antitrust proceedings to Trump’s first term.
Yeah agreed - anything not FOSS is just setting up another bad situation waiting to happen
It says in one of the first paragraphs, that its open-source
No America’s club
So FramaSoft is not a thing ?? It’s French
Pretty good project, but is it the future to have mainly web apps?
For offline editing there’s already LibreOffice
LibreOffice does everything I need it to and there’s no need for anything else.
Doesn’t do collaborative online editing and that seems what this is about. But there are foss alternatives already, collabora/nextcloud, cryptpad etc.
Well yeah, that’s why my parent comment said its good for offline editing. I don’t need collaborative online editing.
Bro has been sleeping under a rock for the past 10 years.
It’s definitely been the direction of travel for the last several years. Not because the products are better, but because it’s easier to develop for just the browser than for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
it’s easier to develop for just the browser than for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
They also work on android and IOS. You are also not dependent on the different toolkits. Also it is so much more performant.
They also work on android and IOS.
I can imagine it’ll be a 160 MB app that loads the website in a webview, like it usually is
A bit of both I guess
Web apps have the advantage of not requiring admin permission and being accessible from pretty much everywhere, and they are often less intensive I believe
And I guess cloud storage of documents makes it even better
I guess I don’t mind if I can self host the server. If I can’t I have no interest in touching it.
no office software requires admin eighter unless you want to install it for all users
A good web app is awesome!
But the big ones usually wants to have a native app so that they can scan your whole computer and so on. This is good news.
which is fine if you deny network connections for it with a per-process firewall. but with a webapp you can never be sure that they won’t snatch your documents.
Just checked the part about self-hosting. While it’s probably possible to handle things with a less heavy approach, their only “easy to use” example right now is to have a full-blown kubernetes cluster at hand or run locally in the source directory. That’s a bit much.
In the README there’s also instructions for Docker Compose, although it’s quite the compose file, with SIXTEEN containers defined. Not something I’d want to self-host.
it seems to contains development containers and external services containers. So the compose file is more for local dev it seems
What i do find weird is the choice for Django for the backend. Python is incredibly slow, and django rest framework is even worse.
Please develop this self hosted version using sandstorm
It makes hosting a breeze with one click installation
Honestly, k8s is super easy and very lightweight to run locally if you know the rights tools. There are a few good options but I prefer k3d. I can install Docker/k3d and also build a local cluster running in maybe 2 minutes. It’s excellent for local dev. Even good for production in some niche scenarios
k8s is overkill for a lot of homelabs. Using docker compose is a fraction of that complexity
Yes if single node, kinda if 2-3 nodes, no for anything above that IMHO.
I don’t like the approach of piling more things on top of even more things to achieve the same goal as the base, frankly speaking. A “local” kubernetes cluster serve no purpose other than incredible complexity for little to no gain over a mere docker-compose. And a small cluster would work equally well with docker swarm.
A service, even made of multiple parts, should always be described that way. It’s easy to move “up” the stack of complexity, if you so desire. Having “have a k8s cluster with helm” working as the base requirement sounds insane to me.
Honestly, a lot of the time I don’t understand why a lot of businesses use k8s.
At my company especially, we know almost exactly what our traffic will look like from 9am-5pm. We don’t really need flexible scaling, yet we still use it because the technology is hyped. Similar to cloud, we certainly don’t need to be spending as much as we do, but since everyone else is on or migrating to the cloud, we are as well.
Kubernetes is not really meant primarily for scaling. Even kubernetes clusters require autoscaling groups on nodes to support it, for example, or horizontal pod autoscalers, but they are minor features.
The benefits are pooling computing resources and creating effectively a private cloud. Easy replication of applications in case of hardware failure. Single language to deploy applications, network controls, etc.
Yea I’m not a fan of helm either. In fact, I avoid charts when possible. But kustomize is great.
I feel the same way about docker compose. If it wasn’t already obvious, I’m biased in favor of k8s. I like and prefer that interface. But that’s just preference. If you like docker compose, great!
There’s one point where I do disagree however. There are scenarios where a local k8s cluster has a good and clear purpose. If your production environment runs on k8s, then it’s best to mirror that locally as much as possible. In fact, there are many apps that even require a k8s api to run. Plus, being able to destroy and rebuild your entire k8s cluster in 30s is wonderful for local testing.
Edit: typos
I won’t argue with the ups and downs of each technos, but I recently looked into docker swarms and it was all I expected kubernetes to be, without the hassle. And I could also get a full cluster with services restored from scratch in 30s. But I am obviously biased towards it, too :)
Seconding k3d (and, by extension, k3s). If you’re in a market for sth suitable for more upstream-compliant clustering solution (k3s uses SQLite instead of etcd, iirc), RKE2 is also a great choice
What was wrong with libre?
The web browser is the future, especially for a crappy document editor and spread sheet.
Then just use Word online.
Not FOSS and probably not privacy friendly
Pretty sure Libre only does local document collaboration, having it online is helpful for teams far from each other or who simply don’t have the infrastructure for their own central server of this kind.
Well this has been running in our Nextcloud and works pretty well collaboratively :) https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online not sure how it scales, but definitely an alternative that can be built on
Thanks for this; I may use it to build out my NextCloud server. I’ve already used it to replace shared calendars and contacts.
If you’re using Nextcloud All In One then it’s easy to enable it in the AIO settings.
If you’re not, I suggest looking into it. It’s the new officially recommended way of installing and it’s been great.
Nextcloud has an export/import data function but at the time I did it I only had a few GB of data so not sure how well it scales.
