Really proud as a French, I think the government has had some success with moving to something matrix based for the public sector too.
https://tchap.numerique.gouv.fr
I just hope we end up having more wins at the EU-level, instead of massive fails like GAIA-X...
It's not completely wrong, it will be understood, but it is ungrammatical and a clear marker that the speaker is not native, similar to getting adjectives in the 'wrong' order ('a big tasty sandwich' sounds more natural to a native speaker than 'a tasty big sandwich', even though the latter makes sense and will be understood).
Demonyms for historical neighbours of England have irregular forms when speaking of a particular person from there. Scotland has 'Scot' and 'Scotsman'; Wales has 'Welshman'; Spain has 'Spaniard'. Other countries indeed need a second word, such as 'person' or 'citizen' ('a Chinese' sounds offensive to me; I would say 'a Chinese person' in all cases). The only country I can think of where using a bare demonym is grammatical when speaking of a single person from there is Germany with 'a German' - probably because it has the suffix -man.
Demonyms don’t use the same rules as countable nouns. Both “French” and “British” are acceptable demonyms, they’re just not particularly idiomatic in American English (which likes to overcorrect with “person” like you’ve noted).
(There’s no particularly consistency with this, it’s just what sounds “good” to American ears. We’re perfectly fine with “as a German” or “as a Lithuanian.”)
If you're going to make statements like that to go against what I've written then at least come up with some viable citations to grammar literature.
Honestly, in all my years on this earth I have never, ever heard anybody in any English speaking country I've spent time in say "a French" "a American" "a British".
And that amounts to a lot of time surrounded by people speaking VERY "casual" English.
P.S. I said "an American" was ok if you re-read.. an NOT a
Technically yes the demonym is "French", but "I'm a French" just doesn't work in English. The word 'French' is almost exclusively used in English as an adjective or the name of the language. It is never used as a noun for anything else. So in context, it reads as an adjective without a paired noun.
In English, you have to disambiguate be adding a noun: French person, French citizen, or Frenchman if you're old and inconsiderate.
Similarly, we don't call people "a Chinese". That construction is considered derogatory, if not outright racist. Demonyms typically cannot be used as nouns alone without a suffix. "A Brazilian" or "a Spaniard" are acceptable.
As usual for English, the rules are vague and inconsistent.
The difference between this and Munich's attempt is that France has been building up gradually. They already run Tchap (Matrix-based) for government messaging, and the gendarmerie switched to Linux years ago with over 70k desktops. Munich tried a big-bang migration without enough internal expertise and caved under political pressure when MS moved their HQ there. Schleswig-Holstein in Germany is taking the same incremental approach now and seeing better results. The pattern is pretty clear: governments that treat it as a multi-year capability build succeed, those that treat it as a licensing swap don't.
still growing, you mean. France is, however significant, just one country. and then there is broader push to FOSS inside Europe, as well as Europe's own sovereign solutions. some attempts were failed, some were successful, but everything is still in progress
EDIT: on a second read, this sounded too diminishing of this achievement than I intended. the point is that it's not fully done yet, although it is remarkable that there is, finally, a political will for such actions
Sadly back in the day the city of Munich caved in (hosting Germany's MS headquarter). They had a good good run with their Linux. But the state of Schleswig-Holstein is pushing for more open source and switching to Libre Office (80% or so done). They talk about that on their Open Source Initiative page [1].
At least so against Israel and other countries actively engaging in open warfare against sovereign nations, as a European I'm very happy we're not getting pulled into those senseless conflicts.
France has been doing this in parts of its government functions for years, building expertise and learning what works. What do you imagine the EU institutions would bring to the table?
More countries and/or EU involvement could bring economies of scale: apart from translation, a lot of work on fixing bugs and adding features to the relevant open source projects can be done once and benefit all. So either get the same results faster, more cheaply per country, or both. Sure, that adds some bureaucracy and coordination cost too, but should be worth it overall.
You forgot the part where the countries voluntarily join the organisation. By the way, the commission is subject to a vote of confidence by the parliament, which is directly elected. I'm pretty sure you don't get to directly vote for your cabinet members either, wherever you are.
> You forgot the part where the countries voluntarily join the organisation.
It might be worth examining the word “countries” there.
Both France and the Netherlands rejected the proposed EU Constitution by referendum in 2005. It was then regurgitated as the Lisbon Treaty (with only superficial changes) in 2007, which was ratified with no public vote.
The Irish people initially rejected the treaties of Nice and Lisbon, and a followup vote was considered necessary. You get two bites of the democratic cherry with enough clout.
The British voted to leave in 2016, and in the three years that followed everything possible was done to reverse the decision.
You might be spotting here a difference in desires and power between the governors and the governed.
Linus Torvalds created Linux as a student in Helsinki, Finnland. He later took U.S. citizenship and lives in Portland, Oregon, TTBOMK.
Now on some level, the question makes less sense, because Linux as we know it now is an international proejct that thousands of developers from dozens of countries collaborated on. But perhaps most would agree that Torvalds, who serves as main integrator, has more say than others regarding the directions of Linux, as long as he is alive.
The open source property of Linux is more important to the question which OS a country's government should adopt: corporate systems are hard to scrutinize, whereas open source systems you can inspect and compile yourself, and it is a wise move of the French government to go in that direction. It will also save a lot of money, but that should not be the primary motive.
It is open source. Many companies which contribute to it are American, but nobody from America can tell you what you can or cannot do with it - unlike Microsoft or Apple with their proprietary OS being forced by US government.
Funnily enough there is some level of control that can be exerted by the US gov via the distros (at least the major ones - see legalese restrictions on Redhat/Ubuntu etc when you want to download , stating the various US gov laws/sanctions that they follow) and also via the kernel - i think some time back Russian kernel maintainers were removed.
So Open source it may be , however there are still pressure points that can be used. I believe this is one of the main reasons RISCV foundation moved to Europe.
Europe has a major distro in the form of SUSE, so that’s not too worrying.
Even if upstream linux banned european contributors, there are enough european contributors that a fork would just emerge. So I’m really not too worried about that happening.
The “main guy” is Finnish. He also got American citizenship recently, but given the US has increased attacks on naturalised citizens [0] and has a history of this [1] it’s not a solid foundation.
If Japanese internment worried you, you should see Europe's treatment of perceived outsiders [0] and get reallyyyy worried about the ongoing attacks [1] and rhetoric [2]. I would urge extreme caution to anyone in Europe that is at risk.
> Expulsion of Jews from Spain [...] On 31 March 1492, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile, issued the Alhambra Decree, ordering all unconverted Jews to leave their kingdoms and territories by the end of July that year, unless they converted to Christianity
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but we've (I live in Spain) come a long way since 1492 (534 years ago) and if that's the most recent example you can find of "Europe's treatment of perceived outsiders" I think you yourself know that stuff like that doesn't happen today, in Europe.
The other two are ok-ish (though notably Reform is not in government and the elections are 4 years away) but yeah leading with a source from the 15th century really doesn’t support the argument.
I've never met a real human that was passionate about what OS a government worker in some local French commune uses, but it's the hottest topic on HN behind AI
Right, what about FOSS developers who care about what guidelines the entire country has regarding OS usage? Maybe I'm living in a bubble, but everyone (mostly Europeans to be fair) seems excited about moving away from US technologies.
This move isn't just "Local French commune thinks about Linux", it's "French government agency that can mandate what others do, set hard guideline for agencies and magistrates to come up with a concrete plan for how to move to Linux", which is worlds beyond what we've seen before.
I remember similar articles being posted 20+ years ago on Slashdot. And as we’ve seen, it’s often less of a “use Linux” and more of a “we have an alternate vendor” and there’s often suspicious lock-in (see the case in the EU or some similar country where the vendor was reading emails).
Over time, more and more work is going to be done by AI though. At some point, it will be unthinkably slow and expensive to let humans work on anything.
The EU chips act is subsidizing new fab construction in Europe.
Meanwhile the french Mistral is partnering with Nvidia to build an AI data center near Paris on which their LLMs will run.
But I agree this is not enough to make the EU a contender in the race with the US and China. The EU still has not seriously considered decoupling from American big tech.
I think it depends on how strong the compression advancements are going to be, such that much can be done locally in the future. I'd be interested in experiences of others here in using Gemma4, which is at the forefront of "intelligence per gigabyte" atm. (according to benches).
At this point in the broader dialogue your position is roughly as interesting as flat earth. Only bored people are going to bother replying and no one is taking you seriously. Don't do yourself a disservice by clinging to this.
I, for one, have never needed AI for anything ever in my life.
AI has, however, made my life noticably worse. Especially when dealing with braindead robot driven customer "support". But also in making it financially impossible to buy more RAM or upgrade a GPU.
I think we'd be better off without yet another bubble.
Were you born yesterday? Phone AIs being dumb didn't take LLMs at all. They were always stupid and frustrating to deal with substitutes for customer support.
I just hope we end up having more wins at the EU-level, instead of massive fails like GAIA-X...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
Demonyms for historical neighbours of England have irregular forms when speaking of a particular person from there. Scotland has 'Scot' and 'Scotsman'; Wales has 'Welshman'; Spain has 'Spaniard'. Other countries indeed need a second word, such as 'person' or 'citizen' ('a Chinese' sounds offensive to me; I would say 'a Chinese person' in all cases). The only country I can think of where using a bare demonym is grammatical when speaking of a single person from there is Germany with 'a German' - probably because it has the suffix -man.
"French" is adjective or a collective noun, but don't use it as a countable noun.
Trying to say "as a French" makes about as much sense as thinking "as a American" is correct.
As has already been said ... "a French (wo)man","a French person","a French citizen" is the correct way to go.
The reason you can say "an American" is because America starts with a vowel.
Same reason why you would not say "a British" but you could say "a Brit".
(There’s no particularly consistency with this, it’s just what sounds “good” to American ears. We’re perfectly fine with “as a German” or “as a Lithuanian.”)
sounds casual but correct to me
I don't care if it "sounds ok to me".
If you're going to make statements like that to go against what I've written then at least come up with some viable citations to grammar literature.
Honestly, in all my years on this earth I have never, ever heard anybody in any English speaking country I've spent time in say "a French" "a American" "a British".
And that amounts to a lot of time surrounded by people speaking VERY "casual" English.
P.S. I said "an American" was ok if you re-read.. an NOT a
In English, you have to disambiguate be adding a noun: French person, French citizen, or Frenchman if you're old and inconsiderate.
Similarly, we don't call people "a Chinese". That construction is considered derogatory, if not outright racist. Demonyms typically cannot be used as nouns alone without a suffix. "A Brazilian" or "a Spaniard" are acceptable.
As usual for English, the rules are vague and inconsistent.
Or talking about a man that is French. Neither of which would be considered 'old', or 'inconsiderate".
Well, context is important on the Brazilian front. ;)
"I had a brazilian at my house" could have other connotations.
yup, at this point, nothing but cobwebs and IOU's left in the coffers over there and every little bit of saving helps.
EDIT: on a second read, this sounded too diminishing of this achievement than I intended. the point is that it's not fully done yet, although it is remarkable that there is, finally, a political will for such actions
[1]: https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/themen/... (German only)
More countries and/or EU involvement could bring economies of scale: apart from translation, a lot of work on fixing bugs and adding features to the relevant open source projects can be done once and benefit all. So either get the same results faster, more cheaply per country, or both. Sure, that adds some bureaucracy and coordination cost too, but should be worth it overall.
It might be worth examining the word “countries” there.
Both France and the Netherlands rejected the proposed EU Constitution by referendum in 2005. It was then regurgitated as the Lisbon Treaty (with only superficial changes) in 2007, which was ratified with no public vote.
The Irish people initially rejected the treaties of Nice and Lisbon, and a followup vote was considered necessary. You get two bites of the democratic cherry with enough clout.
The British voted to leave in 2016, and in the three years that followed everything possible was done to reverse the decision.
You might be spotting here a difference in desires and power between the governors and the governed.
Now on some level, the question makes less sense, because Linux as we know it now is an international proejct that thousands of developers from dozens of countries collaborated on. But perhaps most would agree that Torvalds, who serves as main integrator, has more say than others regarding the directions of Linux, as long as he is alive.
The open source property of Linux is more important to the question which OS a country's government should adopt: corporate systems are hard to scrutinize, whereas open source systems you can inspect and compile yourself, and it is a wise move of the French government to go in that direction. It will also save a lot of money, but that should not be the primary motive.
So Open source it may be , however there are still pressure points that can be used. I believe this is one of the main reasons RISCV foundation moved to Europe.
Even if upstream linux banned european contributors, there are enough european contributors that a fork would just emerge. So I’m really not too worried about that happening.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2026/01/16/nx-s1-5677685/as-focus-shifts...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain
[1] https://www.ein.org.uk/news/home-office-remove-euss-pre-sett...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/0e29224f-9d06-4315-a89f-e334ffbc6...
Also, what nationality do you say Elon Musk is, out of curiosity? Let's test your consistency :)
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but we've (I live in Spain) come a long way since 1492 (534 years ago) and if that's the most recent example you can find of "Europe's treatment of perceived outsiders" I think you yourself know that stuff like that doesn't happen today, in Europe.
Oh, the terror.
> Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland
> In 2004, Torvalds moved with his family from Silicon Valley to Portland, Oregon.
...what?
There's a big lesson for Europe there, everyone super productive and able to move to the US does so at the first opportunity.
That might have changed somewhat, recently.
That is not the situation at the moment.
Astroturfing around this is getting suspicious.
It's perfectly possible for people to be passionate about the subject.
This move isn't just "Local French commune thinks about Linux", it's "French government agency that can mandate what others do, set hard guideline for agencies and magistrates to come up with a concrete plan for how to move to Linux", which is worlds beyond what we've seen before.
Nah, linux and "$curreant_year is the year of the linux desktop" is just something the hacker / maker / nerd scene is passionate about.
Over time, more and more work is going to be done by AI though. At some point, it will be unthinkably slow and expensive to let humans work on anything.
To do *that* locally, you need GPUs and LLMs.
How will Europe solve these two?
Meanwhile the french Mistral is partnering with Nvidia to build an AI data center near Paris on which their LLMs will run.
But I agree this is not enough to make the EU a contender in the race with the US and China. The EU still has not seriously considered decoupling from American big tech.
AI has no value.
I'm not interested in games.
AI has, however, made my life noticably worse. Especially when dealing with braindead robot driven customer "support". But also in making it financially impossible to buy more RAM or upgrade a GPU.
I think we'd be better off without yet another bubble.