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France Says No To Office 365 and Google Workspace in School (theregister.com) 56

Posted by msmash from the taking-a-stand dept.
The French minister of national education and youth has said that free versions of Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workplace should not be used in schools -- a position that reflects ongoing European concerns about cloud data sovereignty, competition, and privacy rules. From a report: In August, Philippe Latombe, a member of the French National Assembly, advised Pap Ndiaye, the minister of national education, that the free version of Microsoft Office 365, while appealing, amounts to a form of illegal dumping. He asked the education minister what he intends to do, given the data sovereignty issues involved with storing personal data in an American cloud service.

Last week, the Ministry of National Education published a written reply to confirm that French public procurement contracts require "consideration" -- payment. "Free service offers are therefore, in principle, excluded from the scope of public procurement," the Ministry statement says, and minister Ndiaye has reportedly confirmed this position. This applies to other free offerings like Google Workspace for Education. Paid versions of these cloud services might be an option if they hadn't already been disallowed based on worries about data safety.
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France Says No To Office 365 and Google Workspace in School

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  • French public procurement contracts require "consideration" -- payment.

    The point of using the word "consideration" is so that one is not limited to financial payments. It's really any sort of quid pro quo, this for that. Is there some sort of translation error here, "consideration" the wrong English word to be using?

    • Negotiation maybe. Anyhoo, the standalone MS Office Home and Education, is available on Amazon.de for about 120 Euro.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      Is there some sort of translation error here, "consideration" the wrong English word to be using?

      "Consideration" is a word that's routinely used in contract law (in English).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by drnb ( 2434720 )

        Is there some sort of translation error here, "consideration" the wrong English word to be using?

        "Consideration" is a word that's routinely used in contract law (in English).

        Yes, that is where the definition that I am applying comes from. That "consideration" is any quid pro quo a contract may specify, not necessarily a financial payment.

        • Sure - but I don't think they're offering non-monetary compensation to use the software either. I'm not sure why that's relevant.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by drnb ( 2434720 )

            Sure - but I don't think they're offering non-monetary compensation to use the software either. I'm not sure why that's relevant.

            I'm thinking we need to know precisely what French law requires, "payment" or "consideration", in order to craft a solution.

    • Consideration is the word used in English contract law and means as you say.

      All he's really saying is that it doesn't fall under "public procurement contracts" because it's free and you don't need one. What's not being said is that it is probably still fine to use it - you just can't have a public procurement contract for the free service (and why would you).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by drnb ( 2434720 )

        doesn't fall under "public procurement contracts" because it's free

        That would have been fine, but that was not the actual written reply, which was: "a written reply to confirm that French public procurement contracts require "consideration" -- payment"

        I am merely pointing out that "consideration" vs "payment" means that there could be a translation error here that is distorting the details. "Free" is not the same as no "payment". I think we need to precisely understand the conflict with French law to develop a solution.

        • That would have been fine, but that was not the actual written reply, which was: "a written reply to confirm that French public procurement contracts require "consideration" -- payment"

          And I think that this statement is intentionally evasive by framing it around procurement contracts. They're not interpreting that statement, just putting it out there and letting the reader come to their own conclusion.

    • "Graft" is the word that comes to mind.
  • Any proof of his words?

  • a position that reflects ongoing European concerns about cloud data sovereignty, competition, and privacy rules

    Eh, probably not. France has famously gone to great lengths to defend their culture from Anglo "imperialism". They restrict English language stuff all the time, movies included, from both America and British Commonwealth country. They promote domestic French language alternatives. They similarly have a distrust of products from English speaking countries. They'll probably end up doing a home-grown, Francophone clone of American cloud services. It'll be really expensive, but they don't care about that, as lo

    • It's actually a rapidly growing EU concern. And the Dutch government has the same problems with the Cloud as the French: the so-called 'patriot' act (better named the fuck-everyone-we-own-you act, or possibly the US-First act) didn't do much for cloud acceptance. Privacy Shield turned out to be not worth the paper it was written on and we basically assume by now that the US is a potentially hostile nation where most of our national interests are concerned. That's fairly new.

      We're still going into the Cloud

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jezral ( 449476 )

      They'll probably end up doing a home-grown, Francophone clone of American cloud services. It'll be really expensive, but they don't care about that, as long as it's French.

      They already did, but it's not expensive - it's free and open source: https://framasoft.org/ [framasoft.org]

  • The biggest problem isn't (Score:3)

    by jodido ( 1052890 ) on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @02:08PM (#63071692)
    The biggest problem for the French isn't data security, or "consideration," or any of that crap. It's that these are American products from American companies.
    • So, you are complaining they are acting just like the USA is then ?

      Trump proved how reliance on the USA was a foolish idea and now they like other nations are looking at spreading their risk

      They should throw money at French software developers to produce a "French" version of open office and Linux.

      The EU should also buy ARM, so they have a longe term alternative to US dominated IT.

    • Re: The biggest problem isn't (Score:4, Interesting)

      by St.Creed ( 853824 ) on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @02:33PM (#63071792)

      You're wrong there. Don't underestimate the damage of the patriot act,or think that the mishandling of private data by US companies like Facebook, the treatment of EU citizens at your border, the espionage done by the CIA and NSA, etc. are just all ignored.

      It's not. And slowly but surely the EU is waking up to the fact that the USA is unreliable at best, hostile at worst. Or do you think we've forgotten the law that says you can invade The Hague at will? Or the way Palantir abused Facebook data to help the Brexit?

      Think what you like, but don't be surprised if the climate becomes very cold in the EU for US companies in the coming years.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        The alternatives are also controlled by jerks.

        • It's called not putting all your eggs in one basket.

          The reliance on the USA by the rest of the world has become extremely problematic.

          It is time to move away from US corporations setting the tax systems, the trade systems, the copyright systems, the financial systems, etc

    • It's that these are American products from American companies.

      Microsoft, by offering a product for free, does what it can to bypass the law. It allows the schools to immediately register without paying, meaning no bidding is required, no review is done, and nobody to check the laws are followed; in short, it makes impossible for the local governments to follow the principles of good administration that are stated in law.

      This is what the ministry invokes (here is the exact law in force in France, for reference https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr... [legifrance.gouv.fr] ). You cannot, in France,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Njovich ( 553857 )

      I think locally hosted Exchange is fine for France and nets the 'United States' (microsoft shareholders and some tax havens that Microsoft uses) more money than these free cloud offerings. It's always funny to me that in any thread like this some American always feels attacked when even the slightest bump is made for an American company. Not all Americans of course. Do you know how often EU companies get barriers put up in the US? There really are very few unfair practices towards American companies in the

      • With the laws in place no company or government working with sensitive data is able to use American clouds or American software that calls home with "telemetry".
        The GDPR is very clear on this point combined with the American laws. That a lot of persons totally ignore the law, that is another matter.

  • FOSS (Score:3)

    by denbesten ( 63853 ) on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @02:09PM (#63071694)

    ...French public procurement contracts require "consideration" -- payment. "Free service offers are therefore, in principle, excluded from the scope of public procurement,..

    By this line of reasoning, I presume that Free, Open-Source Software is also excluded from French public schools.

    • If I started a consultant company that offers some number of years support for FOSS, that would likely be allowed. In principle it's fair as well, since anyone can put together such a company and bid on it.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      You're kind of missing the point. The term you should be focusing on isn't really "consideration" or "free," it's "illegal dumping." It's the idea that a company that normally charges for proprietary products will try to enter a market by saying that market can get the products for free -- the plan being that they will then be locked into using those products, to the exclusion of competitors. It's essentially, "your first hit is free." This practice is particularly insidious in education markets, because pe

    • ...French public procurement contracts require "consideration" -- payment. "Free service offers are therefore, in principle, excluded from the scope of public procurement,..

      By this line of reasoning, I presume that Free, Open-Source Software is also excluded from French public schools.

      I don't think so. For one thing, FOSS isn't a service - whereas Office 365, with its reliance on a for-profit corporation's servers, is very much a service. For another, FOSS functionality and rights can't be "taken back" once it's in the hands of the user. The same is not true of Microsoft software.

    • Nope. There's an EU directive that requires procurers to "prefer" FOSS solutions, for many of the same reasons that corporations like Google, Facebook, & Microsoft often prefer FOSS. By "free service offers" they more than likely mean paid for in personal data rather than money.

    • What is not allowed is for a company to offer *services* for free, such as the service of install/maintain/operate software, whether FOSS or otherwise, on government servers. The problem is if there s no payment, there is also no bidding on specifications, no contract signing, no review by Court of Auditors. It's not about schools, it's the law on public contracts that applies to every entity that is fully owned by the government, such as some hospitals, the firemen brigade, government agencies.

      What they c

  • So those are not allowed because they are not paid... then Free Software like LibreOffice is also not allowed if it doesn't cost money?

    • Pretty sure it just means you don't need a public procurement contract to use it. But I think this was weasel phrasing to sound like he's supporting the idea without actually putting any legal weight on it.

  • "So how much more than free would you like to pay?"

    Allowing govt run schools to name their own price seems pretty fair.

  • this word means "the use of those things may be done, but a LOT of though must be put into it".
    payment is not even a consideration.
    obviously free software is preferred

  • Down with public cloud systems. Other people, businesses and countries should be doing the same. There is nothing that you can do in a public cloud that you can't do in a private cloud where you control your data and the access to it. And YOU control it, not asking some server out of your control to control it per your specs on your behalf.... you actually control it. It gets even more stupid when it comes to IoT devices that require you to authenticate to someone elses servers and ask permission to control

    • It gets even more stupid when it comes to IoT devices that require you to authenticate to someone elses servers and ask permission to control or access something behind your own firewall. Yea... fuck that and fuck them.

      Which is why I still use X10 equipment to this day, but the prices for X10 controllers has never gone down, in 25 years, while the new smartplugs have been getting steadily cheaper. I understand there are ways to intercept the key exchange process when they set themselves up so they can be locally controlled.

  • LibreOffice, or another open offering? (Score:3)

    by Murdoch5 ( 1563847 ) on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @04:23PM (#63072188) Homepage
    Why not go open source and use LibreOffice, or another open offering?
    • It's already used by the french national Gendarmerie, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Schools are probably heading towards the same direction, using a similar distribution.
    • Because it's a different thing. It's an office suite that you install on your computer, not a cloud service.
    • TFA specifically says that french public procurement requires them to pay for something(consideration), and that free options are excluded.

      I'm not saying that's good, economical, or smart, but that's what they want I guess. They think 'free software' means 'unsupported and risky' or whatever their reasoning.
      • Fair, I didn't read much into it, but they could donate to LibreOffice, which would in effect "pay" for the software.

  • Someone told me years ago that "No one copies the French, and the French copy no one."

  • It is about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) EU law.

    French authorities consider Microsoft and Google cloud services that store data in the US to be non-compliant with European data regulations like GDPR and with "Schrems II" - a 2020 ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union governing data sharing across borders.

    From the submitted article above https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]

    In the view of the Court, the limitations on the protection of personal data arising from the domestic law of the United States on the access and use by US public authorities of such data transferred from the European Union to that third country, which the Commission assessed in Decision 2016/1250, are not circumscribed in a way that satisfies requirements that are essentially equivalent to those required under EU law, by the principle of proportionality, in so far as the surveillance programmes based on those provisions are not limited to what is strictly necessary.

    Maximillian Schrems, an Austrian national residing in Austria, has been a Facebook user since 2008. As in the case of other users residing in the European Union, some or all of Mr Schrems's personal data is transferred by Facebook Ireland to servers belonging to Facebook Inc. that are located in the United States, where it undergoes processing. Mr Schrems lodged a complaint with the Irish supervisory authority seeking, in essence, to prohibit those transfers.

    The Court of Justice invalidates Decision 2016/1250 on the adequacy of the protection provided by the EU-US Data Protection Shield [europa.eu]

  • If French schools don't use Microsoft or Google's cloud-based products, what are they going to use? Some obscure French product?

    Most employers expect graduates to be proficient in the Microsoft and/or Google office suites, so the French might be shooting themselves in the foot here.

    • School acquire a limited number of licences of Microsoft/Google/etc. for the purpose of teaching computer skills to students. What is at stake in the current discussion here is the general use of a suite that runs the entire school (e-learning software).

      I don't find you argument "company wants" very compelling. 1) Companies in France are presumably run mostly by people who have been educated in France themselves, are aware of the students level and have adapted their companies to that. 2) Even according to

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