Free and Open Source Software

It is being resisted. But...

Telegram and WhatsApp groups over here, like in many countries, are echo chambers for certain ideologies. I am a professor, graduate school, and some of my students talk about "the great replacement". I ask them what it is and they tell me, straight-faced in front of their peers, what it is and how it is a real thing because they saw it shared on a group chat. With the very recent knife attack and the fact that this was not a French citizen, I would imagine the loonies are out full swing on their group chats.

The "nothing to hide" argument is used a lot here and (this is my personal opinion) I real feel like many French people are poorly informed about the tech world. I still hear people refer to Gates as the boss of MS. My MIL still thinks that Zuckerberg made Signal so she refuses to use it (but spends 14 hours a day on FB). Musk is viewed by many as a benevolent Tony Stark. And once I presented Mastodon to my students and when I explained the content warnings and some of the rules, they all burst out laughing and called it "stoopid".

Now, in reality we have some great stuff going on over here: La Quadrature du Net, Framasoft, Les Chatons, FDN, etc. and the tech community is loud and likes to resist, but getting GenZ and the Boomers and everyone in between to listen for a minute is hard work. I spend a lot of time looking in to this sort of stuff, and I am subscribed to the LQDN newsletters and donate to different similar organisations... This entire story was completely under the radar for me. I heard nothing about it until I looked at that video.

Anyway, it was fun to rant for a bit.

French people, this isn't French-bashing: I know there are lots of overly tech-savvy people here in this beautiful country.