[JDLL 2025] Free Software, Sovereignty and Freedom – Rethinking the Digital Independence of Our Cities

Free Software, Sovereignty and Freedom – Rethinking the Digital Independence of Our Cities

Walid: Well, hello, welcome to be here, welcome everyone, welcome to the RDGP podcast, RdGP, it’s off to a good start, I’m going to do it again. Welcome to the RdGP podcast, a podcast that deals with issues of digital law, individual freedom and privacy.

Benjamin: hello, welcome to the Projets Libres podcast, a podcast that deals with free software business models and communities. In advance, we apologize, it’s going to be a very small one, not very painful, but we’ll get there.

Walid: Today, a doubly exceptional episode, because we record as a duo for an incredible crossover… We hadn’t planned for the double microphone.

Benjamin: And therefore doubly exceptional, since we are recording live free software days in Lyon. So, in public, Lyon, are you doing well? I can’t hear you, are you okay? Thank you.

Walid: Our guest is holding his head in his hands, it’s a good start. And so, our guest today is Nicolas Vivant, and Nicolas Vivant is director of strategy and digital culture at the Échirolles City Hall. Nicolas, hello. And then, first question.

Benjamin: hello, we didn’t hear his voice.

Nicolas: Hello.

Nicolas’ journey

Walid: Nicolas, first question. Can you please start by introducing yourself to the audience and to the listeners of the RdGP and Projets Libres podcasts?

Nicolas: Yes, I am the director of strategy and digital culture at the City of Échirolles. So, I’m the manager, the city’s digital director in fact. With two teams, a team that is the IT department, so the internal IT of the municipality, and then a team that works on digital inclusion with digital advisors who intervene in the homes of the inhabitants to help the inhabitants with problems, either access to the law, administrative problems, paper applications, etc. this kind of thing, or problems of using digital tools, smartphone, PC, creating an email account, that kind of thing.

I was previously the CIO of the Fontaine Town Hall for 12 years. And the previous 20 years, I worked in the private sector, and in particular in American companies, namely HP and Motorola, where free software was not quite the rule.

Benjamin: Can you tell us a little bit about your background, your studies? What made you arrive, where you are today? We feel that you are an expert in a lot of fields, but before arriving at Échirolles and Fontaine, and even at HP, what course did you follow? And for you, what did computer science mean when you were young? Were there computers when you were young? We’re about the same age, I should add.

Nicolas: Yes, so. I started with abacus and punched cards, of course. So, my curriculum, I have no background in computer science. I did a literary baccalaureate, an A2 baccalaureate for elderly people like me, who have memories of this type of study. So, with mainly languages and philosophy. Afterwards, I did a DEUST in audiovisual communication. Because my dream in life was to be a journalist and to be able to speak in front of 12 microphones…

Benjamin: You’re welcome!

Nicolas: And then I found a job in IT, so it was in 1990, at the very beginning of the 90s. So in a context where we were looking for a lot of computer scientists and in the end, there were quite few trained computer scientists. And so, I’ve spent my entire career training on the job. My first day at HP, when I was told about files, I asked what a file was. So, I really didn’t have any level in computer science. The advantage of working in a big, big company is that there are plenty of jobs and you have the opportunity to evolve internally. And so, I worked first, I was an operator, at night, I made backups. I worked on large systems where I did backups, a manard job, at night. And then, I became a system administrator. And then, I worked on databases. And then, I worked on… And then, the Internet arrived.

Well, there you go. I built my curriculum internally. I am completely self-taught in computer science. I was fortunate, let’s say, to be interested in subjects, and I believe that free software is one of them, which are subjects that did not interest many people at the time I was interested in it and that became significant later. So, this is the case with the Internet, the Web, that’s it. Because I knew the Internet without the Web, for example. So, obviously, when the Web came along, it kind of changed everything and I was already in it. I became interested in cybersecurity at a time when it was a topic for no one and it was quite fun. And then there you go, and there, it’s a bit the same with free software, in the end. We can feel that there is a significant dynamic. I started working on free software when I arrived at Fontaine in 2009. And then, we feel that there is a real dynamic in the communities. My career has been made up of that, interests and skills developed on subjects that then became important.

Make people want to spend a holiday in Echirolles

Benjamin: ok, thank you. We know a little more about you. When we prepared the interview in a very serious and academic way, we obviously wrote questions that everyone surely expects. And then, we decided to end with questions that were perhaps a little lighter and a little less in the heart of the matter. And since we’re very afraid of not having time to ask the questions at the end, we’ll start with the question at the end. And so, the question at the end that we had retained was: Nicolas, can you, in two words, make all those who are present in the room and who listen to us on the RdGP and Projets Libres podcasts want to spend a holiday in Échirolles?

Nicolas: Well, without difficulty, because it’s a city I don’t live in. I work there, but I don’t live there. And it’s a city that is very pleasant to live in, with a real cultural, commercial and associative offer. It’s a super nice town in Échirolles. And even in terms of urban planning, it’s a very nice city. We, the people who either work or live in Échirolles, suffer a lot from the image that is given of this city, because when we look in the newspapers, it mainly talks about deals, shootings and… There you go. And we suffer a lot from that because it’s not at all the image we have when we live there, to the great surprise of the people who settle there.

The other thing, to come back a little bit to the theme that is ours, I know that we are at the end of the show, but… is that we do digital not quite, like everyone else in the city of Échirolles. And in fact, it’s something I rarely talk about in the end, but it’s spreading throughout the city. The fact, for example, that the digital advisors who do digital inclusion are in the same direction as the IT department, means that the laptops, which are on Linux, on the same distribution as those we used at the city hall, suddenly, when they need to reinstall a machine for a resident, they tend to reinstall this Linux distribution as well, which is not a problem since they have the skills, and they are there to help if there is a difficulty. And so, you can see that there is a dynamic that would be on the scale of the city, not just internally in the IT department, and that makes it interesting to be in Échirolles for that. Our elected officials are sometimes surprised by residents who say bravo for what you are doing on the digital front, because we don’t communicate a lot, internally to our agents, about what we do. But that’s also something that’s really interesting, I think, including at the associative level too.

Policy coherence around digital technology

Walid: If we get to the heart of the matter, one of the first questions is that there are plenty of cities that use Windows, Office, Teams, and they are very happy. So, why did you decide to switch to free software? Is it because you didn’t want to be like the others? What were the motivations?

Nicolas: So, in fact, what you have to measure is that it’s not my idea at all, and it’s the idea of no one in the department. In fact, it is really a decision by elected officials to be consistent in municipal action, politically coherent, including on the subject of digital technology. That is to say, there has been an awareness of the fact that there are political issues around digital technology, and that there are ways of doing IT that are more or less consistent with the political project. So, we are in a city that is a city with a plural left-wing majority, but whose mayor is a communist. Putting all your eggs at Microsoft, an American Big Tech company, when you’re a communist, is not necessarily very consistent with the rest of the municipal action, by the way. And so there has been this awareness and therefore the desire to address a certain number of issues that you are all aware of and to which I think you are all attached. These are the issues around strategic autonomy, digital sovereignty, therefore, issues around environmental impact, issues around digital inclusion, issues around the proper management of personal data and public data, let’s say. Free software is a response to these challenges. We don’t make free software because it’s great to make free software. This is the best solution we have found to respond to these political issues that we have been asked to work on. So, in Échirolles, there was the creation of this position of director of the digital strategy with this objective. That is to say, when I arrived, the elected representatives had done a job, they had drawn up a political roadmap that was perfectly positioned. That is to say, they didn’t talk about projects, they didn’t say that free software should be put in place. They said that we want this issue, this issue, this issue to be addressed. And on the basis of these political orientations, they asked me to draft, with back and forth, of course, with elected officials, a digital master plan for the city, which takes these issues into account. And so, free software is one of the answers. Digital advisors in residents’ homes are another response to the challenge of digital inclusion. So, there you have it, it really started with a political will. And I’m just the tool, let’s say, straddling the technical and political lines for an operational implementation of this project.

Free software, a leftist thing?

Benjamin: It’s super interesting what you say, thank you. Listening to you, I ask myself a question: but then free software, is it a leftist thing? Because I, a little naively, find it hard to see why we can’t be right-wing. And basically, for free software. And do you have any chance that you have an experience of a town hall where you deployed free software, where there was a change of majority and where, as a result, free software was withdrawn. Because it’s really too leftist?

Nicolas: It’s rarely because it’s too leftist that we suppress free software. In fact, there is an image of free software, a bit leftist. But in reality, you could ask your question by saying “But the values of public service, aren’t they a bit leftist?” Because in reality, the values we defend, which are values of putting ourselves at the service of the inhabitants, of being in sharing, transparency and all that, are not quite values of… hardcore neoliberal, in other words. So, free software is neither right-wing, nor left-wing, nor anything at all. But there are a number of values that are defended. It turns out that these values are becoming more and more important. Well, well, they are very common in the public service, whether you are on the right or the left, and they are becoming more and more significant. When we find ourselves in situations like the current one, where digital technology is used as a kind of geopolitical weapon. And where free software, self-hosting, federation become a way of not being dependent and of protecting oneself from a certain number of attacks on the public service. Actually. So, it’s not too much of a question… I think that a right-wing town hall, I know right-wing town halls, in fact, and I know fervent defenders of free software who are right-wing. So maybe they find an interest in it that is not quite the same as when a communist town hall decides to go there. But they find themselves on “it’s an answer”. On this subject, by the way, I’d like to take this opportunity to say something, since it’s going to be published, super important. When we talk about digital sovereignty, we are not talking about sovereignty. We talk about autonomy, not being dependent, reducing the level of dependency in fact. This does not prevent collaboration and mutual aid. The principle of federation is everyone at home, with their own PeerTube server or Mastodon server. But all interconnected and working together, in fact. So, I’m telling you this because there are websites or accounts on social networks, such as Souveraine Tech. There are some who can join the questions that are ours, because behind it, it’s a project by Pierre-Edouard Sterrin, who is a billionaire, who wants to advance far-right, conservative ideas, and that’s it. So it’s very, very important to be very clear about the fact that we’re in autonomy, not in sovereignism, and that we’re in collaboration, including internationally, including with the Americans. Simply, we avoid making ourselves dependent on each other. To come back to the question, that’s something that is neither right-wing nor left-wing, it’s just common sense.

Why switch to free software in a professional context?

Benjamin: And so I had already forgotten that I had three microphones. Thank you. I am not going to take the questions in order. Why are we switching to free software? As a result, in a fairly classic way, the marketing and sales argument, the most widespread. And the most common way to switch to free software is that it’s free. Don’t use Photoshop, use Gimp, because it’s free. No need to hack it, you can download and install it. Very personal, that’s how I came to free software, because it was free. In a professional context, where users don’t pay for licenses, in any case, it’s their employer who pays for it, I told myself, while preparing with Walid, that the argument of “free software is better because it’s free”, it has absolutely no value. There must be something else. And can you tell us a little more about what brings the use of free software? In a professional setting, in the context of Echirolles.

Nicolas: So, what it typically brings is what is important for a community, it’s less the fact that it’s free than the fact that the costs are controlled. So it ties in a bit with the question of dependency, that is to say that the difficulty, the problem, is not paying for Microsoft licenses, it’s that what we pay this year, we don’t know how much it will cost us next year. And that, you know, local authorities, are obliged to present a balanced budget every year, that is to say that any new expenditure must be balanced by new revenue. And that’s a real difficulty for us. So when Microsoft is dominant in your infrastructure and all of a sudden, they increase the cost of their license by 20%, you find yourself having to compensate for that increase by saving somewhere. And you are unable to plan this, to anticipate this. And that’s a real problem for us. One of the huge advantages of using free software in Échirolles is that with a functional scope, i.e. a number of tools on our network that has doubled since 2021, between 2021 and 2025, we have doubled the number of solutions available. Since 2021, every year, we have presented a budget that is decreasing, in operation and in investment. What is interesting is not this decrease. What’s interesting is that our budget is linear. We don’t suddenly have a monstrous increase in spending because of criteria that are exogenous. With VMware, which, all of a sudden, says that universal licenses no longer exist. You know the story, a takeover by Broadco, and all of a sudden, we find ourselves having to pay a price based on the number of cores we have on these hypervisors, and with costs, CIOs that, all of a sudden, explode. Well, we’re completely protected from that. We are also protected from UBI, such as “Oh well, Windows 11 won’t be supported on a whole bunch of processors, and you’re going to have to throw away half of your fleet”. Our general manager of services, when he discusses these issues with the other general managers of services, how are you going to manage the end of Windows 11? And everything, he’s super happy and ultra, relieved not to have to deal with this type of problem. It’s still nice when you have a department to know what to agree on in terms of budget from year to year. The other thing I wanted to say is not that it’s free. In a number of cases, it must be said, it’s just better. Free software is just better than proprietary software. So you took the example of Photoshop, bad idea, because Photoshop, if there’s one thing that is really very, very difficult to change, it’s Photoshop, for reasons that aren’t actually functional reasons, because at Gimp, you can do a lot, a lot of things, but they’re cultural reasons. Finally, all the graphic designers are trained in the Adobe suite, they arrive, they are all on Mac, on the Adobe suite. And when you go free, you certainly don’t start with the graphic designers in the communication department. It’s better to start with the journalists who are happy to be on Linux and let the graphic designers alone focus on the easier things. But you all know that on infrastructure software, the Internet works with free software, not because it’s free software. It’s just that we’ve all known, well, the oldest of you have known IIS, Microsoft’s web server, it was a disaster compared to Apache at the time and compared to Nginx today. So, in a certain number of cases, and in more and more cases, we have free software that is just superior to proprietary software, and in addition, we have a choice. I don’t know, if you want to do video editing, for example simple video editing, I know three free software programs that allow you to do video editing. And then, what makes the difference is the few different features and the user interface. But we have a choice today. Today, it doesn’t make sense to get a free but proprietary editing software, and software like Shotcut is absolutely great for basic editing. So, we choose free software because it’s better, in fact. And then, then, another thing that I can take this opportunity to say, it’s great when you do a free passage to start by meeting the new needs. Let me explain. If you have collaborative publishing and a cloud based on Microsoft’s SharePoint and you move to an S-Cloud, people will compare. They’re going to say, we could do that, but we can’t do that. We couldn’t do that, now we can do it. There are elements of comparison. If you’re in an infrastructure where there’s no cloud, but there’s a need, and you deploy a Nextcloud, you’re just meeting a need that wasn’t covered until now, and people are very happy. They don’t have any elements of comparison, they can’t say that it was better before. And so there are ways to increase the level of satisfaction of these users, without it being based on free, but simply… the new features, the new needs that we meet.

How can we control the costs of the material part?

Walid: I had a side question to that when you were talking about the transition to Windows 11. The fact that you are not constrained by the renewal of publishers, does it mean that you keep your equipment longer? How you manage, because that too, depending on the cost, the purchase of equipment, it’s something quite important. How do you manage to control the costs of this material part?

Nicolas: Indeed, Linux is a real contribution to that. It’s a contribution, not only to that. Indeed, Linux machines age better. You’ve all heard of… I imagine, because of software obsolescence, we have PCs that are coming, which are more and more heavy and which need to run on more and more powerful platforms, simply because they arrive with software that is more and more resource-consuming, Linux, much less. And so, we have computers that don’t lag after two or three years. And so, it actually makes PCs last longer. But beyond that, we also have objectives to work on the environmental impact of digital technology. And so, we completely changed the way we manage the renewal of our equipment. First of all, we started repairing again. Where, before, you simply changed the central unit quickly, for example. And then it was settled. The same thing happened on smartphones, for example, where we went back to repairing. Another thing, where, before, life was good, you had 1,000 PCs in your fleet and you said well, the lifespan of a PC is five years, that’s it, and so I’m going to renew 20% of my fleet every year and like that, I renew 100% of my fleet over five years and that was good. You could anticipate your costs. So, to say well, all I have to do is budget a certain amount each year, to be able to ensure the regular replacement of my positions. And you found yourself replacing positions that were perfectly functional and that people were very happy with, simply for ease of management. This obviously contradicts the consideration of the environmental impact, since, as we know, the production of terminals is what has the greatest impact on the environment. So, today, our way of working is to say, we replace positions when they need to be replaced, either because they are completely dysfunctional, or because they are rowing too much, or because that’s it. As a result, it’s much less comfortable. That is to say, we have difficulty saying exactly how many positions we are going to change for a given year. Because, well, we don’t know which ones are going to malfunction, all that. But as a result, we have equipment that lasts much longer. Costs that are reduced, but above all an environmental impact that is reduced. So, there is a real contribution of free software to this. But it is not the only one, and to tell the truth, it is not the greatest. One thing we did in Échirolles is that where before, to obtain a laptop, for example, we went through a validation process that could be quite cumbersome, today, it is on demand. What for? Because a laptop consumes much less energy than a desktop PC. And that it therefore contributes to this objective of reducing the environmental impact. So, a real contribution of free software, not the only one, and which is part of a coherence in fact of our work on environmental impact.

Political decisions and the implementation of free software

Walid: What you were saying at the very beginning is that everything comes from elected officials who set major courses. So, you’re coming to that moment, you were already there, you’re coming to put forward this policy. When they set these objectives, do some of them already have in mind the fact that it will go through software or not? First thing. And secondly, a few years later, what do they draw as a conclusion from this implementation for them and also for the citizens? And do they see any concrete results for them from this implementation?

Nicolas: In 2014, I arrived in Échirolles in 2021, in 2014, Échirolles has already signed April’s free software charter. The difficulty, as is often the case, is that political injunctions are not enough, political will is not enough. If you have a service that does not have the skills to implement free software, you are putting your service in difficulty. And obviously, they will tend to either not do it because they think it’s not possible, it’s not out of bad will, it’s because they just think it’s not possible, or do it badly because of a lack of skills. And so, it can be very, very counterproductive in the end to push a service to implement solutions that it does not control for everyone, for users, for residents, for the service itself. That’s why when we talk about resistance to change, in truth, it’s not the resistance to change of users in general, it’s the resistance to change of the service. And it is to this problem that they wanted to respond by creating this position. That is, they knew that… So, it was a real recruitment. I know that what weighed in the balance was the work I had done at Fontaine on the transition to free software, precisely.

But there were other candidates too, who had other experiences, obviously. But the idea was: we’re going to create someone who will have hierarchical responsibility over the team and who will, in one way or another, find a plan to make it work. And so the work was… I was talking about it yesterday in the conference I did, the work wasn’t to increase the team’s skills, it was, one, to communicate on the fact that we were changing direction, that it wasn’t my idea, because the Grenoble region is not very big, people knew me, we know each other between departments in fact. When they saw me coming, they told me: “oh my, he’s going to put free software everywhere”. They didn’t know that it was really a desire on the part of elected officials to go in that direction. And besides, when I told them about it, they doubted it. I had to bring the elected official to a team meeting so that he could say “Oh, I signed the free software charter in 2014”. That’s really the direction we want to go. It’s not Nicolas’ idea. In short, then, what did it go through? It took patience, a lot. And it didn’t come about convincing the teams. Whenever there is a natural turnover in all teams, each time a team member leaves, he or she has been replaced by someone who had both skills in free software and an appetite for free software. And it was over time, in fact, that there was an increase in skills, but not in the agents: an increase in the skills of the team linked to the integration of technically stronger agents who knew free software. That’s how it happened.

In concrete terms, today, what does it look like? I have a feedback from my general manager of services, which is quite nice, where I asked him: “well, there you go, we’ve been in this dynamic for more than 4 years now, what has changed for you?” To note, this is the first one we switched to Linux. And he says: oh, I haven’t really seen any change actually. Oh, yes, yes, there is no more breakdown.” But it’s the best feedback he could give me. That is to say, the first thing, we have an infrastructure that we completely control. Anything can happen on our network, on our systems, on a PC. We are completely in control of our thing. And so we have a reactivity, since we are no longer dependent on a service provider, we have a reactivity when a problem arises, which is important. And we have an infrastructure of extraordinary stability. That is to say, it never crashes. And when it crashes, it’s because we planted and the person didn’t read the email that said “Ah, we’re updating at noon”. There you go. So there is a… The first thing is this.

The second thing is that, as I was telling you, this financial stability, for example, this budgetary stability, that, obviously, is visible to elected officials. Budget preparation, for my management, is never a problem. The trade-offs, that’s it. This is where another thing has changed in the relationship we have with elected officials, however, is that, when you work with proprietary software, the usual way of working for an IT department is: in September, during the preparation of the budget, you contact the other departments and you tell them what your IT needs are for the year. They tell you, you have this arbitrated by the elected officials and the general management. They say this project yes, this project no, this software purchase, yes, this purchase no. And presto, you have your roadmap for the year and your budget for the year.

What does that mean? This means that the driver is the budget. It also means that every year, in September, during the preparation of the budget, you give visibility on what the team is going to do throughout the year. When you switch to free software, all that disappears. Because obviously, there is no longer a budget associated with the software. So you don’t write in September to say what your needs are. If there is a need that is expressed by a department in February, no problem. In March or April, he has his software.

As a result, the driver is the need of the services. Or the inhabitants, it’s the priorities we set, it’s the team’s workload, but it’s no longer the budget. That’s the positive side. The less positive side is that we lose visibility on the department’s projects and on the team’s workload. So we had to find processes to show, one, what we do, and two, not just what we save, because that’s visible at the budgetary level.

You have proprietary email software, it costs you 30,000 euros per year. Suddenly, there is no longer the 30,000 euros because you have switched to free software. It’s visible, that’s less than 30,000 on your budget. But when you didn’t have a cloud, you install a Nextcloud, budget-wise, you were at zero, you’re still zero. It’s invisible on the budget. So, we had to find a way to give visibility on, not savings, but avoided costs.

That is… We did that, it has value. If we had taken it from Microsoft or Google, it would have cost so much. So it has value. It’s an increase in the team’s workload. You have to do the support, of course, the updates, the daily maintenance of the solution. And so, we had to put in place all these mechanisms that didn’t exist before.

That’s something that we don’t measure very often, but when you embark on a real serious transition to free software, it has a real organizational impact. And it forces you to put in place tools and ways of working that you don’t learn. When I talk quite regularly with CIOs who have just finished school, who are trained in the profession, they are not trained in this kind of thing at all. And that, in the link with the elected officials, is also there. That is to say, be careful, I come up with a new notion, it’s called avoided costs and we have to talk about it.

Benefits for citizens

Walid: And for the inhabitants, the citizens?

Nicolas: And for the inhabitants, I was telling you, it mainly involves the digital inclusion part. Because in reality, in the teleservices that we make available, the inhabitants, whether they are free software or not, all they see is: when I write an email, does it answer? When I apply, whether it’s an Odoo that answers me or a proprietary solution, as long as I have a response from the system and it’s fluid, that’s all they ask. But it’s the same thing for our agents, by the way. We don’t necessarily highlight the fact that it’s free software. We don’t need that. We have confidence in the solutions we put in place, they work well, people are happy. And that’s the main thing: it’s to provide the best service, it’s not to make free software. So, we communicate very little internally and not much to the inhabitants about the fact that what they use is free software.

External communication and creation of France Numérique libre

Benjamin: So, you say that you communicate quite little about the fact that you use free software to the citizens. Nevertheless, you communicate a lot. By the way, you are present today at the Free Software Days in Lyon. That’s how we got to know you. You proselytize a lot for free software and, we thank you. I think that in free software, we like transparency because it allows us to compete in a completely free way. And so, I had two questions for you. The first is which is better, the JDLL or AlpOSS? And then, the second, can you tell us about France Numérique Libre?

Walid: He mixed two questions, he mixed two questions.

Nicolas: I talk about it a lot. In fact, the objective is to share, to show that it is possible. The originality of the Echirolle project, and it is linked to this political-service articulation, is that we have done things concretely. I love it when people come to visit us and show them concretely what we’ve done. We made the intranet. It is synchronized with our file server. We did a lot of super Swiss stuff for the streaming of our city council. There are very few municipalities that stream their municipal council only with free software. And we are a PC running Linux, with OBS. All the solutions we use are free. And it’s nice to come and see the result because really, we are far from having the most moldy municipal council in terms of quality. And we stream it with our PeerTube server. Embedding a stream from a PeerTube server on the city’s website, which is on Drupal, is still much, much better for the locals than embedding a Facebook stream, where, after 10 seconds, you are asked to create an account. Oh, really.

In short, that’s originality. When we set up the city council’s streaming, the total cost is 5,000 euros in investment. That is, basically, the purchase of cameras and a switch. That’s what it cost us. Everything else is zero, and it’s zero in operating costs. All the other local authorities, they find themselves paying quite large sums to be able to stream their advice. We say to ourselves, we have to share this with our colleagues. Everyone is looking to save money, and then here we are, it’s the public service. There is more to life than Échirolles. And when you find a good plan like that, you want to say to the others: guys, I have a good plan, that’s how we did it. So we communicate a lot for that. We communicate both on the tools, the tools we use, we also communicate on methodologies, strategies.

Because, I was talking to you earlier about recruitment, HR. There are a lot of preconceived ideas around it. There are plenty of people who say that it’s very important to increase the team’s skills. There are plenty of people who say that resistance to change among users, after all, is something. And then, that’s not what we observe. So, we want to share it too, to say, in real life, that’s not how it happens.

So there you have it, there’s a lot of that. France Numérique Libre, I’m going to start on that and then I’ll answer the question “are the JDLLs better than AlpOSS?” And the answer is yes. But AlpOSS is better than JDLLs, and I’ll explain why, too.

France Numérique Libre is a collective of local authority IT managers. So, by community, we mean municipalities, departmental councils, regional councils, inter-municipal unions, mixed unions, natural parks, SDIS, and therefore firefighters. And the idea is simply to create a mailing list that allows us to exchange tools, strategies, methodologies between local authority IT managers, and to be able to exchange documents. So that means a Nextcloud, being able to communicate about the fact that we exist if a community wants to join us, to offer a website.

Nicolas Vivant

In short, we have built a certain number of tools and we have built this collective for local authorities to be able to exchange. Because we, in Grenoble, have a really important dynamic in the region between municipalities. We talk a lot, we exchange. But in fact, there are plenty of municipalities that do a lot of things, we don’t necessarily know it, and that feel a little isolated in their corners. And so, the fact that we can discuss with each other like that, it allows us to exchange, I tell you, good practices, tools and everything.

Walid: When you say “we”, who do we mean?

Nicolas: We are the IT managers of the local authorities.

Walid: What is the spark that makes you say “OK, we’re going to set up France Numérique Libre”?

Nicolas: At the beginning, it was that we had a local collective in Grenoble called Alpes Numérique Libre. And it was going very, very well, really, with a real local dynamic that was increased, let’s say, by the existence of this collective. It was going really well. And since I was also talking about this a little on social networks, on Mastodon, I started to be contacted by municipalities quite far away who said: “Can we come to the Alpes Numérique Libre?” So, that is to say that you’re in Alsace, so it’s not quite the Alps. We had discussions with Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, for example. So you say to yourself, the Alps in Nancy… Colomiers, near Toulouse. There you go. But at the same time, we were annoyed, because we would have liked to make a place.

Brief. So after a while, we said to ourselves: what we have achieved at the local level, isn’t it worth trying at the national level? We relied on ADULLACT, which is an association whose scope is exactly that. And there, it was to work on the sustainability of this collective. That is to say, we said to ourselves: the tools of the collective cannot depend on one of the members of the collective. Because we have indeed seen setbacks on free software in a number of communities. And it shouldn’t affect the collective’s ability to exchange.

So, we negotiated with ADULLACT and they were very happy to do so, that they host all the tools of the collective for free. So, not only is ADULLACT integrated as a full member of France Numérique Libre, participates in the exchanges… They already had a number of tools that you may be familiar with, such as the Comptoir du Libre, where we have a list of software with a list of service providers who provide services for these software and who were already used a lot by local authorities working on free software. And they took care of the website, they were the ones who registered the domain name, they were the ones who managed the DNS, they were the ones who managed our Nextcloud, that’s it. And it’s a real collaborative work.

We have also worked on exchanges with actors who are daily partners of local authorities, namely the DINUM, which has a software offer for local authorities, the NCT, which also has an offer, the Territorial Suite, with the Ministry of National Education, which is very, very important. It should be noted that half of the local authorities’ computer equipment concerns national education, in reality, since the municipalities equip kindergartens and elementary schools with computers, the departmental councils with middle schools, and the regional councils with high schools. So there are many local authorities for whom national education represents something very important. And there are many exchanges, so they are also in France Numérique Libre.

Today, France Numérique Libre was officially born on April 1st, so it’s been two months. And today, we have 300 members, about 280, you know, and a little more than 200 communities, since there can be several representatives of the same community. And a little more than 200 local authorities, with exchanges. It’s in your Thunderbird’s interest to set up a filter so that it falls into a folder, because there can be 50 emails per day. And with real repercussions already on a certain number of local authority choices.

Walid: So, this whole initiative is an initiative that is to talk about technical or organizational issues, but it’s absolutely not linked to a political will. It’s not political at all actually.

Nicolas: So no, even if a little bit everything is political, in reality, it’s really the services between them for their needs, regardless of whether there is a political will behind it or not, indeed. Politics, we don’t get involved. We have a duty of reserve, civil servants, we don’t do politics. We are concrete. I’m looking for an MDM tool to manage my mobile phone fleet. What do you use as software? And bam, the communities respond by saying “I use this”, “I use this”, “I use this”. Has anyone deployed? How did you go about it? And then, presto, they exchange documents. But it’s really only technical. We don’t talk about politics and I don’t know, each local authority, whether it actually has a political project around the transition to free software or not.

Our elected official in Échirolles has created a collective of digital elected officials in the Grenoble conurbation, a bit of a counterpart to what we have been able to do in terms of services. And there are already organisations, such as Les Interconnectés, France Urbaine, which allow digital elected officials to discuss certain subjects. You know, elected officials, they change every six years. And we stay here to work. So, there is a need for this decorrelation.

Walid: It’s fascinating. I still have a billion questions, typically about how you choose software, etc. So, since we don’t have time, we’re going to give the floor to the room to ask questions. I invite you to come and talk about it on the Free Project podcast in the series How to evaluate free software in a few months. So there you go, if you feel like it.

Nicolas: With pleasure, with pleasure.

Walid: That’s it.

Questions from the audience

Benjamin: Is there a microphone for the room? OK, so there’s no microphone for the room, but so you don’t get jealous, because we still had a lot of them. We have one and we’re going to ask you to speak in it so that we can have a record of your questions.

Walid: Are there any questions?

Nicolas: Benjamin’s shoes, they make a bit of noise…

Question from the public n°2 : three small questions. Question 1: Has an assessment been drawn from Munich? Basically, what is the risk of seeing the Munich players come back? So Munich, a very big free software project that was ransacked for ideological reasons if I understood correctly. Secondly, a bit in the same logic, how can we ensure that the savings made with free software are used to finance quality IT at the service of the people and not tax gifts to Bolloré and Arnaud because you have explained administratively how you do it, but that’s because you have people who listen to you. How do we make sure that people don’t decide that they prefer to steal money from IT since finally it doesn’t go to Microsoft anymore, and so there is no need for money logically anymore

Walid: And we’ll stop there, because there are other people who have questions.

Benjamin: Excuse me, I forgot to lay down the rule. When you ask a question, it’s necessarily a question. And then it’s a question. Because otherwise, we forget about them. And then, we won’t be able to share. We have five minutes left. So, if we want everyone to be able to talk a little, remember the rule. Thank you.

Nicolas: So, on “where does the money go when you save with free software?” That was your second question. It remains de facto. We have enough difficulties in the budgetary authorities.

There are cuts in state funding and all this that means that we are sorely short of money from year to year. And so, we don’t have any shareholders. We have elected officials. Every six years, they are changed. And the money goes into school renovation projects. And we’re happy to be able to, in terms of digital technology, and despite an increasingly important dematerialization…

There is no less and less information technology in the communities. So to be able to present a budget that has been declining for 4 years, we say to ourselves that for the common good, it’s not bad. And we are not worried about the use that is made by local authorities of public funds. Do not believe what the government is telling you when they say that the debt is our fault. We are obliged to present a balanced budget. Every year, we present a budget of zero. We have no choice, it’s the law. So, the debt does not come from us.

Nicolas Vivant

Question from the audience n°2 : yes, hello first of all. I have a small question at the technical level, which was to know, at the Linux operating system level, what do you use at the company level?

Nicolas : So, we use Zorin OS as a Linux distribution, but that’s because it was the most suitable distribution for the environment that ours was. There is no one distribution that is better than another, it really depends on the environment. When I arrive, there is mainly a Microsoft environment, as long as a file server under Microsoft, an Active Directory, Windows Server. Do you want some, here it is. And when we start the transition to Linux, it is: which distribution is best able to integrate into an information system that is necessarily hybrid, and which will remain hybrid for a while? That is to say, we will be able to do authentication on an Active Directory and it will work. This is the type of questioning.

And so, we chose Zorin OS because first of all, in terms of ergonomics, it was something that was very similar to Windows, with real work that was done on it, and which means that the training effort is minimal. And then, in terms of the look, it’s pretty nice and it fits perfectly into our information system. This is a job that was done by the IT department and everyone agreed that it was the best option. So it’s Zorin OS.

It is also one of the distributions where the software catalog is the most extensive, including proprietary software in Zorin. You click on your software icon and install Teams or Zoom, no problem. And so, for user acceptance, that was also a factor.

Yes, yes, that’s right. I’m going to tell you a little anecdote about it, because it made us very happy. In September, we launched — so we started the transition to Linux a little while ago — and in September, we launched a call for volunteers, saying “if you want Linux, we’ll install it for you”. And we have an agent who asked us for Linux, saying “here, I’d like to switch to Linux”, and we refused because this agent, she had been there since January in the community, and since January, she had been on Linux, and she hadn’t noticed it.

Nicolas Vivant

And so, it asks us in September for Linux, and the service made an absolutely tasty response, saying – a great response – “unfortunately there are cases where switching to Linux is not possible”, and all that. But what do they say? And then, in fact, the agent had been on Linux for six months, she hadn’t seen anything. That’s how much work has been done on ergonomics.

Walid: We still have time for a question. Or maybe two, to be seen.

Question from the audience n°3 : hello. I just wanted to know how we are going to make our own town hall aware of the need to take the path you have taken. And don’t just tell me that you have to talk to your mayor about it because when we talk about free software to people who are not aware…

Nicolas: So, raising awareness in your town hall is above all not raising awareness among elected officials. Because, as I told you, if a service is not competent and if it is not convinced that this is the way to go, nothing will happen. So the solution is not elected officials. Especially not now. They change in a year, the elected officials, less than a year. So, above all, not now. These are the services with which we must work. And the way to do it, they all use free software already. There you go.

Where I think that France Numérique Libre can be a real help on this, so to let people know that France Numérique Libre exists, and to let it be known that via France Numérique Libre, they will find really nice solutions. And they will be among colleagues. That’s a very, very good way to do it. Because there are a number of local authorities around the Grenoble region that did not really have a vision around digital technology before the existence of Alpes Numérique Libre. And who, today, explain to you that they have a vision, a real project around free software and all that.

And I discussed with the CIOs by saying: “at what point did you switch? Because if I remember correctly, three years ago, you were laughing at us.” There you go. And the tipping point was the tools, precisely. They heard about tools, they didn’t say anything. They installed a few of them, they tested them, they said: “but wait, but this tool is incredible!”. And then, once, twice, three times, they started to say to themselves: “but in fact, maybe we have something there”. And then, it was the services that started to deploy tools like this. And the elected officials saw these tools arrive and said to themselves: but that’s what you’re doing here, the service. And so, it was the elected officials, who then bounced back on what their department was doing and said to themselves: “but wait, there is a way to make a real policy around this”.

That’s how it happened. There are cases where there are elected officials who are very willing to go and all that. And it’s worth talking to them about the methodology, how we manage to transform this political will into concrete achievements. Except that’s not my job. I’m in the services, and as I was telling you, we, the services, don’t do politics. That’s the job of my elected official. So that’s happening in other circles. And you, the inhabitants, are really talking to your services.

On this subject, I have to tell you something, and then I’ll finish on this anyway. When we started to communicate outside, about the fact that we were attacking the transition to free software in Échirolles, there were several residents who showed up at the reception of the town hall and explained to the women at the reception that they absolutely wanted to talk to me and that we absolutely had to go to Debian, because, otherwise, we were really. So avoid doing that. It’s complicated to make the transition to free in a community. Let your CIOs do it, even if you’re not convinced it’s the best way to do it. Let it happen, and above all, talk about it with the services. For me, this is the best way to do it.

Nicolas Vivant

Benjamin: Thank you very much, Nicolas. Thank you all. You listened to RdGP and Projets Libres!. These podcasts are broadcast on Castopod, both Projet Libre and RdGP. Castopod is obviously an open source, free and open source solution. You can interact on the fediverse, and in particular on Mastodon. You can reshare this episode, like it and comment on it directly, without intermediaries. Thank you all.

Episode production

• On-site recording on May 25, 2025
• Organization and production: JDLL team
• Basis: Benjamin Bellamy and Walid Nouh
• Transcript: Walid Nouh

This article has been automatically translated from the original language into English.

License

This podcast is released under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license or later