I work at Grist, the "tableur collaboratif" (collaborative spreadsheet) listed on the La Suite homepage. We're in the interesting situation of being both a NYC-based company, and open source software the French gov has adopted and is helping to develop. Grist is mostly a node backend. So it is a complicated story. The key is having code the gov can review and trust and run it on sovereign infrastructure.
Your position is fantastic because it immediately puts to death all of that nationalistic nonsense about the EU becoming "anti-American" by enforcing privacy laws on US Big Tech etc, when in fact they are just protecting their citizens' rights against unethical business models regardless of origin. I might be naive, but your company to me represents a win for free/open software and cross-country collaboration.
That being said, I should ask: to what extent do you see being US-based an advantage or a problem in the current state of things? For example, in regards to exports controls, or any other such thing that may potentially limit your business scope depending on $current_admin.
> in fact they are just protecting their citizens' rights against unethical business models regardless of origin.
I don't think it's just that. It's also the increasingly plausible idea that the US government could pressure the EU by actually or threatening to control, throttle or tax EU access to online platforms such as Zoom, Teams, MS Office, Google docs, Azure or AWS.
> Microsoft, for example, cancelled Khan’s email address, forcing the prosecutor to move to Proton Mail, a Swiss email provider, ICC staffers said. His bank accounts in his home country of the U.K. have been blocked.
for example EU privacy laws can be ignored in the states with for example the cloud act. having control over software and infrastructure is protecting the rights of eu citizen in that regard.
Microsoft, Google, et al very famously spy on everything you do and have no compunctions about handing that data to the US government, regardless of whether the person is a US citizen.
Take this idea one step further. Microsoft, Google, et al also snoop on what foreign governments do with their software and report back to USGov.
> and have no compunctions about handing that data to the US government,
Every government can and will compel companies within their jurisdiction to hand over data for legal cases.
Don’t think that this is a uniquely American property. If your data sits on servers within the control of any company that operates in a country, that country can and will apply legal pressure upon those companies to extract the data.
> Every government can and will compel companies within their jurisdiction to hand over data for legal cases.
I'm not sure of your point. This is an excellent argument as to why the French government should run their government videoconferencing and chat on infrastructure in France, as they plan to do, isn't it? Using software that they have vetted. Regardless of if this is a "uniquely American" thing or not.
Right. I’m not disagreeing with that. A country should run their official business on tools that aren’t trivially liable for extraction by foreign governments.
The point was in response to the above comment. All governments can and will compel companies to turn over data. It’s often framed on HN as a feature of only American companies but it’s actually universal.
It happens that the major tech platforms are all US-based, so it's more relevant to talk about US government policy than any other. Even if they are all like that.
But, in addition, the US government has recently become more pushy and less friendly than it was before, which is prompting many other nations to re-assess their dependence on the tech of what was until recently a close ally. The headline is an example.
It seems to me more about "this foreign government is most relevant" than "only this foreign government is like that".
That's not the point. Yes, governments are sovereign within their territory. But the US can force any US company to hand over data, regardless of where that company has located the data center.
I'm not an MS dev type, but I've often seen these forms questions. What made their forms so easy, or more in general what is so complicated about forms that this was even a tool so many liked?
MS Access was on its way out by the time I started working in software, but the simplest explanation I can give about why the "forms" question is this, let's say you're a business person and...:
* You have a huge Excel document that's basically a DB. (What Access kinda was)
* You want users to interact with said data document, i.e add record, find/query record(s), edit records
* You add a "form" for users to do just that. You can also add a "login" form to give some users more permissions.
It's basically if you could turn a SQlite file into a low-coded desktop app.
With Access, a business doing data entry could -- with a business user not a software engineer -- craft a Form and voila, easy onboarding to train new employees instead of filling out sheets of paper and filing them.
Access biggest advantage by far was that you could share the file on a network drive and having multiple people accessing it: You didnt need any type of complex backup procedure.
In case of failure, just copy-over the old file from yesterday - such simple solutions are pure gold for SME without any big IT department
Right but it is cheaper than open source products if you self-host. Most open source products in this space, including grist, are only partially open source.
It is weird that your enterprise features are not self-hostable even if a customer pays. I understand if some features are not open source, but why make it not self-hostable? Self-hosting is a requirement for confidential data.
The enterprise features are self-hostable. Look at "your servers" on the pricing page for Grist. Individuals (and orgs with < $1 million in annual income) quality for free activation keys btw.
For what it's worth, which isn't much because this is probably outdated: I remember trying grist a few years ago and leaving mildly unimpressed with form support (I think because I was hoping to have image upload in the forms and that wasn't supported yet).
Since it is relevant here: support for uploads was code written by a French contributor, and reviewed by a developer working for the French gov (ANCT/DINUM) and a developer working for Grist Labs. Grist Labs has since maintained and improved on it. The forms feature itself was inspired by an integration built by Camille Legeron at ANCT.
I tried doing this years ago as a stand-alone project and it was too much. I wrote a data diff/patch/merge tool called "daff" that worked okay. But I've always wanted to add this to a proper spreadsheet tool like Grist.
I really want people working on data projects to be able to work more like coders, with pull requests and reviews. Not all data projects are as curated as that, sometimes your data is just a big soup, but when it is curated, there should be a better workflow.
Escaping is needed no matter what separators are used, but if a character from the astral plane is always present (like U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO) then you can be pretty sure the software is handling unicode well and isn't corrupting cells without you noticing.
So true about RFC4180. Admittedly this post kind of got out a little early, support for the format was slated for the first of next month...
Grist Labs | Systems Engineer | Full-time | NYC OR REMOTE +/- 3hrs | https://getgrist.com
We're looking for someone to make our modern spreadsheet software run everywhere. To apply, there's a puzzle. Just do:
docker run -it gristlabs/grist-twist
and poke around. If the words battery correct horse staple mean something to you, you might have an advantage.
The essential requirement for the job is comfort working with operating systems and containers, and having some back-end programming experience. People with a dev-ops background will do well. If you have strong open source experience, even better.
Have you seen people install your popular software in weird and wonderful places, and seen all the weird and wonderful problems that crop up? Ever wanted to really go all in on making an app or library that can go anywhere? If so, you're the kind of person we want to talk to. Our software can already be used everywhere: as a commercial SaaS, or as part of a government office suite, running on servers owned by enterprises and citizen self-hosters, desktops, air-gapped installations, compiled to pure in-browser javascript, rippling like a dream through the etheric plane (well, not this last one yet). But it isn't always easy, and that's where you come in!
It definitely can work if the rest of the team is big on async, written comms.
I guess I’ll take your answer as a no then :(
EDIT: Thanks for being dutiful with a timely response to my question. That’s an absolute rarity in this monthly hiring thread where most questions are left hanging with no answers.
The motivation for calling Grist a spreadsheet is that it has formulas, and cell values get updated automatically when something they depend on gets updated. Agree there is scope for misunderstanding here, maybe there's a better word?
[Grist employee]
In Grist, reference columns let you do a lot of what you can do with a join https://support.getgrist.com/col-refs/ while still having spreadsheet-style immediate updates when underlying data changes.
Grist https://www.getgrist.com/
A write-up of how the French gov uses it https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...