Inb4 MS sues them for using Visio as their product name.
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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Visio is a common french term for videoconferencing. Maybe it’ll get struck down as long as it doesn’t include diagramming?
Also, will French law allow a service or trade mark on a common term?
Exactly what went through my head
I though WHY? would you call your product that when its already and established brand. I get that its a great name but its been used for years
The Github repo is called "meet". So maybe they named it Meet then thought, "Oh no, Google will sue us, let's choose a different name like... Visio!"
They should really call it Visio Zoom Meet for Teams that Excel.
I see you chose violence with that naming suggestion. My head hurts now.
As in Google Meet?
The only thing weird about this is that more countries aren't doing it.
Webex is still a thing? I thought they priced themselves out of existence long ago.
organisations are notoriously slow
Powered by LiveKit
Apparently it's AI coded? Or maybe not?
What does powered by mean when LiveKit is about AI agents?
Are we letting AI agents meet instead of ourselves?
The linked LiveKit website and linked LiveKit blog post seem completely disconnected. I don't get it.
Why why why not just use Jitsi ?
People contribute to FSF to support programmers to make important Libre products like this one and give it away , seems so wasteful for a government to fund a whole new different effort
They rewrote a messenger and the entire office suite. They could've collaborated with the Germans in making OpenDesk. Imagine all the dev time going into making Forgejo federated instead of rewriting everything a different way that isn't interoperable with another government's tools.
Maybe it has to start with way, every government making their own FOSS tools, features and code getting closer and closer together until they finally merge or dump one FOSS tool over another FOSS tool. 🤷
My thought is: at least its FOSS
It is so frustrating to see how tax payers are funding projects that reinvent the weel over and over. EU can just fund a good open source self hosted option then every country host it for it self.
IMO, it's a matter of time. They will learn eventually. We're just at the beginning and mistakes are being made and will continue to be made. However, I'm much happier with them doing is as FOSS instead of some proprietary, closed source crap that has to be rewritten for millions by some external company a politician happens to know.
Baby steps.
What does federation in forgejo offer? I mean, it's already git, you can work with different repos. I'm planning on moving my projects to self hosted instance soon. Should I look into setting up federation?
Conservatives who grumble about the inefficiency of government spending are not wrong
The problem is what they see as inefficiency. Social services, education, and a bunch of other things that are actually beneficial to society they consider a waste of money. There is overlap in what I consider inefficient and waste, but it is small. This does make the cut though.
education, and a bunch of other things that are actually beneficial to society they consider a waste of money
For education, at least, I agree with the majority of (non-MAGA) Conservatives. Education should be treated like food, not like roads: government should ensure everyone has access in a diverse competitive market of providers, but not be a direct producer.
50 or 100 years ago, I could much more see the argument that education is a natural geographic monopoly. Now I firmly believe that education is suffering from lack of innovation and competition.
What do you mean by "diverse competitive market of providers"? All I can imagine is religious schools like Catholic, Presbyterian, Suuni, Shi'ite, Taoist, Satanist, and then language schools, vocational schools, universities, sport schools, etc.
Also what do you mean by a "natural geographic monopoly"? Schools are neither natural, nor geographic, nor monopolies. Take Gemany for example. It has 16 different school systems. France has one school system but schools are given quite some leeway. The Netherlands has an extremely complex system with multiple exits and entries. And as for monopolies, there are often multiple schools in the same city, town, village or neighborhood.
I'm curious to read what you mean by those statements.
Because it's all a waste of dev time, over the past year the french government made all kink of foss tools instead of helping out pre-existing projects.
I'm in constant face palm mode with them. Remember their collaborative suite? remember their e2e messenger?
Of course you don't. Because they are irrelevant! Even within french public services.
Just because it integrates with AI tools doesn't mean it's coded by AI.
The AI agents are for taking notes and making transcript.
Following their link to LiveKit's blog, it seems LiveKit provides a real-time communication stack with adaptive video encoding. So they're using it to handle multiple video streams over connections of varying quality. I don't think it's mainly about AI, even though that's LiveKit's focus.
There are lots of ML models that relate to frame generation (you may have heard of Nvidia DLSS) so the “AI” might not be LLM slop, it might be an actual good application of ML like reducing bandwidth by halving the framerate and interpolating on the client.
I wouldn't call such things agents though. They're not acting autonomously or out-of-process.
Is it available for other European citizens?
It seems to be an open source application that anyone can host on a server.