With Investissements d’Avenir (“Investments for the Future”), the State plans to support the development of alternatives to productivity solutions from Google and Microsoft.
Last April, the OpenPaas project received Investments for the Future funding in the amount of €10.7 million. The project aims to develop a collaborative cloud suite combining instant messaging, file sharing, video conferencing and a corporate social network, and to create a collaborative open source suite capable of competing with Google and Office 365 applications.
The open source suite is currently under development, driven by a consortium formed of Linagora (OSS services), Nexedi (open source ERP) and XWiki (open source collaborative platform). Two IT research labs are also contributing to the project: the IT Lab at the Ecole Polytechnique and LORIA, the Lorraine Research Laboratory in Computer Science and its Applications. The first version of the software should be available in the next few months.
Source: www.silicon.fr