France bans ministers from WhatsApp, Signal; demands French alternatives

I'm all for governments using taxpayer money to develop good software as long as they make it open source, sadly that's rarely the case. Germany made some progress in that area, but that's about it.

I bet the idea is that the data stays in France, and I fully understand and support this. Even if it is not open-source, but of course it would be preferable.

According to the article they are using olvid. Doesn't look open source

When you are the said government, you obviously know who is spying the app you know.

It seems to be a proprietary product. And there's no Linux version. So yeah, not great.

They are already doing that

https://element.io/case-studies/tchap

Matrix is not the best encrypted messenger, it's more focused around public groups with E2EE being an optional feature as that doesn't work with most bridges, which is the selling feature of Matrix.