And a 80k$ salary in France amounts to around 125k$ cost for the employer. So 170k$ isn’t that much - I actually know French developers and network engineers that make similar money. The French ITsec architect I interviewed last year would have cost me (converted) around 150k$.

So 170k$ is absolutely not out of the normal range here.

Talking about France: The French government could start to properly support matrix.org as they use it for tChap. The same goes for Germany with the “Behördenmessenger”