[pveierland]

The tax authority in Norway alone employs 500 full-time software developers. If all of Europe followed France's example to adopt the UN Open Source Principles for all publicly funded development - and prioritized open formats + protocols + interoperability - it would within only a few years be possible to greatly improve software reliability for all nations.

[antxxxx]

UK government standards say that government software should be open source by default https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/service-standard/point-12-...

[tjwebbnorfolk]

That is a document. Show me reality.

[pveierland]

They have 1.5k public repositories here at least: https://github.com/orgs/alphagov/repositories?type=all

Collection of RFCs: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-rfcs

Open design system: https://design-system.service.gov.uk

[WickyNilliams]

And individual departments can/do have their own GitHub org. Eg the Office of National Statistics. Some work I did ~10 years ago can be found there! https://github.com/onsdigital

[Digit-Al]

Next thing we need is for them to host their own Git infra, to avoid dependency on US Github.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

Lol remind me who owns Github again?

[pveierland]

Why do you think this is substantial? The software built in these repos is not tied to GitHub.

Git is decentralized and using a self-hosted instance of Gitea / Forgejo will give you a replacement for the essential parts of GitHub. GitHub is absolutely replaceable.

[Nextgrid]

> followed France's example to adopt the UN Open Source Principles

Has this actually produced any tangible results?

I'm all in for interoperability, open source and such but the primary purpose of software is that it should work and actually achieve its task. I'm always skeptical of such top-down mandates where engineering principles or ideas are being pushed over tangible outcomes, as it usually leads to endless bikeshedding and "design by committee", while the resulting solution (if any is delivered before the budget runs out) is ultimately not fit for purpose.

[pveierland]

I'm hopeful that it can work if:

- The top-down mandate is very general: e.g. "default to using or contributing to open standards, protocols, file formats, and interoperability".

- It's applied across many nations and organizations that can themselves choose how they wish to allocate their resources to achieve their specific objective. Meaning that the tax authority in Norway can contribute to a specific tax-reporting software project and collaborate with nations X + Y + Z on this specific project as long as it is fit for their specific purpose and mandate.

Ideally this helps incentivize a diverse ecosystem of projects that all contribute to maximize public utility, without forcing specific solutions at the highest level.

One example of a recent French software project is Garage which is an open-source object storage service. It's received funding from multiple EU entities and provides excellent public utility: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

[tjwebbnorfolk]

EU countries are great at adopting principles. And saying things. And writing documents. And passing regulations.

Meanwhile, very country still runs on Microsoft and IBM.

[digiown]

I wonder if it would work if the governments provide some tax incentives for open source contributions similar to charity donations as well.

[irishcoffee]

Prompt: generate 15k in tax-deductible open source code contributions.

Result: all of our charities are being held hostage by ransomware.

[digiown]

I meant something like, as a deduction from payroll taxes as a proportion of worked hours by the employee if he works on open source projects. Obviously not perfect but I don't think it's much worse than the existing R&D type schemes.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

Soon: Github is filled with even more garbage in order to collect tax refunds. lol

[hollow-moe]

French gov open source is a joke, single repo dump once from a zip file given by the contractor and then nothing. And that's when the source is provided, France Identité is closed source and Play Integrity dependent.

[CuriousSkeptic]

> the contractor

If there is a single policy change I could pick for public spending on IT it would be to forbid outsourcing to “contractors” and thinking of software delivery as “projects”