Collaborative Free Software Platform for Administrations

The increased use of Free Software is a central component for more digital sovereignty. Together with a strong alliance of administrations, politics, business and civil society, we call for the development of a code repository with Free Software for the public sector.

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Do you mean installing something like Gitea, and mirroring in it Free Software projects about the public sector?

Yes, that might be an option, but obviously there is other Free Software source forge software that might be applicable. The idea is not to use any existing proprietary, probably also non-EU-based forge to avoid problems like GDPR violations and vendor lock-in.

Installing the repository server itself seems to be the most easy part. For example Gitea is very easy to install:

It also has a familiar interface, similar to GitHub.
However GitLab might have more features (https://about.gitlab.com/features/).

On the other hand, getting (convincing) the administrations, politics, business and civil society to use that one as a common repository for their public sector projects seems to be the hard part.

There is also this website:

I’ve read through the ‘Ein Ort fĂŒr öffentlichen Code (Version 1)’ pdf (an English translation would be nice), and noticed examples from other countries in the mailinglist: (Technology Transfer Centre in Spain, Etalab in France). Some questions I have regarding code hosting platforms:

  • Is there a comprehensive list of these initiatives by country?
  • Are there any ideas how to integrate these country scoped platforms on a European level, or have them connect in general (even outside the EU)?
  • How open-ended will the listing be? Should it include semi-government? Should it include listings for software which the government contributes to (e.g. Nextcloud ?) or even only consumes (e.g. Linux ?) so in both cases the government is not the upstream location.

In the Netherlands the parliament has called for a similar online listing, but I haven’t seen concrete development.

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Is there a git repo of “Ein Ort fĂŒr öffentlichen Code (Version 1)”?
That would be fitting and make contribution easier.