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Germany's opencode.de goes into production use  

Germany launches opencode.de

[port]
Ciaran O'Riordan
Published on: 20/09/2022 Last update: 03/11/2022 News
opencode.de logoSource: http://opencode.de/

National code repository rolled-out to facilitate local cooperation.

Germany's Online Access Act defines a list of 575 public services
that must be provided online, and requires that these be implemented
through "openness" - a concept which the government's implementation
guide explains as meaning that source code is published as open
source and components are checked for reusability.

Adopted in 2017 and amended in 2021, this act sets a deadline for
end-of-2022 to get the listed services online, so this is a busy
period for the national and regional IT departments.

The idea for a central repository was launched in 2020 and was worked
on by Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA) together with the IT
departments of local administrations. Interestingly, the stated
advantages of Open Source focus on the flexibility and speed of
adding new functionality. Many years ago, the focus was on cost
saving, but this has changed in recent years. Also interesting is the
idea of creating a community.  The aim is that local administrations
can see that particular pieces of software are already in use in
similar administrations--a form of to peer-review or
recommendation--and they also know they can turn to those colleagues
if they have questions. Tasks such as licence verification and
security audits can also be done just once.

A "minimum viable product" was running by March 2021. Twelve months
later a pilot was put online, for use by two of Germany's provinces,
with funding from the 2022 federal budget. The pilot phase was used
for real projects and included licensing guidelines and requirements.

In July 2022 the "pilot" label was removed and opencode.de became
fully available with active projects which had already been using the
platform during the pilot phase.

As we can see already in the repository, local administrations are
using it to share configurations, tools and to agree on software
versions. There is also a forum where implementers can exchange
know-how about the various solutions.

From discussion to final product, the project has focussed on
advantages of Open Source in terms of sovereignty, community and the
flexibility to achieve the government's aims in terms of their cloud
strategy and the Online Access Act. When discussing motivations the
head of the opencode.de project group, Dr Christian Knebel, also made
reference to the FSFE campaign Public Money? Public Code!

If you have further information about this project, or of similar
projects in other regions, please leave a comment below. All comments
are read by an OSOR facilitator.

References

http://opencode.de
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