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In the spirit of open government, France dumps 9,067 repos online to show off its FOSS credentials

Have a gander at la République's open-source inner workings

Le Gouvernement de la République française – the government of France for Anglophones – has published a website containing 9,067 repositories of FOSS software created by 1,022 organisations and groups in the French public sector.

After two years of work, the site hit version 1.0 on Wednesday.

Helpfully for non-Francophones, the homepage and much of the info is in English – although saying that, just to warn you, the same isn't true of all the background information and the various organisational pages we're about to link to.

The site is run by Etalab [Fr], which is a department of DINUM [Fr], the Interministerial Digital Directorate, and the software is released under Etalab's Open License 2.0 – defined in English in this PDF file.

The release happened as a result of a decree [Fr] of Open Government [Fr] from 30 October 2019 after the French government joined the Open Government Partnership in April 2014.

We're always glad to see more governmental openness. Officially the British government is fond of FOSS too, and has been for quite a while, although free-as-in-freedom doesn't mean it doesn't spend a fair whack of cash on the stuff.

Although the US government has long been in favour of it, doing government-funded computing out in the open can be tricky, as NASA has recently found.

It remains to be seen how much effect this will have, but if you want to get in touch, the project has a (fairly taciturn) Twitter account. ®

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