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Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

nldigitalgovernment.nl

41–50 of 143 posts

Re: Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

#41
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am living in Spain, and from my point of view, Netherlands is one of the ones doing the most for FOSS in Europe today! It sees much faster real-world adoption of FOSS in ministries and municipalities than other countries, the government seems eager to fund FOSS (again, compared to other countries) and generally be welcoming to the ecosystem. Browsing around, there seems to be lots of FOSS projects funded by money c…

This map shows that the Dutch municipalities are nearly all in the Microsoft cloud. https://mxmap.nl/

Love it! All European countries should have one

Re: Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

#42
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a fair characterisation. They can access the data, as their data protection officer warned about, it hereby falls under US law, they have to give data when requested, and can shut it down at any time.

None of those things make "The government still plans to place the authentication system of all Dutch citizens in USA hands" a fair characterization, it doesn't seem to be true by any measures, the government has no such plans, unless you can point me to some public session/document that shows that this is actually the plan?

Since a lot of this discussion is talking around the actual situation, let me try and explain it in more detail.

The dutch government has an authentication system called DigiD. It's effectively an OAuth protocol for government sites, and one of the few ways in which the Dutch government has centralized IT. Every dutch citizen can get access to it, and probably will need it at some point to deal with the government (paper options are meant to exist, but you can already guess on how easy the availability of that is.)

DigiD is currently hosted by a dutch company named Solvinity and developed by Logius (the governments in-house IT development organization). Solvinity is currently in the process of being bought out by another company, Kyndryl, which is based in the US. The government approved the takeover under the previous coalition (who are no longer in power.) The takeover currently is under extreme public scrutiny because of everything to do with the US - most people are at least vaguely aware of the deadly combination of the US CLOUD/PATRIOT laws, which would compel Kyndryl to hand over data on any dutch citizen to the US government for any reason[0]. The US government right now is not exactly behaving like a good steward with the powers it has, instead favoring maximum exploitation within (and outside, if the lawsuits are any indication) it's legal limitations, and is also verbally attacking it's own allies near constantly. Given DigiD is effectively a list of personal information on almost every dutch citizen, it's probably a bad idea to hand access to it over to a hostile foreign country.

On an employee level, the takeover is deeply unpopular - some government workers have actively reached out to the press to warn about the deal, something which very rarely happens as government workers aren't expected to publicly break with government policy. This has led to a motion in the second chamber (parliament) to change DigiDs hosting from Solvinity to another provider being passed... in 2028, for a deal set to go through in a much shorter timespan. At the same time, the government (this time: the elected politicians) is unwilling to reconsider it's stance on the Solvinity takeover, claiming that because it already said it was OK before, it can't change its mind now.

[0]: It's also, almost certainly illegal in a GDPR/AVG (local version of GDPR) sense. US/EU privacy laws are fundamentally incompatible with one another because of these two laws, and the courts keep shooting the international data transfer agreements to bits every time. Even on a basic level, having your government authentication systems legality tied to whether or not Max Schrems wins his court cases is a bad idea.

Re: Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

#43

Related to governance, check this project (not mine), would be great to have more (thoughtful) feedback: Integral – A Federated, Post-Monetary, Cybernetic Cooperative Economic System https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877819

Doesn't even seem to mention any prior art, there are tons of systems like that deployed and used today already, Decidim is one of them. Why do you keep trying to push someone else's project btw? Is it related to having a code platform meant for open-source in some way?

TBH, I'm not even closely versed in governance systems, but somehow would love to learn from this critical community. I'm open to variety of opinions backed by thorough thinking, and believe that we as a global society can and will go beyond "just" selfish interest prioritization, towards healthier balance for common good.

PS.: The earlier we try to encourage exploration and wider discussion of alternatives to "capitalism-vs-socialism-vs-nationalism" dogmas, the faster we might get to a healthier global living environment, IMHO.

Re: Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

#44
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their plan is to do nothing to stop the transfer of the system to a USA company. By doing nothing, they are making this happen.

> Their plan is to do nothing to stop the transfer of the system to a USA company And you have concrete proof that this is indeed the plan, stated by the government as the official position, or this is based on your own extrapolation of rumors? The amount of misinformation that any story related to any European country seems to pull in is crazy, seems to be something about the continent that makes some parts of HN fe…

There has not been a single action or communication from government that indicates that they are preventing the ID system from ending up under USA jurisdiction.

Parliament has asked government with near unanimity to prevent this from happening. Government has not even acknowledged that this should be prevented.

Re: Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

#45
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure. I think Germany and France are way ahead?

NLNet is funding open source projects to the tune of tens of millions of euros per year, and it is Dutch.

NLnet (the foundation) is Dutch, but as far as I know NLnet Labs (which does the work and spends the money) is at least partially funded by Germany (through the Sovereign Tech Fund).

I don't have the numbers at hand and cannot dig them up right now. If anyone knows the extent of participation of each country that'd be definitely interesting for others too.

Re: Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am living in Spain, and from my point of view, Netherlands is one of the ones doing the most for FOSS in Europe today! It sees much faster real-world adoption of FOSS in ministries and municipalities than other countries, the government seems eager to fund FOSS (again, compared to other countries) and generally be welcoming to the ecosystem. Browsing around, there seems to be lots of FOSS projects funded by money c…

Norwegian Government has a couple of thousand open repos for their code https://norwegian-public-organizations.vercel.app/ Most notably the Labor and Welfare Administration with 3000+ open repos.

Funny that its hosted on vercel. Probably because its employee driven rather than top down. Saves all the bureaucracy to get someone to sign a budget item to buy a domain.

Re: Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

#47
post #41
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This map shows that the Dutch municipalities are nearly all in the Microsoft cloud. https://mxmap.nl/

Love it! All European countries should have one

In Belgium, 72% of the communes are on Microsoft 365:

https://jurgen.gaeremyn.be/2025/03/08/european-critical-depe...

"Purely based on the MX-records, we learn that 72% of Belgian municipalities run Microsoft mail servers and 60% of the Dutch municipalities. For Scandinavia, it’s 64% in Norway and 57% in Sweden. In Finland, it’s a whopping 77% if the cities that are being served by Microsoft."

Re: Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

#48
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government still plans to place the authentication system of all Dutch citizens in USA hands. And interestingly, code.overheid.nl runs from a residential ip address.

> And interestingly, code.overheid.nl runs from a residential ip address. That’s not what I’m seeing. IP address is currently 147.181.37.238, which is assigned to ODC-Noord via RIPE. ODC-Noord is a data centre for national government organisations according to https://www.odc-noord.nl/

code.overheid.nl points to 62.59.196.156 which is in the Odido ASN.

Checked with `host`, `dig` and hosting-checker.net

Re: Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

#49

They're going to have to work on the i18n. It defaulted to English but the entire page except like 3 words are in some other language.

They are running Forgejo. The text being Dutch on the main page of https://code.overheid.nl/ is probably either because they haven’t provided any translations for the text, or maybe they even put the Dutch version in the template itself directly instead of storing it in whatever DB table Forgejo normally uses for the text.

I run a Forgejo instance too for my own use, but haven’t looked into how translation is set up as I haven’t had any need for changing any of the templates or texts that ship with Forgejo by default.

Re: Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

#50
post #4

There's not much here https://code.overheid.nl/explore/repos but good luck anyway.

I mean...it's a soft launch, not sure what you expect.

It's a public website, and it's advertised on HN, and after all the failures of the Dutch government to run independent IT infrastructure, we hoped for a better launch.
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