Okay. Hi everyone. My name is Marco and I'm an active member of the Floss community for
about 10 years now of contributions to SignalDino also in the wireless community tooling, wireless
mesh community tooling area. Currently I'm working for the German government for a German
government agency that builds IT infrastructure for Germany, mainly backend infrastructure.
And we like we are in the middle between the 16 federal states of Germany and the federal
so we have a lot of stakeholders in place and to contribute to. Also during this job I get a lot
of feedback and see a lot of things that are happening in Germany. So first maybe let's talk
about a little motivation about this talk. So in Germany I have the feeling that the term open
source is very omnipresent in the public administration also in politics. No one actually
speaks about free software. So the open source term is the leading term here. Also there's very
little information about how Floss is used in public administration and also there's little
knowledge in public administration about how to handle Floss software appropriately and
there's hardly any contact with the Floss community. There are exceptions of course but
like generally speaking there are ways to improve that. There are also hardly any statistics on
the use of free and open source software in the German government and so my impression after
three years in this domain is now that everyone is talking about at least open source software.
Maybe they also mean free software. Maybe they don't do the decision between the two terms.
It's also okay but in practice hardly anyone is really doing or following these software
development practices. Yeah right now there is a lot of happening in Germany and I thought it
might be a good chance to give an update what happened in the last year or so and what's happening
right now to give you a better feeling how these things that happen in Germany might also be like
relevant for other countries or if you are from Germany I hope it might also be interesting for you.
Yeah so the first question are we Floss yet in Germany especially and I wanted to start with
the state of Floss laws and regulations there. So in June 2020 yeah two and a half years ago
there was a principle defined in the service standard and this service standard
like these designs or gives design principles for government digital web services like
interactions between people and the government and this service standard is also mandatory
for the largest digitalization program over the last five years. Those of you who are from Germany
may know it as online two and a half years or short OZG. It's a law in Germany that mandates the
government agencies to provide their services online and in this principle it says that a
source code from the realization of digital services must be made available as open source
so that's very progressive. We think that's a nice thing but the problem with it it's not mandatory.
There made a survey I think in 2012 no what was it it's written down here 2022.
They made a survey and out of 15 from 221 people that have been been asked to give it a high priority
in their in their own projects but that's only a very few people from and in practice I also
see many people don't don't know it actually so it's not not very broadly adopted.
Then in 2021 there was another approach there was an obligation from the economic stimulus package
also intended to improve government digital services and there it says the source code
will be made available as open source whenever possible. Nobody really knows what this whenever
possible means and unfortunately the federal ministry of the interior didn't really keep track
of which projects actually released software as as open source under any open license.
I think actually so I personally know only one. There were a lot of projects in there that got
funding so this really didn't have had much impact. Then in November 2021 there we had a new
parliament in Germany we had elections and the coalition that formed after these elections
then decided or wrote down in their coalition agreement that they wanted to
or yeah that the development contracts of public agencies should be generally commissioned as open
source and the corresponding software that is being developed should always be made public.
So this is like the same intention again and yeah there's a but because like after this agreement
the German government spent 4.8 million a billion euros investment in proprietary cloud
infrastructure in addition to 1.3 billion dollars to Microsoft licenses of course you can't just
throw Microsoft software away it doesn't work. So this is like more a long time
terms change but these 4.8 million cloud infrastructure that have been like this
was a new contract that didn't exist before in this form you could have like invested in open
source software here. Also in general less than 1% investment during like for the second by the
current government investments from the current government from the current legislation went
into the open source software ecosystem and also the plan financing for so-called senders
that's the the German Ospo has been cut by nearly half due to resource I don't know they
didn't find the money that was needed so they had only 24 million euros that's still a lot of money
for an Ospo that's great but yeah compared to the initial plan it's less than we expected and hoped.
And also there is still no floss procurement regulations that are badly needed to give government
agencies a tool to really require these procurements to be based on open source licenses.
But we have some policies in the German federal states we have 16 federal states in Germany
and two of them Turing and Schleswig-Holstein they defined a priority for free software
in their federal laws. The first one like it's mainly the same text in those regulations
and the first aspect is that a priority for free software should be applied if technically possible
and economical this is again we don't really know what this means it's like hard to define when is
it economic to use open source software compared to proprietary software often this like also comes
with long-term impacts so this is this is a really hard question and it's easy to like find some
arguments why it's not even cheaper. Also for in-house developments the rule is that an open
source license yeah has to be applied and the software needs to be published as long as it is
not used for security relevant tasks and this is still again I don't know what your security
relevant task is and even like for maybe people thought about like police software etc but still
I think we in this room are know that even like especially in these domains it's super
relevant to have open source software to have the possibility to see inside the code and see what
they're doing there. First to improve the security and second like to improve control
of what agencies do in their day-to-day business. Okay but still like these two
federal states have these like thought about these questions, applied some regulations that's great
I really like the effort there and in practice we see there are still also there are some very
motivated people in the governments there and they're doing everything they can to improve
this even further so I think that's a very good first step here that's nice.
So let's have a short look at the European perspective here. I just created a graphic
based on the information from the join-up platform also from a questionnaire to the
German Bundestag like our federal parliament and we see that currently right now there are
some countries in Germany actually in Europe actually I would say it's a huge amount of the
or like relevant parts of Europe in terms of like their power also in the European parliament
have some some regulations in place concerning open source software.
The Swiss parliament just passed a law this year or last year sorry in March 23 to publish all
government software and an open license there will be another talk in the legal and policy issue
deaf room at 226th Oc so yeah head over to this talk to get more insights about Switzerland.
Okay so but let's have a look at floss in practice and in generally we must summarize that these
political objectives that have been defined are mainly ignored to be honest in public administration
so there is no like the step from legislation to like the execution of this laws is hard and it's
yeah it's not done not not not done yet.
As in the industry we also have this phenomenon of open washing like presenting some kind of
software as being open when in fact it's actually not. A small example for this is like the government
site builder that's used to build the websites of all the German ministries and on their website
they say it's based on open source we dig a bit deeper we can see that the technology the
technological basis is 100% open source that sounds great so I wanted to dig a bit deeper
and I tried to find some download link I have found some and unfortunately I didn't come to any
git repo or something instead I was greeted with an HTTP basic auth because like the software is
based on open source software it's correct but it's not released as open source software.
So why is that that the public administration doesn't really respect these political intentions
that have been formed on or formulated on like every federal level in Germany like from the
from the top federal level in the Bundestag to the federal states and
as far as I see it the public administration has like no no too little experience either with public
procurement of free software it's hard they don't know how to like buy free software and buy
support for free software and also they have no experience with releasing software or releasing
their own code as free software there's little incentive to invest in existing free software
coming from some laws and regulations and also there's little incentive to release
own code and to collaborate with others to improve their own code because there's so little knowledge
about the like benefits of all of that.
Yeah, like in summary I think the application of these
floss software development models still heavily depends on individuals we have individual
cities and we will see there in we'll later see an example of this where it works really well but
yeah my feeling is that it's still dependent on individual persons that yeah mandate for this
and do the the heavy work in practice it's not really widespread and spread adopted in all government
agencies. Yeah we will later see how to fix that but first maybe let's talk about some wins there
are also great things that are happening in Germany. Germany just built an open source
collaboration platform called OpenCode it consists of like GitLab instance there's a discourse forum
there's a wiki.js wiki and it also is also based on the public code YAML standard that is used to
annotate the purpose of public software and this encourages the public agencies to make things open
today the administrations do not really dare to do this though like with this platform they can see
that other government agencies also release their code and if others do it it might be okay and I
might also be able to to release my code as free and open source software and I think that's a great
thing. Also it's somehow a safe haven for for public administrations to get some first experience
where they don't have to go to all the real free software or external free software
repositories like like gitlab.com or or like even github where they have no experience with and like
this is inside the government even if it's public it's something government owned and this might
help to to convince some people to release their software there. I think it works okay so there's
already more public organizations on there than on github at least for for the german
organizations to be fair there are very little organizations on on github in Germany from the
public administration yeah but still only a few real projects exist on this platform to be honest
many of them are stubs many of them are just code dumps or other kinds of documentation
consultation processes etc so it I think it's a good start there needs to be more
more code there integrate all these products we know like for example next cloud colabora
also Univention Corporate Server, Op-Mix Change and all this this kind of software that exists
but doesn't really integrate very well and the idea of Open Desk is to pay the software vendors to
to build integrations between these solutions. Also there is an interesting project from Germany
that's called Kullibri it's completely public funded by an IT service provider of the federal
government and it's basically a component library that uses web components and is meant to be
what are meant to have a strong focus on accessibility and they also do a real open source
model they also accept accepting contributions in my opinion they have interesting great tech
but it doesn't really feel like public administration project it's the normal open source project
and that's great great as a huge recommendation if you if you're looking into a component library
maybe this this might be an interesting thing for you
there's also the current design system that's meant to be used for all government services
to build a unique or re-identifiable design system it's not an actual software project
like the design system which that defines which design elements are used on the websites
but still they have the philosophy and also the community building parts
baked in in their DNA and they're trying to to get involvement and they're trying to to
build a community that's also a great thing that that that happens right now
already mentioned there are some cities they're doing great progress the city of Munich built
its own open source transparency website and this is really interesting because they document
which floss software they use they also document which software they contribute to both in terms
of code and also in terms of funding and they also document which software they write and publish
so they really understood the benefits of free and open source software and build a website to
make it transparent i think that's a good example maybe for other cities too
and we have the national documentation portal that's like read the docs like project
where documentation for developers on the core government infrastructure can be found it's by
itself a license under the european union public license and it's also contributing accepting
contributions so let me close this talk with the question what does it take for free software to
be to become the the default in public authorities and i've brought three challenges here the first
one we need to release custom build software of course under free software licenses i think the
regulations here are very very important so there needs to be some regulation in place that
enforces governments to do this because otherwise they have no knowledge in this there's no
so like there's little to no motivation why to do this in the first place so regulation
helps very much here to to release all all the code
yeah and of course also knowledge and skills in this area need to be built up in the administration
maybe our ospo made contribute a lot to this in the next years but that's a major challenge
in all government agencies second challenge uh for software procurement is of course a real
yeah a thing here we need
you
very important because we need to measure our progress does it really work
does it do we make progress in in this in this area right now there are hardly any statistics so
i think it's it might be a good idea to have the mandatory use of a researchable software catalog
before buying any software like the italian government does this already there's the italian
free software catalog and all italian government agencies need to have a look at this catalog
it doesn't really say anything about what they do about this like results they just have to document
that they have searched here for for the software or for the kind of software that they want to buy
and if there's something in there they that's a good opportunity to look into it and see
like for example is yeah is this software useful for us before they're buying any
yeah non-free software here
yeah if you want to learn more we collected some
infos on best practices about free software in the german government also some examples
this kind of follows the idea of of like the awesome list but like just find some information
about what is what has worked in the government to improve free open source software
maybe this might also be something for for other countries too for your communities too
i really encourage you to build some knowledge about what already exists and communicate
about the efforts that have been taken already
okay thanks for listening and if you have any questions you can contact me here or yeah maybe
later outside if we have time maybe one or two questions we don't have time okay