Proud dutchie here! I was wondering this morning whether they were going to migrate away from GH. Really glad that they did.
I remember applying for a job (at some weird company) to be put up as an open-source contributor for the dutch government last year. The idea was that I was going to build on top of MuleSoft stuff. They ghosted me a day later, despite me having already done these things for the client they needed me for. I would advise anyone that is looking for OS contributors to not out-source them through companies, as the models don't really align.
Nowadays I'm communicating with people in Utrecht to get partijgedrag to a newer level (the current one is kind of weak). I would love to build some tooling on top of our government APIs, as well. I don't think people realize how much internal tooling is being built with the idea to release them to the public. It's really cool to see.
NLnet is also a great Dutch initiative. It's great to see that smaller, more nimble countries are leading the way in Open Source and digital independence.
> I was wondering this morning whether they were going to migrate away from GH.
In the context of other commentary today with various people migrating off of github...
is there an event prompting this, or were you thinking of it more in the general vein of European governments trying to reduce dependency on American services?
You're on the money. They already were discussing moving away from america-dependent infra. We already had a Microsoft-involved power-move a few years ago that resulted in dutch government emails being blacklisted. I was just wondering why they would stay on GH.
I expected them to use GitLab because its older and dutch, but I'm glad they opted for forgejo.
Correction: Gitlab is not Dutch. It has a Dutch co-founder, and was a B.V. for about one year before moving to the US and become an Inc. The original founder is from Ukraine.
So happy to see they're ingesting voting data again! They stopped a few years ago (which is also a few elections), which I thought was such a shame. Knowing what representatives actually do, and not just promise, is really the only thing that matters.
Elwin had some trouble with getting the API going. I ended up helping out, but I was in a big time crunch at the company I was working for at the time.
That's vastly different now, so I want to take a look at how we can properly do ingestion. Currently it's an ETL that is pretty flakey, even with tests. The backend-frontend is also a mess, wondering if we can just go vanillaJS without the mess that is pgtyped/prisma.
I'm kind of wondering if we can use ATProto too, but I'm not too familiar with it.
Elwin is also looking at municipality-independent instances (this is less about code and more about communicating with municipalities). They all want money, which is fair, but we're not sponsored or funded anywhere. Supporting this is fruitful thinking on our side.
The code is still on my gh [0], but i might make an org on codeberg for this and mirror to this back to gh
On one hand, it makes representatives accountable to the public, which is good. On the other, it heavily encourages voting among party lines, and makes lobbying a lot easier (as the lobbyists know whether the representatives voted the way the lobbyists wanted). This effectively moves the heart of government from the representatives themselves to lobbyists and high-level party officials.
It's a bad idea in the same way letting you photograph your ballot and upload it to social media is a bad idea; there's a reason most democracies disallow that.
That just means the forms of lobbying being permitted are antithetical to democracy, and is just bribery in a different form. The problem is with the lobbying, not the accountability.
Show HN timing matters more than people think. Monday-Thursday, 9-11am Pacific, is when the front page has the most engaged readers. Weekend posts get less competition but also less engagement.
I am Dutch and I am glad they finally started to do some open sourcing. I have worked at different governmental bodies and have been promoting open source for some time now. But as a simple 'added hands for hire' I never got any response to my pleas.
I guess it's typical Dutch that we are one of the last to do so.
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 coming from the Dutch state.
Kind of interesting how the perspective is so different from the inside! Maybe it's the typical "the grass is always greener..."?
Yeah, also pretty dope! Sweden also basically spearheads the whole "open data" thing for a long time too :) Too many great stuff happening across the continent to just say one or two countries are doing everything, in that you're right.
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.
Another data point: I've visited public libraries around Friesland province. They all use catalog + internet facilities which look & feel the same across libraries: a browser (Mozilla) + office suite, PDF reader, files can be saved locally put don't persist between user sessions.
This would lend itself perfect for a Linux-based setup: netboot (from per-building local file server or NL-based cloud), read-only filesystem, LibreOffice etc.
But alas: the setup is Windows-based (running on Intel NUC or similar), office suite is Microsoft Excel/Word/PP. Completed by Acrobat PDF reader. No doubt it's at least able to leak telemetry and/or user data if Microsoft were to feel like it (or asked/forced to do by US gov).
Disclaimer: I made mxmap.be after seeing Swiss ant Dutch counterparts. I did not look at MX records only but also at EHLO replies, SPF and DMARC records and at fronting services.
Any recommendations / lessons learned when building this? I would love to give it a go for Brazil if one doesn't already exist around the time of my holidays in June/July.
"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."
Yeah, probably if you asked me for "Top 3 countries for FOSS in Europe" I'd pretty much say France, Germany and Netherlands, hence me saying "is one of the ones" :) Compared to the rest of the countries, those three probably do way more than all the rest together.
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.
I think NLnet Labs is indeed like 50% funded through German Sovereign Tech Fund, but most of NLnet + the rest of NLnet Labs is funded via EU project funds or other public programs. I don't think NLnet receives anything at all from the Dutch government AFAIK, and NLnet Labs gets tiny amount of funds via Dutch SIDN subsidy I guess, but that's pretty much it.
This is all (tried to) rememberings from meetings in 2024 sometime, so could be different today.
Funding for NLnet Labs is largely from paying customers for development of DNS software.
NLnet funds development of the full stack of communication technologies from chip design to office suites. Funding for NLnet comes from public institutions, private companies and citizens.
The sale could be stopped by government. The ID system might be moved to a different company. The government could by the part of the company that hosts the ID system. None of these measures are being taken.
The result is that the information needed to log in to all the important government systems becomes subject to American jurisdiction. Foreign agents will be able to authenticate themselves as any Dutch citizen and act on their behalf.
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?
> 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 feel blood in their mouth or something.
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.
Right, which I agree, sucks, they should be upfront about what they want to do, regardless of what that is. And ideally their plan should be to try to stop it, I'm with you on this.
But the lack of action is not proof that "their plan is to do nothing" nor "the government plans to hand authentication data over to US", those stronger claims require stronger proof, something you seem to be unable to provide.
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.
We have something similar in Spain too, and I'd be outraged if the government planned to sell it all to a US company as well, don't get me wrong.
But I still don't see the "inaction of blocking the sale" as proof that the government is planning or trying to push that sale through, regardless if I personally happen to disagree or I see the drawbacks from it.
I sorta alluded as to how the government is pushing the sale through, but to reiterate more clearly, and with political detail:
* In early 2025, the previous dutch government lost majority coalition support. The previous government remains in power until a new one is elected, but isn't expected to make major decisions any more; they're effectively just stewards to ensure the country isn't totally leaderless[0] (this is also called a demissionary government here).
* In late 2025, a new second chamber is elected and work on a coalition begins. Until a new coalition is formed, the previous government remains in power.
* In November 2025, right around this, Kyndryl announces it's takeover of Solvinity. The demissionary government gives initial approval for the takeover and decides that the takeover won't mess with the DigiD contract.
* In January 2026, the deal begins to fall under scrutiny in IT/privacy circles and some political parties express their concerns, but not much media attention is drawn to it at first. The ACM (dutch antitrust authority) also gives it's approval for the sale. All this still happens under the demissionary government.
* In February 2026, the new coalition government is sworn in. Scrutiny on the deal is starting to intensify and media coverage becomes more public.
* In late April 2026 (as in, last week), parliament passes a motion to request to change away from Solvinity in 2028. At the same time, the minister responsible for the sale is answering press questions about the sale, indicating he doesn't intend to block the sale. Just four days ago, the minister publishes a formal letter to parliament, effectively saying that they aren't stopping anything and that the government already gave preliminary approval to extend the DigiD contract with Solvinity (a separate matter, but just as related) back in March (so under the current government). They expect to ink it before the end of next week (May 6th.)
Somewhere between March and April, some internal government employees also step to the press to warn them about the sale in terms of a national security threat, but I don't exactly recall when on the timeline that happened.
The reason why the government is getting the blame for it isn't just inaction; they aren't standing by and letting something they had no involvement with (since the previous government was demissionary) happen - they're actively choosing to continue the motions of the previous demissionary government - including signing contract extensions that the previous government wasn't involved with - in spite of the very clear pushback they're getting from doing so.
[0]: This is the abbreviated version - somehow the previous government managed to lose coalition support twice, even when it was already demissionary. It's not normal for two parties to pull out like that on separate occasions.
Also worked for the dutch government for the last 5 years. All or most of the projects we did have been open-sourced on github over the years. Currently there are plans to move them to code.overheid.nl I think, though I no longer work there currently. (I was the github org-admin for the department)
> Machine-readable Dutch law execution. regelrecht takes legal texts, encodes them as structured YAML, and runs them as deterministic decision logic. The engine takes a regulation and a set of inputs, evaluates the decision logic, and returns a result with a full explanation trail
Can someone explain this to me? Not the technical aspect, but rather a user story or use case, maybe with example. I can't really wrap my head around it. Thanks in advanced.
As for the use case, it seems to be an explorative exercise to see if something like that can help provide more transparency and consistency within systems of law, "whether machine-executable legislation can provide an answer" to complex and opaque cases. The websites linked earlier have more information + examples.
I read (with much hope in my heart) it as: all the combined rent laws say that the max rent in X district is 5€/mo/sqm but you can charge 20€ for windowcleaning services and 1€/mo/sqm extra if the flat has an ikea bedframe and a bathtub. You enter the parameters of your rental agreement and the magic box spits out wether your situation is legal or not, then you just have to press a button to sue your landlord.
Bringing the boring old legal system closer to smart contracts.
But I don't have a clue if this is really the case.
"Modern calculation engine as a building block for the entire government. In collaboration with the Benefits Service (Dienst Toeslagen). Can we develop a general calculation engine for the government? This project explores how such a system could help in executing complex regulations for citizens and businesses, for example, when calculating benefits."
I imagine if a new law is introduced or a change to an existing law is proposed it can auto-check for consistency, collisions with other laws, auto-flag laws that need to be amended together or things like that.
All that is needed is political will, if then all subdepartments implement the same thing you could even have practical policies be auto-flagged that need to be updated when a law changes with instant suggested updates to some form people need to submit, etc. This whole government apparatus could be much simpler.
Maybe the government should be in charge of critical infrastructure. That seems like a very sensible idea to me.
I think that also includes the operating system and the app distribution channels, though. Right now it's just a fiefdom. Not sure how that's solvable. There's no world government — for better or worse!
Great project, seems off to a good start with its first HN hug of death.
Meanwhile GitHub greets me this morning with the banner "Don't worry if you have missing PRs at the moment, data isn't lost".
Interesting that they apparently deployed a development version of pre-release v16 of Forgejo, rather than the stable v15, wonder why that is? Don't get me wrong, I love bleeding-edge software as much as the next hacker, but seems wild for something like a central hub for publishing software.
The Dutch have a very different approach to risk than many other cultures. Eg I was watching a TV programme about lots of works at the central railway station in Amsterdam and barely anyone was wearing a hard hat. In the UK that would be unheard of, especially on a TV programme
And if something went wrong they would fully admit to them being wrong and fix it
This is interesting. Reminds me of the W3C traceability work a few years back that I was briefly involved with... main focus was defining agreed upon vocab for interoperability across supply chains. Never thought of the same approach being used for public policy, but it's an interesting idea... politics is an area where clear communication and definition is important. That said, vocab tends to change way less than public policy does, so amendments and revisions seem like they'd be tough to manage?
Is it common for government to use open source software? Here even just trying to hire someone to manage that would be hard so you almost have to outsource
Is there a network or organization for the coordination of government open source projects?
I love the idea of my city, region or nation (or planet) working to solve a problem and releasing the tool to the public. I just don't want every government to duplicate all the same work, some duplication and competition is fine. But the idea that different places have different specialities etc....
In the Netherlands municipalities have been collaborating for years already to build an open source ecosystem: https://commonground.nl/
We have 342 municipalities, all buying the same apps (from 3 or 4 vendors) to deliver basic services to their citizens. Common Ground aims to replace all of those with open source solutions.
The way they go about this is still a bit weird / government like. Individual municipalities write tenders for software companies to contribute to these projects. The Vereniging Nederlandse Gemeente is hosting the specific committees that are in charge of product vision / architecture. But I am not sure if there is a way for individuals to contribute to these projects right now. So the source is Open Source, the process very much not yet.
If you are Dutch and looking to work on awesome gov-tech send me a DM.
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.
Most government sites, especially open-source ones that want international contributors, do a decent job at internationalization. It doesn't seem like much of a reach to have that working.
Hopefully, they won't fall into the "Whatng cartel" web engine trap, and be clean classic web (noscript/basic (x)html) with lean web/network APIs. And that includes the SDK, namely the computer languages (excluding de facto ultra complex syntax languages like c++, microsoft rust, java, etc).
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.
Seems interesting.
But i have a feeling that you are after something else.
Why don't you take a better look and share if you have good ideas to add, not just brushing things off as "nothing to see here".
Gitlab has become quite hostile and I would not be surprise if they stop supporting their open source version. Even if you want to pay, the starting price is quite high and there is only one price now and for everything else you need to make a "deal" with them.
Hmm. I work at a state government agency that uses GitLab. Should we be looking for a different source control supplier? I know we host it internally (our agency has a rather strict anti-cloud policy), and do pay some for support, so we might not be in the same situation as the clients/customers using the free version.
I don't think Gitlab have ever moved functionality from Community to any paid version, but you should understand carefully if the functions in the paid (and not open) versions of Gitlab would ever come on your radar. It's not unlikely as user numbers and user organisations increase. It'll be exactly at the point switching to eg Forgejo will be painful enough to pay. Switching when still small is easier.
It is an enterprise product. Enterprise products are not cheap. Also, you should have certain scale to buy an enterprise platform. By setting certain price, they expect you as a business to have scale as there are support and service level agreements the org wants to adhere to, it is also an investment from the org side.
I remember MECC was a big part of my childhood. That was a private/public company that made educational software. Most known for Oregon Trail, but they did a LOT of software for many types of computers.
Eventually capitalism caught up with it and it was bought out, pieced out, and destroyed.
I hope it succeeds and helps to grow open software alternatives in Europe.
We need technology to serve citizens instead of the other way around. We do not need European versions of big-tech because the resulting oligarchy will be as bad.
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.
Everyone can post any website on HN, it's not like they have shared it widely and said that it's done. The website literally says "Soft Launch" in the title.
> "For now, this is a pilot using Forgejo, an open-source, European, and sovereign alternative to GitHub and GitLab. Not all government organisations can use the platform yet. Developers are invited to contribute, with the aim of eventually growing it into a shared Git platform for government bodies."
> after all the failures of the Dutch government to run independent IT infrastructure,
name a few? the infra seems relatively stable. the only api ive used so far doesn't even have rate limiting, so i can queue ~10 requests at once and they all return fine.
Proud dutchie here! I was wondering this morning whether they were going to migrate away from GH. Really glad that they did.
I remember applying for a job (at some weird company) to be put up as an open-source contributor for the dutch government last year. The idea was that I was going to build on top of MuleSoft stuff. They ghosted me a day later, despite me having already done these things for the client they needed me for. I would advise anyone that is looking for OS contributors to not out-source them through companies, as the models don't really align.
Nowadays I'm communicating with people in Utrecht to get partijgedrag to a newer level (the current one is kind of weak). I would love to build some tooling on top of our government APIs, as well. I don't think people realize how much internal tooling is being built with the idea to release them to the public. It's really cool to see.
NLnet is also a great Dutch initiative. It's great to see that smaller, more nimble countries are leading the way in Open Source and digital independence.
One of the projects I work on, OWF, has great engagement with our open source efforts from Dutch companies and NGOs.
https://openwallet.foundation/staff/
Awesome! Did not know this was a thing. Will check it out
> I was wondering this morning whether they were going to migrate away from GH.
In the context of other commentary today with various people migrating off of github...
is there an event prompting this, or were you thinking of it more in the general vein of European governments trying to reduce dependency on American services?
You're on the money. They already were discussing moving away from america-dependent infra. We already had a Microsoft-involved power-move a few years ago that resulted in dutch government emails being blacklisted. I was just wondering why they would stay on GH.
I expected them to use GitLab because its older and dutch, but I'm glad they opted for forgejo.
Correction: Gitlab is not Dutch. It has a Dutch co-founder, and was a B.V. for about one year before moving to the US and become an Inc. The original founder is from Ukraine.
> partijgedrag
So happy to see they're ingesting voting data again! They stopped a few years ago (which is also a few elections), which I thought was such a shame. Knowing what representatives actually do, and not just promise, is really the only thing that matters.
Elwin had some trouble with getting the API going. I ended up helping out, but I was in a big time crunch at the company I was working for at the time.
That's vastly different now, so I want to take a look at how we can properly do ingestion. Currently it's an ETL that is pretty flakey, even with tests. The backend-frontend is also a mess, wondering if we can just go vanillaJS without the mess that is pgtyped/prisma. I'm kind of wondering if we can use ATProto too, but I'm not too familiar with it.
Elwin is also looking at municipality-independent instances (this is less about code and more about communicating with municipalities). They all want money, which is fair, but we're not sponsored or funded anywhere. Supporting this is fruitful thinking on our side.
The code is still on my gh [0], but i might make an org on codeberg for this and mirror to this back to gh
0: https://github.com/van-sprundel/partijgedrag
[dead]
Public voting data isn't always a good thing.
On one hand, it makes representatives accountable to the public, which is good. On the other, it heavily encourages voting among party lines, and makes lobbying a lot easier (as the lobbyists know whether the representatives voted the way the lobbyists wanted). This effectively moves the heart of government from the representatives themselves to lobbyists and high-level party officials.
It's a bad idea in the same way letting you photograph your ballot and upload it to social media is a bad idea; there's a reason most democracies disallow that.
That just means the forms of lobbying being permitted are antithetical to democracy, and is just bribery in a different form. The problem is with the lobbying, not the accountability.
Show HN timing matters more than people think. Monday-Thursday, 9-11am Pacific, is when the front page has the most engaged readers. Weekend posts get less competition but also less engagement.
I am Dutch and I am glad they finally started to do some open sourcing. I have worked at different governmental bodies and have been promoting open source for some time now. But as a simple 'added hands for hire' I never got any response to my pleas. I guess it's typical Dutch that we are one of the last to do so.
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 coming from the Dutch state.
Kind of interesting how the perspective is so different from the inside! Maybe it's the typical "the grass is always greener..."?
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.
Yeah, also pretty dope! Sweden also basically spearheads the whole "open data" thing for a long time too :) Too many great stuff happening across the continent to just say one or two countries are doing everything, in that you're right.
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.
Not sure that site in itself is owned and operated by the Norwegian government.
This is cool (and on Vercel too)
This map shows that the Dutch municipalities are nearly all in the Microsoft cloud.
https://mxmap.nl/
Cool map!
Another data point: I've visited public libraries around Friesland province. They all use catalog + internet facilities which look & feel the same across libraries: a browser (Mozilla) + office suite, PDF reader, files can be saved locally put don't persist between user sessions.
This would lend itself perfect for a Linux-based setup: netboot (from per-building local file server or NL-based cloud), read-only filesystem, LibreOffice etc.
But alas: the setup is Windows-based (running on Intel NUC or similar), office suite is Microsoft Excel/Word/PP. Completed by Acrobat PDF reader. No doubt it's at least able to leak telemetry and/or user data if Microsoft were to feel like it (or asked/forced to do by US gov).
Love it! All European countries should have one
Heh, here you go: http://mxmap.be https://mxmap.ch/ https://kommune-epost-norge.netlify.app/ for Norway and https://swedish-mail-dependency.netlify.app/ for Sweden.
France even has an official map of this kind, with publicly visible recommendations: https://suiteterritoriale.anct.gouv.fr/conformite/cartograph...
Disclaimer: I made mxmap.be after seeing Swiss ant Dutch counterparts. I did not look at MX records only but also at EHLO replies, SPF and DMARC records and at fronting services.
Any recommendations / lessons learned when building this? I would love to give it a go for Brazil if one doesn't already exist around the time of my holidays in June/July.
Just take the source, and ask your LLM to do the Brazilian version. It should not take more than a couple hours, including manual checks.
Do not forget to minimize the geojson (there is even a web-based service for that) and to enable compression in your web server.
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."
Running a Microsoft mail server doesn't automatically mean you are on 365. You can still host Exchange onsite
Not sure. I think Germany and France are way ahead?
Yeah, probably if you asked me for "Top 3 countries for FOSS in Europe" I'd pretty much say France, Germany and Netherlands, hence me saying "is one of the ones" :) Compared to the rest of the countries, those three probably do way more than all the rest together.
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.
I think NLnet Labs is indeed like 50% funded through German Sovereign Tech Fund, but most of NLnet + the rest of NLnet Labs is funded via EU project funds or other public programs. I don't think NLnet receives anything at all from the Dutch government AFAIK, and NLnet Labs gets tiny amount of funds via Dutch SIDN subsidy I guess, but that's pretty much it.
This is all (tried to) rememberings from meetings in 2024 sometime, so could be different today.
NLnet Labs was started by NLnet but now independent.
https://nlnetlabs.is.not.nlnet.nl/
Funding for NLnet Labs is largely from paying customers for development of DNS software.
NLnet funds development of the full stack of communication technologies from chip design to office suites. Funding for NLnet comes from public institutions, private companies and citizens.
[dead]
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.
> The government still plans to place the authentication system of all Dutch citizens in USA hands.
That's not a fair characterization. The company that runs it might be bought. That's not planning to put it in USA hands
The sale could be stopped by government. The ID system might be moved to a different company. The government could by the part of the company that hosts the ID system. None of these measures are being taken.
The result is that the information needed to log in to all the important government systems becomes subject to American jurisdiction. Foreign agents will be able to authenticate themselves as any Dutch citizen and act on their behalf.
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?
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 feel blood in their mouth or something.
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.
Right, which I agree, sucks, they should be upfront about what they want to do, regardless of what that is. And ideally their plan should be to try to stop it, I'm with you on this.
But the lack of action is not proof that "their plan is to do nothing" nor "the government plans to hand authentication data over to US", those stronger claims require stronger proof, something you seem to be unable to provide.
C'mon, be nice, they read a Russian propaganda post and are repeating it as a fact they earnestly believe. We can't all see through their lies.
No, we follow the actual governmental debates. Are you stupid?!
It does. The government is not stopping this takeover, and the authentication system is going to an American company.
Rather strange how adamant you are in your position given that you clearly didn’t look into this at all.
https://www.tweedekamer.nl/zoeken?qry=Solvinity&form_build_i...
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.
We have something similar in Spain too, and I'd be outraged if the government planned to sell it all to a US company as well, don't get me wrong.
But I still don't see the "inaction of blocking the sale" as proof that the government is planning or trying to push that sale through, regardless if I personally happen to disagree or I see the drawbacks from it.
I sorta alluded as to how the government is pushing the sale through, but to reiterate more clearly, and with political detail:
* In early 2025, the previous dutch government lost majority coalition support. The previous government remains in power until a new one is elected, but isn't expected to make major decisions any more; they're effectively just stewards to ensure the country isn't totally leaderless[0] (this is also called a demissionary government here).
* In late 2025, a new second chamber is elected and work on a coalition begins. Until a new coalition is formed, the previous government remains in power.
* In November 2025, right around this, Kyndryl announces it's takeover of Solvinity. The demissionary government gives initial approval for the takeover and decides that the takeover won't mess with the DigiD contract.
* In January 2026, the deal begins to fall under scrutiny in IT/privacy circles and some political parties express their concerns, but not much media attention is drawn to it at first. The ACM (dutch antitrust authority) also gives it's approval for the sale. All this still happens under the demissionary government.
* In February 2026, the new coalition government is sworn in. Scrutiny on the deal is starting to intensify and media coverage becomes more public.
* In late April 2026 (as in, last week), parliament passes a motion to request to change away from Solvinity in 2028. At the same time, the minister responsible for the sale is answering press questions about the sale, indicating he doesn't intend to block the sale. Just four days ago, the minister publishes a formal letter to parliament, effectively saying that they aren't stopping anything and that the government already gave preliminary approval to extend the DigiD contract with Solvinity (a separate matter, but just as related) back in March (so under the current government). They expect to ink it before the end of next week (May 6th.)
Somewhere between March and April, some internal government employees also step to the press to warn them about the sale in terms of a national security threat, but I don't exactly recall when on the timeline that happened.
The reason why the government is getting the blame for it isn't just inaction; they aren't standing by and letting something they had no involvement with (since the previous government was demissionary) happen - they're actively choosing to continue the motions of the previous demissionary government - including signing contract extensions that the previous government wasn't involved with - in spite of the very clear pushback they're getting from doing so.
[0]: This is the abbreviated version - somehow the previous government managed to lose coalition support twice, even when it was already demissionary. It's not normal for two parties to pull out like that on separate occasions.
Curious about how exactly does Kyndryl (or Solvinity for that matter) plan to monitize citizen data.
> 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
Darn, I’m on mobile and the tool I used decided to give me details for the base domain overheid.nl when I asked for details about code.overheid.nl :(
It's an ODIDO ip, but from the old versatel block. I'm assuming it's a business netblock, not the typical ftth/dsl range.
Traceroute goes through `.ftth.glasoperator.nl` routers though.
Also worked for the dutch government for the last 5 years. All or most of the projects we did have been open-sourced on github over the years. Currently there are plans to move them to code.overheid.nl I think, though I no longer work there currently. (I was the github org-admin for the department)
> https://code.overheid.nl/RegelRecht/regelrecht
> Machine-readable Dutch law execution. regelrecht takes legal texts, encodes them as structured YAML, and runs them as deterministic decision logic. The engine takes a regulation and a set of inputs, evaluates the decision logic, and returns a result with a full explanation trail
Can someone explain this to me? Not the technical aspect, but rather a user story or use case, maybe with example. I can't really wrap my head around it. Thanks in advanced.
Probably better entry point is https://regelrecht.rijks.app/ and you can see an example of the YAML and outputs here: https://editor.regelrecht.rijks.app/library/afstemmingsveror...
As for the use case, it seems to be an explorative exercise to see if something like that can help provide more transparency and consistency within systems of law, "whether machine-executable legislation can provide an answer" to complex and opaque cases. The websites linked earlier have more information + examples.
I read (with much hope in my heart) it as: all the combined rent laws say that the max rent in X district is 5€/mo/sqm but you can charge 20€ for windowcleaning services and 1€/mo/sqm extra if the flat has an ikea bedframe and a bathtub. You enter the parameters of your rental agreement and the magic box spits out wether your situation is legal or not, then you just have to press a button to sue your landlord.
Bringing the boring old legal system closer to smart contracts.
But I don't have a clue if this is really the case.
https://regelrecht.rijks.app/
I think that's the project.
"Modern calculation engine as a building block for the entire government. In collaboration with the Benefits Service (Dienst Toeslagen). Can we develop a general calculation engine for the government? This project explores how such a system could help in executing complex regulations for citizens and businesses, for example, when calculating benefits."
[dead]
I imagine if a new law is introduced or a change to an existing law is proposed it can auto-check for consistency, collisions with other laws, auto-flag laws that need to be amended together or things like that.
If such a thing exists (or could exist), I'm certain that my state government agency would benefit greatly from it.
All that is needed is political will, if then all subdepartments implement the same thing you could even have practical policies be auto-flagged that need to be updated when a law changes with instant suggested updates to some form people need to submit, etc. This whole government apparatus could be much simpler.
[flagged]
[dead]
In Germany, we have the similar portal https://opencode.de (no relation to the coding agent)
It's built on Gitlab and does everything you need your git to do.
They also provide hardened base container images at https://container.gov.de
Maybe the government should be in charge of critical infrastructure. That seems like a very sensible idea to me.
I think that also includes the operating system and the app distribution channels, though. Right now it's just a fiefdom. Not sure how that's solvable. There's no world government — for better or worse!
Maybe governments should be in charge of their own critical infra; I'm happy with as much non-government controlled software as possible.
Great project, seems off to a good start with its first HN hug of death. Meanwhile GitHub greets me this morning with the banner "Don't worry if you have missing PRs at the moment, data isn't lost".
Dark mode is a straight up nightmare with dark purple text on a dark background.
It's being worked on, will be improved soon: https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/Codeplatform/issues/15.
Interesting that they apparently deployed a development version of pre-release v16 of Forgejo, rather than the stable v15, wonder why that is? Don't get me wrong, I love bleeding-edge software as much as the next hacker, but seems wild for something like a central hub for publishing software.
The Dutch have a very different approach to risk than many other cultures. Eg I was watching a TV programme about lots of works at the central railway station in Amsterdam and barely anyone was wearing a hard hat. In the UK that would be unheard of, especially on a TV programme
And if something went wrong they would fully admit to them being wrong and fix it
This is interesting. Reminds me of the W3C traceability work a few years back that I was briefly involved with... main focus was defining agreed upon vocab for interoperability across supply chains. Never thought of the same approach being used for public policy, but it's an interesting idea... politics is an area where clear communication and definition is important. That said, vocab tends to change way less than public policy does, so amendments and revisions seem like they'd be tough to manage?
Forgejo was discussed here last year:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42753523 (269 comments)
Is it common for government to use open source software? Here even just trying to hire someone to manage that would be hard so you almost have to outsource
I cannot speak for other countries, but Germany, NL and Belgium have been pretty supportive of open-source
gov.uk have been pretty big on open source https://github.com/alphagov
The day government moves away from proprietary software and extyernal services (especially cloud storage holy god) must come. I'll be here for it
UK government has a list[0] of over 17000 OSS projects it has created.
[0] https://govbrowse.uk
The Dutch government has a similar list[0] though less extensive and does not (yet) include repos from the new platform
[0] https://oss.developer.overheid.nl/repositories
TIL CyberChef is developed by the UK gov
Given the URL contains GCHQ, it isn't really hidden.
[dead]
Is there a network or organization for the coordination of government open source projects?
I love the idea of my city, region or nation (or planet) working to solve a problem and releasing the tool to the public. I just don't want every government to duplicate all the same work, some duplication and competition is fine. But the idea that different places have different specialities etc....
In the Netherlands municipalities have been collaborating for years already to build an open source ecosystem: https://commonground.nl/
We have 342 municipalities, all buying the same apps (from 3 or 4 vendors) to deliver basic services to their citizens. Common Ground aims to replace all of those with open source solutions.
Hey, I would love to contribute to this project. Is there a list of repo's I can take a look at and contribute?
I see some communities, seems like each community has their own setup, some of them have github links.
The way they go about this is still a bit weird / government like. Individual municipalities write tenders for software companies to contribute to these projects. The Vereniging Nederlandse Gemeente is hosting the specific committees that are in charge of product vision / architecture. But I am not sure if there is a way for individuals to contribute to these projects right now. So the source is Open Source, the process very much not yet.
If you are Dutch and looking to work on awesome gov-tech send me a DM.
If by "coordination" you mean central planning, not.
There are things such as sharing best practices and other resources. An example is https://standard.publiccode.net/ and https://new.digitalpublicgoods.net/ .
And of course many efforts towards a shared funding infrastucture, see also https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/KES3TH-funding_europe...
https://govstack.global/ is trying to find common grounds, but it doesn't coordinate any government work
[dead]
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.
> They're going to have to work on the i18n.
You know, they could just use their own language. The link to forgejo even states: "code.overheid.nl (Dutch)"
Most government sites, especially open-source ones that want international contributors, do a decent job at internationalization. It doesn't seem like much of a reach to have that working.
> Most government sites [...] do a decent job at internationalization
This, I fear, is just a materially wrong statement.
Hopefully, they won't fall into the "Whatng cartel" web engine trap, and be clean classic web (noscript/basic (x)html) with lean web/network APIs. And that includes the SDK, namely the computer languages (excluding de facto ultra complex syntax languages like c++, microsoft rust, java, etc).
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.
> TBH, I'm not even closely versed in governance systems,
So again, why keep spreading this project you aren't responsible for, and whose domain you aren't even familiar with?
Seems interesting. But i have a feeling that you are after something else. Why don't you take a better look and share if you have good ideas to add, not just brushing things off as "nothing to see here".
How about you share a recipe for how to make a strawberry cake?
Same tech as Codeberg ?
Yes
Doesn't Codeberg use their own fork of Forgejo?
Some cleaning up is probably required. I opened the "regelrecht" repo, and it contains a bunch of links and references to github.
Is that an identical blue to gov.uk ? ;)
And also a very similar "was this page helpful?"
It's ok, we like the Dutch lol
We'll take the imitation as a form of flattery ;)
Its pretty hard to build and provide a service or product to government. The adoption rates are low imo!
Funny enough, GitLab, has a dutch founder.
Gitlab has become quite hostile and I would not be surprise if they stop supporting their open source version. Even if you want to pay, the starting price is quite high and there is only one price now and for everything else you need to make a "deal" with them.
Hmm. I work at a state government agency that uses GitLab. Should we be looking for a different source control supplier? I know we host it internally (our agency has a rather strict anti-cloud policy), and do pay some for support, so we might not be in the same situation as the clients/customers using the free version.
I don't think Gitlab have ever moved functionality from Community to any paid version, but you should understand carefully if the functions in the paid (and not open) versions of Gitlab would ever come on your radar. It's not unlikely as user numbers and user organisations increase. It'll be exactly at the point switching to eg Forgejo will be painful enough to pay. Switching when still small is easier.
My current company also uses GitLab, but the amount of projects we have would be hard to migrate. I don't think we'll be moving anytime soon.
Try running forgejo for your own projects, see what you think of it. Doing the research beforehand helps a ton for your DevOps team.
Biggest blocker with forgejo is that currently it isn't possible to create "projects" or "subfolders" like in gitlab.
It is an enterprise product. Enterprise products are not cheap. Also, you should have certain scale to buy an enterprise platform. By setting certain price, they expect you as a business to have scale as there are support and service level agreements the org wants to adhere to, it is also an investment from the org side.
It is pretty common playbook.
Enshittification is well on its way to being completed there.
Someones shit is someones money, yo!
I'm not clear on the actual use case how can this be leveraged?
It's for publishing and developing open-source software, I guess that's how it'll be "leveraged"?
Does this mean they’ve removed their repos from GitHub?
Fantastic!
I remember MECC was a big part of my childhood. That was a private/public company that made educational software. Most known for Oregon Trail, but they did a LOT of software for many types of computers.
Eventually capitalism caught up with it and it was bought out, pieced out, and destroyed.
most governments are still in the meeting about whether to OS their code // the Dutch shipped it and went home for dinner
Github, Java, Python, Whatsapp, Gmail, SWIFT, DNS, Cloud infra, Appstore, Playstore - all can become tools in the hands of powers.
Next step is to use this for laws and legislations. Do you have a proposal for new law? Make a pull request!
I hope it succeeds and helps to grow open software alternatives in Europe.
We need technology to serve citizens instead of the other way around. We do not need European versions of big-tech because the resulting oligarchy will be as bad.
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.
Everyone can post any website on HN, it's not like they have shared it widely and said that it's done. The website literally says "Soft Launch" in the title.
> "For now, this is a pilot using Forgejo, an open-source, European, and sovereign alternative to GitHub and GitLab. Not all government organisations can use the platform yet. Developers are invited to contribute, with the aim of eventually growing it into a shared Git platform for government bodies."
> after all the failures of the Dutch government to run independent IT infrastructure,
name a few? the infra seems relatively stable. the only api ive used so far doesn't even have rate limiting, so i can queue ~10 requests at once and they all return fine.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]