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.
Disclamer: 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 to get my numbers.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Heh, here you go: http://mxmap.be https://mxmap.ch/ https://kommune-epost-norge.netlify.app/ https://swedish-mail-dependency.netlify.app/
France even had an official map of this kind, with publicly visible recommendations: https://suiteterritoriale.anct.gouv.fr/conformite/cartograph...
Disclamer: 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 to get my numbers.
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."
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.
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
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 :(
> 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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
UK government has a list[0] of over 17000 OSS projects it has created.
[0] https://govbrowse.uk
TIL CyberChef is developed by the UK gov
Given the URL contains GCHQ, it isn't really hidden.
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.
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"?
Same tech as Codeberg ?
Yes
Funny enough, GitLab, has a dutch founder.
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.
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.
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.