Comment by matsemann
18 hours ago
When I worked for the government in Norway, it slowly changed to all code being developed in the open. 3k repos here now: https://github.com/orgs/navikt/repositories
When I started it was a big security theater. Had to develop on thin clients with no external internet access, for instance. Then they got some great people in charge that modernized everything.
Only drawback is when you quit, you have to make sure to unsubscribe from everything, hehe. When quitting a private company I was just removed from the github org. Here I was as well, but I was still subscribed to lots of repos, issues, PRs,heh.
Very cool! Do they accept external contributions, e.g. from Norwegian citizens? Also, was there any thought given to "digital souvereignty" (wondering because the repos are hosted on a US service)?
I'm also surprised that you were able to (or expected to?) use your private GitHub account for your work.
Not sure how it is now, but when I worked there ~8 years ago we weren't really equipped to accept contributions. Both from a licensing perspective (CLA), but also that we had our own timelines, projects and prioritizations in the team. So most applications were open source more in the sense of source available. Some utils (like generators for Norwegian mock data, or libraries handling Norwegian addresses or whatever) that were actively used by other companies could get some proper contributions once in a while, though.