In the spirit of open government, France dumps 9,067 repos online to show off its FOSS credentials

Le Gouvernement de la République française – the government of France for Anglophones – has published a website containing 9,067 repositories of FOSS software created by 1,022 organisations and groups in the French public sector. After two years of work, the site hit version 1.0 on Wednesday. Helpfully for non-Francophones, …

[steelpillow]

Well, it's a start.

Getting British gov bureaucracies, national and local alike, to open up to F/LOSS is like getting blood out of a stone. Hopefully this will at least goad them into recognising it is an issue they should be addressing.

[Jean Le PHARMACIEN]

Yeh but we got Sovrinty!!

Bah, Frenchies, cant trust them wiv open sauce. Keep them at arms length ("sleeve" length even)

Upvote the British software, all the better because its British and happier for that (any allusions to Hon J R-M are entirely coincidental)

Toodle pip!

[for some o/s Europe, The (English) Channel = "La Manche" (Fr) aka "sleeve" in Fench...]

[Michael Hoffmann]

French code comments?

If their code follows the pattern of Anglo-sphere created software, it will be a great place to learn unusual expletives in various French dialects.

[thames]

Interesting Stats

They have some interesting stats with respect to their code. Here's some examples:

Top 10 most used languages

• Javascript 11.84%
• Python 8.28%
• Java 6.33%
• HTML 4.24%
• Shell 3.64%
• C 1.86%
• TypeScript 1.75%
• PHP 1.75%
• CSS 1.62%

Based on the dependencies listed as being used, the Python stuff seems to use a lot of requests, pandas, and numpy. Those are for fetching and analyzing data, so it looks like a major use for Python is large scale data analysis. That doesn't mean that is the only thing Python is used for of course. It's less obvious what the other languages are used for (other than the obvious web stuff).

Most used identified licenses:

• AGPL 15.1%
• BSD 3 clause 5.36%
• GPLv2 3.59%
• Eclipse 1.33%
• MPL 1.15%
• BSD 2 clause 0.75%
• ISC 0.4%
• CCA 0.27%

AGPL is a version of GPL mainly used with web services, so I would guess a lot of their web services use it. It is by far the most popular license.

I think the license picture may be more complex than that however, as when I search for GPL-3.0 it comes back with more than 8% of repositories using that license which should make it the number 2 license on that list, but it isn't. I suspect that many repositories have a mixture of licenses and the analysis used is too simplistic to capture that.