Bulgaria passes law requiring all government-developed software to be open source

Bulgarian government shifts towards open source to better support public-sector software development

Bulgaria has signed into law a new rule that will require all software developed for, and used by, the government to be open source.

Bozhidar Bozhanov, a software engineer who has been advising the deputy prime minister, blogged that the Electronic Governance Act has been amended to state that "all software written for the government [is] to be open source and developed as such in a public repository".

Bozhanov continued: "That does not mean that the whole country is moving to Linux and LibreOffice, neither does it mean the government demands that Microsoft and Oracle give the source to their products.

"Existing solutions are purchased on licensing terms and they remain unaffected (although we strongly encourage the use of open source solutions for that as well).

"It means that whatever custom software the government procures will be visible and accessible to everyone. After all, it is paid by taxpayers' money and they should be able to see it and benefit from it."

Problems had occurred in the past, he added, because websites and portals had been left unpatched as the contracts to maintain them had expired and the sites - and the code behind them - had been effectively abandoned.

"As for security, in the past 'security through obscurity' was the main approach, and it didn't quite work: numerous vulnerabilities were found in government websites that went unpatched for years, simply because a contract had expired," Bozhanov added. "By opening the source we hope to reduce those incidents, and to detect bad information security practices in the development process, rather than when it is too late."

A new government agency will be set up to manage a repository, probably on GitHub, and will ensure that the law is enforced.

Although Bulgaria is the first country to mandate open-source governance by law, the UK has looked at the idea for some time. Francis Maude MP, formerly of the Cabinet Office, first revealed plans to encourage the use of open source as a cost-saving exercise in 2014.

Since then, it has been confirmed that government departments will, in time, switch to Libre Office, much to Microsoft's annoyance.