In November, Bulgaria’s state eGovernment agency SEGA (Държавната агенция „Електронно управление“ ДАЕУ) will award a contract for building the country’s open source code repository. SEGA began studying submitted proposals this Tuesday. The repository, to be based on Git, will be hosting source all software newly developed by or for Bulgaria’s public services.
The repository is expected to go online in September 2019. It will take over from Bulgaria’s GitHub page, where Bulgaria began collecting open source code in October 2017. The GitHub page will continue as a mirror of the official repository.
Recursion
All of the software and components involved in building the platform must be made available as open source, according to the technical specifications. The document lists seven licences that may be used. The specification also suggests some of the preferred components and development tools. Besides Git, this includes open source search engines Apache Solr or Elastic Search, webservice build tool Swagger.
As of March 2017, it is mandatory for all of Bulgaria’s new government software development projects to use a public code revision and code management system. As explained by SEGA: “administrative authorities shall use public storage and control systems for the source code and technical documentation for development, upgrading or deployment of information systems or electronic services.”
Open data, open source
Last week Thursday SEGA unveiled its most-recent open source project on Bulgaria’s GitHub page. Published under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL) the Data-Gov-BG provides custom code for Bulgaria’s open data portal, including documentation about access and reuse of public sector information. The portal uses CKAN – open source software for data repositories.
More information:
Request for tender for the open source repository (in Bulgarian)
Bulgaria’s rules on sharing source code (in Bulgarian)
OSOR 2016 annual report