Five Dutch government organisations are about to publish an early version of their open source file hosting service for the secure storing and synchronisation of files across computing devices and platforms. It lets users create a folder, keeping the contents synchronized and accessible from other computing devices, website or smart phones. It also lets users give access to files to designated others.

The project's name is still undecided.

It is jointly being developed by the IT departments of the Dutch parliament, the Tax and Customs Administration, the Court of Audit, the Council of State, and the Employee Insurance Schemes Implementing Body (UWV).

The Parliament's developers are working on integration of the service to different systems in the back office. The Council of State is finishing the software taking care of synchronisation with a ubiquitous proprietary desktop operating system, and the Tax administration is contributing the apps on two different smart phone operating systems. The UWV will introduce the solution to all members of the Dutch government information security resource centre.

The first version is planned for September, however, the software's beta version will be made available later next week by Libbit, an open source IT services provider, part of a Dutch systems integrator, Rednose. Libbit is also involved in two other projects developed on the request of Dutch government bodies, document generator Docgen and document collaboration tool Flowgen.

Turn loose

"There is no fence around it", says Ruud Vriens, co-founder of Rednose and working as project manager for the Parliament. "Any government body and any system integrator can use it to offer services to their staff, or others. "The tool does not lock-in its users to its service, or its service provider."

Independence from IT vendors and service providers was the main reason the five government bodies decided to build the tool, he says. "By making it open source, they stay in control of how they use it. It service can not be bought by a foreign company, all of a sudden bringing sensitive documents under the legal regime of a different country."

Light bulb

Security is another reason to make the software open. "Even file folders are encrypted. Suppose somebody takes control over a smart phone, all they'll see is a jumble of characters", Vriens says. "Many eyeballs will avoid back doors or other secret tricks."

The web application is built using the Symphony PHP framework, and requires a web server such as Apache and a MySQL relational database management system. "The best thing to do is to run it on the typical LAMP stack, Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP", Vriens says. "We don't recommend other stacks."

The software will be available under the European Union's free software licence, the EUPL.