State of Open Source: The UK in 2021 | Hacker News Reader

State of Open Source: The UK in 2021

openuk.uk

53 pointsvmbrasseur8 comments

I've only skimmed through the Phase One report, but not surprised to see the UK government website (GOV.UK) mentioned.

The massive GOV.UK website is an excellent example of using open source to provide public services and information. An example service: the official government coronovirus dashboard - https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ Scroll down to the footer and there is a link to all the frontend source code on GitHub.

Information, not just source code, also benefits from being made open. For example, back in 2016, a UK government blog on accessibility shared a series of posters on designing for accessibility [1]. Many readers of the blog wanted to translate the posters. They were posted on GitHub and have been translated into Japanese, Estonian, Russian and many more languages: https://github.com/UKHomeOffice/posters/tree/master/accessib...

Finally, also equally important is open data: https://data.gov.uk/

[1] Dos and don'ts on designing for accessibility (2016): https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/02/dos-and-donts-o...

> The massive GOV.UK website is an excellent example of using open source to provide public services and information. An example service: the official government coronovirus dashboard - https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ Scroll down to the footer and there is a link to all the frontend source code on GitHub.

This is how it should work. Public money, public code and information. The French government is also pretty good at this, a myriad of information being available as Open Data at all sorts of levels, from municipality to the whole central government and public companies - there's data on the number of days the public railway company has striked since 1947[0], the CO2 emissions per passenger on the high speed rail routes[2], or the number and location of electric vehicle charging points in a bunch of municipalities[1]), and the source code of a lot of things is made available (e.g. the health pass/contact tracing app, TousAntiCovid[3].

0 - https://ressources.data.sncf.com/explore/dataset/mouvements-...

1 - https://data.seineouest.fr/explore/dataset/reseau-de-bornes-...

2 - https://ressources.data.sncf.com/explore/dataset/emission-co...

3 - https://gitlab.inria.fr/stopcovid19

Brilliant!

On a different note - GOV.UK in my opinion is one of the most well-designed, practical, and useful public/government sites on the planet.

The rest of the countries needs to take a note on how to design government sites/services

Only the other day I was arguing about how good the civil service was in the UK, amongst many other great things about the UK:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28811319

A lot of people don't agree however, and they think the UK is going "down the pan".

In a similar vein I often see people complain about the NHS. Obviously it has issues, and yes sometimes it doesn't cover something you think it should. But it is world-class both in treatment and research.

Research I grant you, but for treatment, quality is very unevenly distributed. The Welsh NHS is appalling enough that I've considered relocating to England for this reason alone.

Interesting, I'd never head about that. Is Wales historically poorer than it's neighbors?

> 97% of UK companies surveyed use open source and 89% are running open source software.

Is it at all possible that this first number is accurate? I would assume every company at least uses a web browser, which would mean using open source (Blink/WebKit/Gecko).

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