The promises and perils of open source software release and usage by government – evidence from GitHub and literature

Abstract: Open Source Software (OSS) is extensively utilized in industry and government because it allows for open access to the source code and allows for external involvement in the software development process. There are several factors driving this movement in a government setting, making it difficult to assess the adoption's success. Through a study of billions of rows of GitHub activity data, this research analyzes the production of OSS by administrations in German-speaking countries in detail and analyses the motivating factors and challenges to OSS adoption through a literature review. Similar studies have been conducted in other nations, with somewhat different approaches, foci, and different ways to identify public GitHub users as well as insiders and outsiders of OSS projects. 16 consequences of OSS usage and development are listed in the paper. On GitHub, we found 1021 OSS projects run by public agencies in largly German-speaking nations. We then compiled a list of the most popular projects based on commits and the most active public agencies in terms of projects. The research also finds automatic contributions by bots, which have not been taken into account in the literature so far, and demonstrates highly substantial positive correlations between commits, forks, and stars as proxy for the popularity of these projects. This research introduces a new method for identifying government organizations in OSS platforms and illuminates the possible positive and negative effects of the public sector's release and adoption of open source software.