I recently (about the time we hacked HMRC) stumbled upon a wonderful GitHub account. It turns out it belongs to His Majesty’s Government Digital Service.
I assumed it must be a government agency, something like a software house for the government. You see, in Poland, practically every ministry has their own software houses, and they don’t do open source.
The guys at HMGDS certainly do open source. To quote the end of README for one of their repos:
Unless stated otherwise, the codebase is released under the MIT License. This covers both the codebase and any sample code in the documentation.
The documentation is © Crown copyright and available under the terms of the Open Government 3.0 licence.
They mostly seem to use Ruby, Python and bash scripts. I tried to examine an example repository, and it was wonderful. Integration tests, smoke tests, a list explaining of what each file does.
I am in awe. If any of you, employees of HMGDS are reading this – know this – you are an institution of higher culture.
