NHS code clampdown draws open source backlash

Negative reactions are mounting against the UK National Health Service's plan to back away from open source – and you can add your voice. On Monday, The Register reported that the management at the NHS told its tech leadership to wall off the organization's FOSS repositories due to concerns about new LLM bug-hunting tools finding security vulnerabilities. If you will pardon a Douglas Adams quotation, this has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. One of the first reactions that The Reg FOSS desk received was from the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), which sent it to us both by email and direct message. The FSFE says NHS England should not hide public code behind closed doors, and we feel that it has a good point. If you agree, there's an open letter to which you can attach your name. It's called "An open letter asking NHS England to keep its code open" on the simple and memorable domain keepthingsopen.com. At the time of writing, it has 812 signatures. By the time you read this, this vulture, whose shattered limbs have been reassembled by the NHS more than once, will appear on the list too. As a more general point, there is also a petition to the UK Parliament: "Migrate UK civil service to open-source software for data sovereignty & security." As a sensible step toward digital sovereignty and independence from systems and services run by other countries – countries that may not always be the friendly allies they have been – this, too, strikes us as a good move. If public money is paying for computer software, the code should be public as well. ®