Column by Tatyana Isakova about different approaches to implementing IT projects in the public sector

This week, the Department of Information Technology of Moscow suddenly announced the opening of its own platform for developing open source software Mos.Hub: “It should become an analogue of foreign repositories, including GitHub and GitLab.” The start of the project was announced only in April: before that, the mayor’s office did not have a platform for joint software development, although, according to its own statements, it has been keeping the source code of the capital’s IT services for ten years.

This week, the Moscow Department of Information Technology (DIT) suddenly announced the opening of its own platform for developing open source software Mos.Hub: “It should become an analogue of foreign repositories, including GitHub and GitLab.” The start of the project was announced only in April: before that, the mayor’s office did not have a platform for joint software development, although, according to its own statements, it has been keeping the source code of the capital’s IT services for ten years.

The news was unexpected, if only because the creator of the first state code repository was supposed to be the Ministry of Digital Development, which has been working on a similar project for the second year. Initially, the opening of the “national repository” was scheduled for December 2022. However, the acceptance of applications for the development of the Russian analogue of GitHub began only in March. An obvious inconsistency appears: why, if the Ministry of Digital Transformation has more resources for the rapid implementation of the idea (investments in the project were estimated at 1.3 billion rubles), the capital’s mayor’s office was able to do the same in a matter of months?

A similar question, apparently, was asked by the programmers themselves, who, on the day of the launch of the service, discovered that if, when the Mos.Hub website is open, the developer console is launched in the browser, it will display an invitation to participate in the development of the GitLab service, originally created by Ukrainian specialists. The project is based on open source, but under the terms of the MIT license, modifications must be accompanied by an indication of the authors of the original development. Although DIT noted in the announcement that “it has no right to afford to completely depend on foreign platforms,” they confirmed to Kommersant that when creating Mos.Hub, they took the GitLab code as the base, which “was redesigned to suit the needs of Moscow.”

Such a strategy, of course, provides an important advantage in speed. The other side of the coin is that now any technological borrowing is perceived with distrust: if there are no problems with access to GitLab developments, there are risks of hidden code features and platform security breaches. And taking into account the political situation, it is most likely only a matter of time – GitLab, even before the start of hostilities in Ukraine, CNews wrote, forbade the employment of residents of the Russian Federation and China in the company’s staff. Therefore, one can only guess how the platform will react to the use of its code in the Russian public sector.

On the other hand, the project of the Ministry of Digital Development, which is planned to be carried out exclusively by domestic companies, may not appear in the coming year: according to my interlocutors, there are still few people willing to participate in the industry, and another postponement of the commercial launch is being discussed.