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The Dutch government has soft-launched its own self-hosted alternative to GitHub and GitLab, built on the open-source Forgejo platform, as part of a broader strategy to reduce dependency on foreign technology suppliers. The move follows a new government-approved vision on "digital autonomy and sovereignty" — and positions the Netherlands as one of the most assertive movers in Europe's push to cut reliance on US cloud and software giants.

On 24 April 2026, the Dutch government soft-launched code.overheid.nl, a self-hosted Git platform built on Forgejo, an open-source alternative to GitHub and GitLab. For now, access is limited to a handful of government institutions, with developers invited to help build it out further.

The reasoning is explicit: GitHub and GitLab are classified as risky precisely because they sit outside government control and aren't fully free software. The government has said it cannot afford the risk of code or binaries in its repositories being tampered with, since some of that code runs directly in production. Full control over the forge, officials argue, is essential to guaranteeing that integrity.

The platform sits under the Open Source Program Office (OSPO), part of the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, and follows the long-standing Dutch "open, tenzij" — open, unless — policy: open source by default, with exceptions only where there's a clear reason to deviate. It isn't a binding mandate to replace existing systems by a fixed date. It's a default that has been building for years and is now getting real infrastructure behind it.

The Council of Ministers gave that direction more weight at the end of 2025, approving a new Vision on Digital Autonomy and Sovereignty of the Government, proposed by State Secretary Zsolt Szabó van Marum. The vision's stated aim: keep government in a position to choose its own technology and switch suppliers if one fails or falls short — rather than being locked into a small number of foreign vendors.

"It's not about doing everything ourselves, but about being able to choose and maintain control," Van Marum said. "We have to be realistic: complete independence does not exist, but making smart choices does."

The vision lists concrete steps alongside the rhetoric: tightening cloud policy for storing government data under European law, bundling IT procurement across government bodies to negotiate better supplier terms, and modernising outdated systems to cut risk.

The Netherlands isn't doing this alone. It chairs the EDIC Digital Commons, a consortium formed with France, Germany, and Italy — now joined by nine EU member states in total — aimed at jointly developing European alternatives in AI, cloud computing, cybersecurity, office software, and social networks. The forge launch in The Hague is a small, concrete piece of a much larger European argument: that depending on a handful of foreign suppliers for critical digital infrastructure is no longer a risk governments are willing to carry quietly.