"The NHS 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."
"The FSFE says NHS England should not hide public code behind closed doors. If you agree, there's an open letter to which you can attach your name called 'An open letter asking NHS England to keep its code open' on the simple and memorable domain keepthingsopen.com."
"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, this strikes us as a good move."
"If public money is paying for computer software, the code should be public as well. This represents a fundamental principle of transparency and accountability in publicly funded technology initiatives."
The NHS management decided to restrict access to its open-source repositories, citing concerns that new LLM-based bug-hunting tools could expose security vulnerabilities. This decision has generated significant backlash from the open-source community and advocacy groups. The Free Software Foundation Europe argues that public code should remain accessible rather than hidden behind closed doors. Two initiatives have emerged in response: an open letter opposing the NHS decision with over 812 signatures, and a broader UK Parliament petition advocating for the civil service to migrate to open-source software for improved data sovereignty and security. The underlying principle is that publicly funded software should have publicly accessible code.
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