In the digital world, a copy is easily made and costs next to nothing. Here is something we all should duplicate: the French government is building its own community of open source developers. Entitled 'Blue Hats', the community brings together software developers and IT scientists from inside and outside the public sector who want to contribute to government-led open source projects. The goal is to get public services to 'code in the open'.

France is not the first EU Member State to take this course. The UK's government's Digital Service has been encouraging coding in the open for several years, under its slogan 'Make things open, it makes things better'. Coding in the open makes it easier to work together. It lets public services share and reuse their ICT solutions. It helps their IT services to achieve true interoperability. Of course there are barriers to coding in the open – and many ways to overcome these barriers.

The French initiative has arrived right on time. The 2017 Tallinn Declaration on eGovernment, signed by all EU Member States and Efta countries, commits governments to do more with open source. In late 2018 Luxembourg joined the list of EU countries with an open source policy, the European Commission declared its preference for open source, Slovakia realised it has to renew its efforts, and the Czech Republic prepared legislation to encourage the use of open source. Blue hats are back in fashion.