Dutch government turns to NixOS for a sovereign desktop

The Dutch government is backing an effort to build a FOSS workplace for public administration, including a desktop operating system based on NixOS. The DAWO Project has been gestating for some months, but it just got a lot more visible thanks to an in-depth report on Dutch tech news site Tweakers.net. DAWO stands for "Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid," or "Digital Autonomous Government Work Environment." Rather than a single product, its blueprint combines replaceable components for the operating system, cloud infrastructure, AI, communications, and collaborative working. Development remains at an early stage, but small-scale pilots are already under way within Dutch public bodies. The work acquired official status in July, when the Dutch government's ICBR - the Interdepartmental Committee on Government Operations - commissioned three government IT providers to develop a standardized, more sovereign digital workplace: DICTU, SSC-ICT and the ICT division of DUO, the Education Executive Agency. The wider blueprint comes from the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, or BZK. Its components include MijnBureau, a self-hosted workplace suite built from projects including Nextcloud, Collabora, Element and OpenProject. The MijnBureau developers are also collaborating with France's La Suite and aligning their work with Germany's openDesk. Regular Register readers will probably recognize the name openDesk: it's featured in several recent stories. OpenDesk is the suite that the International Criminal Court is adopting following US sanctions against senior court officials. (Tweakers mentions these sanctions as being a motivating factor behind the Dutch efforts.) The ICC is based in the Netherlands, in The Hague. According to a Reuters report, the Trump administration is planning wider sanctions against the ICC. OpenDesk is also a core part of the moves in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, as we reported in July, and those in Switzerland which we covered earlier this month. Back in April, the Association of Netherlands Municipalities, or VNG, announced that four municipalities were taking part in the trials. Tweakers reports that the number has since doubled to eight - still a small fraction of the country's hundreds of municipalities. The project publishes code through the BZK's government-hosted Forgejo instance, with repositories also available through Codeberg for outside contributors. For its client OS, the project initially experimented with openSUSE, then Fedora, before settling on NixOS. The Reg FOSS desk has written about NixOS several times, including its radical approach to package management and the arrival of NixOS 22.11. NixOS offers more than a conveniently Dutch pedigree. It is not controlled by a commercial vendor, while its declarative configuration and reproducible deployments make it attractive for managing and auditing large fleets of machines. The Nix packaging system project was founded by a Dutchman, Eelco Dolstra; the first version of the NixOS distro built with it by another, Armijn Hemel; and the NixOS Foundation is based in the Netherlands. The Nix community has not been without controversy. In 2023, conference organizers withdrew sponsorship from US autonomous weapons vendor Anduril following objections from contributors. The dispute fed into a broader argument over project governance that culminated the following year in a fork called Auxolotl. FOSS projects have little control over who uses their code, while attempts to restrict particular users can create problems of their own. Government interest does, however, bring money and momentum. As we noted following the launch of Euro-Office in April and Collabora's AI-infused CODE suite in June, the scent of public sector cash is proving highly effective at stimulating activity and cooperation in the FOSS world. (R)