Stories, updates, and insights from the Public Code US movement.
September 15, 2026 • 6 min read • By The Public Code US Team
In September 2026, the fight over what counts as 'open' AI reached a boiling point. The stakes: whether governments buying AI get something they can audit — or just something they can download.
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September 9, 2026 • 6 min read • By The Public Code US Team
The EU's proposed Public Procurement Act writes 'European preference' into public buying for the first time. Combined with the open source strategy, it stacks the deck against US proprietary vendors — and shows what procurement power looks like.
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September 1, 2026 • 6 min read • By The Public Code US Team
An update to our April story: Germany's open source migration crossed 80% of workstations, finished a 44,000-mailbox email move with zero data loss, and the payback math is now undeniable. France, Denmark, and China are joining the wave.
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August 29, 2026 • 6 min read • By The Public Code US Team
AB 1856 passed the California Senate 39-0 and the Assembly 69-0, exempting GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache software from age-verification mandates. Colorado did it too. Legislatures are learning what public-code advocates have always known: open source isn't just software, it's a different legal category.
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August 28, 2026 • 7 min read • By The Public Code US Team
On August 20, the VA added $17 billion to its Oracle health records contract. Seventeen of 170 hospitals are live. GAO says 12 priority fixes are unimplemented. This is what closed, proprietary, single-vendor government IT produces.
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August 5, 2026 • 7 min read • By The Public Code US Team
On August 4, the keyv worm hit 400+ npm packages with valid cryptographic signatures. Three weeks earlier, @asyncapi fell the same way. The year's supply-chain attacks keep proving the same point: signatures verify identity, not intent — and the commons needs public investment, not just attestations.
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July 20, 2026 • 6 min read • By The Public Code US Team
Jellyfin's project leader just stepped down from burnout. curl ended its bug bounty over AI slop. Kubernetes retired Ingress NGINX for lack of maintainers. The commons that governments want to depend on is maintained by exhausted volunteers — and 60% of them aren't paid.
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June 3, 2026 • 7 min read • By The Public Code US Team
The EU's Tech Sovereignty Package puts 'public money, public code' and 'open source first' procurement into official strategy. Here's why Brussels did it — and what it means for American tech giants.
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May 11, 2026 • 7 min read • By The Public Code US Team
Estonia files taxes in five minutes, votes online, and lets citizens see exactly who accessed their records. The secret isn't money or technology. It's a choice about who owns the infrastructure.
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May 4, 2026 • 8 min read • By The Public Code US Team
Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP have turned government software into a permanent subscription. The Netherlands is fighting back. Denmark quit Office 365. America is still writing the checks.
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April 21, 2026 • 7 min read • By The Public Code US Team
Government software denies your benefits, sets your bail, flags your taxes, and scores your immigration case. You can't read it. You can't challenge it. You don't even know what it says about you.
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April 14, 2026 • 7 min read • By The Public Code US Team
OMB Memorandum M-25-21 requires agencies to release custom AI code — including model weights — as open source. We dug through the 2026 federal AI use-case inventory: 3,611 use cases, 71 agency-trained models, and exactly one public weight release.
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April 3, 2026 • 7 min read • By The Public Code US Team
Federal agencies spend $755 billion a year on contracts — and more than a trillion dollars in spending can't be traced. Here's the sunlight problem at the heart of government IT.
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April 3, 2026 • 6 min read • By The Public Code US Team
Harvard researchers just put a number on open source software's economic value: $8.8 trillion. The federal government spends over $100 billion a year on IT contracts. The math isn't complicated.
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April 3, 2026 • 6 min read • By The Public Code US Team
Schleswig-Holstein just migrated 30,000 government workers to open source and saved €15 million annually. France built a sovereign digital stack. Munich did it in 2003. What's America waiting for?
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March 27, 2026 • 4 min read • By The Public Code US Team
You shouldn't need a lobbyist to talk to your elected officials. Here's how Public Code US puts direct democracy back in your hands.
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March 16, 2026 • 5 min read • By The Public Code US Team
Why we're fighting for public code, and why you should care
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February 10, 2026 • 5 min read • By The Public Code US Team
Grok 2.5's 'open source' release came with a license banning you from training competing models — and a termination clause for suing. That's not open source. It's marketing with a EULA.
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April 5, 2025 • 6 min read • By The Public Code US Team
The world's most-used 'open' AI model fails the open source definition — and its newest license geo-fences an entire continent. This is what happens when public infrastructure depends on a vendor's marketing department.
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