Why Europe Is Quietly Breaking Up With GitHub — and the Netherlands Just Made the First Move

On April 24, 2026, the Dutch government soft-launched its own self-hosted GitHub alternative. The timing was deliberate. The reasons run deeper than one platform. Here’s what’s actually happening with European digital sovereignty — and why it matters beyond the Netherlands.

GitHub works for most developers. It’s fast, it’s free for public repositories, and almost everyone already uses it. That’s precisely why the Dutch government’s decision to build and host its own alternative is worth paying attention to — not because it’s a rejection of GitHub’s technical quality, but because it represents a considered position on who should control critical national infrastructure. That position is gaining support across Europe, and connects to a broader pattern of European governments building their own digital infrastructure rather than depending on US platforms — something we’ve also seen in the UK’s Creative Content Exchange, where the government is building a licensing marketplace for AI training data rather than waiting for US platforms to set the terms.

The EU’s Tech Sovereignty Package — the broader policy backdrop to the Netherlands’ move — explained independently by Too Long. Not a Wangdoo or government production.

What the Netherlands Actually Built

On April 24, 2026, the Dutch Ministry of the Interior’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO) soft-launched code.overheid.nl — a self-hosted code forge built on Forgejo, an open-source Git platform. The platform is currently in pilot phase, accessible to a limited group of government institutions, with a target to scale to all agencies within a year. Several ministries — Finance, Foreign Affairs, Agriculture, and the Interior — have already onboarded, alongside major Dutch cities including The Hague, Utrecht, Leiden, and Arnhem. Notably, the Electoral Council (Kiesraad) — the body responsible for managing Dutch national elections — already has live repositories on the platform, a detail that makes the digital sovereignty argument more concrete than abstract.

The platform offers a full developer toolset: repository hosting, pull requests, issue tracking, CI/CD pipelines via Forgejo Actions, LDAP and OAuth authentication, and Git LFS support. It runs on infrastructure managed by SSC-ICT (DAWO), the Dutch government’s shared IT service centre — entirely within the Netherlands, on hardware the government controls directly.

Why April 24 Was Not an Accident

The launch date was deliberate. April 24, 2026 is the same day GitHub’s revised privacy and data policy took effect — under which Copilot interaction data from Free, Pro, and Pro+ users (prompts, code snippets, and context sent through Copilot) is used to train AI models unless users explicitly opt out. GitHub is careful to distinguish this from scraping private repositories “at rest” — static code in a private repo is not collected. However, code snippets that flow through Copilot while actively working in a private repository do become interaction data. For a government hosting sensitive infrastructure code where any leakage of code patterns or architecture details carries security implications, that distinction is meaningful but narrow. The OSPO had been building its case for a self-hosted alternative for months before April; the launch date simply made the reasoning visible to everyone at once.

Why Forgejo — and Not GitLab?

The OSPO considered both GitLab and Forgejo before making its choice. GitLab is itself open-source at its community tier, and several European governments already use it. The Dutch team rejected it for one specific reason: GitLab operates on an open-core model, meaning the base product is open-source but advanced features — including many the government would eventually need — sit behind a proprietary enterprise licence. Vendor lock-in at the feature level is still vendor lock-in.

Forgejo, by contrast, is fully open-source under a GPL v3 licence, governed by a democratic non-profit (Codeberg e.V., registered in Germany), with no enterprise tier and no proprietary upsell. Every feature is available to everyone who runs it. The OSPO’s statement was direct: “Forgejo offers the ability to study, modify, and distribute all of its source code. Every investment in Forgejo enters the public domain and thereby benefits tax-paying citizens and businesses. Public money, public code.”

The Wider European Context

The Netherlands is not acting in isolation. The European Commission’s own assessments put the EU’s dependency on non-European digital infrastructure in stark terms: the EU sources over 80% of its digital products and services from outside the bloc, and just three US companies control 65% of the EU cloud market. The Commission has framed digital sovereignty — control over critical digital infrastructure — as a strategic priority equivalent to energy security.

Germany and France are watching code.overheid.nl closely and are considered the most likely next movers — both have strong domestic open-source communities and existing digital sovereignty policies, and have already published a joint digital sovereignty paper. Germany’s public sector OSPO network has been actively monitoring the Dutch pilot. The EU’s broader Tech Sovereignty Package, published June 3, 2026, includes the Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) and Chips Act 2.0, with CADA targeting a tripling of EU data centre capacity requiring around €200 billion in mostly private investment, creating a policy environment where the Dutch move looks less like an outlier and more like an early step in a larger structural shift.

What This Means in Practice — Beyond Government

This matters beyond governments and enterprise developers for a specific reason: the principle the Netherlands is acting on — that critical infrastructure should not depend on platforms outside your control — applies at any scale. A small business, a startup, a solo developer: anyone who stores sensitive code, client data, or proprietary logic on a US-hosted platform that trains AI on repository contents is in a structurally similar position to the Dutch ministries, just at smaller stakes.

The Real Question: Can a Government-Run Platform Sustain Itself?

The honest answer is: not proven yet. Building a sovereign code forge is the straightforward part. Building the developer community that makes it genuinely useful — the ecosystem of contributors, templates, shared pipelines, and institutional knowledge that makes GitHub irreplaceable for most teams — takes years and sustained investment, not a soft launch. The Dutch government is asking developers to help build code.overheid.nl collaboratively, which is a reasonable approach, but it depends on motivated contributors staying engaged over a long period.

The Dutch OSPO has acknowledged this openly, framing the launch as a collaborative project rather than a finished product: “Only by working together can we create a fully-fledged GitHub alternative.” That honesty is a reasonable foundation. Whether it translates into a platform that agencies actually use in preference to GitHub five years from now, rather than as a compliance checkbox, is the question that matters most — and which only time will answer.

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Clayton Samuel (Mr Wangdoo), QFA

Founder & editor, Wangdoo.com. Qualified Financial Adviser with a background in electronics, web development, and cloud infrastructure. Manages Wangdoo’s own hosting, DNS, and server infrastructure directly.