How much do governments actually contribute to open source? The State of Public Code, a Software Heritage initiative, provides the first large-scale, data-driven answer: an analysis of the world’s public sector open source activity, built on the Software Heritage archive (March 2026 snapshot) and published as open data under CC BY 4.0, with a documented and reproducible methodology.

Interest in open source at the policy level has grown considerably in recent years. What's still missing is a shared understanding of what it takes to make that endorsement operational. This panel brings together three evidence bases for closing that gap: new research identifying 13 concrete capacity indicators that separate policy intent from practice; the UN's Open Source Enablement Compass, which is turning that kind of research into a yearly benchmarking tool for governments worldwide; and Software Heritage's State of Public Code, which tracks what governments actually contribute, not just what they claim. Together, they ask: what would it take to move open source in government from policy to evidence-based action?