OpenForge- India's own GitHub

Digital India is one of the prime projects undertaken by the Modi Government. It has received a lot of push, and seems to be the way forward. With that background the Government has launched India's answer to Github, known as OpenForge.

OpenForge is a open source projects platform and it focuses mainly on e-governance projects. As the site reports, 

"OpenForge is Government of India's platform for open collaborative development of e-governance applications. Through this platform, the government wants to promote the use of open source software and sharing of e-governance related source code."

It supports two types of projects- private and public. The former is for Government to Government (G2G) connection implying a centralized network for the project. The latter is Government to community(G2C) connection, that is, inviting all under one roof for the common goal- "Collaborative Development of e-Governance applications." It can be used as your GitHub alternative. Thus, you have the Git support to handle multiple repositories for a project.

Here, we would like to point out that while GitHub is based on the open-source project Git, OpenForge is based on Tulipap. It leverages PHP to accept projects including applications, libraries, SDKs and APIs.

The team of the government cloud service DigiLocker is behind the development of OpenForge

Our take:

OpenForge is a smart move welcoming all to contribute to open source projects. The fact that it is government specific makes it stand out from the rest. It already has 50 ongoing projects. It can be a great platform to identify talent as well as give people chance to get involved in developing the digital base for the country. Let's hope that the project becomes an exemplar of success.