The Russian Ministry of Digital Development has officially abandoned the experiment to create a unified national repository of open source software in Russia. This was announced by Ilya Massukh, Director of the Competence Center for Import Substitution in the Field of Information and Communication Technologies, at the "PROF-IT" conference.
The ministry has not specified why it reversed its decision. However, as far back as April, the Russian Ministry of Digital Development appealed to the government with a proposal to support an existing domestic repository instead of developing a new platform. Officials noted that during the course of the experiment, solutions from large companies had entered the market.
According to Massukh, the ministry is now working on a more comprehensive "concept of Russian repositories". This project aims at the creation and development of an ecosystem for such platforms in the country, and includes requirements for ensuring the security of the storages.
The Russian authorities began discussing the need to create a domestic equivalent to GitHub as early as 2020. The idea was repeatedly reconsidered, and it wasn't until October 2022 that the government officially ordered the experiment to be launched. At that time, it was anticipated that a national repository would be established in Russia by the end of April 2024. In March 2024, sources from the newspaper "Vedomosti" reported that the experiment's completion date was postponed indefinitely due to a lack of funding.