Open Source Is Now Moving Trucks Across Continents

Somewhere on the border of Tajikistan, a customs officer is clearing a truck that set out from another country days ago. The software on that officer's screen is open source, and almost none of us have heard of it.

It's called the eTIR National Application. For seventy years, the UN's TIR Convention has let trucks carry goods across several borders under a single customs document. Today it spans 77 countries and the European Union. When that system went digital, every one of those countries needed a way to connect its customs to the UN platform in Geneva. Rather than leave each to build one from scratch or rent one from a vendor, UNECE built it in the open, under Apache 2.0, for any nation to run, own and change.

10+ merged MRs later, I've seen what open source becomes when the users are governments, the specification is an international treaty, and a broken release can hold up trade at a border.

In ten minutes, you'll see how a national deployment talks to Geneva, how stakes like these change the way code gets written and shipped, and how a student found a way into infrastructure most developers never know exists. FOSS travels much further than our laptops. This talk is about one of the places it ends up.

• What this shift means for FOSS as a whole: open source moving from developer tooling to public infrastructure governed by treaties

• A walkthrough of the National Application's architecture and how national deployments talk to Geneva

• How FOSS norms and practices change when governments are the users and treaties are the spec