\section{Related Projects}
\label{sec:related}

The new SPB platform is a fully integrated environment,
being very advanced in comparison with related projects and initiatives.
%
For instance, the USA government has a platform designed to improve access to
the federal government developed software\footnote{\url{https://code.gov}}.
Code.gov is an interface to organize the USA government projects and, in short,
make it easy for users and developers to obtain information and access their
source code repositories at GitHub. However, there are not social networking
and CMS features, as well as, other communication resources provided by that
platform.

Additionally, there are two initiatives in Europe:
OSOR\footnote{\url{https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor}} and
OW2\footnote{\url{http://ow2.org}}. The Open Source Observatory (OSOR) is a
community hosted in the JoinUp platform powered by the European Commission.
OSOR aims at exchanging information, experiences and best practices around the
use of FLOSS in the public administration. It helps to find a FLOSS made
available by other public administrations, providing access to information such
as news, events, studies and solutions related to implementation of open source
software. It also offers forum discussions and community mailing lists, but it
does not have an integrated source code repository manager and for the each
project there is a link to its own external repository (or its tarball file).
%
OW2 is a FLOSS community to promote the development of FLOSS middleware, generic
business applications, cloud computing platforms and foster a community and
business ecosystem. In short, it aims to support the development, deployment
and management of distributed applications with a focus on FLOSS middleware and
related development and management tools.

Moreover, in 2007 the European Comission published a study examined the impact
the development and distribution of FLOSS by public bodies has on eGovernment
services, the economy, and the information society \cite{ghosh2004}. And there
was between 2007 until 2011 the QualiPSo project that aimed at providing FLOSS
users, developers, and consumers, with quality resources and expertise on the
various topics related to FLOSS. The QualiPSo project also had planned to
develop a platform called QualiPSo Factory but it was not fully completed. 

Finally, in Latin American there is an initiative based on the SPB project
called ``Software Publico
Regional''\footnote{\url{http://softwarepublicoregionalbeta.net}}. From a
practical point of view, it provides a customized Gitlab instance to share the
source code and documentation of the project from the involved countries.
%
Like Brazil, Chile has its own portal also called ``Software
Publico''\footnote{\url{http://www.softwarepublico.gob.cl}}. Users can create
content in the communities (news items, documents, wiki pages), but source code
repositories are available at the Bitbucket
platform\footnote{\url{https://bitbucket.org/softwarepublico}}.

The Brazilian government needed to evolve the SPB platform that existed since
2007. When we started this project, the SPB Portal had about 200 thousand
registered users. For example, we could not just contact these users and ask
them to register an account at Github as well. Moreover, after the Edward
Snowden's case, the Brazilian government approved a specific law decree
(8.135/2013) to rule its communication services, requiring the public
administration to host its information systems to be provided by itself, what
rules out usage of private platforms, specially ones provided by foreign
companies. Therefore, we needed to develop our own solution to cover all the
requirements, producing a complete governmental integrated platform for
collaborative software development.
