\section{Related Works}
\label{sec:relatedworks}

The new SPB platform presented in this paper is a fully integrated 
environment, as we can see in Figure \ref{fig:requirements}, being very
advanced in comparison with related projects and initiatives. For example,
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 FOSS in the public administration. It helps
to find a FOSS 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 FOSS community to promote the development of FOSS 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 FOSS 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
FOSS users, developers, and consumers, with quality resources and expertise on
the various topics related to FOSS. The QualiPSo project also had planned to
develop a platform called QualiPSo Factory but it was not fully completed. 

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 project that
existed since 2005. In 2013, when we started this project, the SPB Portal
had about 200 thousand registered users. We could not just contact these
users and ask them to register an account at Github as well. Moreover,
after the Edward Snowden 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. We thus developed our own
solution to cover all the requirements, producing a complete
governmental integrated platform for collaborative software development.
