Eden: NHS goes to war against open source

Date:
Fri, 01 May 2026 19:27:18 +0000

Description:
Terence Eden reports that the UK's National
Health Service (NHS) is preparing to close almost all of its open-source repositories as a
response to LLM tools, such as Anthropic's Mythos, becoming more
sophisticated at finding security vulnerabilities. He does not, to put
it mildly, agree with the decision: The majority of code repos
published by the NHS are not meaningfully affected by any advance
in security scanning. They're mostly data sets, internal tools,
guidance, research tools, front-end design and the like. There is nothing in them which could realistically lead to a security
incident. When I was working at NHSX during the pandemic, we were so
confident of the safety and necessity of open source, we made sure the
Covid Contact Tracing app was open sourced the minute it was available
to the public . That was a nationally mandated app, installed on
millions of phones, subject to intense scrutiny from hostile powers -
and yet, despite publishing the code, architecture and documentation,
the open source code caused zero security
incidents. Furthermore, this new guidance is in direct contradiction to the UK's Tech
Code of Practice point 3 "Be open and use open source" which
insists on code being open.

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Link to news story:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1070864/


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