Index of glossary terms

Foundation of Public Code:

• Codebase
  • All of the code – including source code, policy, documentation and the history – of a product. Often stored in one or multiple repositories.

    Codebases of the products stewarded by the Foundation For Public Code are hosted and managed by the Foundation For Public Code.

• Ecosystem Level
  • At the level of the Public Code ecosystem and outside of the specific organisational, national or legal contexts.
• Public Code
  • Public Code is both civil code (like policy or regulation) and computer source code (such as software and algorithms) executed in a public context, by humans or machines.

    Because Public Code serves the public interest, it should be: Open, Legible, Accountable, Accessible and Sustainable.

    By developing public code independent from but implementable in a local context, as well as documenting the development process openly, it can provide a building block for others to re-implement in their local context, take as a starting point to continue development or as a basis for learning.

    To facilitate re-use, Public Code should be either released into the public domain or licenced with an open licence that permits others to view and reuse the work freely and to produce derivative works.

• Product
  • A re-implementable set of Public Code, packaged with documentation. We support products over projects to acknowledge that code is not something you make and then abandon, it is not just about planning and control, it is about innovation and maintenance.

Infrastructure as Code:

• Environment
• Instance