Bastien Guerry is a leading figure in public sector open source strategy, best known for his work in the French government promoting and implementing Free Software policies.
As the former Chief Free Software Officer at DINUM (French Interministerial Digital Directorate), he led the national strategy for open source use and contributions by public agencies. His key achievements include launching the Free Software Council, the BlueHats community, the catalog of recommended Free Software, and the first public-sector source code inventory.
Guerry, who initially studied philosophy and cognitive science, is a self-taught programmer (notably a GNU Emacs contributor) whose professional experience includes early work with Wikimedia France and the Etalab mission, where he addressed public sector tech infrastructure challenges. He joined Software Heritage in October 2025.
Tell us about your new role at Software Heritage.
Bastien Guerry, Head of Partnerships, Public Sector & Industry
I manage partnerships with Public Sector and Industry organizations, ensuring that the Archive provides the foundational data and services needed to build innovative products together.
Your departure from DINUM was framed as an “eight-year itch.” What was the key missing piece in the public sector that you now hope to build or fix by working on an infrastructure project like Software Heritage?
It’s not a missing piece per se; it’s a constraint that every organization faces: it’s difficult enough to produce useful Free Software for one’s own needs, it’s even more difficult to produce it for others.
For example, the DINUM Open Source Program Office published an inventory of French public sector source code. It was useful, but we were limited in what we could publish and how we could make this a solution that other Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) could replicate.
Working with Software Heritage is an opportunity to make this kind of project easier for every OSPO out there.
You spent eight years driving open source as a national policy: What’s the biggest mental shift in focusing on product, and how does that policy lens inform the roadmap for an archive like Software Heritage?
Working at Etalab and DINUM meant maintaining a close connection to the products being developed while simultaneously recognizing and shaping the importance of the policies being defined. My first contribution concerned the French government’s 2018 open-source contribution policy, which was the fruit of a highly interministerial effort.: Following that, we asked a critical question: what product could we associate with this policy to give it weight? That’s when we started the source code inventory. Now, what are the objectives of this product? How can we ensure that it really helps ministries to implement their free software policy? What makes it possible to hold policy and products together is the attention paid to users.
Policies without products are empty, products without policies are blind.
You successfully promoted a policy on the “fair redistribution of value” created by open source. How do you see an archival service like Software Heritage—built to be a public good—realizing that value in practical terms for the wider ecosystem?
To measure the value of software, we can use two approaches. First, measure the effects of when it does not work as expected: for instance, if a single library has a critical bug, your entire software may fail to compile. Second, measure all the places where it works: for example, if a certain module is imported by countless other source codes, or if a piece of software is used by over half of all websites.. All too often, we only consider the value of code when there’s a problem, but we should consider it up front! To do this, we need a universal, factual database of all versioned source codes and users who take advantage of it to measure the value of the source codes they use and produce. Software Heritage builds this reference database, with the SoftWare Hash IDentifier (SWHID) as its cornerstone, and goes out to meet these users.
