French Civil Code is now on Github

Legislative bodies in many countries are beginning to clearly understand how effective computerized audit control tools like Git can be for preparing legislation, comparing versions, looking for changes, and discussing edits. The next country that understood this was France, which posted the entire Civil Code on Github (amendment: as noted in the comments, the French repository is a private initiative).

Before France, Github posted the legislation of other countries: Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Finland. For example, here is the Bundestag repository with a funny avatar.

Of course, the normative acts of France have been online before, like other countries. But everyone who has visited the state websites at least once with regulations or used paid software for this, knows what a nightmare they are. Impassable jungle loaded interface, the difficulty of comparing different versions. Only this is enough to justify the move to Github.
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In fact, the legislation is very similar to the source code of open source programs. These are also texts that are being worked on together. Deputies and experts work together on individual texts, which are included in the code after the final polishing.

At the same time, the authors of bills for decades lagged behind the programmers on the use of computer tools. The developers have created extremely effective tools for collaboration and tracking changes in the texts. The most popular of them is Git. On the part of the legislators, it is simply criminal not to use these programs, because in this case they artificially harm the society they serve by reducing the productivity of their work.

It is also important that when editing bills on Github, all the work of lawmakers is open to the public. It can be seen who specifically of the deputies proposed a specific edit, and who deleted it. Indeed, in the traditional process we can only guess what the people's representatives are discussing on the sidelines and why they chose this or that wording.

“The civil code is part of France’s source code. And the source code is subject to version control. Point, ”reads the French repository in README.

The text of the Civil Code is published under the Creative Commons license.