What happened to the US Apple/Google app?
Apple and Google are just providing APIs.
It up to countries and states to build apps on those APIs.
The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source
31–40 of 156 posts
Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source
#32Switzerland's app is opensource.
Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rather bizarrely there are street protests about George Floyd in Europe too.
how is it bizarre? people naturally want to show solidarity with the cause in the US, it's a massive deal for the whole western world.
Hundreds of thousands are dead in Europe from a virus and these people are breaking the rules to stop its further spread because of one incident thousands of miles away that happened to be captured on a smartphone
Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source
#34Some other countries recently took same path, relevant discussion here : 1) Singapore : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22702701 2) India : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23311298 3) Germany : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23376682 ( no discussion, link to repository ) 4) France : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23321137
The UK has an interesting post-hoc approach where the code is open source but only after release, with the git history squashed.
Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23107553
Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
SAP and Deutsche Telekom -- two large IT corporations -- are the main developers. I don't know why the government doesn't hold the copyright, maybe it should. They've released it as free software, though (Apache license).
As far as I know, in Germany copyright cannot be transferred. There is a special and limited exception for direct employees, so the company can hold the copyright, but I doubt that a client (like the government) could hold it.
IANAL, but AFAIK there is no exception for employees. The employee still holds the copyright, but there is usually a clause in the employment contract that gives the employer "unrestricted usage rights" for any copyrightable product of the employee.
Especially software developers should read those parts of their employment contracts carefully, as they may be overly broad and sometimes accompanied by weird clauses regarding their OSS work.
Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source
#36Some other countries recently took same path, relevant discussion here : 1) Singapore : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22702701 2) India : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23311298 3) Germany : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23376682 ( no discussion, link to repository ) 4) France : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23321137
3) Poland's solution was also open sourced very soon https://github.com/ProteGO-Safe . While it could have more privacy protective, as long as it will have an option to turn the contract tracing off I will use it. Unfortunately despite the fact that creators of this app are privacy conscious I only heard about it from negative articles. I checked it myself and they are using centralised tracing system, only because Apple/Google decentrilised one isn't ready and it is a main concern in disparaging articles. I'm not saying that currently Poland isn't going into autocracy, but it isn't a tool in this machine. However with 10k installs in a 40m country it is useless.
Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source
#37This shows the application and gives an overview of how the product works for the citizen: https://github.com/immuni-app/immuni-documentation/blob/mast... This the main technical documentation document: https://github.com/immuni-app/immuni-documentation/blob/mast... All the documentation is here: https://github.com/immuni-app/immuni-documentation
That last link seems like maybe the most informative place to start, so we've changed the link above to that from https://github.com/immuni-app.
Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source
#38Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source
#39What happened to the US Apple/Google app?
The API is supposed to be available once 13.5 goes live (and it is available in public beta now, I believe). Here is a list of states who are participating with compatible apps: https://9to5mac.com/2020/05/21/covid-19-exposure-notificatio...
TL;DR: Hardly any.
Edit: Whoops, I am out of date, I thought 13.5 was not out yet! Apparently it is, and then some.
Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I know, in Germany copyright cannot be transferred. There is a special and limited exception for direct employees, so the company can hold the copyright, but I doubt that a client (like the government) could hold it.
IANAL, but AFAIK there is no exception for employees. The employee still holds the copyright, but there is usually a clause in the employment contract that gives the employer "unrestricted usage rights" for any copyrightable product of the employee. Especially software developers should read those parts of their employment contracts carefully, as they may be overly broad and sometimes accompanied by weird clauses reg…
If the employee still owns the copyright, does that mean employees could continue to use that software after they leave the company?