Dissection of COVIDSafe (Android): Australian government's contact tracing app
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Re: Dissection of COVIDSafe (Android): Australian government's contact tracing app
#2It's interesting to see these tracing app discussions crop up all over the world at the moment. In Germany it quite literally took dozens of public interest groups, two weeks of media attention, EU guidance and an open letter by hundreds of scientists to make the government switch from central data collection to an acceptable decentralised approach.
The amount of misinformation put out by lobby groups in the process was frankly astonishing, is that similar in Australia or is this app primarily driven by the government itself?
Re: Dissection of COVIDSafe (Android): Australian government's contact tracing app
#3I would assume many GPL-licensed applications are GPL non-compliant. From a user's perspective, what are the most relevant problems when this is the case? (Excluding problems of philosophical nature that only free software geeks care about. No intention to be disrespectful; but the more practical the problems, the more likely it is that ordinary users can relate to them.)
Re: Dissection of COVIDSafe (Android): Australian government's contact tracing app
#4I saw this coming BUT I thought if they were clever they might get the code from the Singapore government (Who I think developed OpenTrace) direct?
You can release you code as GPL. But you can also release you code however, separately if you want.
Also it depends on OpenTrace's libraries and if it's been contributed to.
Re: Dissection of COVIDSafe (Android): Australian government's contact tracing app
#5I would assume many GPL-licensed applications are GPL non-compliant. From a user's perspective, what are the most relevant problems when this is the case? (Excluding problems of philosophical nature that only free software geeks care about. No intention to be disrespectful; but the more practical the problems, the more likely it is that ordinary users can relate to them.)
Without source code, you cannot trust what the app does. This is particularly bad for an app that will supposedly track your every move.
Also, non-compliance with a copyright license effectively means “stealing”. So the government is effectively buying stolen goods from Amazon and Boston Group.
Re: Dissection of COVIDSafe (Android): Australian government's contact tracing app
#6It was interesting to hear a lead story on the nightly news talking about data privacy issues related to where the data was stored, saying that the data would be stored on “American company Amazon’s Servers”.
No mention of Australian regions or GovCloud etc.
Re: Dissection of COVIDSafe (Android): Australian government's contact tracing app
#7> Non-compliant. The CovidSAFE application heavily uses source code from https://github.com/opentrace-community/opentrace-android which was released under GPL v3
That's not to say its non-compliant, they could have reached out to the (one) contributor and licenced it separately.
Re: Dissection of COVIDSafe (Android): Australian government's contact tracing app
#8I would assume many GPL-licensed applications are GPL non-compliant. From a user's perspective, what are the most relevant problems when this is the case? (Excluding problems of philosophical nature that only free software geeks care about. No intention to be disrespectful; but the more practical the problems, the more likely it is that ordinary users can relate to them.)
Without source code, you cannot trust what the app does. This is particularly bad for an app that will supposedly track your every move. Also, non-compliance with a copyright license effectively means “stealing”. So the government is effectively buying stolen goods from Amazon and Boston Group.
> Also, non-compliance with a copyright license effectively means “stealing”. So the government is effectively buying stolen goods from Amazon and Boston Group.
Do you have a good source for that? (No, a random tweet isn't a good source.)
Re: Dissection of COVIDSafe (Android): Australian government's contact tracing app
#9I saw this coming BUT I thought if they were clever they might get the code from the Singapore government (Who I think developed OpenTrace) direct? You can release you code as GPL. But you can also release you code however, separately if you want. Also it depends on OpenTrace's libraries and if it's been contributed to.
Uhm, no.
Once your code contains GPL code that is not yours, it has to be GPL. Particularly in v3, where a number of loopholes were closed. You are free to attach further non-conflicting clauses to it, but the GPL of the original code must be respected. That’s the entire point of the GPL.
Double-licensing requires you to have ownership of the entire codebase. At that point, you are licensing everything, so you’re free to pick any license that suits you.
Re: Dissection of COVIDSafe (Android): Australian government's contact tracing app
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without source code, you cannot trust what the app does. This is particularly bad for an app that will supposedly track your every move. Also, non-compliance with a copyright license effectively means “stealing”. So the government is effectively buying stolen goods from Amazon and Boston Group.
> Also, non-compliance with a copyright license effectively means “stealing”. So the government is effectively buying stolen goods from Amazon and Boston Group. Do you have a good source for that? (No, a random tweet isn't a good source.)
Source for what? It’s in TFA...?