Source code of Germany’s official covid-19 contact tracing app

Re:Source code of Germany’s official covid-19 contact tracin... by gspr on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @07:19AM (#23537808)

What I find far more unbelievable is that countries – at least European countries that through the EU have a common legal framework – did not get together and share the bill for the development of a common open source app. Perhaps each country would have to do some minor local customization, but surely the vast majority of the code could be shared?

I frequently find myself pondering this whenever my government announces yet another contract for (the admittedly decent) IT services for interacting with state entities.

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Re:Source code of Germany’s official covid-19 contact tracin... by bad_user on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @07:33AM (#23537908)

In any big organization, the more you try to "share", the more bureaucracy is involved, because you have to get people to agree. You can hardly get agreement on how things should be done in a company, let alone in the EU.

In any big organization, it's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission, meaning that it's better to build it first, prove that it works and then seek to establish it as a standard, than vice versa. And if there are multiple competing proposals, then competition is healthy.

Do all countries have the same commitment to privacy? No. Are all countries willing to work within the limitations imposed by Apple/Google? No. Disagreement is natural and it would be pretty stupid for everyone to stand still until an agreement is reached.

Besides, 20 million euro for a country like Germany is peanuts. All EU countries have spent far more than that during the lockdown.

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Re:Source code of Germany’s official covid-19 contact tracin... by DanielleMolloy on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @07:57AM (#23538085)

I think they wouldn't be able to agree wrt even the most basic data privacy questions.

It would actually be quite interesting to compare the different apps and their philosophies (privacy, security, centralization vs. decentralization, open vs. closed source, source code..).

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Re:Source code of Germany’s official covid-19 contact tracin... by Someone on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @07:56AM (#23538080)

The money isn’t spent on the app; it’s spent on the backend, and there, scaling efficiency gains are limited because of diversity in computer systems.

Also, the app would have to be translated in many more languages. If you don’t want that to increase time to market, it will cost a lot of money.

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Re:Source code of Germany’s official covid-19 contact tracin... by funcDropShadow on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @08:16AM (#23538210)

But in my understanding the backend of the german app is generic, since it only receives random IDs from the mobile apps and assembles a list of them to download again.

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