68 lines
4.6 KiB
HTML
68 lines
4.6 KiB
HTML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
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<html newsdate="2021-08-30">
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<version>1</version>
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<head>
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<title>Public bodies fail: Volunteers have to sacrifice free time to make CovPass app available to all</title>
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</head>
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<body>
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<h1>Public bodies fail: Volunteers have to sacrifice free time to make CovPass app available to all</h1>
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<p>After the successful liberation of the German Corona tracing app from Google services last year, volunteers once more have to step in
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to take over the government's task in order to make the CovPass app available to everyone.</p>
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<p>With the CovPass app, the EU digital COVID certificate for Corona vaccination can be used on smartphones. Until today, it was only
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available on Apple, Huawai and Google app stores due to proprietary dependencies. The support team of the CovPass app also argued that
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the app cannot be published in other app stores due to security reasons and to prevent misuse. This argumentation is not only misleading
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and wrong, as we have already seen with other Corona apps, but prevents the use of many Corona apps for people who value privacy and
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software freedom on their devices. A group of volunteers worked heavily in the past weeks to make this app available to everyone and
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released it today on <a href="https://f-droid.org/packages/de.rki.covpass.app/">F-Droid, a Free Software app store.</a></p>
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<p>To do so, the volunteers also removed proprietary Google libraries which are not necessary for the app to function. This additional work
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could have been prevented if the CovPass developers (who are paid with public funds) would not include such unnecessary proprietary libraries
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from the beginning. Furthermore, the company developing CovPass was unsupportive towards external developers, which increased the difficulty
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for the volunteers to contribute improvements. Because of this, improvements which would have required little effort by the original developers
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turned out to be a difficult task for volunteers. A positive example is the COVID Certificate, the official app for storing and presenting
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Swiss COVID certificates. It was developed by the Federal Office of Information Technology, Systems and Telecommunication (FOITT) on behalf
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of the Federal Office of Public Health, and the developers made sure to include the app in the Free Software app store F-Droid themselves.</p>
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<blockquote>Felix C. Stegerman, software developer and part of the volunteers group that worked on the CovPass app: "I want to
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make sure that everyone can use publicly financed apps so we can tackle the pandemic. It is sad that the processes of
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some of those publicly financed apps scare off external contributions instead of working together on improvements. More
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administrations should follow the example of the developers of the Swiss COVID Certificate app."</blockquote>
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<blockquote>Matthias Kirschner, President of the Free Software Foundation Europe expresses: "One more time volunteers
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are taking over governments' and administrations' tasks to make Corona apps available to everyone. The FSFE thanks
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@jugendhacker, @mythsunwind, @rugk, @tzugen, Felix C. Stegerman and Marcus Hoffmann for their crucial work in tackling
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the pandemic. But it should not be on volunteers to do this job: we urge the government to quickly adapt its practices
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and make sure everyone can use such apps without any restrictions from the start. Furthermore, if ensured that solutions
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are published as Free Software, they can be adjusted and reused by other institutions around the world." </blockquote>
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<figure>
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<img src="https://pics.fsfe.org/uploads/big/912df5f4c7fcf6e695e339776e65eb1d.png" alt="Free Your Android"/>
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<figcaption>Free Your Android</figcaption>
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</figure>
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<p>Since the beginning of the Corona crisis, the FSFE has demanded that all apps released to tackle the crisis must be Free Software. Only Free
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Software offers enough transparency to validate complete data protection and compliant use; allowing trust to be established. Also, global problems
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need global solutions, and it is only Free Software that enables global code development in a legally safe and cooperative environment. Any
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proprietary solution will inevitably lead to countless isolated solutions and thereby waste energy and time. Besides global cooperation, Free
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Software licences allow sharing of code in any jurisdiction and for every device.</p>
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</body>
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<tags>
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<tag key="front-page"/>
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<tag key="corona">Corona</tag>
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<tag key="fya">Free Your Android</tag>
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</tags>
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<image url="https://pics.fsfe.org/uploads/big/912df5f4c7fcf6e695e339776e65eb1d.png" alt="Free Your Android"/>
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<translator/>
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</html>
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