Hacker News Reader

It's not under an open source license, though. Any idea why?

Because lawyers and a secretive, untrusting government.

Interestingly, much of the code is forked from Singapore's OpenTrace initiative, which is GPL3, so Australia's app is most likely a copyright violation. Whether anyone will take action is another story.

As far as I'm aware, the Australian government got permission from Singapore to make the fork in that way, so as long Singapore didn't accept external contributions (or if they did, under a contributor's agreement) then they're in the clear. GPL doesn't automatically make it impossible to copy code under other licenses. You can license code out in multiple ways. GPL is just the default license that can be used without explicit permission.

Thanks for the info, though I would have imagined that the government, which already has a trust deficit, might have mentioned this somewhere.

I feel like they did, but a quick Google can't turn it up - strange. But I agree they could have been more clear about it. Just one of many issues with how they've handled this situation.

The concept of open source is so horrible to them that it already pains them to just show the source publicly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com