Comment by moooo99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moooo99 | Hacker News Reader

This is not the official contract tracing app (that one can be found here https://github.com/corona-warn-app), its a commercial product that's only been "open sourced" under pressure of the public. Their service was financed be the same public figures that are now heavily pushing for its use.

And as one comment in the linked GitHub issue states, calling their license "open source" is really more of a marketing joke. Although the seem to have changed their restrictive license [1] to the GPL License [2]

Edit: Although its not the official apps, its heavily used by some official instances such as the health departments of some cities/states. The Luca app is financed by those departments purchasing a license. According to news, some licenses cost around 440k€ of taxpayer money [3]

[1] https://gitlab.com/lucaapp/android/-/commit/a30432ec4a01c2ca...

[2] https://gitlab.com/lucaapp/android/-/commit/4433884f00462bae...

[3] (German) https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/mecklenburg-vorpo...

I'd like to mention that while Belgium did not everything right.

Having a rather small company "devside" to build the app ( it had references and a credible portfolio of > 100 apps) was a good thing for a good price.

They won from those that build the app in Germany and wanted big belgian telecom to join for the infrastructure for a much higher cost. While they only needed to change some parameters and localize it.

Result: 1 week of delay ( 8 weeks was budgeted) and everything opensource from the start, is what I consider a good result.

Respect where it's due! Hat off

https://github.com/covid-be-app

>This is not the official contract tracing app (that one can be found here https://github.com/corona-warn-app)

This sounds like they do the same thing. But the luca app is for check-ins ( which are mostly still done with pen in paper in germany ). Check-ins are not supported by the official corona-warn-app (yet).

Also 2 states already purchased the app and 8 other announced to purchase it [1]. So if you live in one of these 10 states (out of 16) then you can consider the luca app to be official.

[1] (German) https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Corona-Apps-Die-wichtigsten...

> Check-ins are not supported by the official corona-warn-app (yet).

According to [1] version 2.0 will be released in two weeks and will support check-ins.

[1] (German) https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/corona-warn-app-check-in-10...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com