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Comment by kioleanu | Hacker News Reader

Lucky for them that they’re not a public service in Germany, otherwise they would get sued for unfair competition (and lose): https://www.deskmodder.de/blog/2020/03/12/kostenlose-warnwet...

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This is comparing apples to pears, as the saying goes.

Only the free app was deemed anticompetitive. All the data is available: Geoservers: https://maps.dwd.de/geoserver/web/ (weather and warnings) https://cdc.dwd.de/geoserver/web/ (climate infomarmation) https://www.dwd.de/DE/leistungen/geodienste/geodienste.html (Overview)

You are also free to embed all the information from the website (maps, etc.) and there is also the raw data server: https://opendata.dwd.de/

For context, from the court ruling (BGH, DeepL translation):

  Originally, it was envisaged that all services provided by the DWD to the general public for public dissemination via modern means of communication, such as mobile devices via an app, as specified in Section 4 (1) DWDG should be free of charge (Explanatory Memorandum to the Government Draft of a First Law Amending the Law on the German Meteorological Service, BT-Drucks. 18/11533, S. 22). The Bundesrat has commented on this and raised competition law concerns about the tax-funded DWD making meteorological and climatological services available to the end consumer free of charge, because such a free charge constitutes an impediment to established private-sector providers and erects barriers to market entry for new providers or new offerings (explanatory memorandum to the government draft of a first law amending the law on the German Meteorological Service, BT-Drucks. 18/11533, S. 25). The version of Section 6 (2a) DWDG that has become law is based on the resolution recommendation and report of the Bundestag Committee on Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BT-Drucks. 18/12836, p. 2), according to which not all services provided by the DWD to the general public pursuant to Section 4 (1) DWDG should be free of charge, but only those pursuant to Section 4 (1) Nos. 3 and 7 DWDG.

Quite interesting reasoning given in how many places the state intervenes and how high taxes are.

Though then again not that surprising that they manage to publicly fund something and then ruin it, leaving the taxpayer in the worst condition. I believe there’s even no official source of laws online in Germany decades after the internet has made it cheap and easy to provide access to information.

No disagreement on the weird reasoning from me, but I don't think the part about the laws is true. gesetze-im-internet.de is, according to their Impress, run by the ministry of justice.

They law part is not true, according to the website they provide almost all of the German laws. The site is also linked from the ministry of justice itself, so it is definitely legit: https://www.bmj.de/DE/Service/GesetzeInternet/GesetzeInterne... They even have an RSS feed when laws are updated: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/aktuDienst.html (Funnily enough, they also say IE 6 does not support the RSS feed)

It’s legit but not complete, it’s not the official form (amtliche Fassung) and only the current laws, not the historic view. In Austria for instance RIS is much more complete: https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/

Edit: not directly related but a fun fact: in Switzerland you can get a copy of the constitutional laws for free at any bookstore and it’s supposed to be understandable for normal citizens and not only for lawyers.

Interesting, did not now about the amtliche Fassung. But the full archive with the amtliche Fassung is also published online for free, starting from 1949: https://www.bgbl.de/xaver/bgbl/start.xav

They also mention it on the gesetze-im-internet website: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/hinweise.html

It seems that the Austrian way is much better though.

Good point. It’s even worse with court decisions. Every lawyer needs access to them. But there is no free central source for them. Instead, the government has made a deal with a private company, which itself is a spin-off of a former government entity, which receives court decisions directly from the courts. And they then sell it as a membership to lawyers and professionals, with the profits going to that private company. It’s a government subsidized monopoly. On access to documents which were created by tax funded institutions. Which all citizens need for access to the court system. It is quite a disgrace.

I think the alternative would be much worse. It's perfectly fine as it is.

The person with the most freedom of speech in their bank accounts should be able to have the most say in how the government runs. Because they have most freedom of speech at stake.

They still publish all their data free of charge and are required to do so by law. For weather forecast, they dump all parameters of their recent model runs.

So I guess I'm saying that you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially...

Like Meteocool? https://github.com/v4lli/meteocool

Developed by a former colleague of mine. Open source and my favorite for 2h forecasts about upcoming rain in Germany.

The app „Tiny Weather Forecast Germany“ (https://codeberg.org/Starfish/TinyWeatherForecastGermany) seems to exactly make use of that. There are probably others, but it is the only one I found on F-Droid.

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