Public bodies fail: Volunteers have to sacrifice free time to make CovPass app available to all


With the CovPass app, the EU digital COVID certificate for Corona vaccination can be used on smartphones. Until today, it was only available on Apple, Huawai and Google app stores due to proprietary dependencies. The support team of the CovPass app also argued that the app cannot be published in other app stores due to security reasons and to prevent misuse. This argumentation is not only misleading 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 software freedom on their devices. A group of volunteers worked heavily in the past weeks to make this app available to everyone and released it today on F-Droid, a Free Software app store.
To do so, the volunteers also removed proprietary Google libraries which are not necessary for the app to function. This additional work could have been prevented if the CovPass developers (who are paid with public funds) would not include such unnecessary proprietary libraries from the beginning. Furthermore, the company developing CovPass was unsupportive towards external developers, which increased the difficulty for the volunteers to contribute improvements. Because of this, improvements which would have required little effort by the original developers turned out to be a difficult task for volunteers. A positive example is the COVID Certificate, the official app for storing and presenting Swiss COVID certificates. It was developed by the Federal Office of Information Technology, Systems and Telecommunication (FOITT) on behalf 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.
-

- Login or register to post comments
Printer-friendly version- 1930 reads
PDF version
More in Tux Machines
- Highlights
- Front Page
- Latest Headlines
- Archive
- Recent comments
- All-Time Popular Stories
- Hot Topics
- New Members
digiKam 7.7.0 is released
After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release.
|
Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand
|
Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech
The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world.
Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility.
|
today's howtos
|








.svg_.png)
Content (where original) is available under CC-BY-SA, copyrighted by original author/s.

Recent comments
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago
1 year 11 weeks ago