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Most European countries develop their contract tracing apps as open source software.

The fragmented landscape is unfortunate. It's not just the code being developed that could benefit from a cooperative approach, the ethical, legal, medical and governance issues around these apps could benefit a lot from a shared European approach.

We have done this with the GDPR, we should collaborate on this as well.

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At this scale, collaboration would probably slow things down more than it helps. Finding a consensus among so many parties is hard. Building separate solutions first and then unifying them later might be better.

Maybe. I just don't understand why European developers didn't start by forking the austrian app, which has an apache license.

The Stopp Corona app is developed by the Austrian red cross and has already been successfully deployed and used. There's a lot of experience around it.

Why not begin with a fork and add your own requirements? Then slowly try to merge those upstream? Now the landscape is fragmented from the start. It's NIH all over the place.

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