Japan: An open source community built a contact tracing app but the government doesn't adopt the app and building different app. I expect the app won't be open sourced.
Looks nice! Why is "SAP" holding the copyright? In Italy, the government acquired the copyright of the app (it was donated by the company that won the tender to develop it).
However, the copyright holder can grant another party unlimited usage rights as well as waive the right to be mentioned as the actual copyright holder.
Both of these might apply here: SAP's and Deutsche Telekom's employees most likely have waived their right to be mentioned as individual copyright holders (which is a common stipulation in German employment contracts) while SAP and Deutsche Telekom have not, which is why they are mentioned as copyright holders instead of the Federal Republic of Germany.
SAP and Deutsche Telekom -- two large IT corporations -- are the main developers. I don't know why the government doesn't hold the copyright, maybe it should. They've released it as free software, though (Apache license).
As far as I know, in Germany copyright cannot be transferred. There is a special and limited exception for direct employees, so the company can hold the copyright, but I doubt that a client (like the government) could hold it.
IANAL, but AFAIK there is no exception for employees. The employee still holds the copyright, but there is usually a clause in the employment contract that gives the employer "unrestricted usage rights" for any copyrightable product of the employee.
Especially software developers should read those parts of their employment contracts carefully, as they may be overly broad and sometimes accompanied by weird clauses regarding their OSS work.
Not just unrestricted usage, exclusive unrestricted usage, which is why it could be a problem (instead of just being a simple case of dual licencing) if the contract claims rights to off-hours work.
German law has a clear distinction between authorship rights and usage rights. Usage rights, including reproduction, can be sold, rented, perhaps even taken illegally at gunpoint, I don't know. It's just your run off the mill intellectual property. But authorship rights cannot be transferred at all except through inheritance, it's simply impossible for A to pay B to relinquish the right to state that B is the creator of X. But outside of literature and music where special compensation schemes exist this is only about recognition and has zero economic relevance.
This authorship right is also only available to natural persons, so it's clearly not the reason why SAP and T-Systems are still claiming copyright. It just wasn't something the state buyer cared about and given that they apparently did care to get the code under Apache 2 I can't fault them, the result is almost like a reimentation of the recognition part for companies instead of natural persons.
Copyright (at least the closest German equivalent of it) is non-transferable and automatically belongs to the creator, so it isn't really meaningful anyway. That's what licenses are for.
3) Poland's solution was also open sourced very soon https://github.com/ProteGO-Safe . While it could have more privacy protective, as long as it will have an option to turn the contract tracing off I will use it. Unfortunately despite the fact that creators of this app are privacy conscious I only heard about it from negative articles. I checked it myself and they are using centralised tracing system, only because Apple/Google decentrilised one isn't ready and it is a main concern in disparaging articles. I'm not saying that currently Poland isn't going into autocracy, but it isn't a tool in this machine. However with 10k installs in a 40m country it is useless.
https://github.com/mamori-i-japan/mamori-i-japan-ios