About the caching things. This is a flaw in the backend, not in the Frontend. If the backend is only relying on prefix cache you need to look for more fine grained cache solutions like HiCache or Lmcache. If your backend discards the whole cache because of one date is changed, you really can’t blame it on the Frontend. It is an implementation detail that you push to the wrong side.
Well we have already made the source code open and free and also encouraged the city to release an app with our source code as base. They weren’t interested in that. They would rather license the app, support and maintenance to us. We have quoted a fixed sum per month for that service and we plan to use that money to reimburse everyone sending PR:s we merge.
The law is not specific at all in regards to the format of the document. So to talk about an “API legally” has no meaning. In a private scenario it makes sense but what we are talking about here is public documents which are sent through an API. The city has responsibility to only send information I have (as a parent) legally right to see. How I parse it and present it is up to me as citizen (through an app or save it as json and upload to an excel file or such)
One implication of this project could be that government agencies in Sweden can not have private API:s.
To use more proprietary methods (private api:s) will have no effect on the constitutional law. You still have received a public document as a citizen.
If you encrypt it, you have to, at some point, also send the keys to the user. The key has the same legal protection as the rest of the document so encrypting the data has no implication on the legal discussion.
No, the app has no communication to us, we don’t even have a server. This means that from a legal standpoint we aren’t publishing any information. We only help our users to present their own data in a better format (than json).
(I am Christian Landgren, cofounder of the project)
You are right, the city believes they have ownership of the data, mainly because they fail to understand that they aren’t showing data in an app, but rather publishing data in an API. In Swedish law, once you have released data from a government, the receiver have the right to do whatever they want with the that data (as long as it isn’t violating any other laws).
The city in this case is responsible to check that the data is safe to share publicly and once they have- the data is not theirs. This is regulated in the constitutional law regulating free speech which goes back to year 1766.
This means that they can’t really apply the same logic as a private company can when publishing data in their api. A private company can still keep license over what can be done with the data they publish. A city can not do that because of these constitutional laws.
I am one of the programming parents, please help us get the word out to Wired, TechCrunch etc this ridiculous request can not be accepted. We have to put pressure on politicians to stop this now.
Thanks! Yes, we are investigating our legal options.
We just recently filed an appeal regarding getting access to the API documentation.
We have gotten a lot of PR in Sweden from the major news papers and tech press. So I think the pressure is building but if it is one thing Swedes are worried about is the appearance internationally. So help us getting this story to Wired, TechCrunch etc - that will make them crazy. We still live on the front page of Newsweek from 2000 - the capital of Internet. That might be true for the tech scene but definitely not the public sector.
We would rather concentrate our limited time and resources on making the product better instead of this crap but we have an amazing community that are helping us with both legal advice, artwork, communication, UX etc so we will continue the fight and will keep you updated here in Hacker News.
We did. We have a regex to catch all variants of spellings. But since our code is open they can easily select another variant. We could load our script dynamically but have chosen not to of security reasons. (And transparency).
Socials: - github.com/irony
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[ my public key: https://keybase.io/irony; my proof: https://keybase.io/irony/sigs/elgi4arJRc3AVP0OxBa0gw1RKNbJf_NdAYvjmBwulW8 ]