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Comment by hnarn | Hacker News Reader

Users are not entitled to a guarantee that this will never happen again, because Signal is free and open source software provided free of charge and without warranty.

The Android app is GPL licensed. The license clearly states:

> For the developers' and authors' protection, the GPL clearly explains that there is no warranty for this free software.

If you feel let down by open source software, you have many options available to you to make that software more reliable.

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Moxie Marlinspike is famously belligerent against Signal forks, so no, the license does not really help here.

It does. You are allowed to fork or reimplement the Signal client, and even distribute it, with the official Signal servers configured, so long as you do not infringe the Signal trademark.

They don't like forks using their servers, but it's the users who connect to their servers, not the fork publisher. Those users are permitted to connect via the TOS, which is independent from the GPL.

They also refuse to open source their server software.

This is the problem in my mind. Open source in words, but not spirit.

This is false https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

So are you telling me I can run my signal server and use it to communicate with others on the signal network?

I am telling you that "They also refuse to open source their server software." is false.

Signal typically delay releasing the server source code, so the latest version of the server is not open source. In one case it took them almost a year (no public commits between 20 April 2020 and 6 April 2021).

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/11101#iss...

Among the official reasons given was staying ahead of spammers. In this instance it was also speculated that the payment function which they were building into the server was to remain secret.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/11101#iss...

You can run your signal server and use it to communicate with others on your signal network.

The openness or otherwise of the code has literally nothing to do with the terms of use of any service being run.

No.

The product _is_ the network. By restricting access to the network, access to the product is also curtailed.

You originally asked about running your signal server. Now you're talking about the network that's hosted through Signal Inc's servers.

So what's your point? Do you think everyone should have a right to connect to their servers however they like, and the service operator can't exert any control over that?

You seem to be confusing open source for a federated protocol.

Signal is not federated, as an explicit design decision.

The source code for the server and the client are both free software.

Not only is it false as has already been pointed out, it doesn't matter at all. There is nothing stopping them from silently running a fork.

As far as I'm aware, I have to use the official server if I wish to communicate via the platform.

If this isn't true, I'd be very interested to learn more.

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