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Comment by ssddanbrown | Hacker News Reader

Their website describes this as open source but their linked repo is under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 [1] so not commonly regarded as open source, but instead source available. They have been made aware of this [2]. Additionally, I think it may only be the front-end parts of their apps that are source available, I'm not sure the server-side parts of their app have sources published.

[1] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ [2] https://github.com/skiff-org/skiff-apps/issues/94

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Hello! Yes, we're working on this. Note that our UI, cryptography, and editor libraries are MIT licensed.

Good luck working on it!

Global preference for open source aside, whichever license you pick, I'd recommend visiting https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/solution/joinup-... for example, a great tool to find the appropriate license for your software.

https://reuse.software/tutorial/ is a great read and a wonderful initiative to help with licensing and compliance.

P.S: CC is not made for software.

I always end up with MPL whenever I do these kinds of selection guides and always wonder why it isn't more widely used. Is it because the lgpl covers a lot of the need for it, or because once you allow static linking you might as well go BSD?

Do you have a link to the MIT license of the editor? As far as I can see its also CC NC

Why does the claim remain 3 weeks after admitted false?

Free marketing at the expense of user trust

hello, how can I be sure the service mentioned above is really e2e encrypted ?

how can we verify that the server side code they/they will publish is what they are running on their servers?

Actually I'm doing something related to this. So considering e2ee by definition doesn't require the messenger/middleman to co-operate, you can turn any communication medium into an end to end encrypted one. So I made a fully offline, client-side browser extension (it can also be a copy paste console snippet) that hooks into the send button of a POC malicious chat app and performs a key exchange for you. Then it sets up hooks to automatically encrypt messages before sending it, and also decrypt messages you receive.

So visually it looks just like you're chatting normally, but the server gets only encrypted messages.

Open source does not mean anything in the first place. Terms like Libre or Free Software exist for a reason.

"Open source" is defined by this page, which has been around since the 1990s: https://opensource.org/osd/

Yet it is so poorly understood and you see open source mentioned like here when its not meeting such definition. The name is just plain bad.

They are most likely using the open source name to increase their media/marketing coverage, not because they don’t know what it actually means.

Which is why we have to keep fighting misuse, the same way those companies will fight for trademarks.

It is too late to change the name. Just because you and I would have chosen a different name if we could go back in time does not make it OK for you to assert that the name "does not mean anything in the first place".

Since the 1990s there has existed an entire non-profit organization dedicated to clarifying the meaning of the name.

Libre/free software is commonly defined by the FSF[1]. Open source is commonly defined by the OSI[2].

[1] https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/index.en.html

[2] https://opensource.org

Perhaps you mean "open source" doesn't mean anything to you.

Which is fine, but still quite surprising to hear in a hacker forum in 2023...

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