this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2022
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Privacy
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Signal is free software, he can't technologically or legally stop forks or third party clients. All he can realistically do is complain about them
The software is FOSS but the servers are under their control and they refuse federation or unofficial clients.
I'm talking about actually blocking forks/third party clients on a technological level, not ToS or demands in github tickets. As far as I am aware he does not have that ability.
According to their readme the fork called Molly uses Signal's servers. Can he block Molly from using Signal's servers? Has he tried to?
He shut down LibreSignal: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issuecomment-217211165
While the Signal software itself is free software, my understanding is he trademarked the name Signal so you can't fork it without rebranding it (similar to what Mozilla does with Firefox and Rust), and if you rebrand he forbids you from using the OWS servers.
Trademark is an entirely different issue from copyright and it's my understanding that the trademark was the only legal avenue of attack he had against LibreSignal. Other forks of Signal such as Molly avoid using Signal's trademark for that reason