this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2021
90 points (96.9% liked)
Privacy
31938 readers
942 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Being developed in secret or rejecting community PR's does not make a project closed source. They may be your requirements for an open source project, but it doesn't mean the code is closed source.
You're conflating two separate ideas and spreading misinformation to dissuade people away from a project you personally don't like. I find that behavior dishonest and think we can do better than that.
I don't have a stake in this, but here's my two cents:
It's highly unlikely they have not updated their backend code for the whole year that their public repo was silent. By the definition of open source, if they made changes to their production codebase and did not disclose them, it means that said codebase was proprietary for that time.
This is especially true for Signal's server, since it's licensed under AGPL-3.0. For ANYONE else using the server code, modifying their production server and not disclosing it for a year is a direct violation of the license's requirements and in the worst case could get them sued or the right to use the codebase revoked. The only reason that Signal themselves can get away with it is because they own the code so they're not bound by the license terms, but that means they were explicitly acting outside the bounds of their very own open source project.
A strawperson, really?