this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2021
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Privacy
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I think the difference is it's not a federated platform so not many people really care about access to the server-side code. If I was hosting a lemmy instance I would obviously be frustrated if you withheld from all other instance admins as you'd be putting us at a disadvantage. Signal doesn't allow federation so the consequences aren't the same.
You're embellishing the story for added emotional value. What if instead you wrote, "users were angry, the Signal devs were busy, but eventually got around to publishing the latest code". You weren't there so you can't say that they didn't want to - or had the time to - publish the server code. You're implying malice when it doesn't have to be. Why? Maybe it was on their backlog and it was a task that nobody ever got around to? I dunno, I've been in situations like that before and it just sucks to hear people implying the Signal devs are doing shady things when it may simply be that they're human and not perfect. I've had times where our dev team was accused of being "lax" when we're all running at 110% but just can't get to that one thing that a small handful of people really want and are very vocal about.
I can tell you, publishing source code is as easy as typing git push. That they needed to "clean things up" at all in an ostensibly open source codebase is sus.
I'm going to disagree again.
I know how easy it is to type "git push". I've worked where we had 200+ things that were that "simple" but just weren't prioritized because of our small team. Also had to do thorough code reviews before we synced to our public repo. There's a hundred non-malicious reasons they delayed - including that they didn't yet want to make the monero stuff public yet. It's not uncommon to keep things from the public until they're ready, in case you decide to scrap the project and remove it last minute before you sync to your public repo and have people question something that is no longer valid/important. I guess I try to look at it from a more human perspective than immediately trying to tarnish people's intentions.
That simply means that development isn't out in the open. Why would you not push branches and do code reviews out in the open for an ostensibly open source project?
Correct. FOSS doesn't mean they have to develop it out in the open, only that they have to release the code for everyone else's benefit.
Because open source simply means the code is available. You're not forced to interact with anyone else just because something is open source.