Funny to see Twitter and Facebook links on the bottom of the blog, pure privacy. lmao
No more Moxie Marlinspike? Maybe finally, a signal that accepts custom clients the way matrix and mastodon do?
I doubt it, somehow I feel it’s going to be even worse without him. I get a very Dorsey exits Twitter vibe from this, and that’s not a good thing…
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They can’t shut down 3rd party clients, but i heard moxie is rather oppose to them
I’m confused about this. Are these surviving because Moxie didn’t know about them, or because he changed his stance on alt clients?
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
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I think his main issue was re-distributing a recompiled version of the official Signal client but he got a bit carried away when arguing. So I guess as long as there is no chance that a 3rd party client is mistaken for the official one, it is being tolerated for now.
This is the first time I see Signal in Brazilian news since the controversy regarding WhatsApp’s policy change one year ago (Signal’s adoption is null here, while WhatsApp is king, with Telegram somewhere in between), all because “WhatsApp’s founder is back leading a messaging app”, so for now we can say this move is at least good marketing for them.
Does it mean WhatsApp at the helm of Signal?
Brian Acton was one of the founders of WhatsApp, but he left WhatsApp a few years ago. Supposedly, he regretted selling WhatsApp to Facebook, which is why he got involved in Signal.
