#signal server is now officially closed source, making it de facto a worse-looking telegram.
The problem is not just an AGPL violation here, even though the license explicitly requires to show the code if you are providing a service on top of it. According to AGPL-3, if you are using the service you are the user. Good luck anyway submitting such a request to them at this point.
The actual problem is that #signal is no longer willing to publicly share the sources of their server platform, which is what #signalapp users criticized the most about others in the past, #telegram in particular.
@danielinux @Arcaik @mmu_man also, telegram had at least plausible explanation ("we were going to make server-side source code open from the start, but then we were tipped that a certain government is going to use them to set up their own surveilled messenger and block Telegram on its territory, so that people would not complain too loud because there is a government-managed alternative which is just as great but surveilled; and we had to scrap our plans").
I don't think there is any explanation from Signal?
@Arcaik @danielinux @mmu_man The point was not about hijacking Telegram's infrastructure, the point was about hijacking Telegram's features.
For example, Russia tried to block Telegram a couple of years ago. Everybody just started using proxy servers and VPNs just because Telegram is so convenient, that it made sense to tolerate the inconvenience of block evasion.
Government tried to promote some affiliated messengers (e.g. TamTam: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%A2%D0%B0%D0%BC ), but they were extremely crappy because the government and its affiliated companies are just so incompetent, and nobody started using them.
In the end, the government had to give up and unblock Telegram 2 years later.
But if government would start its own Telegram clone back then, even if it was 100% surveilled (modifying client and server code to remove all and any encryption, which is much easier than creating your own messenger from scratch)? A lot of people would probably start using it, because they don't care much about surveillance. And other would have to follow because of the network effects.
