[lorenzhs]

You're cherry-picking the bits of Jarwain's response that you like to respond to, ignoring the others, yet complain about the discussion culture and being down-voted (which is not appreciated on here) in your original post.

Moxie is taking issue with others using the name "Signal", as that would lead to confusion. Forking and using your own name and servers is totally okay with him.

And of course you can allow others from distributing apps that use your servers in the EU. There's a difference between using modified code with OWS servers (which might be okay in the EU, IANAL), and distributing apps that interface with OWS servers despite their demand that you do not (which is certainly not okay in the EU).

[kuschku]

Forking and using your own servers is exactly one of the things about XMPP Moxie hated si much that he created Signal in the first place!

The whole point why Moxie created it is so that everyone is on the same one, to avoid federation issues.

> stributing apps that interface with OWS servers despite their demand that you do not (which is certainly not okay in the EU).

I'm not a lawyer, but:

EU law very specifically allows you to create software interfacing with third party software or services, even if they tell you not to do so, and you can even decompile their software to learn how to do that interfacing (compare §69d UrhG), as long as you don't have to break their ToS doing so. (Which I don't, the only ones possibly breaking the ToS would be the users, and there's also a legal argument that you can't prevent users from modifying the software they use to access your service (see the AdBlockPlus vs. BILD case, LG Hamburg)).