It's not a licensing restriction, it's a terms of use for their network service. It's also not enforced. Their clients are open source, signal-cli uses a fork of the Android app's client library.
I cannot speak for moxie or Signal. I can speak for my own experiences, as the maintainer of a fork of signal-cli, and I have never seen any evidence that Signal's servers block signal-cli or my fork. I don't know about signal-cli but my fork clearly identifies itself in the user agent (and another field called the "signal agent") to the server. If they wanted to block me they could.
> If you think running servers is difficult and expensive (you're right), ask yourself why you feel entitled for us to run them for your product.
I don't get Moxie's stance. Aren't they running Signal as a public service? This sentence reads as if LibreSignal would be stealing profits from Signal by using later's servers. But there is no intention to raise profits / add monetization, is there?
signal-cli uses a clearly identifiable user agent [0] that could easily be blocked if Signal wanted to. signal-cli could escalate by trying to evade that kind of a block, but as it stands signal-cli has been operating without trouble for several years.
I meant they may ask some clients not to use their servers, but they don't have any enforcement mechanism in place beyond asking them to stop on github.
They can apply measures to the users. They are not doing it right now, but they could suddenly start. By the discussion on some reddit threads [1], this moxie guy looks sketchy to say the least.
But I support the devs who work on alternative clients. The official Electron app is just bad, especially on Wayland. Hope signal-cli will keep working.
Sorry what am I looking for in this 200 comment reddit thread? I don't see any comments from moxie himself, just a lot of other people claiming to know what moxie wants. Are there reports of specific issues with 3rd party clients or comments from a Signal employee or something?
Because open source is only used as a publicity tool by Signal. That's why their server code was abruptly closed sourced without announcement for a year (purportedly to add a scam cryptocurrency that Moxie has a conflict of interest in).
It's hard to trust a project with a divisive, evasive and concealing leader.
https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...
When did this stance change? Is there a current statement from moxie to that effect?