[LurkersWillLurk]

Could you explain what Signal is doing to discourage contributions?

[afroboy]

By not allowing 3rd parties apps to coexist with official signal app. (Using same servers)

[growse]

Signal placing restrictions on who can use their service has nothing to do with whether or not people can contribute to the codebase.

[hjek]

It does. There is less incentive to work on a Signal client fork if it can't be used to interoperate with the Signal service.

[growse]

That's a bit like saying there's less incentive to work on (for example) Elasticsearch, because you can't deploy your fork on Elastic Co's official managed service. It's nonsense.

[hjek]

There's a difference here between Elasticsearch and Signal, namely that that network effect is a very important factor with messaging apps.