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by Pr0ject217 1288 days ago
"Real time collaboration systems such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Mattermost, Wire, Threema, WhatsApp and Signal are currently all closed proprietary systems - meaning they are walled gardens whereby all parties have to use the same vendor."

Signal is in this list. Isn't this false? The server and clients are here: https://github.com/signalapp

2 comments

Signal is (as far as I know) single-vendor, which they are confusingly calling “closed proprietary”
I wrote this sentence. “closed proprietary” here means that it’s not an open standard, and it’s not an open network you can connect your own clients to, and so it’s vendor-locked, and in the case of Signal there are gaps of years when they don’t release opensource code on the server.
I guess it's a bit debatable. It's more or less open source - apparently there have been long periods when it was closed source (I think when they added cryptocurrency nonsense) and also it's centralised so you have to use their servers.

I would say it's a bit disingenuous to put it in the same list as Teams, Slack and WhatsApp though.