Signal on F-Droid

I will not bother you any longer with that :slight_smile:
Signal are not in the spirit of free software and it is better just to move to something else instead of wasting energy…It is sad to say so, but I will just continue using their “own” builds, and trying some things like xmpp, Matrix, Jami, DeltaChat… :upside_down_face:

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I don’t know if all upstream developers are notified of every fork published on f-droid, however they have never complained about it. The problems with libresignal arose when a request was made to include it in f-droid which caused the upstream developers to intervene directly, so going down the same path would probably lead to the same conclusion.

So yes:

To intervene means they were able to block the server access to the fork if published on Fdroid?

They intervened by not giving consent to use their servers or possibly to support the federation with other servers. I think they have the possibility to block access to the servers (but I’m not sure, since I’m not a programmer), also I think that in extreme cases they could have taken legal action (again it’s a guess, but if the fork doesn’t respect the terms of service I think it’s possible). And anyway the conclusion is always:

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As far as I am aware, they have no technical ability to block forks, and there are forks of Signal (e.g. Molly, and until 2018 Noise from CopperheadOS) that use their servers.

Signal’s demand to LibreSignal was actually two demands (stop using our servers, and stop using our trademarks), one of which (trademark) was legally actionable. Most Signal forks do not use the name Signal or any name similar to Signal for this reason (this is similar to the reason third party builds of Firefox are not named Firefox).

At most a third party app or fork would be a TOS violation (I haven’t read Signal’s TOS), however, as has been pointed out in this thread, F-Droid has no issue with hosting apps that violate TOS, such as NewPipe and Aurora Store.

My read of the situation, as it stands, is that F-Droid will only allow a Signal-compatible app if 1) Signal themselves allow them to publish Signal, or a fork of Signal, or 2) someone develops a clean-room reimplementation that includes no code owned by Signal. An alternate possibility 3) may be an alternate frontend using libsignal, but that depends on how F-Droid enforces its policy.

(It should be noted, of course, that Signal apparently gives its consent to forks not using their servers, but there is no practical reason for maintaining such an app, and any effort put into this should be put into an actual free-software-friendly chat network)

(IANAL)

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@Altons Yes, forks connecting to Signal’s server exist at Signal’s discretion and can in theory be banned at any time as they did with LibreSignal. This would be more of a legal issue as mentioned by @adrianmalacoda, I don’t think Signal has a technical means of preventing a server connection from an unofficial client.

Some folks have also mentioned Langis which still includes binary blobs, it just forces a websocket connection.

In summary Signal will never be on the main F-Droid repository unless the Signal developers want it to be, which they’ve been against so far (see my link in my first post above for why). There’s no technical reason why it can’t be there as patches exist to remove proprietary components and F-Droid could ship a Signal-signed reproducible build as it does for some other apps like Briar.

(Ironically Google Play Store will soon insist on Google-signed builds for new apps, if that rolls out to all apps in the future Signal might regret putting almost all their eggs in one proprietary basketl!)

Signal only wants official builds of Signal to connect to Signal servers

That sounds shady as fuck, ngl.

And what about Bitwarden? XD

It’s not possible to build it currently. We need to build xamarin-android from source which requires us to build .Net SDK from source. See Draft: Bitwarden (!8995) · Merge requests · F-Droid / Data · GitLab

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