Hacker News Reader

Comment by Xenograph | Hacker News Reader

> Not open source, only partly, just like Telegram.

Signal is completely open source. I'm not sure why you think it's only partly open source.

Quoting Wikipedia[1]:

> All Signal software are free and open-source. The clients are published under the GPLv3 license, while the server code is published under the AGPLv3 license.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)

View on HN

It's not even on f-droid. You install the binary they control and connect to the servers they run, it's literally a proprietary app, just like Telegram.

App being open-source means you can compile and build it yourself.

They've also gone to extreme lengths to prove that the software running on their servers has not been tampered with: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/#trust-but...

I think your doubts create very unreasonable expectations for Signal.

Telegram can be built locally too, and there are independent apps for it, and they have taken efforts within the security community to prove that it is secure.

Can you build and run the server locally?

You may be able to run Signal server from your build, but you won't be able to talk to users on Signal.org. Signal's official position is that it will never federate with others. So I don't understand how building and running a server locally is a step up in any way.

You can run your own signal server and compile the app to point to your own server instead of theirs.

It doesn't get much more open source than that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com