How in the world did a walled garden ecosystem like Snap manage to embed itself so deeply into Linux culture? There needs to be a user and industry revolt against Snap for this sort of shenanigans.
If Signal is willing to leverage the DMCA to take down the Snap package, they could just as easily take down any other unofficial repository.
If you wish to solve this problem, write a letter to your favourite American legislator to protest the stupid way the DMCA is set up or contact Signal legal and tell them their use of the DMCA is bad for the open ecosystem that they operate in.
Someone freely choosing to grab an unofficial version of Signal from the store of their preference isn't the problem here.
Linux and OSS software became what it is, became the stable, secure powerhouse it is, literally dominating every aspect of computing, because profit was originally less important.
Look at Debian, which only ships when ready, and never ever to a fixed deadline.
Yet today, almost all private corps take and take and take, without every contributiong code and workers back.
Look at Ubuntu, a distro which literally could not even remotely exist without Debian, from which most of it is derived, and rebased to constantly.
To Ubuntu, a great leech of the OSS world, it is more important to give a crappy experience(snaps), than use Firefox LTS, for example.
Good grief.
I'm not being facetious, it's just that this aspect has not been described to me so far, IIRC.
Debian had to support it, mostly because at the time Gnome, another Redhat controlled project, decided to depend upon systemd.
2. You're saying that Debian made this choice because of a choice by GNOME. But - was GNOME strong-armed by commercial interests?
3. AFAIK, The dependence of GNOME on systemd was broken quite easily (IIANM mostly by using a forked elogind).
Regardless of now, at the time, there was no alternative such as elogind.