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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I'm slowly building my own XMPP client, one key thing I'm running into trouble with is there seems to be no standard library for End to End Encryption other than Signal's own, I don't want to have to relicense my entire project for one dependency, I would rather keep my project Apache licensed. The other problem is voice and video options seem to be married to some Java specific library (Jingle) which is fine if you're using Java, but I'm not, seems nobody has implemented a solution to this in other languages that I'm interested in as well.

For the End to End I could try my best to implement it using existing libraries as pieces I can use, but I'm not comfortable doing that.

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Maybe someday the Snikket SDK[0] will be ready for use. I suppose you could look at it now anyway. Honeybee[1] is already using it for voice.

[0]: https://github.com/snikket-im/snikket-sdk [1]: https://git.sr.ht/~anjan/honeybee

Funnily enough honeybee is AGPL, but snikket is not, I will take a peek at Snikket, its interesting that it is in fact coded in Haxe. I am always fascinated with the capabilities of Haxe.

Let me know if you have any questions about the SDK (now called https://borogove.dev )

It doesn't have OMEMO in the native builds yet, but that will be happening this year.

We do have voice in the native builds but not video yet.

Honestly getting voice first would be a good stand out feature, even the glorious Pidgin struggles with it.

https://github.com/matrix-org/vodozemac

seems like to contain a reimplementation of the Signal Protocol in Rust - apache licensed.

Curious how they managed that, if its 'clean room' its fine, if they're looking at the source for Signal, that could be bad. Funnily enough, my client is in Rust.

it's clean room.

How can you claim something accurately that is impossible to prove?

You might be interested in this article by soatok [0] which discusses OMEMO and XMPP. Soatok has many reservations but I think if you use the most recent OMEMO version I think it should probably be fine.

Also of interest, OpenMLS [1]

[0] https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/

[1] https://github.com/openmls/openmls

I’m not 100% sure on this in the case of AGPL, but I think you don’t need to relicense your project if you include AGPL code; you only need to make sure your project respects all the freedoms the AGPL requires it to (in a suitable way).

So your own code would still be under Apache, and people could follow only the Apache conditions if they only use your code. But combined with the APGL part, the project as a whole would of course have to follow the APGL conditions.

GPL and AGPL typically imply that your entire project is licensed under those conditions is my understanding. I find it silly to licensed something MIT or BSD but pull in some GPL code, since now the entire thing needs to comply. GPL is about end-user freedom by force against the developer. Don't get me wrong I love the GPL, but if I want to use a specific license I rather stick to that license.

> you don’t need to relicense your project if you include AGPL code; you only need to make sure your project respects all the freedoms the AGPL requires it to (in a suitable way).

correct

It’s your choice of course, but in the messaging world of gatekeepers and walled gardens, I think AGPL makes the most sense. It’s a key tool we’re going to need if we want to be successful at having a federated network.

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