OpenAI is 501c3, should they also be required to release everything?
If it were expensive to release it, that would be a reason. But it costs roughly zero dollars to create a public repo on GitHub and a cron job to push to it once a day.
Making the system public potentially increases the likelihood of a hack, which would be bad for Signal users. But relying on this argument to keep the source secret is, I think, a confession that your security is below par. Or to put it the other way round: A secure software system remains secure even if its source code is public, so making your source public is a strong signal that you are confident in your security measures. Security isn't something I expect all non-profits to focus on, but I think it would be telling for Signal to hide behind this reason.
What other reasons are there?
If I were Signal I wouldn’t want either of those.
2. An app like Signal depends completely on network effects, so there's even less motivation for a community-fragmenting fork than in most OSS cases, where you'll notice that forks are already rare. There would have to be something very weird or contentious happening with the original codebase for people to want to fork it -- otherwise it's in no one's interests.
Actually you're mistaken. Under the 501(c)(3) tax code rules, they are required to act in the public good. Nobody has sued them to enforce this though, but I'd at least like them to acknowledge the game they're playing by ghosting us all on this.
Nevertheless the point stands - I don’t see what relationship company organizational mission has with their technical responsibilities. Indeed, if the open sourced everything, standing up a clone would be easier which creates funding risk due to a race to the bottom of people who didn’t invest into the R&D investing very little additional to compete.
> OpenAI is a 501c4 not a 501c3
> Also the structure is much more complicated for OpenAI.
“Apple” was a non-intimidating name that would appear early in the phone book. It had nothing to do with Newton, that logo came after the name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.
> According to Wozniak, Jobs proposed the name “Apple Computer” when he had just come back from Robert Friedland's All-One Farm in Oregon. Jobs told Walter Isaacson that he was "on one of my fruitarian diets," when he conceived of the name and thought "it sounded fun, spirited and not intimidating ... plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book."
Plus we all know the Beatles had that company name first.
Just because someone calls themselves something doesn't mean it is.
"Open" is a name that George Soros uses for a lot of the things he puts his billions into e.g. the Open Democracy blog.
I'll leave you to decide whether Soros' enterprises are really open.