Comment by ig1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ig1 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think their choice of GPL3 is a mistake; it's premised on the idea that people will only ever use one app to communicate and it'll be their app.

In reality that's never going to happen; people are always going to use multiple apps to communicate whether it's via photo sharing apps, games or something else.

We need a secure messaging infrastructure that transcends single apps - and that means it needs to be under a licence that can be integrated with both open source and closed source applications.

It's not just a case of integrating with consumer apps but also business apps. You want your secure messaging system to be able to connect to every CRM, help-desk, shopping etc. system and again that requires a more liberal licence than GPL3.

(Also it's not clear that you can legally distributed a GPL3 app on iOS)

I think GPLv3 is perfect in this scenario. There's no reason why you can't integrate it with a proprietary application or distribute it on iOS -- just purchase a proprietary license exception from the authors.

They don't seem to have copyright assignment from third party contributors so they wouldn't have the legal ability to do that.

Woa, that's a big big problem, then.

Hypothetically, if someone integrated this into their own proprietary app with hidden code under a proprietary license... how would you know it hadn't been compromised?

Open-source isn't very different from closed-source in terms of security unless users compile from source.

Even in the case of the original app, most people are downloading a pre-compiled binary from the Play store, which has a similar security concern.

I think GPL3 is a fine license for the project. Affero GPL would be even better.

Communication is fundamental to what humans do, and if you want secure communications, the USER needs access to the source for auditing purposes. The GPL gives that freedom & protection to the user. BSD et al. only gives freedom to developers, and when building a platform that purports to be secure, the code must be visible to everyone that uses it. That's what the GPL provides.

Or you could just implement their protocol and work with any code you want to. https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/wiki/ProtocolV2

Reply on news.ycombinator.com