While looking for an app I stumbled upon this one. I followed much of the “messenger wars”, but I never heard of this one before. I know it’s Chinese but on paper it is pretty good:
- E2EE
- no phone number signup
- FOSS
- serverless
I tried it and it works well. Seems to have all the things people like but I never heard it mentioned before, any thoughts?
Who is suggesting the source is only available on request? You can be GPL-licensed & both hide the source from public and compile something into the source later. You can even request money to get the source and still be GPL & “open source”.
“Source available” is just the fallback term for software whose source is, surprise, available (publicly or not), but isn’t redistributable or allowed to be modified (or has restrictions about who can redistribute or modify). This is why I get leery about the usage of “open source” & having a positive connotation while “source available” does not even if it can offer similar guarantees (& one could argue it could offer more user freedoms by prohibiting the capitalist/exploitative elements–ala Commons Clause or similar–but then the software can’t fit the narrow “open source” definition). This sucks since in practice something like Peer Production License or Prosperity/Parity licenses have the spirit of open source that most users colloquially think of for the term while not being recognized by the OSI (who get to define the narrow usage of “open source”).
Digression aside: in terms of being able to read the source for auditing, “open source” does not necessarily guarantee any more availability than “source available” for the purpose assessing privacy.
(You can take your downvote back now)