Not everyone agrees that protecting a brand and controlling who connects to and uses a service you run and pay for is "being an asshole".
Lots of people pretty readily made the choice to move from WhatsApp to Signal when the benefits became clear. There's nothing stopping anyone from forking the client/server and running their own network - if there are meaningful benefits to end users of the fork, there should be no problem picking up traction.
If you don't want people to be able to fork your product, make it proprietary. Don't pretend to be open source and then attack people for exercising the rights that development model affords them.
Come on Drew, you can't do this here. We ban accounts that do. I don't want to ban you. You're smart and do valuable work and I can feel that your heart is in the right place (edit: at least I hope it isβhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26723629 is pretty mean), but your comments that break the HN guidelines set an incredibly shitty example. You may not be coming from a mean place but plenty of other commenters will take this kind of thing as a free pass into forum hell.
> "Protecting the brand and controlling who connects to your service" is what put Moxie in a position of power from which cryptocurrency garbage could be introduced to scam money from its users. That's all there is to it. I call that being an asshole.
I feel sad that you're apparently so angry about a piece of software.
> Nothing stops you from forking the network, except for the fact that none of the users come along. Signal holds its users hostage. I call that being an asshole.
The users have the choice to use it or not. If you build an alternative and noone uses it, it's not better. Like I said, more than a few people happily wandered over to signal from WhatsApp. Weren't those users "held hostage" by Facebook in the same way?
> Calling it open source and saying "anyone can fork it!", then suing anyone who dares mention the word Signal in their documentation? I call that being an asshole.
Lots of people pretty readily made the choice to move from WhatsApp to Signal when the benefits became clear. There's nothing stopping anyone from forking the client/server and running their own network - if there are meaningful benefits to end users of the fork, there should be no problem picking up traction.