woelkchen , 1 year ago

You shifted your goalposts from “they’re working together so they can’t compete because (somehow) that’d drive them out of business” to “they’ve cooperated with other companies to make their services more secure” and are somehow acting like you were right.

I see you’re new to PR speak. If Signal’s commercial cooperation was solely “to improve other services”, all Signal code would be BSD-licensed and available for free to incorporate into any proprietary service, not AGPL + CLA with sublicensing clause. That’s not shifting any goalposts, that’s basic comprehension of PR speak and what such licensing models are for. Signal is working with Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, and in the past also Google when Allo was still a thing.

Second, there’s no fucking way they’d drive Google and Facebook out of business just by offering a superior service. Even if they did, wouldn’t that be good for them? How did you even come to that idea in the first place?

Not Google or Facebook as whole but their chat services. Those companies would have absolutely no incentive to pay Signal money for proprietary licenses. Google Allo is already dead, so Google is not paying any longer, unless Signal tech is incorporated into another product.

Dual-licensing with a CLA is nothing uncommon, neither is a non-profit being attached to a for-profit.