Oh come on kuschku, stop it with the deliberate misinformation about Signal! You bring nonsense like this up in just about every thread on Signal and it's becoming harder and harder to assume that you operate in good faith.
Moxie is most decidedly not against building the code yourself. He doesn't want anyone distributing forks or other clients using the official servers because a) that creates a giant hassle when updating the server and suddenly someone's fork doesn't work anymore and people will blame Signal, and b) if the client doesn't do what they want it to, people will blame Signal even though it's a third-party bug because it's got Signal in the name.
Moxie has publicly stated that he is against anyone publishing a third-party build of Signal.
He has openly and loudly ranted against F-Droid. Of course he's not against users building it for themselves, but he's publicly stated he won't allow F-Droid, or distributions, or anyone else, to build and publish the client, under the name Signal, so that it can connect to his servers.
noja said: "Give us a github repo and we can build it ourself" and I pointed out that moxie never opposed it when people build the code themselves. I'm not denying that he doesn't like it when people distribute their own builds (F-Droid) or forks (LibreSignal), and I'm not a fan of that policy either. But I understand why he's acting this way. If you read the issues you so kindly linked, he explains his reasons, and they are valid points to make even if I don't like their consequences. It's a pity that as a result, Signal is controlled by a small group of people in Silicon Valley, just like any other software product these days. I would like to have a good native desktop client just as much as you. But that's not a reason to misrepresent his position, or to inject it into only tangentially related discussions.
I’m interpreting it in the way that noja is writing it from the perspective of distributions. As in, just link us a repo, and we (Fedora) can include it. That interpretation might be wrong, and I might have misinterpreted it because I’ve been working with distro maintainers on getting some of my software into distributions recently.
But with that interpretation (and the context around that, where users asked about including it in distros), my arguments are certainly relevant.
> If you read the issues you so kindly linked, he explains his reasons, and they are valid points to make even if I don't like their consequences.
His points are basically irrelevant if compared to the risks that the centralization causes.
Users of distributions have to trust their distro anyway, for many other packages (including the kernel build) already, trusting them for Signal, too, actually reduces the number of parties you have to trust.
On the topic of LibreSignal, a fork with the only change being that it supports notifications without relying on proprietary libraries:
> I'm not OK with LibreSignal using our servers, and I'm not OK with LibreSignal using the name "Signal." You're free to use our source code for whatever you would like under the terms of the license, but you're not entitled to use our name or the service that we run.
