> i.e. Don't pretend to be "Open", altruistic, acting only in users security interests, selling benefits of open source, taking public interest donations, contributions, etc - and then prevent users from actually exercising simple neighborly freedoms.

What in the world do you think our motivation is, then? We're not a business, it's not like we're doing all of this to capture revenue. We could all be making orders of magnitude more working elsewhere. We're doing this because we believe it's the most effective way to make private communication ubiquitous, and it's working.

> How many Signal users don't have GCM or Play Store? 1%? Hardly an extreme server load burden. More so, it would have attracted code contributions to further improve Signal. Equating THAT with assault as you have, is rather fkng melodramatic.

What code contributions? If this is something you want to see in Signal, sure, submit a clean well-written PR and stick around to maintain it. The only contributions we've seen from this particular community haven't even begun to pass code review.

> Oh, wait, people are taking liberties and entitlements? Well what the hell do you think you're doing by using the GPL in the first place? What was the spirit and intent of the authors who wrote it? Do you think THAT is being respected?

Exactly, we make our code available under the GPL. That entitles you to use the code for whatever you would like under the terms of the license. It does not entitle you to use our service for your product, or to use our name for your product.

> Quite simply, don't give people nasty lock-in surprises. If you intend to be a closed, tightly-controlled cathedral of non-optional dependencies on large swathes of commercial mystery meat blobs - then just say so in the first place. If you start off with non-commercial protocols like SMS, then switch to GCM, plus have federation clearly in your plan, until you're big enough you don't have to care and can rip it - then give people an out that doesn't involve losing their whole network.

I think I've been pretty consistent in my position from the beginning. I've been saying the same things over and over at least since #127, which was early 2013. It's true that we wanted to pursue federation, and we did. But when we tried it with Cyanogen, it was a total nightmare that probably set us back a year in development time. So we've learned from our mistakes, which I think is a good thing. We'd all be better off if projects like XMPP had also learned from their mistakes.

> Whether you like it or not, a big part of the reason Signal attained the critical mass of users necessary to take it to the next level, was the promotion and backing of the FOSS community.

I don't know what you consider "the FOSS community," but I think of them as being the same people who have been sending me a torrent of verbal abuse, legal threats, and even death threats pretty much non-stop over the past three years. At no point have I wanted any part of that.

> The attack on open protocols, cooperation, standards and community is hence the most disappointing part. We wouldn't even be having this conversation, if we weren't here standing on the shoulders of giants of open protocols from IETF, W3C, etc. Signal's contribution was respected as one of those, until it transformed (or revealed?) itself as a closed monopoly.

Plenty of people have used the Signal source to build their own projects (some even in "the FOSS community" like SMSSecure), so I don't know how you can say it's closed. Plenty of other people have also come to our project with an understanding of our development goals, and have helped to contribute to making Signal something better. A very small vocal minority of FOSS moralists have decided that we should have to do whatever they want if they scream loudly enough, and have contributed very little of anything but verbal abuse.