alt Hacker NewsNon profit doesn't necessitate open sourcing their whole product. If you don't like that, don't donate. As long as they are transparent about their decisions that is the only obligation they have.
Non profit doesn't necessitate open sourcing their whole product. If you don't like that, don't donate. As long as they are transparent about their decisions that is the only obligation they have.
Perhaps it shouldn't necessitate it, but I can't think of a good reason why not.
If it were expensive to release it, that would be a reason. But it costs roughly zero dollars to create a public repo on GitHub and a cron job to push to it once a day.
Making the system public potentially increases the likelihood of a hack, which would be bad for Signal users. But relying on this argument to keep the source secret is, I think, a confession that your security is below par. Or to put it the other way round: A secure software system remains secure even if its source code is public, so making your source public is a strong signal that you are confident in your security measures. Security isn't something I expect all non-profits to focus on, but I think it would be telling for Signal to hide behind this reason.
What other reasons are there?