> He even gave a talk at C3 a couple years ago that was basically an hour long explanation for why he continued to think this way and that he hadn't changed his mind at all.
In that talk he explains why they don't decentralize their protocol or the ecosystem.
His concern is that a decentralized ecosystem means actively supporting third party implementations and having to achieve consensus when making changes, which slows down (or flat out stops) their ability to evolve the protocol and turn out new features.
That's a totally orthogonal issue to banning unofficial, unsupported clients.
> Additionally, they're more or less required to go after trademark violations if they get too big.
That's a trivial problem to solve: don't put Signal in your client name.
The unofficial clients are part of the ecosystem. Centralizing the ecosystem means centralizing the back ends and the clients.
It's not orthogonal at all, and he's talked at length about how he views every client connected to their servers as under his control, and his dislike for unofficial clients, and his willingness to squash them if they get too big.
Before signal he was head of security at Twitter which has a similar 'squash unofficial clients if they get too big' policy.
> That's a trivial problem to solve: don't put Signal in your client name.
In that talk he explains why they don't decentralize their protocol or the ecosystem.
His concern is that a decentralized ecosystem means actively supporting third party implementations and having to achieve consensus when making changes, which slows down (or flat out stops) their ability to evolve the protocol and turn out new features.
That's a totally orthogonal issue to banning unofficial, unsupported clients.
> Additionally, they're more or less required to go after trademark violations if they get too big.
That's a trivial problem to solve: don't put Signal in your client name.