The Signal Server repository hasn’t been updated since April 2020. There are a bunch of links about this here but I found this thread the most interesting.
To me, this is unforgivable behaviour. Signal always positioned themselves as “open source”, and the Server itself is under the best license for server software (AGPLv3 – which raises questions about the legality of this situation).
Signal’s whole approach to open source has constantly been underwhelming to say the least. Their budget-Apple attitude (secrecy, i.e. “we can never engage the community directly”, “we will never merge/accept PRs”, etc) has lead to its logical conclusion here, I guess. I have been somewhat of a “Signal apologist” thus far (I almost always defend them & I think a lot of criticism they get it very unfair) but yeah I’m over Signal now.
The thing is, I first thought that it was not updated frequently simply because the server side of Signal is really simple (it’s only role is to forward messages after all), so the code was very rarely touched.
However there seems to be people that have tried to run their own infrastructure that are not able to get some features to work.
Would it be even legal for them to run an updated version of the server without releasing it as FLOSS given the AGPL license?
If you are the sole owner of the copyright of some software you can do whatever you want with it. The license applies to others, not yourself.
Not well versed in this, so this may be inaccurate, but the other issue is that the Server relies on and uses other AGPLv3 software (e.g. storage-service), so if they want to use the latest versions of each they also have to release all the latest changes to the server under AGPLv3 (which is why Google avoid AGPL like the plague).
This is not true. That library appears to be entirely developed by Signal: https://github.com/signalapp/storage-service/graphs/contributors and if that’s the case they don’t have to follow any of the AGPL requirements because they own the copyright on it.
The legality of this is unclear. If their silence on this topic isn’t because they’re trying to do their best Apple role-play (which is most likely, imo), the cynic in me says it’s because they acknowledge they should publish the source ASAP in compliance with the AGPLv3.
do you have any links/more info about the people who had issues running their own infrastructure? ive been following Signal development pretty closely and all features im aware of make sense that they would not require a server code change. I’d love to see any actual technical details over the hysteria in this thread.
This thread linked by OP contains someone talking about attachment not working. I wasn’t able to find where I remember reading about someone not being able to make reactions work.
It actually seems like they have already been criticised in the past for being slow to release the server side code: https://community.signalusers.org/t/where-is-new-signal-server-code-why-not-share-signal/15068/2