May 20, 2016

Moxie Marlinspike, the software engineer best known for developing an open source end-to-end encrypted messaging app and partnering with companies such as Facebook and Google to popularize the adoption of his open source encrypted messaging protocol, has apologized to the free software community after a previously undisclosed meeting with the free software advocate and software engineer Richard Stallman.

"I'm sorry," said Moxie, in a press conference held shortly after the meeting, "I know that a lot of people are disappointed in Open Whisper Systems. We've tried to strike a practical balance between developing free software and getting the Signal protocol integrated into as many products as possible, so that more people can enjoy confidentiality in their communications. Today, I realize that this was a mistake."

Moxie went on to outline a new direction for Open Whisper Systems:

"We are abandoning our relationships with WhatsApp and Google, but we know that a lot of people feel that we have abused the trust you put in us and our project, so we're going further than that. Signal will no longer be available in the iOS Apple Store. Apple products are fundamentally incompatible with free software, and we simply cannot support that anymore. Signal desktop will no longer be available. We refuse give legitimacy to a company like Google, which spies on their users for profit, in any way, including using their browser to distribute software that prevents Google from spying on users. We are currently reviewing the viability of Signal for Android. Unfortunately, many phone vendors add proprietary after-market software to their Android ROMs, and we cannot support that."

Moxie added:

"We're developing a new version of Signal, which we call GNU/Signal. Users will be able to use the venerable text editor, Emacs, to chat with their friends. Following the Unix philosophy of small, powerful tools, GNU/Signal will encrypt messages with GnuPG and send them via IRC. We will support federated servers - I know that's important to a lot of you, and we hear you! But that's not all. We don't want to support proprietary software in any way. We don't want our free software libraries or protocols baked into proprietary applications, and we don't want our code to run on proprietary systems. Starting today, GNU/Signal will rm -rf your home directory if it detects contrib non-free in your /etc/apt/sources.list."

[applause]

Moxie:

"Thank you. We're also looking to partner with Lemote to offer a Lemote Yeeloong phone, so that you can use GNU/Signal on a device that only supports free software. Since the baseband firmware that's available on most handsets is proprietary, we are exploring other options for the Lemote YeeLoong phone, such as encrypted software defined radio over the amateur radio band... pending FCC approval. To recoup some of our research and development costs and to save money on the initial hardware run, our first version of the Lemote Yeeloong phone will have a teleprinter user interface. The teleprinter will be sold separately. These are very exciting times and we can't wait to get these phones into the hands of users around the world!"

Richard Stallman was not available to comment on this article. We tried to reach him before publication, but since he does not own a phone, this proved difficult.