How in the world did a walled garden ecosystem like Snap manage to embed itself so deeply into Linux culture? There needs to be a user and industry revolt against Snap for this sort of shenanigans.
No... there are many reasons to revolt against snap. That, and software that gets released on Snap Store only is definitely not worth using. Sorry for not having elaborated as to why snap sucks, but I have written so many comments on it already. I may look them up and bookmark them for future reference.
The snap distribution is unofficial. The Signal team only provides .deb files for Linux (seemingly built for Ubuntu Xenial) and any other distribution method on Linux is strictly done by volunteers.
If Signal is willing to leverage the DMCA to take down the Snap package, they could just as easily take down any other unofficial repository.
If you wish to solve this problem, write a letter to your favourite American legislator to protest the stupid way the DMCA is set up or contact Signal legal and tell them their use of the DMCA is bad for the open ecosystem that they operate in.
Someone freely choosing to grab an unofficial version of Signal from the store of their preference isn't the problem here.
The same was systemd did? The force of a multi-billion dollar company, where profit is far more important than doing it right?
Linux and OSS software became what it is, became the stable, secure powerhouse it is, literally dominating every aspect of computing, because profit was originally less important.
Look at Debian, which only ships when ready, and never ever to a fixed deadline.
Yet today, almost all private corps take and take and take, without every contributiong code and workers back.
Look at Ubuntu, a distro which literally could not even remotely exist without Debian, from which most of it is derived, and rebased to constantly.
To Ubuntu, a great leech of the OSS world, it is more important to give a crappy experience(snaps), than use Firefox LTS, for example.
So, do you think the adoption of systemd was motivated to a great extent by the influence of commercial companies' interest? Would you say that's true for distributions like Debian, which you gave as an example?
I'm not being facetious, it's just that this aspect has not been described to me so far, IIRC.
