Jerod Santo: For the sake of conversation, let me play the bear for a minute with you, Alan, because as you said, internally it was not unanimous, so no doubt you had interesting conversations with your colleagues and leadership at Wire around this. One of the major points brought up by people who were skeptical of open sourcing - I think it’s a legitimate skepticism with regard to rip-offs. Rip-offs happen, and the more successful you are, the more they can happen.

In fact, just recently I was reading about a cryptocoin wallet called Coinomi, which I think is an Android-only thing now, and I was just reading about their history a little bit (these things interest me) and they were open source, I think it was GPL-ed even, and their Android application was all open source, on GitHub, and they were doing it all in the open… Which makes a lot of sense for a crypto wallet as well, because talk about you wanted to know what the coin is doing… Similar to an encryption type of a secure chat, you wanna know what’s going on under the hood, so it made sense for them to be open source. Well, what happened was other people who were being very capitalistic, decided they were going to just take that code, rename it, rebrand it, and put it on the Android Store.

This is not an isolated incident, we see this happening over and over. The Coinomi folks stopped open sourcing, they decided it wasn’t worth it for them anymore; I believe that repo is still on GitHub, but it hasn’t been updated in a few years, and they’ve marked it as inactive, so they’ve continued to develop the codebase closed, because they had these problems.

Was this a potential reason not to open source discussed at Wire? Because surely, if everything you do is in the open, somebody could just take all of your code and all that you’re doing and rebrand it and compete with you.