Hi,

For obvious trust and security reasons, I wonder if there is any hope of this application becoming open-source?

Regards
--
k

On the surface an open source is better for trust, unless you take into account the ease of source code manipulation that won't add trust rather opposite is true. So the best is to obtain some trust in the developer. Sounds strange but the most trust would have a hidden person that has no ties to known entity or even physical human as those conditions offer the best IRL physical security and peace of mind for the dev.

As for security - security through obscurity isn't meaningless and definitely adds positively to overall security of a product.

The only valid open source license for this type of project would be the GNU Affero GPL v3 or later. Network use must count as redistribution as to make sure we can sue for the source code when copyright trolls use it to hurt the network. We will never be as big as bittorrent if we are not open source.

Explain how this is the case? Everyone can see when code is changed in a public open source project.

Also how can we know a government won't force the dev to compromise his own application under a gag order?

Agreed 100%!

Most coders are illiterate to read C/C++ code. So diffs don't do a lot in this regard. Linux kernel has never ending stream of bugs and vulnerabilities...

In this particular case we can't be sure, unfortunately. But somehow the long dev's track record is telling he would most likely discard the dev efforts and withdraw from the projects entirely than to obey into submission mode. Donations aren't taxable are they? And how do we know Tor isn't monitored globally end-to-end down to the physical addresses on any interesting endpoint?