Every line of code is public.

December 2023 to June 2024 · Android, CLA, closed drawers

Libre, later

Revolt marketed an official native Android app while the source stayed closed. On 2 December 2023, Declan Chidlow (Vale) emailed Insert “on behalf of concerned Revolt users.” The team wiki published the thread. Vale wrote that the Android lead, Jennifer, had “explicitly stated that her primary motivation for keeping code proprietary is so she can collect praise,” had “skirted around any questions regarding the source availability of the Android app,” and met feedback with “a dismissive or snide response.” Discover and the admin panel “remain entirely closed source.” The CLA, Vale wrote, has historically been used “to abuse and manipulate open source projects into using closed source licenses.”

Insert’s reply, on the same page: the CLA exists so he can “Enforce the license on behalf of the contributors,” “Provide commerical licensing options. Which allows for alternative revenue streams,” and “Potentially make it easier to ship code that we can’t publish.” On Discover: “it makes business sense not to publish it here.” On the team: he would not remove people unless it was “truly detrimental,” because “everything is on a volunteer basis.”

May 2024: a lounge fight over the missing Android source and whether a CLA is FOSS. Insert’s 11 May write-up said they had “intentionally strip[ped] the privacy oriented branding” because there was still no E2EE, that the admin panel rewrite was AGPL because “nothing was blocking me from doing so,” and that Discover, anti-spam, and the old admin panel were still unpublished for time and branding. He proposed to sort licensing “by the end of May,” then to “Ignore the drama completely going forwards.” 7 June 2024 blog addendum: CLA dropped for a DCO, Android and admin panel released libre. Still owed: auxiliary projects, “namely Shield and Discover.”

Vale inquiry, archived · 11 May 2024 controversy, archived · June 2024 addendum · CLA repo

2024 · Discover

The near future

On Reddit, asked why Discover was non-free, Insert wrote: “we intend to release Discover with a libre license in the near future, keep a look out on our blog for when that happens.” That was July 2024. In December 2023 he had already written that publishing Discover “makes business sense” not to do. A third-party frontend, Discoverolt, called Discover “one of the few proprietary parts of otherwise FOSS service revolt.chat.” Fermi’s 2026 write-up still found source-first / FUTO-style components on an unlinked GitLab at git.is.horse, plus git.stoatinternal.com, which you cannot browse.

January 2026 · Admin panel

AGPL with a locked inner box

stoatchat/service-admin-panel#5 remains open. MathMan05: app/panel and server/modules “contain proprietary code within an aGPLv3 project which the aGPLv3 prohibits.” Not a lawsuit yet, because the authors can still relicense their own work. The moment an outside contributor lands, the ribbon tears.

Late 2022 onward · The Real World

The license they could not enforce

Andrew Tate’s paid platform “The Real World” ran a modified Revolt stack and did not publish the changes. Vale confirmed API responses still named Revolt. The team said they lacked resources to sue. TRW later leaked on the order of 800,000 user records after misconfiguring their own databases. Wikipedia lists the fork as the project’s controversy section. The exhibit is still “AGPL will protect you.”

October 2025 · F-Droid

The listing that walked off

After the rebrand, users on Lemmy reported the Android app disappearing from F-Droid. The Play Store early-access listing remained. A FOSS chat app whose mobile build you fetch from Google is a sentence the about page does not enjoy.