I was looking for a good and quick file transfer method and stumbled upon Warp on Linux (flatpak). It says the app is open source but I did a quick Lemmy search and someone mentioned the protocol magic wormhole is closed.
Even though I found the application very useful, like I can transfer files even when connected to a VPN service, the closed source nature turns me off.
Also when operating without a VPN, wormhole connects via local network, my desktop is behind a firewall, but the transfer still happen! How does it do that without opening a port in f/w?
Any alternate suggestions are welcome as well.
Edit 1. The domain for the magic wormhole relay and transit server that most open source clients (like Warp) use is magic-wormhole.io. I have to check if they really are open source.
Edit 2. There seems to a mention of the magic-wormhole.io domain in their PyCon 2016 presentation.
I’m not familiar with warp, and couldn’t find it with a search. But I did find magic wormhole, and it appears to be MIT licensed, so it is open source. I also searched packages.debian.org and found it, so definitely open source.
As for firewalls: it might only block incoming connections, or has an exception for LAN hosts. I’d have to see the configuration to say more.
https://flathub.org/apps/app.drey.Warp
Thanks. I think I found its homepage, is it the same as this? That looks like part of Gnome, so should be open source too. (It’s maybe available in your operating system without needing a flatpak, if you would prefer it that way)
I have looked into how the firewall gets bypassed. To my knowledge they seems to be applying a method called firewall punch through in which the clients establish connection with each other using an external rendezvous server.