You're welcome. I was under the impression that only the Canonical Snap backend is closed source but it's possible to use, manage and publish snaps without access to Canonical's Snapcraft.io or even access to the internet. Ubuntu Unity maintainer built his own snap store.

So it looks like the snap format, snapd, the core software, confinement tools like #Apparmor and even the snapcraft frontend are all open source. Criticising snap because of #Snapcraft looks like criticising flatpak due to some issue with #Flathub.

Btw, I personally love #flatpak and use it on all our home PCs : )

Snaps can have advantages over flatpaks like:

- support for CLI apps and system services

- built-in automatic updates

- prevents normal users from installing apps I think

Many of these will only make sense for large deployments if you have to manage hundreds of machines and when the users are not the owners...

Also, you and I might not care about government deployments but they're driving #Linux adoption especially in schools with a new generation of students growing up accustomed to #foss.