BHbheadmaster·Apr 24, 2023
According to this blogpost from 2020 [0], this AskUbuntu discussion [1], this random german blog [2] and many other search results of "canonical snap backend proprietary software", the snap backend is proprietary software. There is no official information from Canonical available (that I've managed to find), so I think we can reasonably assume all this correlating information is true.
According to this Ubuntu documentation [3], the "dedicated snap stores" are just Canonical-hosted snap stores with more granular control, which isn't equal to hosting your own snap store.
There is an open-source implementation of snap store [4] which (assuming it works and someone is using it) would fall under "reverse engineering the protocol" part of my post, because the guy who wrote it reverse engineered the protocol [5]. Assuming that it works, this is
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the only part of my post that is not completely accurate - it is technically possible to host your own snap server without reverse engineering the protocol yourself, but that's only because someone else already did it. But Canonical could change the protocol any time and render this implementation obsolete, as they've done in the past [6].
[0] https://hackaday.com/2020/06/24/whats-the-deal-with-snap-pac...
[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/1383583/is-it-true-that-snap...
[2] https://merlijn.sebrechts.be/blog/2020-08-02-why-one-snap-st...
[3] https://ubuntu.com/core/docs/dedicated-snap-stores
[4] https://github.com/freetocompute/kebe
[5] https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/announcing-project-kebe-open-so...
[6] https://github.com/noise/snapstore