Trump’s new social media platform found using Mastodon code

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2021/10/trumps-new-social-media-platform-found-using-mastodon-code/

by nanna • 5 years ago

512 491 5 years ago

blog.joinmastodon.org

shp0ngle• 5 years ago

Is this actually true? The network was available just for a short time and now is not anymore.

Yeah I thought the same thing. Someone pointed out that even creating test accounts probably qualifies as "over the networks."

But it seems silly. And unless mastodon is enforcing this clause against every other instance operator, I'm guessing this is just posturing.

Having said that, I'd like them to continue posturing and getting their concept of federated social media more traction.

knowfilter3• 5 years ago

Good point, because similar cases have been brought against Vizio and Tesla, among other, this clearly isn't just posturing.

ddaalluu1• 5 years ago

I wondered how he could've developed a social network in such a short time frame. I wouldn't be surprised if that was true, given his track record l.

wizzwizz47• 5 years ago

It's not that hard to develop a “social network”; it's basically just a web front-end to a database. The hard part is making it good, but if you have enough humans working behind the scenes, that can come later.

ddaalluu2• 5 years ago

Obviously developing a social network that is production ready and scales isn't done in 3 months. So what's your point?

usui3• 5 years ago

Does a history of enforcement help in cases like this? The article itself says that Truth Social is "antithetical" to Mastodon's values, but that there's nothing they can do about the usage of their software other than license violations. It sounds like they have a bias to enforce their license in this case.

If Mastodon has a weak history of enforcing their license to other organizations, does it weaken the case? I'm wondering if selective enforcement in the software-licensing world hurts the authority or credibility of a license, in the eyes of the law.

My wondering was somewhat inspired by the way Nintendo aggressively polices the appearance of its video game trademarks on places like YouTube and basically the rest of the internet. I hear an argument is that if they don't aggressively enforce their trademark policing, their legal position wouldn't be as strong if they want to pursue a big violation in the future.

deepsun• 5 years ago

If they had noted a legal enforcement, it would have sounded like threatening. They did the right thing and just noted the problem for now. Maybe the other party will fix the infringement and close the issue.

FemmeAndroid3• 5 years ago

No, unlike trademark law, copyright law does not require consistent enforcement to maintain. (Copyright law is the basis of the license.)

Also, stating a bias does not imply selective enforcement. I don’t think there are many examples of mastodon instances breaching the terms of the license, and certainly not at this scale.

cedilla• 5 years ago

In general, you don't have any obligation to enforce your rights.

There is the well-known exception of trademark law, but that's in the nature of the matter. If PepsiCo sells Coca-Cola and the Coca-Cola company doesn't react, then the trade mark obviously doesn't allow customers to identify genuine Coca-Cola.

throwaway0a5e2• 5 years ago

You don't have an obligation and in theory (and only in theory) it doesn't matter but a history of doing it anyway sure as shit helps in court.

PatentlyDC123• 5 years ago

Your example seems a bit off. Yes, Coca-cola is not required to enforce their trademark via legal means; however, they may lose the ability to prove infringement of the mark later (even in another case) if they do not police use of the mark. I think there was also a case or course of legal thought by some judges that the mark's owner owed a duty (fiduciary maybe?) to actively protect the mark from infringement or risk losing the trademark rights altogether.

poizan42• 5 years ago

I think this question was decided by SCOTUS in Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.:

In a 6-3 ruling, Justice Ginsburg declared that laches cannot be invoked as a bar to pursuing a claim for damages brought within §507(b)'s three-year window. However, in extraordinary circumstances, laches may curtail the relief equitably awarded at the very outset of litigation,

guipsp• 5 years ago

In case anyone doesn't know what laches is:

In common law legal systems, laches (/ˈlætʃɪz/ "latches", /ˈleɪtʃɪz/}; Law French: remissness, dilatoriness, from Old French laschesse) is a lack of diligence and activity in making a legal claim, or moving forward with legal enforcement of a right, particularly in regard to equity. This means that it is an unreasonable delay that can be viewed as prejudicing the opposing party. When asserted in litigation, it is an equity defense, that is, a defense to a claim for an equitable remedy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_%28equity%29?wprov=sfla...

ADifferentKyle2• 5 years ago

Would the latches doctrine really apply to separate enforcement cases though? My understanding is that doctrine would prevent me from enforcing my rights against a particular actor if I wait too long to enforce those rights… but waiting too long against one actor wouldn’t be relevant if I seek to enforce those rights against a separate actor in a separate case.

projektfu2• 5 years ago

It depends perhaps on whether it ends up in anti-SLAPP or something like that. But if, for example, you don't sue a hospital for showing your film to a group of children, but you do sue a school, the fact you didn't sue the hospital probably doesn't matter too much, even though your bias is against caretakers of healthy children as opposed to sick children.

Not a legal opinion, of course.

_jal• 5 years ago

SLAPP is a mechanism to short-circuit certain attacks on freedom of speech, it has nothing to do with intellectual property.

Miner49er4• 5 years ago

I'm not sure they have a weak history, though. They enforced their license just as aggressively against Gab.

snarf21• 5 years ago

I think the other factor is scale. If I copy Mastodon and violate ALL conditions of the license, no one will care. This version will get 100Ks of users and as such is prominent in people's mind as a "just like Mastodon" clone. People will form opinions on Mastodon based on this implementation.

gpm• 5 years ago

Can you point to a case of someone violating mastadon's license and them not pursuing it?

tialaramex4• 5 years ago

That trademark stuff is an excuse for wealthy litigious companies, it isn't actually how the law works and we should stop giving them a pass.

Disney, Nintendo and similar outfits can afford to go after people who weren't causing them any harm and so they do.

ncallaway7• 5 years ago

it isn't actually how the law works and we should stop giving them a pass.

That’s not accurate. Trademark law does require active policing and enforcement, and failure to enforce a trademark can be grounds for losing it.

Yes, big corps probably are more aggressive than the law requires, but it’s a pretty fuzzy, not super well defined, line.

rsynnott9• 5 years ago

If Mastodon has a weak history of enforcing their license to other organizations, does it weaken the case?

No; it’s normal for copyright violation to be selectively enforced. There are a very few rights bodies who enforce for everything (notably, the movie industry tends to do this) but in general copyright holders only go after big offenders.

papito3• 5 years ago

Expecting Donald Trump to observe the rules and norms that are not strictly enforced is extremely naive. He thinks only suckers do that. What does he do? He ignores all of that and gets ahead.

That's why I call people like him "termites of civilization". They slowly eat at the foundation, until the society itself collapses. We are already seeing it. The pandemic of selfishness and shamelessness, and overwhelming rudeness toward each other. Just look at what the service industry has to put up with - and it all came directly from the top. Donald Trump let everyone know that the rules are NOT for them, that it is totally OK to be a shit-tier human.

ed25519FUUU3• 5 years ago

So weird that everything started collapsing exactly on January 20th, 2017.

The people who have been in power for 40 years are definitely NOT the problem. It was just that last guy.

ed25519FUUU3• 5 years ago

The near universal agreement here (from non-lawyers) that lack of past enforcement won’t affect future enforcement is a signal to me that it actually might.

chrismeller• 5 years ago

Seems like the terms they quoted are boilerplate. I wouldn’t attribute this to malice.

anoonmoose2• 5 years ago

It'll be fair not to attribute it to malice once they start following the terms of the license...until then, all we know is what we can see

hartator• 5 years ago

The site is not officially up though.

FemmeAndroid3• 5 years ago

Despite them being boilerplate, they come along with the removal of the existing license text. Still, I’ll reserve final judgement until 30 days pass or this letter is acknowledged.

op00to2• 5 years ago

I would. It’s table stakes to follow the licenses of your software or else you may end up in court.

treme• 5 years ago

Ethereum classic moment for mastodon

NDizzle• 5 years ago

Petty.

invalidusernam3• 5 years ago

Calling a company out for breaking copyright law is not "petty". I suspect you only view it that way because of who is involved

dafoex2• 5 years ago

I suspect Mastodon is laying on the "big bad Trump" a little thick, here, but yes. I'm on the side of the GPL, not Trump or Mastodon, so all I want is Free Software licences to be respected.

rogual• 5 years ago

Do we really have to give this guy the #1 Hacker News story? He was fading into the background so nicely.

lynndotpy2• 5 years ago

This is interesting to me because it's both a high-profile violation of AGPL, and because it's (for better or for worse) a high-profile usage of Mastodon in the wild.

h2odragon5• 5 years ago

Gab was pretty high profile too, no?

pibechorro• 5 years ago

You mean the person who was the sitting president of the united states, who got deplatformed in unison by big tech social media, and is now fighting against censorship by using tech? Yeah, that is not relevant at all to hackernews /s

krapp• 5 years ago

I like how everyone always says "sitting President of the united states" when they mention Trump's deplatforming, as if to imply that being a sitting President gives Trump greater legal right to a social media account, or that deplatforming Trump was in some way an coup or overthrow of Trump's position as President, thus reinforcing the narrative of social media being an organized supranational conspiracy that poses a threat to national sovereignty itself.

It's these consistent, subtle details that make the Trumpist propaganda so effective. The other side needs to start taking notes.

parrellel3• 5 years ago

That is an interestingly context free take.

What did he do? What could he possibly have done, to get that to happen? It's like I wasn't sitting a mile from the capitol watching the WTOP national mall guy hiding behind a banister while the mob from his rally battered down the doors.

knowfilter3• 5 years ago

users cannot "disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site."

Sorry how does that count as "fighting against censorship?" Sounds like they can censor any user that disparages their platform (the way that Trump regularly disparaged Twitter, on Twitter.)

https://truthsocial.com/terms-of-service/

thinkcontext3• 5 years ago

He's not fading. He's firmly in control of the party and is purging those that won't repeat his election lies.

HKH24• 5 years ago

What a surprise that those people happen to be neocons.

Somehow we're supposed to believe George W. Bush is a good guy after all.

MadeThisToReply• 5 years ago

Enjoy this brief respite, because it won't be long until he's center of attention again.

kreeben• 5 years ago

I think that looking upon him as The One Who's Name We Shall Not Speak and effectively killing him on the internet will lead to him becoming a martyr among his supporters. Considering his diverse support from a number of different grass root and/or radical movements, I would say it could backfire on you, hard.

We've seen what powers he bestows. These will increase with martyrdom.

zaik• 5 years ago

Fading into insignificance does not make him a martyr.

MomoXenosaga3• 5 years ago

Anyone who thinks deplatforming works should read Goebbels.

op00to2• 5 years ago

No he is not fading into the background. He is still currently trying to overthrow the US government. He is attempting to delegitimize elections over the entire country. He is an evil man that will stop at nothing to regain power.

elzbardico• 5 years ago

Man, you know how this sound like the party line against Trotsky during Stalin's time? Please, let's keep our opposition to trump decent, lest we look like ridiculous pearl clutchers

nxm• 5 years ago

Lots of hyperboles there

herbst• 5 years ago

Isn't it still the same America that voted for him not to long ago? Censoring reality never was good idea

spiderfarmer• 5 years ago

Amplifying nonsense was never a good idea either.

JohnWhigham2• 5 years ago

People never miss an opportunity to reap karma from a "Trump Bad!" story

h2odragon5• 5 years ago

This (possible but technically not yet a) license violation has gotten more press for OSS licenses and enforcement than anything before, I think.

Certainly more press than the Vizio thing, which will actually impact a lot more people if anything comes of it.

CalChris• 5 years ago

TiVo

Linksys

Most of Oracle's business model.

EdwardDiego4• 5 years ago

Vizio?

h2odragon5• 5 years ago

TV maker Vizio sued for GPL infringement https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/20/vizio_gpl_lawsuit/

JohnWhigham2• 5 years ago

Amazon violating open source agreements to host their own version of the product and squeeze the life out of the original company? Not a peep.

People whose political opinions differ from my own use the software? This must be stopped at once.

boredumb• 5 years ago

The reaction of people towards political campaigns using facebook data to campaign for US president in 2012 vs 2016 is similarly amusing and migraine inducing.

lghh3• 5 years ago

I think calling open fascism something as simple as a "differing political opinion" a bit reductive.

Additionally, a former president (and future presidential hopeful) taking advantage of someone in this manor is more newsworthy than a multinational corporation.

Though, I agree with what I assume is also your opinion that that Amazon situation matters more.

dgb23• 5 years ago

Amazon violating open source agreements to host their own version of the product and squeeze the life out of the original company? Not a peep.

Many of us are pointing out Amazon's malpractices and ethical failures and there have been tons of articles from mainstream media talking about those as well.

Prominent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23065782

rsynnott9• 5 years ago

Early days yet, but that Amazon thing got FAR more coverage on this site than the Trump thing has so far.

Now in mainstream press you’re probably correct; this is an uncomplicated story involving an actor who everyone knows doing a fairly simple, obvious bad thing to a non-profit. Obviously that is a much better story than AWS (laypeople do not really know what this is) doing something potentially bad but rather more complex and murky to another for-profit company.

account422• 5 years ago

Which open source agreements has Amazon violated?

detaro• 5 years ago

some previous threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28961528

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29054451

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29044477

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29001573

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28959468

roenxi6• 5 years ago

One of Trump's biggest advantages is his enemies drastically over-react to things and end up looking stupid.

GPL violations are a serious business and Mastodon is well within their rights to ask for the code to be released. But the business hasn't even opened yet and they're already waving permanent revocation around. This sort of aggression in enforcing the GPL may actually be unprecedented.

martimarkov3• 5 years ago

But it is correct. I would love for all violations to be policed like this. I didn’t take time away from my family and life for someone else to profit. I did it ONLY because I’d knew what GPL would enforce.

The business opening or not does not matter here. GPL is enforced on the moment you publish underneath that license.

kkjjkgjjgg8• 5 years ago

What exactly are you hoping for or missing? No actual harm has been done to anybody. If "Truth Social" was online for real it would be different, but now? The beta users presumably didn't mind that they didn't have the source code.

I think the Mastodon people are merely hoping they can stop Trump, they are not really concerned about getting the source code.

_-david-_4• 5 years ago

It may not actually be correct if nobody who has access to the beta website has actually requested the code.

Consultant324524• 5 years ago

I agree with you. The following is my opinion of what happened, not an endorsement.

Trump's role in our history was primarily a f-you to the established players in both parties. He won because he made all the right people mad. And the more his enemies drastically over-react the more powerful he becomes.

nkozyra10• 5 years ago

But for all that superficial posturing, he accomplished very little of his agenda and generally ended up trying to play ball anyway. The anti-establishment game lasted until he entered the white House.

His primary accomplishment was building a base of angry people.

rvz2• 5 years ago

As painfully admitted by the comments here, it is virtually impossible for them to stop talking about Donald J. Trump and they have to even resort to censoring themselves as if he never existed.

So it just means that Donald J. Trump is in their minds 'rent-free'; forever.

gameswithgo• 5 years ago

Yeah I remember all those lectures about over reaction and we ended up with an insurrection and an entire half of our country convinced an election was stolen.

refurb5• 5 years ago

[snark]Almost lost the Republic on Jan 6th to a whole lot of shoving.[/snark]

But more seriously it looks like the government is having a hell of a time convicting anyone there of more than mischief and trespassing.

skocznymroczny• 5 years ago

One man's insurrection is another man's mostly peaceful protest.

dafoex2• 5 years ago

I would hazard to bet that most of those people involved in the insurrection only did so because of the number of violent protests that were met with underreaction in the previous year.

Still, america is a nation of extremes, and if something doesn't go their way they're all very quick to jump to "its a conspiracy against us" conclusion. A union bound together by nothing is doomed to fall apart from the slightest push.

jokethrowaway2• 5 years ago

The previous election was also accused to be stolen. If you look at tweets, both parties had complete trust in election integrity when it fitted their narrative and it was a complete fraud when it was convenient. Do you remember the Russian hackers?

Given how crappy USA election practices are (no voter IDs? mail ballot? workers counting ballots without witnesses?) I'm pretty sure there were instances of election fraud in both cases, it's just hard to establish how much it affected the result.

macinjosh6• 5 years ago

That is extremely hypocritical as the never-Trumpers claimed for 4 years Trump was an illegitimate President and continue to do so even after a multi-year investigation failed to prove any claim to that effect was true.

nkozyra10• 5 years ago

Where's the "advantage" in this instance?

macinjosh6• 5 years ago

This persons point is being proved by the downvotes. Get a grip HN.

jrootabega11• 5 years ago

As far as personal feelings are concerned, of course we would prefer if people so antithetical to our values did not use and benefit from our labour

And sensible people would prefer that license violations would be published and pursued fairly, and personal feelings kept personal, rather than creating a soft list of people and perspectives whose online/computing freedom is less important than others.

rp13• 5 years ago

That sounds like a personal feeling.

jrootabega11• 5 years ago

It's a personal feeling about the purpose of the license, not about the people who are using the license.

hn_throwaway_692• 5 years ago

I think this is a tu quoque fallacy.

In my view, it is OK to invoke personal feelings about whether personal feelings should be invoked in relation to the enforcement of a software license.

IiydAbITMvJkqKf2• 5 years ago

Then the mastodon devs shouldn't have picked the AGPL.

furyg3• 5 years ago

Just as Truth Social can use Mastodon's source code to spread lies and hate as long as they comply with the license, so can Mastodon use their own blog to disprove of Truth Social... as long as they enforce the license.

Their statement does not detract from their action.

jrootabega11• 5 years ago

I think it makes people believe they will enforce the license unevenly to satisfy their personal feelings about who is using it, as well as add an unwritten "these kinds of people are are not allowed to use our software" clause to their license.

usui3• 5 years ago

Is there an example of a software with a license with more overt political views being directly stated in the agreement ? I'm NOT saying that it's wrong to have personal views, or to make a statement about what Mastodon feels about Trump's Truth Social, but I am curious if there is software in wide-use with something like "No anti-vaxxers". So far the most ideology-enforcing licenses I know are mainly about the battle for Free Software or code availability. Just imagine if there was a license demanding a certain way to feel politically (other than open-source political views).

jrootabega11• 5 years ago

There's the json "don't use this for evil" license.

teddyh3• 5 years ago

IIRC, there were a lot of those licenses in the 1990s and early 2000s. They were mostly all weeded out in the license flame wars, largely initiated by system integrators and re-distributors who wanted to have a standardized set of licenses and not have to deal with any cute extra restrictions. Nowadays, software should use a license approved by OSI or FSF, or the software will find itself not being worth consideration.

IiydAbITMvJkqKf2• 5 years ago

GlovePIE's license forbids militaries from using it.

EdwardDiego4• 5 years ago

Well, in the licence, Apple wouldn't let me use iTunes to build nukes, so that was rude.

orblivion• 5 years ago

Well, there is the BipCot NoGov license, made by libertarians, that bans use by the government. Being committed libertarians, they don't enforce it with copyright law. I think it's mostly for humor.

https://bipcot.org/

smhenderson4• 5 years ago

Back in 2004 Fyodor, creator of nmap, terminated SCO's rights to use it based on their suit against IBM and general attacks on the Linux community. A very specific example, but one that immediately came to mind when reading your comment.

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/fyodor-terminates-sco-righ...

mijoharas3• 5 years ago

There are also a few that disallow the software to be used in nuclear facilities[0]

I think there is a fairly long tail of variations and similar [1]. As others have mentioned I think the additional restrictions aren't particularly popular.

[0] https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause-No-Nuclear-License-20...

[1] https://blueoakcouncil.org/list

rsynnott9• 5 years ago

Notoriously, JSLint, which can only be used for evil if you happen to be IBM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#%22Good,_not...

serial_dev• 5 years ago

But isn't it exactly what they say? Like "hey, I wish they didn't use Mastodon, but there's a license and they can use our software if they want to and they comply with the license"? Or did I misunderstand this?

Their only issue in the article is that they don't comply with the license. I believe the "personal feelings" paragraph was added so that they explain to some people that they don't want to/cannot prevent them from using Mastodon. I'm sure they had received emails like "how can you allow Trump to use your open source software", "stop him, he is evil, and if you allow him to use Mastodon, you are evil too".

jrootabega11• 5 years ago

I could understand that interpretation. I just don't believe it's true. I think the best thing to say, if anything was necessary to say, would have been "This action is meant to defend the license, and does not constitute a judgment of the user that is violating the license."

blitzar3• 5 years ago

if people so antithetical to our values

Values such as forking a public project, removing the logo, then claiming that the new project is proprietary private work that they did themselves.

People with values like that can fuck right off, but if they comply with the licence, they can use it.

gargron• 5 years ago

Would you care to finish reading the sentence you're quoting the first part of?

As far as personal feelings are concerned, of course we would prefer if people so antithetical to our values did not use and benefit from our labour, *but the reality of working on free software is that you give up the possibility of choosing who can and cannot use it from the get-go*, so in a practical sense *the only issue we can take with something like Truth Social is if they don’t even comply with the free software license* we release our work under.

d_theorist3• 5 years ago

Are the quoted terms actually incorrect or in violation of the license?

all source code ... are owned or controlled by us or licensed to us, and are protected by copyright and trademark laws

That's correct isn't it? The mastodon code would be licensed to them under the AGPL. So I am not sure this should be a source of "worry" in and of itself.

The potential issue appears to be that they have modified the mastodon code without publishing their modifications, which I believe might be a violation of the licensing terms (although I am certainly not an expert).

dmm2• 5 years ago

Even if you don't modify the sources you have to provide them to anyone who uses the service.

the-dude• 5 years ago

There is no service.

masklinn2• 5 years ago

I'm not sure it's correct, since they're reusing mastodon they should be clearly indicating that parts or all of the work is licensed under AGPLv3. And the claims you quote seem at best weasely if the entire thing is derivative of mastodon (and thus not in any way owned by truth social).

Per my reading of the AGPLv3 (though IANAL), section 5 seems to be rather thoroughly violated:

5. Conveying Modified Source Versions.

You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:

a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.

b) The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under this License and any conditions added under section 7. This requirement modifies the requirement in section 4 to "keep intact all notices".

c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.

d) If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display Appropriate Legal Notices; however, if the Program has interactive interfaces that do not display Appropriate Legal Notices, your work need not make them do so.

Truth seems to violate:

- 5 (a) by not having prominent notices that it's a Mastodon fork (assuming there's actual divergences from mastodon aside from the —— illegal —— white-labeling modifications)

- 5 (b) by not indicating that parts of it (and which) are under AGPLv3

- 5 (c) by not providing licensing terms for the mastodon derivation it must license out

- 5 (d) by having actually removed existing legal notice entirely

d_theorist3• 5 years ago

I agree that - on its face at least - the platform is probably in violation.

My point was just that I don't think the TS terms that Mastodon quotes in its blog post are incorrect.

red_trumpet• 5 years ago

On Oct 26, we sent a formal letter to Truth Social’s chief legal officer, requesting the source code to be made publicly available in compliance with the license. According to AGPLv3, after being notified by the copyright holder, Truth Social has 30 days to comply or the license may be permanently revoked.

IANAL, but this reads to me as if they don't comply in time[1], they might lose the license, rendering the statement incorrect.

[1] I don't know if they have to comply in 30 days, if the service is currently offline. Maybe they have 30 days after release?

d_theorist3• 5 years ago

Agreed that the statement would become incorrect if this outcome happens. Nevertheless, at the moment I believe the statement to be accurate.

jraph• 5 years ago

Besides the source code, attributions are missing if this quote is complete. The quote is not wrong I guess, but things are probably missing so the text in its entirety could be considered wrong, I guess too.

KingOfCoders• 5 years ago

"On Oct 26, we sent a formal letter to Truth Social’s chief legal officer, requesting the source code to be made publicly available in compliance with the license. According to AGPLv3, after being notified by the copyright holder, Truth Social has 30 days to comply or the license may be permanently revoked."

zdkl• 5 years ago

Wouldn't a semi-malicious actor be mostly in the clear if they provided the upstream code and a statement declaring they make no modifications to the provided source directly? If so, what would the recourse be? I can't imagine a court backing a demand to reveal <malicious actor>'s production systems based on what little external evidence one would have in these circumstances.

masklinn2• 5 years ago

Wouldn't a semi-malicious actor be mostly in the clear if they provided the upstream code and a statement declaring they make no modifications to the provided source directly?

Sure, but that seems to be belied on its face by them having actually stripped the present-by-default mentions & links:

neither the terms nor any other part of the website contained any references to Mastodon, nor any links to the source code, which are present in Mastodon’s user interface by default.

That, then, would be extremely strong evidence that they're lying, and I would expect more than enough for a legal injunction.

ncallaway7• 5 years ago

I can't imagine a court backing a demand to reveal <malicious actor>'s production systems based on what little external evidence one would have in these circumstances.

That’s not really how courts work. You don’t how to have all the evidence to support your claims when you file the lawsuit.

Rather, you can go to court saying “I have reason to believe Doe is doing thing X, it’s causing me harms Y, and we could prove it with Z”.

If the case is not dismissed at an early stage, then the discovery process is started. This gives subpoena power to both sides to discover relevant facts about the case, hold depositions under oath with relevant parties, and other means of gathering information that wouldn’t be available outside of the court process.

It’s very likely that the Truth Social source code would have to be turned over to the plaintiffs during the discovery process. Additionally, the plaintiffs lawyers would probably ask the Truth Social developers questions under oath about how the platform was developed.

The evidence gathered during discovery is what the judge would use to decide whether a license violation occurred, and to issue an order.

So, the public evidence available at the start of a civil court case doesn’t need to support the requests for relief.

kkjjkgjjgg8• 5 years ago

So they would still have 25 days left to provide the source code? Why then make a fuss now?

swiley• 5 years ago

Why don't they just publish the source?

nextlevelwizard• 5 years ago

Feel like title is click bait. At least I immediately thought that Mastodon had special clause that Ol' Trumpster was violating, but just not publishing source.

Yeah this is license violation, but pretty minor, very common, and harmless (assuming they do release the source now that they are made aware of the licensing agreement)

Miner49er4• 5 years ago

They violated every other clause of the license.

    a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.
    b) The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under this License and any conditions added under section 7. This requirement modifies the requirement in section 4 to "keep intact all notices".
    c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.
    d) If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display Appropriate Legal Notices; however, if the Program has interactive interfaces that do not display Appropriate Legal Notices, your work need not make them do so.

From my understanding, they didn't do any of these, and claimed the code as their own.

macinjosh6• 5 years ago

From my understanding, they didn't do any of these, and claimed the code as their own.

Where did they "claim the code" as their own? This project hasn't even launched yet. There is no published work for which they could do any of those things yet.

I'll get my pitchfork if the service is launched and they still haven't done these things.

im3w1l4• 5 years ago

Truth social is, as far as I'm aware, not launched. Thus I'm curious whether the AGPL "if you run a modified program on a server and let other users communicate with it there" has really been triggered.

Edit: This was based on the https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html explanation of the AGPL but the quote is not present in the license itself.

FemmeAndroid3• 5 years ago

They didn’t ‘officially launch’ but the platform was up and running. There isn’t a ‘you don’t need to comply if it’s an alpha test’ clause in the AGPL.

rubyist5eva3• 5 years ago

If you don't legally have access to the platform, you have no claim on license enforcement.

The platform wasn't officially launched, and the accounts were used by exploiting a misconfigured page.

They are under no obligation to release the source code, yet.

im3w1l4• 5 years ago

I initially had some misunderstandings based on the lay-explanations of the license. I think I finally have a correct understanding now.

The relevant portion of AGPL is section 13. "if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source".

Notice that the right to receive the source code belongs to the user. Not to the upstream author. So if you do run a private test, then only the people in your test have that right. Since this was not intended to be public, you could argue that the public does not have a right to the source.

Now if the program did not offer the source to the legitimate users that is indeed a violation, but the way to cure it is to offer the legitimate users the source.

havkd4• 5 years ago

Antithetical to your values why, because it’s supposedly going to be a free speech website (I’ll believe it when I see it), as opposed to the tightly moderated fediverse instances? Or is it just the guy? Or something else?

Anyway, it hasn’t launched yet, so why can’t this post wait until then?

JumpCrisscross2• 5 years ago

why can’t this post wait until then?

The group announcing signing a merger agreement with a now-two-billion-dollar SPAC [1] is the likely spark. It's an announcement of a change in economic magnitude. That can make previously-ignorable mistakes meaningful to pursue.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/21/trump-linked-spac-shares-soa...

havkd4• 5 years ago

I understand. But can this be fought in court as long as the website doesn’t even exist?

There is no indication that the website will infringe on this licence yet… it hasn’t launched yet!

fdschoeneman6• 5 years ago

The licence says "over the network" but it hasn't launched. I realize some people have made test accounts, so I suppose there's an issue there if they've made issues of similar behavior before, but I don't see how the merger agreement is relevant to the license.

micromacrofoot3• 5 years ago

so far most (all?) attempts to create a “conservative” social network end up as sites with large nazi userbases

either way, some people are already using the site and the license should apply - the source needs to be available to all of them

pyronik19• 5 years ago

hardly any worse than pure vileness of twitter.

randyrand2• 5 years ago

what site do “the nazis” use now? Do they just keep to themselves? or do they use other nazi forums.

throwaway420y• 5 years ago

I fail to see how a website that's not up yet is violating any licenses, can anyone tell me more about this ?

CTDOCodebases4• 5 years ago

The article states it was made available to a small subset of people.

I guess distribution is distribution even if it just handing a USB stick to a friend.

luke9112• 5 years ago

I've read the AGPL, and it says that it must be able to be distributed to every user of the software. Every person that uses Truth Social must be able to find the source code.

_-david-_4• 5 years ago

Has any person who has access to the site actually requested the source code? If not then there is no license violation right?

spamizbad• 5 years ago

The website was up, and claimed it was running proprietary software.

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

On the other hand Trump's network might be coopted to contribute to mastodon's development, since they have apparently billions in funding. And it would be very ironic if this ends up boosting the decentralized web.

option_greek• 5 years ago

That's the shortsightedness part of it. They should have tried to get them license compliant and may be even negotiated with them to keep it compatible with Mastodon network. It would have not only helped both parties but also introduced Mastodon to more non tech users. Instead, it appears to be the typical knee-jerk reaction for woke points. So now Mastodon is liberal, left leaning and want to control what people discuss? Get in queue folks. We already got twitter and facebook for that!

Miner49er4• 5 years ago

They are trying to get Truth Social to be compliant. That's the whole point.

monooso• 5 years ago

They should have tried to get them license compliant

That's precisely what Mastodon is trying to do. In fact, that's _all_ they're trying to do, as the article made clear.

INTPenis• 5 years ago

The instance in question was taken down almost as soon as it was discovered. And still the headlines keep coming. That's how strong the Trump name is.

paradite• 5 years ago

What if I deployed my own node and just changed some css styling? Do I also need to somehow open source the changes?

Edit: And what if I wrap it with another service, say a CDN, that changed some behaviour and styling (proxying, path rewrite, etc)?

mijoharas3• 5 years ago

1. yes.

2. I think no, but I believe this is a contentious point, and it depends on whether the "mastodon instance + CDN/proxy/whatever" constitutes a "derived work" or not.

s7r3• 5 years ago

In terms of "antithetical values", the machine learning project ml5js.org actually did something about this. They bound their open-source license to a Code of Conduct¹, which forbids the use of their ML software for (1) discriminating against marginalized communities, (2) building tools that disingenuously manipulate public opinion, (3) building tools of mass surveillance and prediction to repress the rights of people, and (4) building tools that control weapons, including tools that automate the deployment, operation, and targeting of weapons.

Reported violations of the Code of Conduct are sent to a Steering Committee, made up of members of the community, who determine if the reported project is in violation of the Code of Conduct. If so, the Committee takes steps to remedy the situation (e.g. realigning project with the Code of Conduct, or removing ml5.js from the project) — and if no resolution is found, the project falls out of compliance with the terms of the software license.

It's an interesting experiment.² Software is a tool to help us solve problems and reach desired outcomes. Licenses are also a tool to help us solve problems and reach desired outcomes. When desired outcomes exclude certain things (e.g. discrimination of marginalized communities, manipulation of public opinion, autonomous weapons, values antithetical to that of a community), it seems a Code of Conduct can also be a worthwhile tool to solve problems and support the outcomes that the community is working towards. (Of course, wisdom and governance are crucial and not to be taken for granted. Shout out DKP servers³ for showing some light there.)

¹ ml5.js Code of Conduct: https://github.com/ml5js/Code-of-Conduct/

² Analysis from KE Mitchell on ml5.js licensing: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/01/12/ml5js-Takes-a-Stan...

³ On Dragon Kill Points and governance systems in World of Warcraft: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=958945

roenxi6• 5 years ago

If all software was licensed that way, 5-15 years would pass then suddenly there'd be a whole bunch of "Wow, Stallman was right again! We should have been using free software licenses!" style articles.

Restricting software use to only people approved by the creators is a terrible idea. Society has to operate with some level of trust that even people we disagree with, using methods we don't approve of, have the potential to improve the world. Otherwise the situation will get worse.

geewee• 5 years ago

Why? In what world does using software to marginalize people or mislead the public create a better world?

jlangenauer• 5 years ago

Why? The creators created the software, they can put any conditions they please on how others might use it. They're under no moral or legal obligation to allow people to use the fruits of their labors, except as they permit.

veltas• 5 years ago

Not just Stallman, it's incompatible with the OSI definition of open source.

s7r3• 5 years ago

Restricting software use to only people approved by the creators is a terrible idea.

Everyone is free to use the software. If a project is found to be in violation of the Code of Conduct (e.g. discriminating against marginalized communities, manipulating public opinion, automating weapons) than the community developing the software takes steps to remedy the problem with the reported violator, or the project falls out of compliance with the license.

I agree with your hesitance and apprehension of how it could could go wrong. There is significant responsibility in interpretation and governance, presumably (though in some cases, it could be pretty clear — like with weapons.). And in cases with consequences related to violence and weapons and oppression, it also seems like a step in the right direction.

In the context of some software, this may not fit or be useful. In other libraries, it could also be incredibly important and impactful.

It also requires stepping out of our innocence. It requires accepting responsibility for interpretation, decision-making, and governance — and that sometimes, some of our decisions may not be right. Sometimes, we have to make decisions even when the answers aren't clear. This is part of our personal lives, being in families, being in communities, being in companies. It's just decision-making at the end of the day — call it what you want (e.g. governance, licensing, restricting). Why shouldn't that kind of decisionmaking and responsibility be part of software and the communities building software — especially given its growing impact on the world around us?

Society has to operate with some level of trust that even people we disagree with

This is well said. I would just note that ml5.js's approach leaves room for disagreement, and a pathway to hear and understand and reconcile disagreement, before any action is taken. The devil is in implementation — though it does seem wise, and the community has likely thought through and accounted for more of the problems than we have. They probably had discussions just like this, actually, with perspectives just like ours.

mdp20215• 5 years ago

Your point about the «terrible idea», including the statement «Otherwise the situation will get worse», requires more defence. There is an issue with undesirable use of technology, so many are fearing future regret (Alfred Nobel in front of the title 'Le marchand de la mort est mort') - this has to be assessed, and is not solved by an appeal to trust (which is exactly what is lacking). The fear is about the opposite to «improv[ing] the world».

Ardren4• 5 years ago

If all software was licensed that way, 5-15 years would pass then suddenly there'd be a whole bunch of "Wow, Stallman was right again! We should have been using free software licenses!" style articles.

Why do you think that would be the case? If the license doesn't achieve what the creator wanted, then they can just change it. It's not up to the greater community to decide what the best license is for other peoples projects.

It sounds like you have your own idea of what will "improve the world" and want other people to license their work to match with it.

Dumblydorr• 5 years ago

Is it really a terrible idea to restrict your software from being used to control weaponry? To spread lies about science, like climate change denial or vaccine lies? To host child pornography sharing?

These above scenarios amount to handing criminals and bad actors powerful technological tools which allow them to increase harms done to society. This is a software company's choice, there is no law that states a company must provide its software to whomever, even if they have evil intent.

nuerow8• 5 years ago

Restricting software use to only people approved by the creators is a terrible idea.

Isn't that the whole point of author's rights/intellectual property in general and software licenses in particular?

krageon3• 5 years ago

Society has to operate with some level of trust that even people we disagree with, using methods we don't approve of, have the potential to improve the world.

This is emphatically wrong. For at least two to three generations society has operated with a large part of it understanding that another large part of it is unethical and wrong (i.e. conscientious objectors and folks that sympathise but cannot bring up the courage to do so). If being so understanding is what made the world better, then 1930 would truly have been a golden age.

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

Stallman was always right

archagon• 5 years ago

Personally, I can’t abide my software being used to harm others. My definition of “harm” will certainly differ from that of others, but for important software, I’d be happy to append a “not for military use” clause to the OSS license, which would beat keeping the software closed source and entirely proprietary.

lorabe4• 5 years ago

Not really, it goes withing the framework of freedom to define what actions are to be allowed or not under certain licenses.

There is nothing wrong with making, let's say, a licence that prohibits the use of its adhered product for activities such as the development of nuclear weapons.

EGreg• 5 years ago

Reminds me of the dispute between Douglas Crockford (the inventor of JSON and writer of JSON2 parser) and the open source movement…

The parser had a cheeky requirement that made it incompatible with various software licenses:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3693108

Also the same Douglas Crockford on refusing to change JSONLint 2’s strictness:

https://twitter.com/martinkl/status/43086204350119936?s=21

rrss2• 5 years ago

Sure, interesting idea, but this is not open source as it is widely understood or as it is defined by OSI.

bjt2n3904• 5 years ago

Wasn't Hacker News all up in arms over the SQLite "Code of Conduct" that borrowed too heavily from the Bible?

This is similar nonsense. You might as well have a "Don't Be Evil™" code of conduct that is as follows:

1. You may not use this software to do evil.

2. I decide what is evil.

brailsafe• 5 years ago

discriminating against marginalized communities

Only marginalised communities?

taneq2• 5 years ago

The way things are going, they’re probably defining discrimination as any negative outcome for a member of a marginalised community (where ‘marginalised’ is also defined on their terms.)

Robin_Message2• 5 years ago

The licence surely implies any discrimination being forbidden.

Proof by contradiction: if someone uses this software to discriminate against an apparently non-marginalised community, then that community would be being marginalised in at least one way (by this usage), thus making that community a marginalised community, thus making that usage against the licence.

MomoXenosaga3• 5 years ago

I wonder just how far people are willing to take their wokeism. So far neither the Pentagon nor CIA has had any problems recruiting scientists and software developers.

With idealism I've discovered that words are rarely followed by action.

coldacid• 5 years ago

All the woke are doing are ensuring that all hell will break loose when the pendulum swings back.

HideousKojima2• 5 years ago

That's a surefire way to make sure proprietary software solutions win:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed...

I've stated some of my views about other political issues, about activities that are or aren't unjust. Your views might differ, and that's precisely the point. If we accepted programs with usage restrictions as part of a free operating system such as GNU, people would come up with lots of different usage restrictions. There would be programs banned for use in meat processing, programs banned only for pigs, programs banned only for cows, and programs limited to kosher foods. Someone who hates spinach might write a program allowing use for processing any vegetable except spinach, while a Popeye fan might allow use only for spinach. There would be music programs allowed only for rap music, and others allowed only for classical music.
The result would be a system that you could not count on for any purpose. For each task you wish to do, you'd have to check lots of licenses to see which parts of your system are off limits for that task.
How would users respond to that? I think most of them would use proprietary systems. Allowing any usage restrictions whatsoever in free software would mainly push users towards nonfree software. Trying to stop users from doing something through usage restrictions in free software is as ineffective as pushing on an object through a long, soft, straight piece of spaghetti.
It is worse than ineffective; it is wrong too, because software developers should not exercise such power over what users do. Imagine selling pens with conditions about what you can write with them; that would be noisome, and we should not stand for it. Likewise for general software. If you make something that is generally useful, like a pen, people will use it to write all sorts of things, even horrible things such as orders to torture a dissident; but you must not have the power to control people's activities through their pens. It is the same for a text editor, compiler or kernel.
You do have an opportunity to determine what your software can be used for: when you decide what functionality to implement. You can write programs that lend themselves mainly to uses you think are positive, and you have no obligation to write any features that might lend themselves to activities you disapprove of.

Ardren4• 5 years ago

I don't think their choice of license had much to do with losing the battle with "proprietary software"...

mkotowski• 5 years ago

To be honest, deciding if you are not breaking ml5.js Code of Conduct feels like a material for full-time research on its own.

How to define who is marginalized by whom? And by what actor? Creators of the code, users, customers? What if both groups think they are marginalized by the opposing one? Who can use the code then?

Forbidding manipulation of public opinion is also too lax of a term to use that way. Look for example into such polarizing topics like pro-life/pro-choice debate worldwide. Each side can accuse the other of manipulating the public while still believing they are in the right.

Controlling weapons is probably the point that could be easily defended in terms of being rather concrete, but I think it could be placed as some kind of custom license (IANAL).

Putting things that should be confined to decisions made by some kind of regulatory body like a country’s judicial system in a text file is rather a pointless signaling in my opinion, although it can be easily understood why somebody would want to include something like that.

danShumway3• 5 years ago

open-source license to a Code of Conduct

Just a minor note, a license that works this way can't be accurately described as Open Source. It's more accurate to say that ml5.js is an Ethical Source license. See https://ethicalsource.dev/ for more details.

I'm sure this is a name that will get debated as it becomes more common. But personally, speaking just as an outside observer I really like the name Ethical Source. I think it gets across what the movement's priorities are (open access with ethical restrictions). I think it gets across the movement's connections to the Open Source movement and its origins. But it does so in a way that doesn't promote confusion around the fact that the movement does have different philosophies and is a separate licensing scheme. It's a movement that sprung out of a specific objection to Open Source licensing philosophy (https://opensource.org/faq#evil) and makes a targeted pivot (Open->Ethical) to address the concerns it has.

superdisk2• 5 years ago

I prefer the classic term, PROPRIETARY software. At least be honest about what this is.

s7r3• 5 years ago

Well said, I didn't mean to misconstrue! Thanks for sharing this information and vocabulary. Indeed, Ethical Source does seem to be quite communicative. It also probably provides enough of a signal, when it comes to choosing licenses, if a decision-maker has some level of self-awareness. (e.g. If I feel my project doesn't have a problem meeting an "Ethical" standard, I'll feel comfortable choosing Ethical Source. Otherwise, I'll choose Open Source.)

It could also be a signal to end-users, community members, customers, and other stakeholders as well — who may prefer technologies built with Ethical Source, as compared to Open Source, which seems like it could be similar to patterns we see in the real world around "Fair Trade" and "Ethically Sourced" etc.

kkjjkgjjgg8• 5 years ago

So who decides what is "disingeniously manipulating public opinion"?

I think for many people that statement is too vague and hence the risk of using that software is too high.

quotemstr4• 5 years ago

disingeniously manipulating public opinion

This is code for promoting viewpoints that the creators dislike.

timwaagh• 5 years ago

Isn't that software closed in all but name. I mean since they determine themselves whether anything violates the code of conduct they can basically ban usage of the software retroactively. If I use it to make a gazillion dollars through selling stuffed animals they would claim it violates code of conduct and I could get back into compliance by paying the committee the gazillion dollars and I'd have no recourse even though to an outside observer selling stuffed animals doesn't do any of the things banned by the code of conduct.

naasking• 5 years ago

(1) discriminating against marginalized communities, (2) building tools that disingenuously manipulate public opinion, (3) building tools of mass surveillance and prediction to repress the rights of people, and (4) building tools that control weapons, including tools that automate the deployment, operation, and targeting of weapons.

Who decides whether the license was violated? That is, what counts as discrimination, what counts as "marginalized", do those differ by country, what counts as "disingenuously manipulating public opinion", what counts as "repressing rights", what counts as "tools that automate the deployment, operation and targeting of weapons".

For instance, can a nuts and bolts manufacturer whose nuts and bolts might be used to assemble pieces of a weapon use that ML project to do quality control of their products? Seems like an unsolvable quagmire.

veeti• 5 years ago

The ultimate irony is that this project is apparently sponsored by Google [1], a known peddler of mass surveillance to repress the rights of people.

[1] https://github.com/ml5js/Code-of-Conduct/issues/2

cabalamat8• 5 years ago

They bound their open-source license to a Code of Conduct

This isn't open source software, because the Steering Committee can arbitrarily take away anyone's right to use the software any time they like.

Chris20484• 5 years ago

The usual meaning of "code-of-conduct" is a conduct guide for contributors to a project; In this case it appears to be for users of the software, and specific to project usage rather than user conduct (I think?).

Furthermore, if non-compliance with the CoC means: " the project falls out of compliance with the terms of the software license" then the terms of the CoC are the terms of the license.

Now, one solution would just to be to grant the steering committee the power to revoke the license, but this is not clearly the case:

If anyone notifies you in writing that you have not complied with the Code of Conduct, you can keep your license by taking all practical steps to comply within 30 days after the notice. If you do not do so, and the ml5.js Code of Conduct Committee (or its equivalent or successor) agrees that you are in violation of the Code of Conduct, your license ends immediately.

So, what if someone (anyone?) notifies you that you are in violation, but you don't agree? I'd argue "all practical steps to comply" in the case that you are not violating the CoC is to do nothing. Even if the steering committee does agree you are in violation, this is not the only condition for ending the licence:

If you do not [take all practical steps to comply with the CoC], and the [Committee] agrees that you are in violation..

These things are usually written in legalese for a reason; the "and" is ambiguous, but the usual interpretation is that both conditions need to be true, hence the committee decision is irrelevant if the first condition is not met, and who decides that?

scohesc• 5 years ago

That sounds like a bunch of very wishy-washy vague terms that open source licenses shouldn't implement.

You're going to get a lot of companies that don't want to deal with the legal hassle of these special terms not contributing to open source software.

Whether the developers want that or not, I guess that's their choice.

theHIDninja• 5 years ago

You will have to demonstrate how a social media platform that hasn't even launched yet has "discriminated againt marginalized communities". They haven't.

ydlr• 5 years ago

This is such an enlightened approach. Why stop at software. Shoe makers should absolutely start licensing their foot ware so that permission to wear their product can be revoked for violations of their Code of Conduct.

Just imagine has much better the world would be!

dragonwriter• 5 years ago

They bound their open-source license to a Code of Conduct¹, which forbids the use of their ML software for (1) discriminating against marginalized communities, (2) building tools that disingenuously manipulate public opinion, (3) building tools of mass surveillance and prediction to repress the rights of people, and (4) building tools that control weapons, including tools that automate the deployment, operation, and targeting of weapons.

That’s just not a free or open source license, period. Which is fine, as long as they don't pretend that it is either of those things, but it sounds like they do.

Brosper• 5 years ago

This is good for Mastodon who will be more recognisable after this event

aksss2• 5 years ago

any publicity is good I guess, but reading their spiel left me with a bad impression of their style. But whatever.. kind of hate all social media (in the fb, twitter, Parler, TS) sense of the term anyway, so probably predisposed to think little of a posturing platform company anyway.

api2• 5 years ago

Con man who made his money (when he made it) stiffing contractors, running a fake university, and abusing bankruptcy laws stiffs software authors. Big surprise.

andrew_• 5 years ago

What's the over/under on how many times this will be pushed to the front page?

Was going to post some prior discussion links, but there are over two pages of Google results for unique HN links on the topic: https://www.google.com/search?q=news.ycombinator.com+trump+m...

kkjjkgjjgg8• 5 years ago

Until "Truth Social" has been stopped, presumably...

margalabargala8• 5 years ago

Or just their license violations.

woodpanel• 5 years ago

"but the reality of working on free software is that you give up the possibility of choosing who can and cannot use it from the get-go"

I always wonder why wokeism hasn't reached software licenses yet?

Just imagine the anger when it would come to a FOSS dev team's attention that <insert-evil-group> is using their product, successfully even...

"of course we would prefer if people so antithetical to our values did not use"

I mean just the effort involved by a lot of people in the dev community to dig something up:

"findings that various people have presented to us,"

While the stated proprietary licensing text could be easily just a beta version, or totally fine anyways (I'm not a lawyer), but definitely something other projects would get a pass for. You know, a nicely written e-mail not making any fuzz.

In a way this fuzz mastodon makes out of it, is exactly the PR a Trump would want, no?

maeln• 5 years ago

Just imagine the anger when it would come to a FOSS dev team's attention that <insert-evil-group> is using their product, successfully even...

Err, this is something a lot of FOSS dev' have been complaining about actually. There has been complain in the past directed toward Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon and many top-100 company for using free software without contributing anything back (code or financial support), or again, because they are disliked by the original FOSS team.

This "woke" word has been thrown around left and right at this point and is completely nonsensical, like SJW before that.

justin66• 5 years ago

I always wonder why wokeism hasn't reached software licenses yet?

The license you’re waiting for was JSLint. It was brilliant and the effect it had on users was a hilarious thing to behold:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138866

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4762035

Nothing involving Trump’s projects will provoke the same sort of hilarity. A desire to avoid litigation on the part of the user, combined with at least a minimal, superficial concern over good and evil, are necessary for the gag to work.

haunter• 5 years ago

Kinda off and I have no horses in the race but how come Mastodon has so many gambling sites and casinos as sponsors? Never knew that, feels a bit odd. Also personally not a big fan of this...

https://joinmastodon.org/sponsors

vanattab• 5 years ago

Lol. Another sponsor is Mark Mitchell from https://www.bestblowjobmachines.com/

nsxwolf• 5 years ago

Probably the same reason the WNBA sponsors are all hard liquor. You take what you can get.

Ardren4• 5 years ago

I assume they're just being used as ads? The page does say you get a logo and a non-follow link for donating.

Then again, I checked a random company, Fire Stick Tricks, and they donate to a bunch[1] of open-source projects. So maybe they're just companies that have extra money to give back?

1: https://opencollective.com/fire-stick-tricks

david_allison• 5 years ago

There's a large number of e-gaming companies sponsoring OSS as a means of CSR and advertising. For smaller OSS, it is the majority of corporate donations as other types of companies don't bother. It's not likely that Mastodon encouraged those donations, but other companies aren't likely to reach out.

Doing further research, Mastodon's sold out on those tiers of sponsors[0], so they're likely in the lucky position that they could pick and choose.

[0] https://sponsor.joinmastodon.org/

300bps• 5 years ago

ESG Investing is one of the hottest trends in investment management that aims to eliminate investments in companies that don't adhere to Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance standards. Most investment management firms are scrambling to come up with product offerings to meet the substantial demand.

So you're not alone in your feelings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social_and_corp...

cyber_kinetist3• 5 years ago

Oof, so those companies were donating to OSS solely to adhere to a weird metric that only investors use? That explains everything…

luke2m• 5 years ago

Seems like they just want the back link from an important site. A lot of popular projects have some pretty sketchy sponsors, [0]

[0] https://www.android-x86.org/ [1] https://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.html

lettergram2• 5 years ago

Mastodon has also banned Gab and others from the network that they disagree with. The whole point of a federated system is free speech... yet they have spent a lot of time trying to kick out people who disagree with them.

Frankly, it’s disheartening I want to know what the communists, fascists, republicans, democrats, racists, religious, technocrats, etc want to say.

It’s so frustrating having everyone in bubbles and getting banned for speaking about topics. The most calls for hate and violence I’ve seen are on Twitter and not from the right lol...

h2odragon5• 5 years ago

I also found it deeply amusing that the "fediverse" proclaimed its diversity with "look at all the banned nodes!"

I peeked at the Mastodon code and it gave me a headache before I got through the "required for installation" section. Makes me want to go set up an RBBS node again.

cyber_kinetist3• 5 years ago

The fediverse was not about diversity in the first place, its main purpose is to decentralize power from one platform owner to various instances with their own rules. Since each instance can have their own whitelists/blacklists for other instances, there can be less diversity of what people you meet, but people have their own preferences.

If you want a platform where people from all political sides come together (and fight via quote tweets and ratios), then Twitter is your best bet. But not everyone wants to have that experience, and I’ve seen people move to Mastodon to escape from that and have a more curated, closely-knit experience.

EdwardDiego4• 5 years ago

Welcome to humanity and our inherent tribalism.

kypro• 5 years ago

It really never ceases to amaze me how few people actually seem to value freedom of speech. Almost everyone claims to until someone says something they disagree with.

I guess I'm not sure the problem is technological any more. If public sentiment towards freedom of speech doesn't change it doesn't really matter if a truly free platform exists or not. If 99% of people don't want freedom of speech then these platforms will inevitably become radicalised cesspools only used by the 1% who have opinions which they can't express elsewhere. Subsequently if these platforms become popular enough they'll inevitably be censored in one way or another by the 99% who disapprove.

I'm with you, I like to know what the radicals are saying. I actually find a lot of the mainstream arguments against radical belief systems to be very poor and this actually re-enforces the beliefs these communities hold. I personally believe if we tried to understand some of the grievances these people have and then tried to actually provide solutions to their problems we wouldn't see half as much radicalisation. Instead we try to silence and shame these individuals then dismiss their grievances with stupid arguments which only demonstrate to them that we have no understanding or interest in their problems. It's really no surprise that radical online communities seem to be growing with censorship. No one changes their beliefs because someone censors and shames them.

qwerty456127• 5 years ago

LOL lawyers are so lawyers, always trying to claim everything to be their "proprietary property" with everything reasonably and unreasonably relevant altogether. Next they will probably sue somebody for merely looking in their code so they could even discover it has something to do with Mastodon and try to convince the judge there is no evidence which was obtained a legal way and can be taken in account this way :-]

ghostoftiber• 5 years ago

Mastadon: "Trump is using our software!"

Also Mastadon: "Lol Trumps social media site got hacked!"

Also Also Mastadon: "Changes to the look and feel of the site violate our license!"

OK that's not encouraging anyone to use their software. I have a feeling this is much more a knee jerk reaction to who is using their software rather than a well thought out complaint.

I think the most important part of this debacle is that the site itself wasn't supposed to be launched. This is the equivalent of someone leaking footage of (lets say) a baseball being thrown at a truck window, and the window breaking, and everyone going "oh well that's obviously rubbish" in Jeremy Clarkson's voice. Nevermind that the truck was obviously a mock-up.

macinjosh6• 5 years ago

Open-but-only-if-we-like-you-Source

helen___keller2• 5 years ago

There are licenses like this, but AGPL is not one of them.

pketh• 5 years ago

What happens if a software license is revoked? E.g. what are the teeth behind OSS licenses?

helen___keller2• 5 years ago

At surface level, a violated license becomes a standard copyright issue, same as you might expect if you acquired AWS source code and tried to sell your own Copyzon Web Services using their code.

(disclaimer: not your lawyer, not law advice)

Smithalicious• 5 years ago

Okay, fair enough, I expected worse from the title. The "antithetical to our values" thing is silly political posturing, but the case itself seems like a pretty clear cut AGPL violation. Hope it gets worked out alright, and that across the aisle we can all agree to respect free software licenses.

fdschoeneman6• 5 years ago

I think this is about right, as long as mastodon is enforcing the requirement across all instances. I suspect that if it was enforcing this in other instances it would have said so.

lorabe4• 5 years ago

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with having political ideas behind what you do, at the end of the day Mastodon was created for political reasons, first, to support free software, second, to create a web alternative to the shitshow that twitter tends to be.

Having that said, enforcing the AGPL rules is an activity that should be done regardless of your political ideas, if someone is violating the AGPL3 the projects have every right to ask them to comply, especially when the offenders belong to powerfull corporate groups that do have the money and the resources.

Mastodon saying "we don't like them" is an expression of honesty IMO, but not the only reason to why they want to seek legal counseling.

fdschoeneman6• 5 years ago

If I understand correctly, a) the license requires people who use mastodon "over the network" to meet certain requirements and b) the site is not yet live or being used "over the network." If my understanding is correct, the whole story and the commentary linked are a waste of time and I have to question the motives of anyone pushing either. What am I missing?

throwawaymast• 5 years ago

It is very likely Robert Colbert is behind this. Gab uses Mastadon as well. He worked on several projects for Trump and other conservatives. He appears to be very nationalistic.

ospzfmbbzr• 5 years ago

Trump MADE twitter. I have a 3 letter twitter account from 05 or 06 when it was beta. Until Trump was on Twitter in 15 I considered it a big yawn that made no money -- gossip for total retards. Hate him or love him, and with Trump there doesn't seem to be any middle ground, this would have MADE mastodon into SOMETHING instead it is STILL an irrelevant pet project. Maybe they are afraid of losing too many arguments? Only reason to ban those who disagree with you. The license is just being used as an excuse. The rights holders don't even believe their own arguments they are just trying to stake out a plausible position. Phonies.

nixroot2• 5 years ago

This is incorrect. Currently Truth is still internal software not available to the public, AGPL requires distribution of source code alongside the distribution of the program or service. Because Truth is only made available internally, the modified source code only has to be made available to their own company. This would change once the service does go public.

AGPL can also not be "permanently revoked". It's not individually licensed to each user like proprietary software often is, it's one license addressed to anyone. Furthermore the AGPL is explicitly irrevocable. They can change the license to a proprietary one but this does not affect existing copies under AGPL.

Last I'd like to touch on "antithetical values". If Mastodon were to discriminate against persons, groups or fields of endeavor in their license they would no longer meet the definition of open source, but rather become a source available proprietary product.

cyber_kinetist3• 5 years ago

People seem to have found an undisclosed internal address and made accounts there. Would this be an instance of “distribution of the service” in lawyer terms?

mumblemumble2• 5 years ago

See section 8, "Termination":

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html

Revoke may not be the legally correct word to use, but it's an informal blog post and not a legal document, and what they intended to say is clear enough.

I think that your understanding of how the licensure works is a bit off. Open source software is still individually licensed to everyone. The copyright holder retains copyright, and can terminate an individual's rights under the license as long as the license includes a termination clause. Which the AGPL does.

nixroot2• 5 years ago

Interesting, I was not aware of that.

I did not take termination into account in the second paragraph. I was referring to AGPL being addressed to anyone instead of a specific party. This means that a full revocation of the license would revoke it from everyone, even though that's not possible with AGPL. This does not apply to terminating licensees as you mentioned which appears to be what they mean and is possible under condition.

But because of the lack of a violation a permanent termination in 30 days would still be invalid.

teddyh3• 5 years ago

AGPL can also not be "permanently revoked". It's not individually licensed to each user like proprietary software often is, it's one license addressed to anyone.

The license is addressed to anyone, but an individual user gets an individual license.

Furthermore the AGPL is explicitly irrevocable.

The Mastodon authors can not choose to revoke the license, but the license itself contain clauses which specify revocation under certain conditions, and after a certain time delay. This is one of the areas in which the GPLv3 (and AGPLv3) is more lenient than the old GPLv2, which was automatically revoked instantly upon any license violation.

falsenews• 5 years ago

That is false, the site was available to the public.

Many users were able to create accounts and use it
the AGPLv3 requires that you provide (to every user) an opportunity to receive the entire Corresponding Source for the website based on that code. These early users did not receive that source code

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/oct/21/trump-group-agplv...

ThinkBeat• 5 years ago

Getting into any form of discussion regarding T is unwise. Yet I wanted to point out something

Mastodon mission has always been to provide users freedom from and alternatives to the giant faceless autocratic exploitative social media.

Or at least that is what I gleam from a search of Mastodon prior to when T ran for president.

To now state for the record that T is not supposed to use the software seems like a politically biased flip.

I also think that it is prudent to wait until launch to critique their compliance.

Usually marketing / legal comes up with copy and its get cut and pasted in.

It -may- change, it probably wont. We will have to wait and see.

I know I have replaced content for similar things right before someone hits the button and right aftwards.

I hope the organization does the right thing with attribution.

I have not visited yet, and I dont know much about Mastodons code.

If they have configured and setup an instance of Mastodon with their own graphics / content / resources. Is just that required to be published to be in compliance?

I presume people much smarter than me know they have added features and improvements to the code I certainly hope they share it.

I am 100% sure that there is a giant hoard of high profile lawyers who wants this case now and plenty of millionaires and billionairs who want to fund it. Mastodon will not have to finance the trials that might come.

Lastly the more T is seen as a martyr being kicked out everywhere the more devoted his cult followers become.

randyrand2• 5 years ago

what is T?

DeathMetal3000• 5 years ago

The former so called president of the US.

zaphar• 5 years ago

To be clear Mastodon is not claiming that T can't use their software. They very clearly state that he can absolutely use their Software so long as he abides by the license and provides attribution as well as any modifications to the source publicly so this is not in the category of a politically biased flip. It's common place license enforcement that just happens to be politically significant because the target is T.

smarnach• 5 years ago

Why should a software licence only apply after "launch"? From what I can tell, "Truth Social" is violating the AGPL if they don't hand over the source code within a thirty-day period after the request from Mastodon. If they do, fine, but if they don't, Mastodon can revoke permission to use their software.

ElijahLynn• 5 years ago

AGPLv3 for the F _ _ _ _ _ G WIN!!!! Nice job Mastodon!

Notably, neither the terms nor any other part of the website contained any references to Mastodon, nor any links to the source code, which are present in Mastodon’s user interface by default. Mastodon is free software published under the AGPLv3 license, which requires any over-the-network service using it to make its source code and any modifications to it publicly accessible.
On Oct 26, we sent a formal letter to Truth Social’s chief legal officer, requesting the source code to be made publicly available in compliance with the license. According to AGPLv3, after being notified by the copyright holder, Truth Social has 30 days to comply or the license may be permanently revoked.

quotemstr4• 5 years ago

They bound their open-source license to a Code of Conduct

That's called a proprietary software license. Usage restrictions disqualify software as free software or open source. This kind of restriction makes me cringe, and I wish someone would just defy these guys and dare them to actually take the issue to court. I don't think they would.

Trump’s new social media platform found using Mastodon code

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