Synthaholic
Diamond Member
Open source is not public domain. What's the name of Rick Wilson's book? 'Everything Trump touches turns to shit'. It's true.
Former President Trump’s new social network may only have thirty days to live.
© BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI
Trump launched the app — TRUTH Social — on Wednesday evening. Within hours, members of the open source software community began to notice something: a test version of the website appeared to be accessible, and it seemed to operate based on a software that already exists, called Mastodon.
Mastodon is a social network that is similar to Twitter. The code is open-source, meaning that anyone can use it, so long as they abide by certain rules: namely, that they agree to make the source code of the modified version available to the public.
TRUTH Social did not do so.
On Thursday, Mastodon’s founder Eugen Rochko told TPM that TRUTH was not only using his code, but appeared to have violated the terms under which others can use it.
That claim could be enforced through the courts, and Rochko said that he would speak with attorneys about the matter.
“Mastodon exists under that license because the Mastodon developers seek to assure that anyone who gets copies of the software gets full source code and changes or modifications or configurations that anyone else has done,” Bradley Kuhn, Policy Fellow at Software Freedom Conservancy, told TPM.
That specific requirement exists thanks to the Afferro General Public License, which Kuhn helped develop. It mandates that anyone who uses the code of software under the license must make modifications publicly available. Though the software in question is open-source, it’s not in the public domain, Kuhn explained.
How A Licensing Violation Could Shut Down Trump’s New Social Media Site
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crim...ved-lives-police-say/ar-AAPQonY?ocid=msedgntpFormer President Trump’s new social network may only have thirty days to live.
Trump launched the app — TRUTH Social — on Wednesday evening. Within hours, members of the open source software community began to notice something: a test version of the website appeared to be accessible, and it seemed to operate based on a software that already exists, called Mastodon.
Mastodon is a social network that is similar to Twitter. The code is open-source, meaning that anyone can use it, so long as they abide by certain rules: namely, that they agree to make the source code of the modified version available to the public.
TRUTH Social did not do so.
On Thursday, Mastodon’s founder Eugen Rochko told TPM that TRUTH was not only using his code, but appeared to have violated the terms under which others can use it.
That claim could be enforced through the courts, and Rochko said that he would speak with attorneys about the matter.
“Mastodon exists under that license because the Mastodon developers seek to assure that anyone who gets copies of the software gets full source code and changes or modifications or configurations that anyone else has done,” Bradley Kuhn, Policy Fellow at Software Freedom Conservancy, told TPM.
That specific requirement exists thanks to the Afferro General Public License, which Kuhn helped develop. It mandates that anyone who uses the code of software under the license must make modifications publicly available. Though the software in question is open-source, it’s not in the public domain, Kuhn explained.