I was looking at perhaps a different scenario, one that might have unfolded like this:
Person A: "I have been tasked with putting together a social network."
Person B: "Well we could base it on Mastadon, it's open source, that is what Gab did. That would save us some time."
Person A: "Great let's do that."
Person B: "We will need to comply with the licensing restrictions for Mastadon though it means giving our changes back to the community."
Person A: "Oh, I don't like that at all, what's our alternative?"
Person B: "Well we could write a new system from scratch but it will take us at least 6 months to get to where these existing systems are."
Person A: "Hmm, that doesn't fit our timeline, how about this, we use the Mastadon code, tell everyone it is our own code, and get rid of any references to Mastadon in the code. Then nobody comes after us and we can be up and running before the 2022 elections season starts in earnest."
Person B: "But that would be dishonest and wrong."
Person A: "Is that what your replacement will say?"
Person B: <grumble><grumble>
Person A: "Okay, since we have agreement let's get to it."
i mean let's be real who is ever going to work for this thing, the amount of qualified engineers who are going to sign up for Trump's Mastodon media clone you can probably count on one hand.
Which might arguably be the biggest problem all of these companies are going to have, how are these people ever going to find actual developers
I guarantee you there are plenty of smart, capable, clever engineers willing (and likely motivated by sincerer personal belief) to work on Trump's Mastodon media clone.
I'm not one of them, but I also put active effort into not letting my social spheres from taint my view of "the other"'s ability too much.
I'm certain you're right that there are a lot of talented engineers with political philosophies all over the spectrum, many of whom I would whole-heartedly disagree with.
However, Trump and the folks in his immediate circle seem to drive away competence through a special combination of malice, selfishness, pettiness, projection, and short-sightedness that boggles the mind. Set aside ideology for a minute; it seems like not paying the bills is standard procedure for their organization, and I don't know who would stand for it regardless of their ideology.
There are very few of Trump's allies that would ever work for him, either as an employee or a contractor. They can see his modus operandi clear as day.
And yet somehow there are always suckers that he can convince to do his shit for free. Of course there is a promise of payment, but the check never arrives.
Absolutely, the Truth platform will likely fail due to inept management, legal troubles, learning that moderation is actually a hard problem, etc.
I just want GGP to know that there are plenty of smart people willing to work on such a project (assuming they get paid) - and I want to combat this idea that the "other side" is just a bunch of bumbling bozos who don't know the difference between a bit and a byte.
There's likely also a small number of people who would work on this just because they believe in Trump's ideology, and would like to see Truth exist more than they'd like to get paid on a regular basis.
There is a massive pool of engineers that if payed FAANG*1.1 salary would work on anything. As long as they set salaries correctly they will not have any issues recruiting talent.
You also seriously underestimate number of people pissed off about having spout the latest woke tropes to continue being employed at FAANG, those will go for much lower rate.
Seems like the type of person to do something just for the resume pad or the chance of working with rather than working for. Any sane person knows that what ever agreement you start with will 100% be renegotiated later, and paid in full never.
It feels like they outsourced this, or hired the people willing to do the work most cheaply. More likely they hired the people in their network who had any experience in this space and hoped for the best (Bill was director of engineering for a regional bank? He knows people, right?).
I don't doubt there would be engineers willing to work on this if 1) the pay was right 2) the culture was right. Do they have the executives in place who know how to set those two things to attract the best engineers? All signs point to no.
Could you point to the violation please? I don’t see how users would be entitled to their modified software if they do not distribute it. Using the software is not distribution. Or is it?
So if my users are my customers or employees, this license would make the product unusable. Maybe.
Where’s the line? The product provides my content, in the form of html/css/JavaScript/whatever. That’s technically software/copyrightable but isn’t a component of the AGPLed product.
Otherwise, I agree that the AGPL would require distribution of software mods to the product. I can’t imagine why they would modify or how the author would detect such modifications.
Sorry, but I’m still having trouble understanding just what modifications are being discussed. Nothing I’ve read yet talks about specifics. There should at least be a smoking gun, no? Otherwise, post a link to the product and you’re done.
> So if my users are my customers or employees, this license would make the product unusable.
No, not at all; you'd simply have to release the changes you make. For the purposes of this article, your 'users' are anyone who interacts with the software.
> Sorry, but I’m still having trouble understanding just what modifications are being discussed. Nothing I’ve read yet talks about specifics.
Mentioned in the article; they've been removing references to Mastodon from Mastodon. Which you are allowed to do, but at that point you have to release any changes you've made.
Let me ask another way. Did these modifications require a recompile? Pulling a word out of a config file would not constitute a “modification to the software”, merely use as intended.
> Let me ask another way. Did these modifications require a recompile? Pulling a word out of a config file would not constitute a “modification to the software”, merely use as intended.
Actually, it might. Per section 1:
> The "Corresponding Source" for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities.
Mastodon is written in Ruby, and large Ruby programs (particularly Rails) usually use Ruby DSLs for configuration. It's very plausible that changes to the config would trigger the AGPL.
So technically this could mean that every person that has launched a mastadon instance needs to make a copy and release to the world our config files, passwords, DB users and other changes for the world to see?
Or we are all in violation of making changes and not re-releasing them?
Does it spell out how we need to release them, like upon request via email or have a link to a package via main page or something?
Your passwords and databases are probably not considered code, whereas a DSL that happens to be used for configuration would be.
But let's be clear: copyright holders get to decide when they enforce their copyrights. They aren't beholden to enforcement the way that trademark holders are. It's perfectly reasonable and legally consistent for a copyright holder to prioritize egregious violations (like TRUTH's) while ignoring smaller ones (like Joe Schmoe forgetting to publish his tuning changes).
That not withstanding, copyright applies only to that which is copyrightable. One may not express rights they do not have.
Portions modified may not be subject to any form of copyright protection if the original code and/or modifications are purely functional. Purely functional expressions that lack any creative element are not copyrightable to begin with.
> Portions modified may not be subject to any form of copyright protection if the original code and/or modifications are purely functional. Purely functional expressions that lack any creative element are not copyrightable to begin with.
This is a more abstract observation than is perhaps relevant to the situation at hand, which involves a group of people modifying software components that the current body of software copyright law would not consider "purely functional."
Is the service even public yet? The license says that users of the service are entitled to the code but if the service isn't open to users I fail to see the violation.
Truth Social hasn’t officially launched. But users could access a test version of the platform, where many of them created prank accounts that flooded the service with false company announcements and even fake Donald Trump posts. (The platform has since been replaced by a waitlist.) The SFC demands that TMTG offer all these users access to the Truth Social source code. “If they fail to do this within 30 days, their rights and permissions in the software are automatically and permanently terminated,” Kuhn says.
It didn't say that the beta was public. If you run AGPL code on a home server for personal use and someone hacks in I don't think you should owe them code.
If you deploy a "test" version of an app to a public server/domain and send an invite to a closed mailing list for users to beta test it, then that still triggers the AGPL.
"Truth Social hasn’t officially launched. But users could access a test version of the platform"
> if you run AGPL code on a home server for personal use and someone hacks in
No one hacked in [1]
"we could find no evidence that someone illegally broke into the website [...] the site was simply deployed live early as a test, and without proper configuration [...] people merely used the site legitimately to register accounts and use its features"
I think if you run AGPL code on a public server and someone breaks into it, you also don't owe them the source code because unauthorized access isn't legitimate use.
What is the definition of a "user"? Is every visiting rando from the Internet a user? If a person has five sock-puppet accounts, is that five users or one?
If a software robot creates an account, is that a user? Do we owe the source code to the robot? Or to the author of the robot?
Are users of the service entitled to free-of-charge access to the source code? Or could you comply by stating, "for a processing fee of $17,750 USD, we will mail a thumb drive to a real person's residential address"?
>Is every visiting rando from the Internet a user?
Yes.
> If a person has five sock-puppet accounts, is that five users or one?
Each of those sock-puppet accounts can request the source, so 5. No wait, it's still a single human being, so 1. Either way, it doesn't matter. They can request the source, and they should get it.
Are users of the service entitled to free-of-charge access to the source code?
> Each of those sock-puppet accounts can request the source, so 5. No wait, it's still a single human being, so 1. Either way, it doesn't matter. They can request the source, and they should get it.
The answer is complicated.
If I hack into a company and steal a binary for an internal tool (that uses GPL licensed stuff), I can’t demand the source code because I was not authorized to use said binary.
If its a beta not designed to be used by the public, it’s not clear how it will go. The users weren’t authorized to use it but it was easily accessible.
OK. Now, further, suppose you're the member of some copyleft outrage group and have heard that someone broke into a company and obtained an internal tool based on GPL-ed code. You jump up and down and scream that the person be given the source code in 30 days, or you will somehow terminate their license to use that code.
That's interesting; so if I have a developer make $50K worth of changes to some GPLv2 program, I still can't charge more for distributing it than the cost of the distribution errand.
The way you get paid is not to do the changes until/unless you have some work contract in place beforehand. If you've already made the changes, you mustn't try to get paid for them.
I think that's a misreading. That clause only limits additional fees charged to existing users for access to the source code.
You can make the changes and charge whatever you want for the software. When the user requests the source code, as is their right, for that you can only charge the physical costs.
The intent is to prevent expensive source code fees from being used as an end-around the source disclosure requirements. It also makes sure the distributor can cover the cosrs, but no more than that.
You can release your changes under a proprietary license, then relicense as GPL when you receive money. If you don't release it into general availability, you can simply revoke it.
> Is every visiting rando from the Internet a user?
Yes.
> Or could you comply by stating, "for a processing fee of $17,750 USD, we will mail a thumb drive to a real person's residential address"?
The author doesn't have to distribute their clause for free, but I assume there's some clause about not being allowed to charge an outrageous price. More importantly, whoever pays for the initial distribution will be allowed to further distribute it for free.
I think the Moderate Left needs to come to grips with the fact that the Authoritarian Left's insistence on silencing and cancelling the unfaithful is most directly responsible for the inevitable loss of political power of the Democrat Party by continuously feeding the Right easily marketable messaging.
"Whataboutism" is a thought-cancelling phrase. Truth Social is going to be silenced with one or more set of tools (AGPL or something else) just like Parlor was silenced.
Regardless of your perspective of the world and a presumption of people's motivations, that doesn't take away from the fact that the Software Freedom Conservancy is alleging they violated AGPL, which is entirely what the article is about. And violations, especially high profile ones, should absolutely be challenged regardless of political orientation.
I agree with you regarding the SFC. However, regardless of your perspective of the world and a presumption of my motivations, it is reasonable and fair to make the observation that this scrutiny is not happening in a vacuum absent of politics.
"I stole a car, and painted 'Vote Joe Bloggs' on it, and now I've been arrested! Help! I'm being silenced for my support of Joe Bloggs!"
Donald doesn't have some sort of special license to ignore copyright; he's subject to the same rules as anyone else. He can either comply with the license, or use some other software.
Trump signed an executive order to allow people to "silence and cancel" Twitter users after Twitter added a fact check to a single Tweet of his. Does that make him part of the Moderate Left or the Authoritarian Left?
If there's no link to the order (EOs being publicly available), then exactly what is the claim? The two things stated in the article about new rules around section 230, which does not match your original claim of
> Trump signed an executive order to allow people to "silence and cancel" Twitter users after Twitter added a fact check to a single Tweet of his.
Which 'people' did the EO allow to 'silence and cancel' Twitter users? Can you please explain yourself? Who was canceled? Can you name one person? Which person canceled them that was not allowed to before this EO?
You've made quite the claim. Can you substantiate it?
It made major headlines, I'm surprised you're so far out of the loop you never heard about it. The link to a Google search I provided for you makes it easy to find the EO:
I did hear about that order, but it did nothing of the sort the commenter claimed it did. It did not allow 'people' to 'cancel' other people. It asked the DOJ to investigate any violations of section 230, and asked the FCC to rework its administrative rules regarding the law. It did not suspend anything. Did not create new law. That is editorial nonsense.
If you'd heard about it, you wouldn't need someone else to find cites or links, I'm not that gullible.
> Did not create new law
Right, it had no effect, just more signalling from Trump. He sought to increase the legal responsibility of social media companies for what their users say, exposing them to lawsuits, in effect silencing and canceling users.
> Trump signed an executive order to allow people to "silence and cancel" Twitter users after Twitter added a fact check to a single Tweet of his.
Which people were allowed to silence and cancel others. The links you cite contain nothing of the sort. Rather they have to do with procedural rules around section 230.
The only actual link is the second one, from the governmental archives. Your first link is an image of Trump signing an EO against anti-semitism. Unless you're in favor of anti-semitism, I'd personally feel ashamed of posting such a thing and claiming it's bad. But... to each his own.
> My executive order calls for new regulations, under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, to make it that social media companies that engage in censoring or any political conduct will not be able to keep their liability shield. That’s a big deal. They have a shield; they can do what they want. They have a shield. They’re not going to have that shield.
My executive order further instructs the Federal Trade Commission, FTC, to prohibit social media companies from engaging in any deceptive acts or practices affecting commerce. This authority resides in Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act. I think you know it pretty well. Most of you know it very well. I would think you know it quite well, right?
EDIT: for those who read this later, the original commenter in his zeal to paint me out to be some ignoramus, posted this image of trump signing a purported EO on censorship that was actually one meant to combat anti-semitism. What drove him to do this... I cannot say.
Trump sought to increase the legal responsibility of social media companies for what their users say, repealing protections under Section 230, thereby exposing them to lawsuits, which would in effect silence and cancel users.
The rules trump was asking the FCC to reconsider couldn't violate the actual written law. He was asking for administrative rules to change, and for DOJ to investigate any illegal activity under the existing law. Can you cite any user canceled under this policy?
You'd never even heard of the EO before today, so I understand why you're confused.
Nothing ever went into effect, it would have run afoul of the First Amendment, and it made demands US gov agencies that are statutorily outside presidential control. Trump didn't know this because...well he's a game show host. That's why I used the word "sought" (you can scroll up to find it).
Please act in good faith. I did hear about that EO, but it did not do anything along what the original commenter said. There is no EO to allow 'people' to 'silence and cancel' others. Such an EO does not exist. There is an EO asking for administrative reworking of section 230.
> Nothing ever went into effect, it would have run afoul of the First Amendment, and it made demands US gov agencies that are statutorily outside presidential control.
So you admit you're comparing a theoretical 'cancellation' that was successfully prevented by checks and balances to actual cancellations that had no checks or balances?
Trump sought to increase the legal responsibility of social media companies for what their users say, which would in effect silence and cancel users. Coincidentally right after Twitter hurt his feelings.
That really happened, I had to link you to all of the information about it despite the fact that you "totally knew" about it...
I get that you are angry about the fact that I chose to draw a distinction between moderates and authoritarians. If you are offended by that idea that's unfortunate, but Trump's EO has literally no power and never did. It was just grandstanding like most of his presidency.
To me what I see here is that the software to run a social media site is available to everyone, but some people don't want social media sites just to reach people, they want to build little empires. Why would you try to build a proprietary application when one already exists if your stated goal is free expression? Why would you attempt to obscurely and illegally re license software that already serves it's purpose? It's honestly a sign of what is slowly happening in social media, things like this and what gab did are the death throes of proprietary interactive media.
> Why would you try to build a proprietary application when one already exists if your stated goal is free expression?
If I could hazard a guess... because that goal is a smoke screen to hide the real intent, exploiting the people on that network. (See any large "free" social network for examples.)
This site is likely to leak user data just like many before it.
If the Republicans are for free anonymous speech, why don't they host Tor servers, write a simple web site instead of a hack and tell all users to use Tor?
Because republicans don't need or care for free anonymous speech, or social networks, since we typically have large networks of real-in-life friends.
IMO the freakouts you saw by conservatives on social media censorship were mainly due to the closure of churches and other in-person social groups.
Honestly, I'll freely admit to feeling the same way, and frankly being wrong on wanting that much more regulation of Facebook et al (I do think we need some more regulation, just not a lot). The feeling of having your old social network (your church) shut by government fiat, forcing you onto platforms that want to censor you (It's not reasonable to teach your congregation how to use Tor and signal and Mastodon over a weekend), and then being censored, was a feeling no one should experience. Once the churches re-opened, everyone in my parish [1] deleted their facebook. Now we use alternate services, including some over Tor, and others for distant communication.
But more importantly, we just talk to each other. IMO, liberals don't understand this aspect of conservative information dispersion. My father, brother, mother, uncles and aunts keep long lists (in the several hundreds in some cases) of individuals who they broadcast messages to by various means... phone, text, ham radio, in person, etc.. It's like the mice network in the rescuers down under.
[1] or at least all the men... My wife and some women are still on facebook. I have some theories why
Do churches not have zoom meetings and email lists? Genuinely asking, as I'm not religious but my understanding is that remote worship is a pretty well-solved problem in abrahamic religion- radio, tv, mailing lists, zoom, etc.
Well as a Catholic, no. Mass is not valid via virtual 'remote' anything.
Mailing lists? Sure. But mailing lists are run by google or other companies. Most people just text or call or tell people stuff using their mouths and ears
I mean given the poster I was responding to was talking about facebook groups I figure that "this is run by a company" is already done with.
> Well as a Catholic, no. Mass is not valid via virtual 'remote' anything.
I'm not Catholic, but when I google "Catholic mass zoom" I see a ton of stuff. Is there like a religious leadership/doctrine these are against or something?
You're talking about Abrahamic so I'll chime in. For Muslims, remote worship is still not broadly accepted. Its better to do the prayers with your family or people you live with rather than doing it with a screen.
However, remote discussions and teaching is okay. Not prayers or worship of God though.
Trump's and the Right's temper tantrum against social media platforms long predate Covid lockdowns. It started when conservative users went so far over the edge that no one could deny they were violating a site's TOS anymore and a handful of long overdue bans started coming out. Of course, those actions were all carefully crafted to placate the outcry without jeopardizing too much revenue.
> Because republicans don't need or care for free anonymous speech, or social networks, since we typically have large networks of real-in-life friends.
I would be interested in seeing data to back up these assertions.
Given how frequently some conservative news sources complain about things like cancel culture and how many conservative social networks have sprung up in the past few years, I'd guess that you're wrong. It seems like some conservatives really do care about social networks, whether those networks are anonymous or not.
Maybe if you live in California, but I grew up in "the southern states" where "cancel culture" and censorship have been the norm for decades, for people who aren't conservatives.
Conservatives living in million dollar+ mansions crying about being critiqued on Twitter don't know real cancel culture.
I haven't done a close reading of the license text, but is there a specific point in time or condition after which someone is obligated to share their forked source code? Can you only clone the source via git into another public repository, or is there some other condition that causes your changes to become publicly available?
This could signal an interesting future, as it's probably a trivial change for this company to comply with the license terms, but a scenario where an organization like the SFC becomes the new RIAA/MPAA of selective enforcement is something worth considering. Sure, the rules are the same for everyone, but their enforcement, well...
> I haven't done a close reading of the license text, but is there a specific point in time or condition after which someone is obligated to share their forked source code? Can you only clone the source via git into another public repository, or is there some other condition that causes your changes to become publicly available?
For the AGPL, you're required to share your changes as soon as you begin serving those changes to users. That includes running a quasi-open beta with your server software, as "TRUTH" appears to have done.
Now I'm trying to parse the legal language. Section 5 appears to relate to this, but it's about "conveying," which in the license definitions, excludes providing access to a service that uses it.
> To "convey" a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.
I'm sure the Mastadon author has constructed their view based on a more strategic logical parsing of the license, and for now they have succeeded in making the brand story about how it's just another example in a long line of frauds and thefts as was what seemed to be the straightforward intent.
However, litigating software licenses as part of partisan lawfare can have knock-on effects for everyone else. I'm imagining what developing new products will be like in a world with something like the SCO patent litigation but by people with tumblr accounts and backed by superpacs.
The requirements imposed by the AGPL are unambiguous: if you host a server using code from an AGPL codebase, you are required to provide networked access to the source code for your modifications.
There's nothing particularly "partisan" about it: it's a remarkably straightforward, cut-and-dry AGPL violation. Stretching immediately for partisan motivations shows your hand a bit, as does comparing enforcement of a copyleft license to the SCO debacle.
Section 13 begins with "Notwithstanding any other provision of this license..." which opens it up to a whole bunch of mitigating circumstances. The AGPL can score some points and the company changes its practices and everyone moves on.
It may very well be an easy GPL violation, but if you want to completely destroy FOSS, hand enforcement mechanisms to partisans. It's only an issue because of the pariah involved. The article also stated this is just a straight forward AGPL violaiton, and surely it only came to the authors attention likely due to the prominence of the user, but I'd warn that FOSS licenses are artifacts of technical collegiality and trust that is no longer a feature of the society the software operates in.
The story is about a social pariah triggering a license enforcement action, and we need to seriously consider the consequences if those two things are related. The SCO debacle hindered the adoption of FOSS in the enterprise for years just by isolating the projects with the legal threat. Those were naive times compared to what goes on today. Whether it's my hand or just an unfamiliar example of principle is left as an exercise.
> Section 13 begins with "Notwithstanding any other provision of this license..." which opens it up to a whole bunch of mitigating circumstances.
I welcome you to find a countervailing provision within the AGPL that permits TRUTH to host a service based on their Mastodon fork without distributing their changes. That would be, in legal terms, a "doozy."
> The AGPL can score some points and the company changes its practices and everyone moves on.
This is, as far as I can tell, precisely the intended outcome: the SFC intends to compel TRUTH to comply with the terms of the software they're using. Once they do (i.e., "change their practices"), they are perfectly free to continue using it (i.e., "move on").
As for the rest of your response: it's the same handwringing. The terms of the license are clear; Trump's status as a pariah doesn't entitle him to special relief from the terms of a software license.
I'd say they can just distribute their changes to remedy the situation and issue is resolved, or they can do the litigating you are asking for, and then be mindful that as a pariah organization they are the canary in the coalmine for FOSS license lawfare.
Indeed, I don't think anyone would offer them special relief, but if this issue shows we are in an era of political exposure to opportunistic enforcement, that's notable for everyone who develops products.
> I'd say they can just distribute their changes to remedy the situation and issue is resolved, or they can do the litigating you are asking for, and then be mindful that as a pariah organization they are the canary in the coalmine for FOSS license lawfare.
I'm not asking for litigation, nor has the SFC threatened any. They've told TRUTH to comply with the licensing terms of the software that they're using, and they've given them a month to demonstrate compliance before taking any further steps. They can do precisely what you just said ("distribute their changes"), and everybody would walk away satisfied.
... The AGPL has been around for about 20 years; it's not some new scary thing. If you don't want to comply with the terms, don't use software that uses it. If you do use software which uses it, you must comply with the terms. This is very simple, and nothing at all like the SCO litigation.
I mean…if it was anyone else I’d say it’s good that they’re suing, they should be able to easily prove this, etc.
But this man has made a lifetime out of screwing people over and ignoring rules. There have already been literally thousands of lawsuits against his companies. Therefore, I strongly suspect this will be yet another instance of him using the law to delay, delay, delay, and by the time anything happens he’ll still have gained something. Heck he’ll probably counter-sue on some ridiculous basis.
We live in an age where things move very fast and we desperately need something better/faster than law courts to sort these things out.
I think there is a reasonable point though. Courts are backed up, the Senate is always slow at confirming (and some presidents slow at nominating) judges. And there's not enough Judges or courts to handle our population/amount of suits?
One negative consequence of this is the amount of plea deals and the pressures that puts on the accused.
Pandemic seemed to have made it worse.
Another thought would be building out more official specialization to speed things up. I can't find it but there was a HN article a few weeks ago talking about a I think a Texas judge who handled the vast majority of some type of specific litigation. It might have been patents I can't seem to remember. Said because that judicial district has a larger volume of case 'law' and well-defined regulations which is also an odd quirk to me as a non-lawyer - that regions can be different. article was about court shopping too, where corporations use their power to get moved into his court because they get better outcomes.
Confirmations could certainly be a lot faster without being any less thorough. Why does a nation of over 300 million people need to task the same 100 people with this? It could still be 100 people per confirmation but for example there could be several groups of 100 in the government whose job it is to vet people and each group of 100 gets a different handful of positions to confirm.
You are being hyperbolic. There isn't thousands. Hundreds yes. Compare him to current Biden, who has been confirmed to have a son that broke law which one of the most detest act in American society, it says a lot about you being agreeable to those kind of acts. Put your priority straight. Focus on the more serious i justice in society than to hop on the bandwagon of making a fuss of a billionaire while a lot of other billionaires are doing it to you at this very moment.
From what I understand, while the source has to be available, there is no specification that it be downloadable or easily available. IIRC, for the original GNU software, the source code was provided by writing to GNU via snail mail.
This is just harrassment against a right-wing media site. Most likely outcome is they will release the source code of the mastadon instance. Why wouldn't they? This would be such a stupid fight. Or they'd claim that you can write and be given the source.
Lots of companies do this kind of thing with (A)GPL. IIRC, Apple didn't release it's OS X source code until well after OS X was first available. Should it be excused, no. But based on the targeting of the founding team here, I find it difficult to imagine this was not motivated partly by politics, which I find distasteful, since I generally do not like selective enforcement and targeting of laws.
> This is just harrassment against a right-wing media site
It's... really mind blowing that they're not even pretending to be objective about this stuff any more. Even if you think it's justified, you ought to be able to see that normalizing this sort of behavior can and will backfire.
Right. It seems to me no one's even asked the company to provide the source and received a negative answer. They just insist that since it's not on github or publicly available that they're violating the law. The license says the code must be available to users, not the general public. Have they tried contacting the company? Surely there's a reasonable amount of time in which the company has to respond. No where is there a requirement the source is immediately available.
If they've written to the company and the company insists they are not using mastodon or don't need to provide the source.. that's one thing. But that doesn't seem to have happened.
Instead, since it's not a downloadable link already (which again, there is no requirement it be), they're getting all mad.
6. Conveying Non-Source Forms.
You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these ways:
a) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by the Corresponding Source fixed on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange.
b) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.
c) Convey individual copies of the object code with a copy of the written offer to provide the Corresponding Source. This alternative is allowed only occasionally and noncommercially, and only if you received the object code with such an offer, in accord with subsection 6b.
d) Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge. You need not require recipients to copy the Corresponding Source along with the object code. If the place to copy the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party) that supports equivalent copying facilities, provided you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source. Regardless of what server hosts the Corresponding Source, you remain obligated to ensure that it is available for as long as needed to satisfy these requirements.
e) Convey the object code using peer-to-peer transmission, provided you inform other peers where the object code and Corresponding Source of the work are being offered to the general public at no charge under subsection 6d.
END QUOTE
So it seems to me that one can be compliant without it available on a network server. HOnestly, I'm not a lawyer. I just know the old GNU software could be requested using mail, before github.
You've quoted the "non-source forms" clause, which is an optional clause that extends your obligations under the source clause. Your own quote says exactly this:
> You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License [...]
Emphasis mine.
Put another way: this section has no impact on TRUTH's legal obligations, which consist primarily of the sections I've quoted above[1]. They're merely additional things that TRUTH could do to be a good member of the OSS community.
So I looked for all instances of 'network server'. Nowhere else in the license text is there any requirement that the source be made available on a network server, other than in that disjunctive clause I posted.
Thus, I stand by my original belief that the source code has to be made available to users, and that snail mail / individual requests of the source code are a viable means to comply with the license. And I stand by my original belief that this copyleft group is politically motivated, as it publicized the claim that truth social is not complying before it gave it any time to comply.
If you had searched for "computer network" you would have found it. It's in section 13, "13. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License.":
> Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, 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 of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.
You're welcome to believe whatever you want about the SFC's motivations. But the language of the AGPL is clear.
How could they have 'broke' the rules (notice the headline is in the past tense), if they're still within the 30 days period? Didn't the platform 'launch' yesterday (and as far as I could tell, no one can actually access the service)
Well, first, they need to contact the company and ask for the source code, after they themselves have signed up, since the AGPL demands the code be available to users.
If the company responds in the negative (i.e., denying they're using mastodon or outright refusing to provide the source) or if the company fails to respond in a certain amount of time (like a week at least, since this is a new company), then you can start legal action.
It seems to me that because this organization could not find a link or a github making the source code public (which AGPL does not require), they decided to sue. They made no attempt to contact the company and ask, and they're not making any allegation the organization has outright refused. Instead, they've presumed such based on lack of a public download.
> From what I understand, while the source has to be available, there is no specification that it be downloadable or easily available. IIRC, for the original GNU software, the source code was provided by writing to GNU via snail mail.
This isn't "original GNU software." It's an AGPL licensed project, and here is the verbatim language of the license[1]:
> The GNU Affero General Public License is designed specifically to ensure that, in such cases, the modified source code becomes available to the community. It requires the operator of a network server to provide the source code of the modified version running there to the users of that server. Therefore, public use of a modified version, on a publicly accessible server, gives the public access to the source code of the modified version.
> Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, 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 of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.
> If your software can interact with users remotely through a computer network, you should also make sure that it provides a way for users to get its source. For example, if your program is a web application, its interface could display a "Source" link that leads users to an archive of the code. There are many ways you could offer source, and different solutions will be better for different programs; see section 13 for the specific requirements.
Apple, to the best of my knowledge, avoids both AGPL and GPLv3 like the plague. They've stuck to GPLv2 for any GNU software they happen to distribute, and they're making a concerted effort to remove even that.
> IIRC, for the original GNU software, the source code was provided by writing to GNU via snail mail.
True, but irrelevant. Different license.
> Lots of companies do this kind of thing with (A)GPL
Examples of companies misusing the AGPL? Misuse of the GPL is somewhat common, though they generally release the source code when prodded, _mostly_ complying with the letter of the license if not the spirit (strictly speaking, they often fail to make the offer, which is a breach). AGPL's requirements are rather stricter, though.
> IIRC, Apple didn't release it's OS X source code until well after OS X was first available.
True, but irrelevant. Different licenses; they didn't have to release Darwin at all.
If Trump is sincere about wanting to have a space for free speech, then he should comply with the GPL. If his goal is to grift off appearing to champion free speech, then attempting to steal from the free software movement is clear way to prove himself as such. Then again, I guess there is always option three: rewrite a proprietary one, saying he had no knowledge that the engineer(s) were stealing code (not an outrageous claim honestly). I gladly await the hate for not taking a particularly partisan view of this issue.
> The Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) has 30 days to comply with the terms of the license before its access is terminated — forcing it to rebuild the platform or face legal action.
Is that true? Wouldn't the actual copyright holder of the software have to assert this? Are the SFC making this specific demand, and are they the copyright holders?
Moreover, before the copyright proprietor takes action, wouldn't there have to be a legitimate complaint from a user of the site, who wanted the source code but had been denied? Otherwise it's a one-handed clap.
I'm looking at a Mastodon repo on github. Is this the right thing?
This has serious issues. There is a LICENSE file in the root directory, but this doesn't mention any authors; it's just a copy of the AGPL. There is a copyright notice in it naming the Free Software Foundation, but that pertains to that file itself, not to Mastodon.
The presence of this file tells us that someone has put Mastodon under the AGPL, as a big umbrella license for everything in this tree.
However, individual source files lack copyright headers.
I see the AUTHORS file, but this is just a list of poorly identified github accounts and such. It's not clear who wrote what (unless we go digging through git history, I suppose). Anyway, these people don't seem to have assigned their copyright to the project, so the copyright proprietorship (who wrote what) boils down to looking at the git blame of every file to get the set of authors who touched any line.
In summary, this project appears to be a bit of a gong-show, in terms of licensing.
If I deployed this, and some copyleft group started harassing me, I'd ask them to write me another e-mail, this time from one of the accounts listed in the Mastodon AUTHORS file, and specifying a list of the files of which that account is an author, substantiated by git blame analysis.
If I had not modified any of those files, I'd reply "have a nice day".
It's not even available yet, is it? If he's not even providing it as a service it's a bit difficult to say he's violating the license until he takes it live.
Besides, we all know the first people to sign up will be those pathetic betas that'd sit there refreshing their feed over and over to be the first one commenting on Trump's Twitter feed.
So to truly custom mod mastadon or similar agpl things that could hide some of the secret added sauce.. you could modify the core project to call another code chunk / like a wordpress plugin..
then you'd be required to release copies of your modified source which would just have a new line of code calling for 'other thing'..
it wouldn't have to include the whole 'other thing'
like if you added a line bringing in recaptcha
so essentially you could create right in mastadon, or similar project, but you could also break out separate things, like wordpress themes, wordpress plugins, third party addins..
Is this all right?
I'm trying to remember some of the debate back in the day with licensing and WP themes and plugins and such, although I'm thinking that was a different license.
It certainly seems to me like this is going to end up being a situation where there is a publicly available github thing that has nothing of interest other than a few lines calling for a few extra js calls or something for spam / moderation and not the actual code that is hidden in those addins.
If this is not the case with this type of licensing I'd like to know - I've been itching to deploy a mastadon for a while now and would like to know more about restrictions. abuse vectors, all that.
146 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadI was looking at perhaps a different scenario, one that might have unfolded like this:
Person A: "I have been tasked with putting together a social network."
Person B: "Well we could base it on Mastadon, it's open source, that is what Gab did. That would save us some time."
Person A: "Great let's do that."
Person B: "We will need to comply with the licensing restrictions for Mastadon though it means giving our changes back to the community."
Person A: "Oh, I don't like that at all, what's our alternative?"
Person B: "Well we could write a new system from scratch but it will take us at least 6 months to get to where these existing systems are."
Person A: "Hmm, that doesn't fit our timeline, how about this, we use the Mastadon code, tell everyone it is our own code, and get rid of any references to Mastadon in the code. Then nobody comes after us and we can be up and running before the 2022 elections season starts in earnest."
Person B: "But that would be dishonest and wrong."
Person A: "Is that what your replacement will say?"
Person B: <grumble><grumble>
Person A: "Okay, since we have agreement let's get to it."
i mean let's be real who is ever going to work for this thing, the amount of qualified engineers who are going to sign up for Trump's Mastodon media clone you can probably count on one hand.
Which might arguably be the biggest problem all of these companies are going to have, how are these people ever going to find actual developers
I'm not one of them, but I also put active effort into not letting my social spheres from taint my view of "the other"'s ability too much.
However, Trump and the folks in his immediate circle seem to drive away competence through a special combination of malice, selfishness, pettiness, projection, and short-sightedness that boggles the mind. Set aside ideology for a minute; it seems like not paying the bills is standard procedure for their organization, and I don't know who would stand for it regardless of their ideology.
And yet somehow there are always suckers that he can convince to do his shit for free. Of course there is a promise of payment, but the check never arrives.
I just want GGP to know that there are plenty of smart people willing to work on such a project (assuming they get paid) - and I want to combat this idea that the "other side" is just a bunch of bumbling bozos who don't know the difference between a bit and a byte.
There's likely also a small number of people who would work on this just because they believe in Trump's ideology, and would like to see Truth exist more than they'd like to get paid on a regular basis.
You also seriously underestimate number of people pissed off about having spout the latest woke tropes to continue being employed at FAANG, those will go for much lower rate.
Not of the country it didn't.
Significantly less than half of the significantly less than half of the the country that voted at all voted for this guy.
Or, an alternate phrasing, significantly less than half the slightly more than half of eligible voters that actually voted at all voted for this guy.
But, in any case, nowhere near half of the country voted for him.
I don't doubt there would be engineers willing to work on this if 1) the pay was right 2) the culture was right. Do they have the executives in place who know how to set those two things to attract the best engineers? All signs point to no.
If they've changed it at all, they'll need to release that.
Where’s the line? The product provides my content, in the form of html/css/JavaScript/whatever. That’s technically software/copyrightable but isn’t a component of the AGPLed product.
Otherwise, I agree that the AGPL would require distribution of software mods to the product. I can’t imagine why they would modify or how the author would detect such modifications.
Sorry, but I’m still having trouble understanding just what modifications are being discussed. Nothing I’ve read yet talks about specifics. There should at least be a smoking gun, no? Otherwise, post a link to the product and you’re done.
No, not at all; you'd simply have to release the changes you make. For the purposes of this article, your 'users' are anyone who interacts with the software.
> Sorry, but I’m still having trouble understanding just what modifications are being discussed. Nothing I’ve read yet talks about specifics.
Mentioned in the article; they've been removing references to Mastodon from Mastodon. Which you are allowed to do, but at that point you have to release any changes you've made.
Let me ask another way. Did these modifications require a recompile? Pulling a word out of a config file would not constitute a “modification to the software”, merely use as intended.
Actually, it might. Per section 1:
> The "Corresponding Source" for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities.
Mastodon is written in Ruby, and large Ruby programs (particularly Rails) usually use Ruby DSLs for configuration. It's very plausible that changes to the config would trigger the AGPL.
But let's be clear: copyright holders get to decide when they enforce their copyrights. They aren't beholden to enforcement the way that trademark holders are. It's perfectly reasonable and legally consistent for a copyright holder to prioritize egregious violations (like TRUTH's) while ignoring smaller ones (like Joe Schmoe forgetting to publish his tuning changes).
Portions modified may not be subject to any form of copyright protection if the original code and/or modifications are purely functional. Purely functional expressions that lack any creative element are not copyrightable to begin with.
This is a more abstract observation than is perhaps relevant to the situation at hand, which involves a group of people modifying software components that the current body of software copyright law would not consider "purely functional."
Under the AGPL, modified forms of the software that are used to provide user services must be distributed under the same terms.
Truth Social hasn’t officially launched. But users could access a test version of the platform, where many of them created prank accounts that flooded the service with false company announcements and even fake Donald Trump posts. (The platform has since been replaced by a waitlist.) The SFC demands that TMTG offer all these users access to the Truth Social source code. “If they fail to do this within 30 days, their rights and permissions in the software are automatically and permanently terminated,” Kuhn says.
edit: Only the users of the AGPL service are owed the code, it doesn't need to be posted publicly.
"Truth Social hasn’t officially launched. But users could access a test version of the platform"
> if you run AGPL code on a home server for personal use and someone hacks in
No one hacked in [1]
"we could find no evidence that someone illegally broke into the website [...] the site was simply deployed live early as a test, and without proper configuration [...] people merely used the site legitimately to register accounts and use its features"
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/oct/21/trump-groups-viol...
If a software robot creates an account, is that a user? Do we owe the source code to the robot? Or to the author of the robot?
Are users of the service entitled to free-of-charge access to the source code? Or could you comply by stating, "for a processing fee of $17,750 USD, we will mail a thumb drive to a real person's residential address"?
Yes.
> If a person has five sock-puppet accounts, is that five users or one?
Each of those sock-puppet accounts can request the source, so 5. No wait, it's still a single human being, so 1. Either way, it doesn't matter. They can request the source, and they should get it.
Are users of the service entitled to free-of-charge access to the source code?
No, with limits.
https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/compliance-guide....
>GPLv2 permits “a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution”. This fee must be reasonable.
The answer is complicated.
If I hack into a company and steal a binary for an internal tool (that uses GPL licensed stuff), I can’t demand the source code because I was not authorized to use said binary.
If its a beta not designed to be used by the public, it’s not clear how it will go. The users weren’t authorized to use it but it was easily accessible.
See also: the horrific CFAA Act
Does that fit what we are looking at here?
The way you get paid is not to do the changes until/unless you have some work contract in place beforehand. If you've already made the changes, you mustn't try to get paid for them.
I didn't even notice that all these years.
You can make the changes and charge whatever you want for the software. When the user requests the source code, as is their right, for that you can only charge the physical costs.
The intent is to prevent expensive source code fees from being used as an end-around the source disclosure requirements. It also makes sure the distributor can cover the cosrs, but no more than that.
Right? But since that's a legal document, possible misreadings can end up exploited somehow.
Even something like an ambiguous comma can be at the crux of a dispute
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/us/oxford-comma-maine.htm...
> Yes.
According to what legal doctrine, where, though?
The "user" is a party in the license contract, so that requires a concrete, identifiable legal entity --- or so I would naively think, IANAL and all.
Yes.
> Or could you comply by stating, "for a processing fee of $17,750 USD, we will mail a thumb drive to a real person's residential address"?
The author doesn't have to distribute their clause for free, but I assume there's some clause about not being allowed to charge an outrageous price. More importantly, whoever pays for the initial distribution will be allowed to further distribute it for free.
See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#CompanyGPLCostsMon...
They also are not entitled to the code unless it's been modified.
But this is the license and reality, not what HN makes up in their heads, two very different things.
(It is entirely possible they have modified the code and are allowing uses to access this code, but I haven't seen it shown)
I think the Moderate Left needs to come to grips with the fact that the Authoritarian Left's insistence on silencing and cancelling the unfaithful is most directly responsible for the inevitable loss of political power of the Democrat Party by continuously feeding the Right easily marketable messaging.
Donald doesn't have some sort of special license to ignore copyright; he's subject to the same rules as anyone else. He can either comply with the license, or use some other software.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/28/trump-targets-social-media-w...
I can't find a link to the order itself though.
> Trump signed an executive order to allow people to "silence and cancel" Twitter users after Twitter added a fact check to a single Tweet of his.
Which 'people' did the EO allow to 'silence and cancel' Twitter users? Can you please explain yourself? Who was canceled? Can you name one person? Which person canceled them that was not allowed to before this EO?
You've made quite the claim. Can you substantiate it?
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/ex...
> Did not create new law
Right, it had no effect, just more signalling from Trump. He sought to increase the legal responsibility of social media companies for what their users say, exposing them to lawsuits, in effect silencing and canceling users.
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/ex...
https://books.google.com/books?id=B1MzEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA259#v=on...
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/re...
https://www.google.com/search?&q=trump+executive+order+twitt...
> Trump signed an executive order to allow people to "silence and cancel" Twitter users after Twitter added a fact check to a single Tweet of his.
Which people were allowed to silence and cancel others. The links you cite contain nothing of the sort. Rather they have to do with procedural rules around section 230.
The only actual link is the second one, from the governmental archives. Your first link is an image of Trump signing an EO against anti-semitism. Unless you're in favor of anti-semitism, I'd personally feel ashamed of posting such a thing and claiming it's bad. But... to each his own.
> My executive order calls for new regulations, under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, to make it that social media companies that engage in censoring or any political conduct will not be able to keep their liability shield. That’s a big deal. They have a shield; they can do what they want. They have a shield. They’re not going to have that shield.
My executive order further instructs the Federal Trade Commission, FTC, to prohibit social media companies from engaging in any deceptive acts or practices affecting commerce. This authority resides in Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act. I think you know it pretty well. Most of you know it very well. I would think you know it quite well, right?
EDIT: for those who read this later, the original commenter in his zeal to paint me out to be some ignoramus, posted this image of trump signing a purported EO on censorship that was actually one meant to combat anti-semitism. What drove him to do this... I cannot say.
https://firstamendmentwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2...
Nothing ever went into effect, it would have run afoul of the First Amendment, and it made demands US gov agencies that are statutorily outside presidential control. Trump didn't know this because...well he's a game show host. That's why I used the word "sought" (you can scroll up to find it).
> Nothing ever went into effect, it would have run afoul of the First Amendment, and it made demands US gov agencies that are statutorily outside presidential control.
So you admit you're comparing a theoretical 'cancellation' that was successfully prevented by checks and balances to actual cancellations that had no checks or balances?
Trump sought to increase the legal responsibility of social media companies for what their users say, which would in effect silence and cancel users. Coincidentally right after Twitter hurt his feelings.
That really happened, I had to link you to all of the information about it despite the fact that you "totally knew" about it...
If I could hazard a guess... because that goal is a smoke screen to hide the real intent, exploiting the people on that network. (See any large "free" social network for examples.)
If the Republicans are for free anonymous speech, why don't they host Tor servers, write a simple web site instead of a hack and tell all users to use Tor?
IMO the freakouts you saw by conservatives on social media censorship were mainly due to the closure of churches and other in-person social groups.
Honestly, I'll freely admit to feeling the same way, and frankly being wrong on wanting that much more regulation of Facebook et al (I do think we need some more regulation, just not a lot). The feeling of having your old social network (your church) shut by government fiat, forcing you onto platforms that want to censor you (It's not reasonable to teach your congregation how to use Tor and signal and Mastodon over a weekend), and then being censored, was a feeling no one should experience. Once the churches re-opened, everyone in my parish [1] deleted their facebook. Now we use alternate services, including some over Tor, and others for distant communication.
But more importantly, we just talk to each other. IMO, liberals don't understand this aspect of conservative information dispersion. My father, brother, mother, uncles and aunts keep long lists (in the several hundreds in some cases) of individuals who they broadcast messages to by various means... phone, text, ham radio, in person, etc.. It's like the mice network in the rescuers down under.
[1] or at least all the men... My wife and some women are still on facebook. I have some theories why
Mailing lists? Sure. But mailing lists are run by google or other companies. Most people just text or call or tell people stuff using their mouths and ears
> Well as a Catholic, no. Mass is not valid via virtual 'remote' anything.
I'm not Catholic, but when I google "Catholic mass zoom" I see a ton of stuff. Is there like a religious leadership/doctrine these are against or something?
However, remote discussions and teaching is okay. Not prayers or worship of God though.
I'll make sure to bring up your comment at my next far right friends gathering.
I would be interested in seeing data to back up these assertions.
Given how frequently some conservative news sources complain about things like cancel culture and how many conservative social networks have sprung up in the past few years, I'd guess that you're wrong. It seems like some conservatives really do care about social networks, whether those networks are anonymous or not.
Conservatives living in million dollar+ mansions crying about being critiqued on Twitter don't know real cancel culture.
This could signal an interesting future, as it's probably a trivial change for this company to comply with the license terms, but a scenario where an organization like the SFC becomes the new RIAA/MPAA of selective enforcement is something worth considering. Sure, the rules are the same for everyone, but their enforcement, well...
For the AGPL, you're required to share your changes as soon as you begin serving those changes to users. That includes running a quasi-open beta with your server software, as "TRUTH" appears to have done.
> To "convey" a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.
I'm sure the Mastadon author has constructed their view based on a more strategic logical parsing of the license, and for now they have succeeded in making the brand story about how it's just another example in a long line of frauds and thefts as was what seemed to be the straightforward intent.
However, litigating software licenses as part of partisan lawfare can have knock-on effects for everyone else. I'm imagining what developing new products will be like in a world with something like the SCO patent litigation but by people with tumblr accounts and backed by superpacs.
The requirements imposed by the AGPL are unambiguous: if you host a server using code from an AGPL codebase, you are required to provide networked access to the source code for your modifications.
There's nothing particularly "partisan" about it: it's a remarkably straightforward, cut-and-dry AGPL violation. Stretching immediately for partisan motivations shows your hand a bit, as does comparing enforcement of a copyleft license to the SCO debacle.
It may very well be an easy GPL violation, but if you want to completely destroy FOSS, hand enforcement mechanisms to partisans. It's only an issue because of the pariah involved. The article also stated this is just a straight forward AGPL violaiton, and surely it only came to the authors attention likely due to the prominence of the user, but I'd warn that FOSS licenses are artifacts of technical collegiality and trust that is no longer a feature of the society the software operates in.
The story is about a social pariah triggering a license enforcement action, and we need to seriously consider the consequences if those two things are related. The SCO debacle hindered the adoption of FOSS in the enterprise for years just by isolating the projects with the legal threat. Those were naive times compared to what goes on today. Whether it's my hand or just an unfamiliar example of principle is left as an exercise.
I welcome you to find a countervailing provision within the AGPL that permits TRUTH to host a service based on their Mastodon fork without distributing their changes. That would be, in legal terms, a "doozy."
> The AGPL can score some points and the company changes its practices and everyone moves on.
This is, as far as I can tell, precisely the intended outcome: the SFC intends to compel TRUTH to comply with the terms of the software they're using. Once they do (i.e., "change their practices"), they are perfectly free to continue using it (i.e., "move on").
As for the rest of your response: it's the same handwringing. The terms of the license are clear; Trump's status as a pariah doesn't entitle him to special relief from the terms of a software license.
Indeed, I don't think anyone would offer them special relief, but if this issue shows we are in an era of political exposure to opportunistic enforcement, that's notable for everyone who develops products.
I'm not asking for litigation, nor has the SFC threatened any. They've told TRUTH to comply with the licensing terms of the software that they're using, and they've given them a month to demonstrate compliance before taking any further steps. They can do precisely what you just said ("distribute their changes"), and everybody would walk away satisfied.
But this man has made a lifetime out of screwing people over and ignoring rules. There have already been literally thousands of lawsuits against his companies. Therefore, I strongly suspect this will be yet another instance of him using the law to delay, delay, delay, and by the time anything happens he’ll still have gained something. Heck he’ll probably counter-sue on some ridiculous basis.
We live in an age where things move very fast and we desperately need something better/faster than law courts to sort these things out.
"I hereby declare all cilantro lovers as heretics and therefore automagically sent to the gulags for re-education."
Umm, no.
[0]: https://www.britannica.com/story/why-does-cilantro-taste-lik...
One negative consequence of this is the amount of plea deals and the pressures that puts on the accused.
Pandemic seemed to have made it worse.
Another thought would be building out more official specialization to speed things up. I can't find it but there was a HN article a few weeks ago talking about a I think a Texas judge who handled the vast majority of some type of specific litigation. It might have been patents I can't seem to remember. Said because that judicial district has a larger volume of case 'law' and well-defined regulations which is also an odd quirk to me as a non-lawyer - that regions can be different. article was about court shopping too, where corporations use their power to get moved into his court because they get better outcomes.
https://www.uscourts.gov/judges-judgeships/judicial-vacancie...
This is just harrassment against a right-wing media site. Most likely outcome is they will release the source code of the mastadon instance. Why wouldn't they? This would be such a stupid fight. Or they'd claim that you can write and be given the source.
Lots of companies do this kind of thing with (A)GPL. IIRC, Apple didn't release it's OS X source code until well after OS X was first available. Should it be excused, no. But based on the targeting of the founding team here, I find it difficult to imagine this was not motivated partly by politics, which I find distasteful, since I generally do not like selective enforcement and targeting of laws.
It's... really mind blowing that they're not even pretending to be objective about this stuff any more. Even if you think it's justified, you ought to be able to see that normalizing this sort of behavior can and will backfire.
If they've written to the company and the company insists they are not using mastodon or don't need to provide the source.. that's one thing. But that doesn't seem to have happened.
Instead, since it's not a downloadable link already (which again, there is no requirement it be), they're getting all mad.
This is false. The AGPL explicitly requires that the source be accessible through a network server.
START QUOTE
6. Conveying Non-Source Forms. You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these ways:
a) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by the Corresponding Source fixed on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange.
b) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.
c) Convey individual copies of the object code with a copy of the written offer to provide the Corresponding Source. This alternative is allowed only occasionally and noncommercially, and only if you received the object code with such an offer, in accord with subsection 6b.
d) Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge. You need not require recipients to copy the Corresponding Source along with the object code. If the place to copy the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party) that supports equivalent copying facilities, provided you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source. Regardless of what server hosts the Corresponding Source, you remain obligated to ensure that it is available for as long as needed to satisfy these requirements.
e) Convey the object code using peer-to-peer transmission, provided you inform other peers where the object code and Corresponding Source of the work are being offered to the general public at no charge under subsection 6d.
END QUOTE
So it seems to me that one can be compliant without it available on a network server. HOnestly, I'm not a lawyer. I just know the old GNU software could be requested using mail, before github.
> You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License [...]
Emphasis mine.
Put another way: this section has no impact on TRUTH's legal obligations, which consist primarily of the sections I've quoted above[1]. They're merely additional things that TRUTH could do to be a good member of the OSS community.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28959468
Thus, I stand by my original belief that the source code has to be made available to users, and that snail mail / individual requests of the source code are a viable means to comply with the license. And I stand by my original belief that this copyleft group is politically motivated, as it publicized the claim that truth social is not complying before it gave it any time to comply.
> Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, 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 of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.
You're welcome to believe whatever you want about the SFC's motivations. But the language of the AGPL is clear.
They did so by contacting the company and saying "Hey, you have 30 days to make your source code available."
I'm not sure what you want here.
By violating the terms of the license. They have 30 days to remedy the violation, or their rights in the software are permanently terminated
> and as far as I could tell, no one can actually access the service
It was publicly accessible: "Truth Social hasn’t officially launched. But users could access a test version of the platform"
Enjoy your stay. The decor is nice, but the visitors are mostly terrible fucking people and the management are corrupt.
What is the appropriate level of response?
If the company responds in the negative (i.e., denying they're using mastodon or outright refusing to provide the source) or if the company fails to respond in a certain amount of time (like a week at least, since this is a new company), then you can start legal action.
It seems to me that because this organization could not find a link or a github making the source code public (which AGPL does not require), they decided to sue. They made no attempt to contact the company and ask, and they're not making any allegation the organization has outright refused. Instead, they've presumed such based on lack of a public download.
That is completely false. If you read the article or the license before commenting you will understand why.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html#section13
This isn't "original GNU software." It's an AGPL licensed project, and here is the verbatim language of the license[1]:
> The GNU Affero General Public License is designed specifically to ensure that, in such cases, the modified source code becomes available to the community. It requires the operator of a network server to provide the source code of the modified version running there to the users of that server. Therefore, public use of a modified version, on a publicly accessible server, gives the public access to the source code of the modified version.
> Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, 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 of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.
> If your software can interact with users remotely through a computer network, you should also make sure that it provides a way for users to get its source. For example, if your program is a web application, its interface could display a "Source" link that leads users to an archive of the code. There are many ways you could offer source, and different solutions will be better for different programs; see section 13 for the specific requirements.
Apple, to the best of my knowledge, avoids both AGPL and GPLv3 like the plague. They've stuck to GPLv2 for any GNU software they happen to distribute, and they're making a concerted effort to remove even that.
[1]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html
True, but irrelevant. Different license.
> Lots of companies do this kind of thing with (A)GPL
Examples of companies misusing the AGPL? Misuse of the GPL is somewhat common, though they generally release the source code when prodded, _mostly_ complying with the letter of the license if not the spirit (strictly speaking, they often fail to make the offer, which is a breach). AGPL's requirements are rather stricter, though.
> IIRC, Apple didn't release it's OS X source code until well after OS X was first available.
True, but irrelevant. Different licenses; they didn't have to release Darwin at all.
Is Tesla a right-wing media site too? Vizio? Or did you just construct a narrative without knowing history?
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2019/oct/30/calling-all-tesla...
https://twitter.com/RealGlenMerlin/status/145106846423215718...
Is that true? Wouldn't the actual copyright holder of the software have to assert this? Are the SFC making this specific demand, and are they the copyright holders?
Moreover, before the copyright proprietor takes action, wouldn't there have to be a legitimate complaint from a user of the site, who wanted the source code but had been denied? Otherwise it's a one-handed clap.
I'm looking at a Mastodon repo on github. Is this the right thing?
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/
This has serious issues. There is a LICENSE file in the root directory, but this doesn't mention any authors; it's just a copy of the AGPL. There is a copyright notice in it naming the Free Software Foundation, but that pertains to that file itself, not to Mastodon.
The presence of this file tells us that someone has put Mastodon under the AGPL, as a big umbrella license for everything in this tree.
However, individual source files lack copyright headers.
For instance, no copyright header in this randomly picked file: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/app/mailers/a...
I see the AUTHORS file, but this is just a list of poorly identified github accounts and such. It's not clear who wrote what (unless we go digging through git history, I suppose). Anyway, these people don't seem to have assigned their copyright to the project, so the copyright proprietorship (who wrote what) boils down to looking at the git blame of every file to get the set of authors who touched any line.
In summary, this project appears to be a bit of a gong-show, in terms of licensing.
If I deployed this, and some copyleft group started harassing me, I'd ask them to write me another e-mail, this time from one of the accounts listed in the Mastodon AUTHORS file, and specifying a list of the files of which that account is an author, substantiated by git blame analysis.
If I had not modified any of those files, I'd reply "have a nice day".
Besides, we all know the first people to sign up will be those pathetic betas that'd sit there refreshing their feed over and over to be the first one commenting on Trump's Twitter feed.
so essentially you could create right in mastadon, or similar project, but you could also break out separate things, like wordpress themes, wordpress plugins, third party addins..
Is this all right?
I'm trying to remember some of the debate back in the day with licensing and WP themes and plugins and such, although I'm thinking that was a different license.
It certainly seems to me like this is going to end up being a situation where there is a publicly available github thing that has nothing of interest other than a few lines calling for a few extra js calls or something for spam / moderation and not the actual code that is hidden in those addins.
If this is not the case with this type of licensing I'd like to know - I've been itching to deploy a mastadon for a while now and would like to know more about restrictions. abuse vectors, all that.