Mastodon has not sued anyone. Vizio and Tesla have both run afoul of similar GPL licensing and been called out by the same organization (SFC) that's calling out Truth Social.
So like you said, this is clearly not just posturing, Truth Social is legitimately in violation of their license agreement.
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.
I could develop a social network that “scales” in way less than three months, just working alone. A few days for the web front-end (with a few days of tweaking a bit later, and then a week of actually making it work). A couple of weeks for the ActivityPub implementation. Five minutes… perhaps 15, if I want to double-check my work, for the SQLite database. Then another week of making sure everything fit together nicely; might be able to do it in two months, actually.
It wouldn't be pretty, and it wouldn't cache images locally (which is a problem from a privacy point of view), but it would work, and it would scale just as well as the rest of the Fediverse.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Theoretically no, but the court is more likely to side with you if your lawyer can go down the list checking off each reason this lawsuit is like the last one that you won.
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.
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,
>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.
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.
You have the correct instinct. Laches (not latches, it really is a different word) is about a specific cause so it only helps if you've got a reasonable case that the plaintiff should have noticed this cause ages ago. If the cause is new that's obviously not going to work.
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.
That was probably a reference to the fact that Trump has filed anti-SLAPP suits against people suing him as an intimidation tactic and to run up their legal bills.
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.
> That’s not accurate. Trademark law does require active policing and enforcement, and failure to enforce a trademark can be grounds for losing it.
Do you have some actual examples of this? Trademarks which were cancelled not for lack of use (a real reason) but for lack of enforcement ? I don't think that's a thing, which is why I'm asking.
It's true that genericisation is at least a potential threat, although I think many businesses would say that's a great problem to have (your mark can't become generic if people aren't familiar with it, and if they're familiar with it that means you sure have sold a whole lot of product, the real examples of genericisation are famous successful companies such as Xerox or Hoover, hardly stories of failure).
But also this isn't about genericisation anyway. Mere mentions aren't actionable. That's what is insidious about it, you can sue people who are no threat to your mark at all, and the likes of Disney do that all the time. But you can't (successfully) sue people who mention your mark in a way that just contributes to eventual genericisation.
It's a good question, and I don't specifically. I've heard this advise from lawyers in various different fields (not specifically Trademark lawyers), but when I go digging for examples, or the specific legislative history, most of my searching ends with "there's no a clear, definitive case on this topic".
So, in a lot of ways, I think you're right to challenge this assertion. It seems more like a recommendation that comes from "an abundance of caution" rather than a clear legal ruling, but I think I was wrong when I definitely stated that "trademark law does require active policing and enforcement". It seems like it might be more accurate to say: "some lawyers believe trademark law may require active policing and enforcement"
> some lawyers believe trademark law may require active policing and enforcement
That's definitely true. Of course we might observe that it sure is convenient that Trademark lawyers believe you should hire more Trademark lawyers... If this is their honest belief then even if it wasn't true they aren't committing fraud since fraud requires dishonesty. So that's nice.
> 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.
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.
If both-side-ism makes you feel better than everyone else. It didn't start collapsing in 2017. This has been brewing for a long time, one could argue since the 90s, when political discourse and bipartisanship started degrading. Donald Trump was just the catalyst needed to accelerate the final collapse. And by collapse I mean "collapse". American democracy is not surviving the next 20 years.
As an aside, it it really strange to see people falling in front of Trump to protect him on HN, a place with seemingly smart people. A man with zero principles, no moral compass, and fewer redeeming qualities than Caligula.
And all of this in a thread that is wondering - why doesn't Donald Trump care about our rules?
Off to shout obscenities at a school board meeting, toodles!
Every generation thinks their problems are the worst. It’s just more of the same political fighting where one side demonizes the other to try to get people on their side. The world moves on until the next time they need to demonize someone and nothing of importance really happened. There is no collapse, just on to the next candidate.
The first time in American history there was no peaceful transfer of power, the loser claimed the election stolen, and refused to concede. So, no, it's not "just another candidate". This false both-side-ism is intellectually dishonest.
It’s not both side ism. They literally lied for years and spent millions of tax payer dollars trying to take out the president, and yet nothing more than words were said by the other side. Send pretty insignificant to me. If anything the opposite party you are claiming abused the legal system while the other simply expressed an opinion with no abuse of power whatsoever.
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.
I mean, it's _theoretically_ possible that they modified it to remove the link to the source, accidentally put it live, always intending to revert the modification before deliberately going live... but that's not winning any prizes for plausibility.
In any case 'officially up' is likely irrelevant here.
> In any case 'officially up' is likely irrelevant here.
That's not true, especially considering they took down the site as soon as it was noticed it was publicly facing.
If a company misconfigures a VPN and you're able to access an internal tool that would not be otherwise available to the public, but uses GPL code, that would not entitle you to the sources. Especially if the company immediately fixed the issue of the public having access to said internal tool, any reasonable court would side with them.
If the site re-launches without fixing the issue, though, that is a very different story.
Another thing that really should be considered here are the principles involved here...you can completely ignore 2015-current and still acknowledge the guy's long history of not paying contractors, ripping people off, going back on stuff he said, etc.. There's really no reason to give him the benefit of the doubt
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.
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.
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.
Mastodon's original developer sent a cease and desist letter to Gab on October 21 for not publishing the version of their codebase that is currently in production.[1] Gab updated their repo in one hour, and later shared the entire code tree instead of just a password protected archive file.[2]
It's really not that difficult to comply with AGPLv3. Truth Social should simply release the code and keep the repo up to date.
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
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.
But he did violate their terms of service over and over while in office. You could argue that they should have booted him sooner, after a few warnings and repeated violations. And they can argue that they gave him, and other political figures, extra leeway due to their public positions and their newsworthiness. But at the end of the day he was repeatedly given special treatment that most of us would never get on any of the platforms he was banned from.
If there was anything nefarious going on it was Twitter, FB, etc. looking the other way because they knew that his violations of their terms was attracting attention and therefore making them money.
> But he did violate their terms of service over and over while in office.
One of the primary issues is that Twitter has routinely granted privileged protected status to their favored political side, and refused to ban prominent people on the left that have behaved dramatically in violation of their policies [1][2]. There were a huge number of examples of it from the left during the unhinged Nick Sandermann cultural conflict for example (a wave of direct calls for violence by blue checkmarks against underage children).
Twitter has no qualms with unevenly applying their policies, so long as they're helping their political side. That has particularly been going on for four or five years non-stop at this point.
I certainly don't doubt there are plenty of other examples and I don't have any love for Twitter or any other SM platform these days.
But as far as I could see, only seeing the former president's tweets in the news because I'm not a Twitter user, he was also granted protected status. So I fail to see it as some leftist conspiracy and find it more likely that Twitter just allows users that attract more attention this privileged status because it's in their best interest to do so.
Honestly, I don't know who Nick Sandermann is and could not care less about what Jane Fonda and Spike Lee are up to on Twitter. You've just pointed out some great examples of why I left it behind a long time ago.
However, as a US citizen, I do care what my president gets up to, even on social media. Given it's outsized influence on our society these days, I'm probably more interested in what the president is saying on social media, where he, and every other politician, seem to be able to get away with saying things they'd never have said on mainstream television or on traditional media not that long ago.
What a pile of nonsense. Now I'm not an American and have no stake beyond not wanting your country to burn because it's bad for the world... but come on? Have you ever seen another president treated that way? Maybe Nixon? Imagine if he was on twitter when in office. Extra leeway lolololol. You must be a reporter or a FAANG employee with options?
I seriously doubt that former president Richard Nixon would have ever been on Twitter behaving the way our 45th president did. From what I saw the only way he was treated was to get a pass on violation after violation of Twitter's TOS.
I've yet to see any other president ever behave that way on any social media platform so I have no point of reference to either dispute or agree with what you're saying.
And no, I'm not a reporter or an employee of a tech company, please keep your inferences about my character out of the conversation.
> as if to imply that being a sitting President gives Trump greater legal right to a social media account
That's not what they're implying.
The implication is that if they can do it to the office-holder of one of the most powerful jobs in the world, they are very powerful and can do it to you.
> the narrative of social media being an organized supranational conspiracy
When lots of social media companies do the same thing at the same time, what other explanation is there?
I'm sorry but what part was a lie? Russians did hack the DNC, sparing the RNC. They did coordinate with Trump associate Roger Stone in the distribution of the materials, and Stone informed Trump of this. Trump's campaign did meet with a Russian spy at Trump's residence to discuss a quid pro quo deal in which dirt on Clinton was exchanged for relaxed foreign relations, both of which did materialize from the respective parties. Trump did solicit help from Russian hackers to attack Hillary Clinton, an attack which did materialize according to investigators.
And to top it all off, Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort, who was deep in debt to a Russian oligarch (Deripaska) yet working pro bono for Trump (a billionaire), was caught giving internal campaign polling data to a Russian intelligence officer (Kilimnik) working directly for Deripaska, which was then used to target the social media psyops campaign by the GRU.
This is exactly the collusion many said occurred during the 2016 election, and just because it took 5 years to prove doesn't mean we were wrong in 2016 when we pointed out what was obvious to us. Yes some took it too far and said Trump was a literal agent of Russia, but the effect is really the same agent or not - the Trump campaign was working hand-in-hand with Russia to get him elected over Clinton. They were coordinating in public and private, sharing data, making deals, and following through on those deals, and they all lied about all of it at every opportunity (establishes consciousness of guilt). Collusion.
These are all facts laid out in the Mueller Report Vol I [1], the Senate Intel report on Russian Active Measures (especially Vol V) [2], and the US Treasury Department [3]. Calling all of this a "lie" at this point feel like memory holing.
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.
> 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.)
I'm confused, what do GWB or neocons have to do with a willingness to lie about elections? Are you saying those two are bad because they aren't willing to lie about it?
I think there's two ways people interpret that - when neocons and progressives (or whatever, the slimiest of both parties) end up arm in arm denouncing a guy, you can either say that guy must be really bad, or really good. ;)
My point is that he is purging neocons, and it seems you want to construe it as being all about election issues and that he was okay with them before that.
Your contention is that Trump is purging people like GA Gov Kemp because he is a neocon not because of his statements that the election was not stolen? That's a puzzling position given Trump's many, many statements mentioning Kemp and the election but none that I've seen mention neocon.
A lot of things can be true, but if you only focus on the things which you consider expedient, your perspective will not be balanced, and you might turn GWB and his cronies into saints, as I have seen some do.
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.
Trump isn't fading into insignificance at all. He still overwhelmingly dominantes the right half of US politics. The social media ban has made Trump look much better than he otherwise would have had he remained on social media and been blathering this entire time. Big tech did him a favor with the ban. And meanwhile Biden's mainstream media poll numbers have collapsed (which is to say his real numbers are even worse). He's one of the least popular presidents in the past century thus far. It's setting the stage for Trump to make a legitimate run at the presidency in 2024 if he so chooses. Biden won't be competent to run in 2024 and Harris can't beat Trump. The tactic of hiding Biden, which worked very well in terms of letting Trump punch himself out, is no longer working now that he's president and being held to a different expectation; instead, it's tanking his numbers because he's viewed as a mediocre leader.
Quoting the relevant passages or mentioning the name has been getting people banned, recently from FB, Twitter, and others...
"The emperor has no clothes" ha! the skinsuit tore off and the naked Terminator machinery is on display for all to see. and its nowhere near as cool and fascinating as it was in the movies. It's just "keyword list" string match stupidity re-iterated yet again.
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.
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
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.
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.
Is it possible I live in an insulated worldview largely detached from the political, economical, and societal issues faced by non-urban dwelling, non-millennials?
That reads a lot like "I'm surrounded by people who think there's no (non-Democratic) fascism and that's proof I'm correct when I tell you it's okay." Frog-boiling is a serious problem in US politics these days.
Could you list some of the things that make the right fascist? Its a pretty blanket statement to call everyone that has a different political opinion of you fascist. Here is the definition https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism
Last administration had several people of color in it. It also had an openly gay member. I did not see them banning anyone off social media or suppressing the opposition. They removed far more regulations than they created which reduced their administrations power. As far as I know they never ignored a supreme court ruling.
Sure the last administration had major problems, but to try and compare say it is fascism is absurd imo. The fact the we have a new administration is all the proof you really need.
Fascist actions to me are things like admitting the government regularly bans people they don't like from social media. Ignoring supreme court rulings. Trying to shutdown opposition news organizations. Spying on opposition news organizations. Spying on political opponents. Demanding access to see every citizens bank transactions. Demanding the federal government have full control of all elections. All these actions lead towards a one party system in which the federal government has completely control over every aspect of its citizens life and forcefully suppresses the opposition.
> Fascist actions to me are things like admitting the government regularly bans people they don't like from social media.
Didn't really have a way to effectively do that, but tried to get laws changed so social media platforms that people had to opportunity to speak out against him on were shut down. That was a pretty common theme during his term.
> Trying to shutdown opposition news organizations. Spying on opposition news organizations.
He actively went after every news org except for Fox and orgs further to the right of Fox. And nearing the end of his term, he started going after Fox as well.
There was the whole "throw protestors (and people near protests) in cars and drive them to undisclosed locations" thing that happened in Portland. There was the whole "can we invoke the Insurrection Act" stuff too.
You also miss the race stuff that definition of Fascism you linked to mentions. Stephan Miller's general existence should be enough to convince anyone of that.
Other characteristics of Fascism: punishing political opponents. Remember "Lock Her Up"? What about Democrats stealing the election and how they should be punished? One party system, right?
Then there was that tiny infiltration of the capital that he may or may not have had a large hand in.
He was very good at pushing as far as he thought he could, but no further. I admit, he didn't open fun down people in the streets. You're right, not a fascist.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
GPL does not differentiate between beta and not. You use GPL code - you release anything build on top of it. Simple as that. Anyone can request a copy of their source and should get it. Doesn’t matter if it’s in beta or not as long as it’s licensed under GPL. Even if it’s internal software. Don’t like it - go build from scratch and use some other software but don’t break the license agreement just because you are lazy and can’t be bothered to write your own code.
I don't think that's correct. Unless you publish it, you don't have to release anything. Otherwise it would be madness.
Also my question was more about why that specific concern about the license - why did you pick AGPL instead of GPL and why do you care so much about that specific case?
OK? As far as I know, AGPL only requires code to be provided upon request. If people in the beta test have not requested the code there may not be a violation.
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.
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.
I don't think the primary concern of his voter base was advancing their political agenda. I believe the anger was the whole point, and they got it by the truck loads.
There was no reason to believe that they would get what they wanted policy-wise from a Democrat or from a different Republican candidate. The next best thing is to make all of the bad people angry, which they did get.
It's not like they would've complained if they'd gotten some of their policies advanced, but that was not the point.
The point was that he said things like "kung flu" and it drove the bad people insane. Or "I can't call Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas any more because she's not an Indian."
I have a hard time believing that the entire point was to temporarily bother people. I mean literally every president does this just by virtue of American partisanship.
I think the goal was a transformative presidency that cemented Trump as one of the best presidents. But he just didn't have the aptitude to pull that off.
> I hope you're not taking his 2016 electoral campaign statements regarding what his agenda is at face value...
Is that a joke? What on earth would you judge someone on (with regards to their agenda) other than the commitments they make as a candidate?
I don’t care about whether someone accomplished a “secret unpublished” agenda, if it’s all revealed after the fact.
Obviously, I care about the changes made during the presidential term, but when it comes to “evaluating whether they fulfilled their agenda”, it seems farcical to say “I hope you weren’t actually considering the public commitments they made about their agenda”
Strongly disagree. You have to remember democratic politics is about turning a massive ship in a new direction. Unless you’re willing to start shooting people democracy moves in increments.
I would say the US drastically changed a few ways: 1) the public’s perception of the media [Trump’s antagonism exposed just how partisan it is across the board], 2) the US strategy with regards to China [Biden seems to be quietly adopting many aspects], 3) a significant adjustment of tax strategy and offshoring of profits [it was a major shift in how offshore profits are treated], 4) healthcare regulations [hospital price transparency and drug pricing had some people shitting bricks and it’s just started].
Now you can argue those moves were bad, but to argue nothing changed is short-sighted.
It’s not that dissimilar to a large corporation. I’ve seen leaders (not even CEOs) push in a certain direction and it’s clear years later it made an impact.
> I would say the US drastically changed a few ways: 1) the public’s perception of the media, 2) the US strategy with regards to China, 3) a significant adjustment of tax strategy and offshoring of profits, 4) healthcare regulations.
These are ephemeral changes, the type that flap back and forth frequently with presidential changes.
That's why things like ACA are far more monumental - they're codified, much harder to undo.
Trust in media has been in steady decline for decades now.
I count two. Regardless, but not the kind that has (or would have to) survive constitutional challenge. In four years they barely made a dent on ACA, and that was a critical part of the mission statement.
Either could be reversed, as has happened in previous administration changes. Our tax code and rates are pretty malleable, if the last forty years is any indication.
States are actively implementing nullification of federal laws. Some blue states are illegal immigrant sanctuary states. Some red states are federal gun law sanctuaries. Marijuana sanctuaries abound. People in positions of power are openly discussing more nullification and even national divorce.
You don't repeal laws, you nullify them. The ACA is small potatoes in that regard. They're not coming for the ACA, they're coming for the whole union.
What you're discussing is nothing new. State marijuana decriminalization has existed for decades, states have selectively chosen to enforce immigration laws differently for even longer.
What state gun laws are intended to supersede or nullify federal ones?
None of this is new or shocking. It's largely the way the republic has operated from day one.
The First Step Act was a major push towards criminal justice reform - something all parties claim they'll do but don't deliver on.
Also his tax reform led to lower and middle class families paying significantly less federal income taxes while at the same time increasing treasury deposits.
Tax reform and criminal justice reform were part of his agenda and those were accomplishments.
He was an ok president, despite what the media say.
He didn't wreck the economy like democrats do, but he didn't cut spending which is the only sane thing to do.
We needed a Ron Paul, not Trump.
Unfortunately governments are a reflection of people and most people are pissed at the government. Trump didn't create angry people, he channeled the anti establishment sentiment like Berlusconi did 30 years ago in Italy.
Most likely, once they became the establishment the found out the system is engineered to be impossible to dismantle from the inside.
The only way out of this increasingly huge government is collapse.
Democrats effect on the economy is mixed just like Republicans, and the truth is that the president does not actually control very much when it comes to what markets are doing. If the economy is good they take credit for it and if the economy is bad they blame the last president if they were of a different party.
Government tends to grow under every administration because that's what all the incentives inside government encourage. You get what you incentivize.
Libertarianism is a political loser because a libertarian political platform would ultimately be about making politics and thus politicians less important. No career politician is going to really do that, and you can't get to high office without making it a career unless you're a fluke like Trump. I think a lot of people supported him for that reason, but unfortunately he was the wrong kind of fluke.
BTW the worst president of the last 100 years was not Trump. It was George W Bush for the Iraq war alone. Trump was obnoxious and might have been dangerous if he had more actual power, but he did not do anything to even approach the damage Bush did with that decision. I also doubt there would have been a President Trump had Bush not burned the US' reputation to the ground.
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.
I know a lot of smart, logical people who lose all sense of thought process when it comes to Trump. Not sure why people act like that. I would never vote for the guy but at least I can keep my head on when discussing him.
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.
> [snark]Almost lost the Republic on Jan 6th to a whole lot of shoving.[/snark]
Snark aside, the danger of Jan 6 was not shoving - It was people deciding to do the wrong thing in the name of gaining power.
The insurrectionists who organized January 6 (yes it was planned) were at the Willard Hotel in a number of suites they called a "War Room" (yes, their words). The entire plan was to delay certification of Joe Biden's victory to give state legislatures time to arrange an alternate slate of electors to be sent to the Capitol. This delay was achieved via a violent mob directed at the Capitol. A delay happened by it wasn't long enough, so the effort failed.
But it almost succeeded. They wanted to push Pence in the direction of refusing to certify Biden's 2020 win, thereby kicking the decision to state delegates, of which Republicans controlled a majority. Obviously they would have voted for Trump over Biden.
This is how autocracy happens in America: a president who loses both the popular vote and electoral college, appointed by a political party on the basis of fraudulent claims of fraud. No elections will be trusted by either side after that happens.
> No elections will be trusted by either side after that happens.
This is the Democrats fault. Their shoe-in candidate lost and they spent four years bleating that Trump was illegitimate and failed to prove it with a far reaching investigation. _That_ is where trust started to be lost.
I have to agree. They didn't explicitly lie like Trump did/does, but they (or at least, Hilary specifically) did repeatedly mention that they "won the popular vote" as if it was relevant - they wanted to imply the same thing, that Trumps presidency was unfair if not illegitimate.
The Muller report and Senate Report on Russian Active Measures (I posted links earlier, but you've already read them I assume: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29080495) show that Trump and Russians coordinated efforts, made secret deals, delivered on quid pro quo arrangements, and yes even shared information during the 2016 election. And they lied about it all, destroyed evidence, and obstructed the investigations into their activity. You can characterize objections to such behavior as "bleating", but it doesn't change the fact that the Trump campaign worked with Russian intelligence as they hacked the DNC. There is still no explanation for Trump's campaign manager handing internal campaign data to a Russian intelligence officer, other than collusion.
There's no theory presented here, just a list of things that happened according to the Special Counsel and Congress. There's no mystery about what went on, and yeah, it's also clear that no one cares. Because that's the world we live in now, and I'm okay with that. But let's just be clear about where we are right now: a campaign for President coordinated with a foreign power as that power was hacking the campaign's opponent in the election, and they lied about it to everyone. That's okay behavior now, because as you said, the FBI did nothing. The Attorney General read the report I linked to and concluded the behavior was perfectly normal. But that doesn't make the charges of Russian collusion a "lie", as some have spun the results of those investigations. If Trump's campaign handing internal campaign data to Russian intelligence officers isn't collusion, the word has lost all meaning.
I mean, this isn't even the product of some partisan hit job on Trump. This is the result of two Republican-led investigations. One, led by a fmr Republican FBI director appointed by a Republican deputy AG, who in turn was appointed by Trump himself; the other written by the Republican majority and chaired Senate Intel committee. It's really easy to dismiss this as a "conspiracy theory" or "witch hunt" as the then President tried very hard to call it, but Republicans and Democrats both agree on the facts in these reports. They are not lies. They are not conspiracy theories. And yes, they are also a nothing-burger, because the behavior is now normalized. That's how presidential campaigns will be run from here on out basically thanks to this whole issue, and no one should be surprised when Democrats do it.
I’m sorry but I chuckled a bit. In my last company our corporate legal used to ask us not to call our conference room the “war room” - it might imply anticompetitive actions. I rolled my eyes but apparently I was wrong in thinking that was a ridiculous statement.
And the fact that the Democrats argued that Trumps 2016 election and Bush’s election was “suspect” if not “fradulent” doesn’t do much to bolster your argument.
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.
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.
It's a shame that the parties don't think ahead. When one party pushes for better election practices, the other should roll over, because next election it will benefit them and this election it won't matter.
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.
> 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.
I read it as being personal at first but on second read interpreted the “antithetical” comment to reference the issue that they were breaking the license and limiting the users freedom.
I meant that my comment was a personal feeling about the license, and not about any particular users or violators of the license.
The post says "we would prefer if people so antithetical to our values did not use and benefit from our labour", and that is clearly not a criticism of just the nature of the license violation, but the people who are violating it.
Can’t a generous person who chooses to give away something (on the condition that anyone who chooses to accept this gift does the same) criticise the character of those who take advantage of this kindness for their own personal financial gain?
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.
This isn’t a fallacy because I’m not making an argument or asserting the parent commenter is wrong. I’m suggesting to the parent commenter that they follow their own advice and keep their personal beliefs personal.
For instance, if someone who eats steak tells me that studies show eating red meat causes heart disease, it’s not a fallacy to suggest that they should stop eating red meat.
I’m suggesting it because you said that personal beliefs should be kept personal. Similar to how if someone eating steak told me steak was unhealthy, I would advise them to stop eating steak. I read what you originally wrote, assumed it was true, and pointed out a logical inconsistency.
>I’m not making an argument or asserting the parent commenter is wrong. I’m suggesting to the parent commenter that they follow their own advice and keep their personal beliefs personal.
You're going further than that, though, aren't you? You're impliedly suggesting they're a hypocrite. You're doing that to cast doubt on whether it's correct to invoke personal feelings when enforcing software licences by saying they are invoking personal feelings themselves when discussing that issue.
I suggest to you that this is an argument, and a blatant fallacy.
>For instance, if someone who eats steak tells me that studies show eating red meat causes heart disease, it’s not a fallacy to suggest that they should stop eating red meat
In your example, if you used the fact that someone who said red meat was bad ate red meat in support of the proposition that it is not bad to eat red meat, that would be a perfect example of the fallacy.
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.
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.
A sensible person might wonder what justification you have for that belief. Looking at the respective histories of both groups, I think you'll find that the violators are the sort of people to engage in uneven enforcement.
Moreover, is there another Mastodon license violator who's getting away with it because of their ostensibly favourable politics? What does it mean for your supposition if there's only the one violator?
> I think it makes people believe they will enforce the license unevenly to satisfy their personal feelings about who is using it
Maybe they will. As copyright holders, they are allowed to do that (though I don't think they have copyright assignation, so there would also be lots of _other_ copyright holders who could attempt different enforcement, presumably).
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).
I was hoping for something more enforceable than that, but still interesting enough. Looks like half of all companies using JSON are in trouble (obviously it's subjective, don't think that needs to be said).
It's not the JSON format, but rather certain libraries which process JSON (I should have been more precise). Many companies avoid using those libraries for that very reason.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Yeah I don't get why people don't understand the sentence or the point of it. "[...] people so antithetical to our values" implies that the values of Mastodon are the opposite of the people using the code. I.E. since everyone knows the Trump people are racist, homophobic, and misogynist pieces of shit, the Mastodon company values are to be the opposite of that.
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."
I understand why someone would interpret Mastodon's statement that way, but I believe it is a misinterpretation and not what Mastodon meant. I don't have a doubt about Mastodon's meaning.
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.
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).
People were able to access the service and create accounts. Those people are entitled to the sources.
This would immediately go away if they just posted a tarball of the almost certainly unmodified sources. I guess nobody running this understands what's going on?
This platform is going to be under continuous attack from all angles. The company has to be ready to be boycotted, licenses revoked, regulation enacted, smear campaigns run, deplatformed by infrastructure providers, etc. Their lawyers are going to be the more combative type, when they signed up it was pretty clear the sort of wild-eyed hate that the Trump brand is going to attract from established actors in the social media sphere.
My hope is they're just going to take 20 days to think about it then release the source code. But we'll see.
I doubt there'll be much boycotting; the people who might boycott won't want to use it in the first place. Certainly no regulation will be enacted. I doubt a smear campaign, either; if it's anything like Twitter, a simple screenshot of the homepage will be enough. So the only things are:
• licenses revoked – except with free software, this can only happen if you violate the license
• deplatformed by infrastructure providers – which is part of the reason we need not to have centralisation in the first place.
As much as I dislike this former president, I expect his social media site might actually have better moderation than his Twitter followers had; for PR reasons, if nothing else. I'd rather it wasn't around, but I don't think it's worth taking it down. (Enforcing the AGPL, however? That's worth something.)
> licenses revoked – except with free software, this can only happen if you violate the license
Eh, there _are_ commercial licenses which would have a "don't bring us into disrepute" clause, but you'd imagine they'll probably avoid those. Mind you you'd also imagine they'd avoid violating the AGPL, and yet here we are.
Sorry, I was grammatically ambiguous. Free software is the one where this can only happen if you violate the license, and it's an exception to “traditional” (proprietary) software licensing. Please read the “except” as a fancy “but”. (How dare you not pick up on my intonation‽ It was obvious in the timing of my keypresses!)
I think that certain classes of massive blatant bigotry will be forbidden. Perhaps not as well as Twitter, thinking about it, but still probably better than some of the other sites out there that are tailored to this demographic.
The ulterior motive of this website is simple: the immediate interests of this guy. The ulterior motives of some other websites are harder to see.
_Any_ large social network which was violating the AGPL should expect trouble.
> Their lawyers are going to be the more combative type
But probably not the more competent type, based on the prior adventures of Donald Trump. I mean, this is coming from the same people who brought you Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
If you have no right to a computer service, you have no right to the AGPL code it runs. For example, a company is allowed to make internal GPL-based tools and not have to release their code. If I hack into their service and download the binary, I’m not entitled to the source code.
If the closed beta was meant for a select few, but was found by someone else, that someone else doesn’t have a right to the code just because they managed to get access. Only the select few would be allowed.
The fact that it’s a public web server (with no access controls) does throw a wrench into things, but it’s not as simple as many here make it seem.
> If the closed beta was meant for a select few, but was found by someone else
The license makes no such distinction. The website had no warning that it was a private test, was hosted on the presumed official domain and looked like it went live.
I never received an explicit authorisation by YC to use Hacker News and here I am. I wouldn’t call my access unauthorised even though it was never authorised.
> The license makes no such distinction. The website had no warning that it was a private test, was hosted on the presumed official domain and looked like it went live.
That is true. I mention that in my last paragraph:
> The fact that it’s a public web server (with no access controls) does throw a wrench into things, but it’s not as simple as many here make it seem.
However, simply being accessible is not akin to authorization. If that company tool is accessible to the public through a misconfigured DNS, the courts probably won’t side with me asking for the source.
The law is not black and white (despite what many here think). Judges are humans and will apply judgement as to whether Truth was meant to be accessible or not.
There’s also the fact that the CFAA is a broadly worded law and could easily be wielded by Trump against the people accessing Truth prior to launch. Just say they weren’t authorized and were hacking. They’ll probably lose in court with that argument, but we won’t know until the ruling would come out
> However, simply being accessible is not akin to authorization.
That’s a hard argument to push unless the judge is unbelievably biased. If the website is up and running on the expected domain, functions correctly and has no indication it’s a private beta, it’s hard to assume bad faith from the unintended users.
IIRC, the idea was tested in the early days of dial up systems and a system that was setup to not require authentication that had a “Welcome to this computer” banner was considered open enough the intruders were not considered intruders.
If you have a building and charge for entry, but there is no access control at the door, no ticket sales and no indication you need to pay to enter, can you complain someone wandered into the building without paying?
They win either way. If mastodon pursues the copyright claim, they get a ton of press and probably more money from donations to fight the “woke Marxists”.
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
> 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?
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.
"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."
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.
> 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.
They might be running a forwarding proxy with substitution rules. I don't think AGPL would have a problem with that, even though SSPL would. (Though, let's face it: they totally modified the source code.)
Yea, but you don’t have to prove your case to get into court.
You have to be able to say, with a straight face, that you really believe that they did the thing you’re accusing them of.
So just because it’s theoretically possible that there’s a path to the facts we see without violating the license, the fact that a license violation is a plausible explanation is enough to launch a court case.
After all, the court case including the discovery process and the trial itself are all about determining the relevant facts.
And if not enough for an injunction, certainly enough for an “information and belief” claim in a lawsuit, which would likely survive a motion to dismiss and get you to discovery.
> 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.
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)
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.
> 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.
This is all in Mastodan's blog post. It hasn't officially launched, but was made public for a bit, people signed up. It was clearly just a Mastodan fork, and it had a terms of service with this in it:
Unless otherwise indicated, the Site is our proprietary property and all source code, databases, functionality, software, website designs, audio, video, text, photographs, and graphics on the Site (collectively, the “Content”) and the trademarks, service marks, and logos contained therein (the “Marks”) are owned or controlled by us or licensed to us, and are protected by copyright and trademark laws and various other intellectual property rights and unfair competition laws of the United States, foreign jurisdictions, and international conventions.
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.
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.
Exactly. Truth Social could actually sue any one claiming they used the platform for abusing a security flaw to obtain and maintain access to a protected computer system. That would be hilarious.
> Armed with the app developer’s name, the hacker told the Daily Dot that they were able to utilize Shodan, a search engine that locates servers exposed to the open internet, to track down the company’s digital footprint.
> The hacker was able to locate numerous web domains as a result, including one that appeared to be running the mobile beta for Truth Social.
> News of the public website quickly spread across social media after making its way to Canadian hacker Aubrey “Kirtaner” Cottle, who was able to set up faux accounts for numerous high-profile individuals such as QAnon guru Ron Watkins.
Whether that counts as misconfigured idk, but these are certainly not normal users doing normal user things.
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.
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?
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.
> can this be fought in court as long as the website doesn’t even exist?
The website did exist. Users created accounts and demanded a copy of the source. They were refused, and so the license was infringed. Mastodon isn't threatening legal action. They're asking for that refusal to be reversed, thereby curing the infringement.
I had the same question- "Does taking down the website cure the violation?"
Here's the relevant clause in GPLv3:
> You may not propagate or modify a covered work except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to propagate or modify it is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License (including any patent licenses granted under the third paragraph of section 11).
> However, if you cease all violation of this License, then your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated (a) provisionally, unless and until the copyright holder explicitly and finally terminates your license, and (b) permanently, if the copyright holder fails to notify you of the violation by some reasonable means prior to 60 days after the cessation.
> Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice.
Basically- the website WAS in violation, and Mastodon is within their rights to permanently withdraw the license following their 30-day notice. I think the key here is the difference between "cease violation", with truth.social has done by taking down the site, and "cure the violation", which refers to correcting the earlier violation by distributing the source as it existed at that time. Without "curing" the previous violation, then truth.social cannot launch again with any modified version of Mastodon, as their license will be permanently revoked.
That said, there's leeway involved due to truth.social not being intentionally public. On one hand, "people were able to access it and make accounts", on the other hand, gaining access to some company's internal GPL tool because they misconfigured a VPN does not entitle you to source for that tool (and you violated the CFAA). It's a question for the courts, but it probably doesn't really matter because one of three things will happen:
1) truth.social will re-launch with no Mastodon code, and doesn't care if their Mastodon license is revoked.
2) truth.social will re-launch with Mastodon code, will provide their sources, and the whole thing goes away.
3) truth.social will re-launch with Mastodon code, will NOT provide the sources, and Mastodon has a much stronger legal leg to stand on.
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.
chan sites, gab, some forums on tor... I'm honestly not sure if they're trying to hurt conservatives or if the continual embedding into conservative social platforms is an attempt to cling to relevancy?
I don't think all conservatives are nazis by any means, but I'm not a fan of the "any vote we can get" tactics that are hesitant to admonish white supremacy
I think they are fusing, conservatives and racism have almost always been correlated, so there is a common ground.
Having that said, nazism and republican conservatism are surprisingly different, say, nazis are anti jews, conservatives are anti mexicans. Again, there is a common ground.
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.
I don’t know. I’m not privy to the private communications of the users nor do I have the legal expertise to understand the validity of the terms and conditions of a license.
Regardless I just see this announcement as a pre emptive move by the developers of Mastodon to compel the owners of Truth Social to comply with their license moving forward.
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.
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!
You scrubbed the entire meaning from the sentencing by removing the context. They are saying that despite the conflict of values, principles of free software mean that the network is free to use their code provided they comply with the license. The previous paragraph makes clear the reasons why, and improvements to upstream software is a key one.
> We pride ourselves on providing software that allows anyone to run their own social media platform independent of big tech, but the condition upon which we release our work for free in the first place is the idea that, as we give to the platform operators, so do the platform operators give back to us by providing their improvements for us and everyone to see. But that doesn’t only benefit us as the developers – it benefits the people that use these platforms as it gives them insight into the functionality of the platforms that manage their data and gives them the ability to walk away and start their own.
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.
We will create many Distributed Permacomputers which will be long lasting, durable, with the right to repair and a right to free speech without being deplatformed.
Rusulting Code will be public domain and easy to setup.
It was never about the code, it was always about the data.
And....what exactly does this have to do with this situation? If your permacomputer hosts something that breaks the licence of the software used, I'd also hope it would be shut down, whatever it's hosting.
A permacomputer exists only as long as there are people hosting it. Bittorent files are famously impossible to take down....only as long as there are any seeders remaining. You don't need to shut down the entire internet to stop a distributed system from working.
Bittorent is a protocol, that's like asking how do you stop the English language or poetry or musical notation - it doesn't even make sense in context. You can absolutely stop individual people participating in the network however and stop them from hosting or make it difficult for them. Just like with bittorent, it can be more or less difficult depending on the infringement, but again, if the software you host is breaking the licence then I'd hope enforcement would be effective against you.
Let me flip this around - do you believe that things like licences, copyright, perhaps even legality of material posted shouldn't matter at all on this "permacomputer"? Reading your page it's clear you want to go back to the "good old days" of internet - which is admirable, in a sort of romantic way. It is hacker news after all. But yes, if I made some software, and I found you were using it without a licence, I'd definitely try to sue you for it, permacomputer or not. Just because your network might have the technical resilience against being shut down doesn't mean you get to go back to golden days of the internet where no one really cared about silly things like actually paying for stuff. I see the attempt to dress it as "prevent deplatforming of politicians" just as dishonest as the attempts to shut everything down because "think of the children" - they are two sides of the same extremist(in opinion) coin. You can't have a completely open internet(yes, like we used to have, that's gone), but you shouldn't have a completely closed surveiled internet either.
I know you are wrong. I don't think you have anything of value to protect with license. You can't sue a person for creating software, you'll have to go after the person hosting. My view is the correct view and the only view which will have any permenence on this planet. Good luck with your licenses.
>>my view is the correct view and the only view which will have any permenence on this planet
And that's a fantastic view to keep when trying to discuss anything, really keeping that mind open eh? Good luck with your project.
>> I don't think you have anything of value to protect with license.
You are wrong(hey, two can play this game)
>> You can't sue a person for creating software,
Sure, but that's not what I said, so you're making a point just for its own sake.
Also I kinda hoped you'd answer my question if you think any licences/copyright/legality don't matter on your permacomputer. But then you haven't even answered my other comment, so meh, maybe I expected too much.
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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.
So like you said, this is clearly not just posturing, Truth Social is legitimately in violation of their license agreement.
It wouldn't be pretty, and it wouldn't cache images locally (which is a problem from a privacy point of view), but it would work, and it would scale just as well as the rest of the Fediverse.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, that's entirely completely different.
Now, start a website selling Doctor Who episodes, and see how far your incomplete enforcement argument gets you with the court.
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,
>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...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_transcription#
Not a legal opinion, of course.
Disney, Nintendo and similar outfits can afford to go after people who weren't causing them any harm and so they do.
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.
Do you have some actual examples of this? Trademarks which were cancelled not for lack of use (a real reason) but for lack of enforcement ? I don't think that's a thing, which is why I'm asking.
It's true that genericisation is at least a potential threat, although I think many businesses would say that's a great problem to have (your mark can't become generic if people aren't familiar with it, and if they're familiar with it that means you sure have sold a whole lot of product, the real examples of genericisation are famous successful companies such as Xerox or Hoover, hardly stories of failure).
But also this isn't about genericisation anyway. Mere mentions aren't actionable. That's what is insidious about it, you can sue people who are no threat to your mark at all, and the likes of Disney do that all the time. But you can't (successfully) sue people who mention your mark in a way that just contributes to eventual genericisation.
It's a good question, and I don't specifically. I've heard this advise from lawyers in various different fields (not specifically Trademark lawyers), but when I go digging for examples, or the specific legislative history, most of my searching ends with "there's no a clear, definitive case on this topic".
So, in a lot of ways, I think you're right to challenge this assertion. It seems more like a recommendation that comes from "an abundance of caution" rather than a clear legal ruling, but I think I was wrong when I definitely stated that "trademark law does require active policing and enforcement". It seems like it might be more accurate to say: "some lawyers believe trademark law may require active policing and enforcement"
> some lawyers believe trademark law may require active policing and enforcement
That's definitely true. Of course we might observe that it sure is convenient that Trademark lawyers believe you should hire more Trademark lawyers... If this is their honest belief then even if it wasn't true they aren't committing fraud since fraud requires dishonesty. So that's nice.
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.
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.
The people who have been in power for 40 years are definitely NOT the problem. It was just that last guy.
As an aside, it it really strange to see people falling in front of Trump to protect him on HN, a place with seemingly smart people. A man with zero principles, no moral compass, and fewer redeeming qualities than Caligula.
And all of this in a thread that is wondering - why doesn't Donald Trump care about our rules?
Off to shout obscenities at a school board meeting, toodles!
In any case 'officially up' is likely irrelevant here.
That's not true, especially considering they took down the site as soon as it was noticed it was publicly facing.
If a company misconfigures a VPN and you're able to access an internal tool that would not be otherwise available to the public, but uses GPL code, that would not entitle you to the sources. Especially if the company immediately fixed the issue of the public having access to said internal tool, any reasonable court would side with them.
If the site re-launches without fixing the issue, though, that is a very different story.
It's really not that difficult to comply with AGPLv3. Truth Social should simply release the code and keep the repo up to date.
[1] https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/107181466903817162
[2] https://code.gab.com/gab
Truth Social can just do what Gab did and provide a password-protected file in a public self-hosted git repository and they will be compliant.
It's these consistent, subtle details that make the Trumpist propaganda so effective. The other side needs to start taking notes.
I agree, though, that it does sometimes sound like it's being hinted that something more nefarious was happening when people talk about it like this.
If there was anything nefarious going on it was Twitter, FB, etc. looking the other way because they knew that his violations of their terms was attracting attention and therefore making them money.
One of the primary issues is that Twitter has routinely granted privileged protected status to their favored political side, and refused to ban prominent people on the left that have behaved dramatically in violation of their policies [1][2]. There were a huge number of examples of it from the left during the unhinged Nick Sandermann cultural conflict for example (a wave of direct calls for violence by blue checkmarks against underage children).
Twitter has no qualms with unevenly applying their policies, so long as they're helping their political side. That has particularly been going on for four or five years non-stop at this point.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094762/spike-lee-sued-f...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/north-america-donald-trump-ap-top...
But as far as I could see, only seeing the former president's tweets in the news because I'm not a Twitter user, he was also granted protected status. So I fail to see it as some leftist conspiracy and find it more likely that Twitter just allows users that attract more attention this privileged status because it's in their best interest to do so.
Honestly, I don't know who Nick Sandermann is and could not care less about what Jane Fonda and Spike Lee are up to on Twitter. You've just pointed out some great examples of why I left it behind a long time ago.
However, as a US citizen, I do care what my president gets up to, even on social media. Given it's outsized influence on our society these days, I'm probably more interested in what the president is saying on social media, where he, and every other politician, seem to be able to get away with saying things they'd never have said on mainstream television or on traditional media not that long ago.
I've yet to see any other president ever behave that way on any social media platform so I have no point of reference to either dispute or agree with what you're saying.
And no, I'm not a reporter or an employee of a tech company, please keep your inferences about my character out of the conversation.
That's not what they're implying.
The implication is that if they can do it to the office-holder of one of the most powerful jobs in the world, they are very powerful and can do it to you.
> the narrative of social media being an organized supranational conspiracy
When lots of social media companies do the same thing at the same time, what other explanation is there?
And to top it all off, Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort, who was deep in debt to a Russian oligarch (Deripaska) yet working pro bono for Trump (a billionaire), was caught giving internal campaign polling data to a Russian intelligence officer (Kilimnik) working directly for Deripaska, which was then used to target the social media psyops campaign by the GRU.
This is exactly the collusion many said occurred during the 2016 election, and just because it took 5 years to prove doesn't mean we were wrong in 2016 when we pointed out what was obvious to us. Yes some took it too far and said Trump was a literal agent of Russia, but the effect is really the same agent or not - the Trump campaign was working hand-in-hand with Russia to get him elected over Clinton. They were coordinating in public and private, sharing data, making deals, and following through on those deals, and they all lied about all of it at every opportunity (establishes consciousness of guilt). Collusion.
These are all facts laid out in the Mueller Report Vol I [1], the Senate Intel report on Russian Active Measures (especially Vol V) [2], and the US Treasury Department [3]. Calling all of this a "lie" at this point feel like memory holing.
[1] http://opensourcemuellerreport.com/mueller-report-vol-1.pdf
[2] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/publications/report-sele...
[3] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0126
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.
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/
Somehow we're supposed to believe George W. Bush is a good guy after all.
He often says 'RINO' or 'the swamp'.
We've seen what powers he bestows. These will increase with martyrdom.
"The emperor has no clothes" ha! the skinsuit tore off and the naked Terminator machinery is on display for all to see. and its nowhere near as cool and fascinating as it was in the movies. It's just "keyword list" string match stupidity re-iterated yet again.
The man IS going around pushing election claims, and people down ticket ARE copying him.
Certainly more press than the Vizio thing, which will actually impact a lot more people if anything comes of it.
Linksys
Most of Oracle's business model.
People whose political opinions differ from my own use the software? This must be stopped at once.
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.
No, definitely not. They’re just actual fascists.
Last administration had several people of color in it. It also had an openly gay member. I did not see them banning anyone off social media or suppressing the opposition. They removed far more regulations than they created which reduced their administrations power. As far as I know they never ignored a supreme court ruling.
Sure the last administration had major problems, but to try and compare say it is fascism is absurd imo. The fact the we have a new administration is all the proof you really need.
Fascist actions to me are things like admitting the government regularly bans people they don't like from social media. Ignoring supreme court rulings. Trying to shutdown opposition news organizations. Spying on opposition news organizations. Spying on political opponents. Demanding access to see every citizens bank transactions. Demanding the federal government have full control of all elections. All these actions lead towards a one party system in which the federal government has completely control over every aspect of its citizens life and forcefully suppresses the opposition.
Didn't really have a way to effectively do that, but tried to get laws changed so social media platforms that people had to opportunity to speak out against him on were shut down. That was a pretty common theme during his term.
> Ignoring supreme court rulings.
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/15/891563635/trump-administratio...
> Demanding the federal government have full control of all elections.
Not federal, but: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/03/us/politics/trump-raffens...
> Trying to shutdown opposition news organizations. Spying on opposition news organizations.
He actively went after every news org except for Fox and orgs further to the right of Fox. And nearing the end of his term, he started going after Fox as well.
There was the whole "throw protestors (and people near protests) in cars and drive them to undisclosed locations" thing that happened in Portland. There was the whole "can we invoke the Insurrection Act" stuff too.
You also miss the race stuff that definition of Fascism you linked to mentions. Stephan Miller's general existence should be enough to convince anyone of that.
Other characteristics of Fascism: punishing political opponents. Remember "Lock Her Up"? What about Democrats stealing the election and how they should be punished? One party system, right?
Then there was that tiny infiltration of the capital that he may or may not have had a large hand in.
He was very good at pushing as far as he thought he could, but no further. I admit, he didn't open fun down people in the streets. You're right, not a fascist.
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
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.
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
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.
The business opening or not does not matter here. GPL is enforced on the moment you publish underneath that license.
I think the Mastodon people are merely hoping they can stop Trump, they are not really concerned about getting the source code.
Also my question was more about why that specific concern about the license - why did you pick AGPL instead of GPL and why do you care so much about that specific case?
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.
His primary accomplishment was building a base of angry people.
There was no reason to believe that they would get what they wanted policy-wise from a Democrat or from a different Republican candidate. The next best thing is to make all of the bad people angry, which they did get.
If any of the criticism had gone beyond the level of "crooked Hillary" then I could buy this theory of Trump as expose. But it never did.
The point was that he said things like "kung flu" and it drove the bad people insane. Or "I can't call Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas any more because she's not an Indian."
I think the goal was a transformative presidency that cemented Trump as one of the best presidents. But he just didn't have the aptitude to pull that off.
That depends on what you believe Trump's agenda was.
I hope you're not taking his 2016 electoral campaign statements regarding what his agenda is at face value...
If not that, then ... what?
Not much got done, certainly not in the spirit of lasting change or advancing conservative agendas.
Is that a joke? What on earth would you judge someone on (with regards to their agenda) other than the commitments they make as a candidate?
I don’t care about whether someone accomplished a “secret unpublished” agenda, if it’s all revealed after the fact.
Obviously, I care about the changes made during the presidential term, but when it comes to “evaluating whether they fulfilled their agenda”, it seems farcical to say “I hope you weren’t actually considering the public commitments they made about their agenda”
I would say the US drastically changed a few ways: 1) the public’s perception of the media [Trump’s antagonism exposed just how partisan it is across the board], 2) the US strategy with regards to China [Biden seems to be quietly adopting many aspects], 3) a significant adjustment of tax strategy and offshoring of profits [it was a major shift in how offshore profits are treated], 4) healthcare regulations [hospital price transparency and drug pricing had some people shitting bricks and it’s just started].
Now you can argue those moves were bad, but to argue nothing changed is short-sighted.
It’s not that dissimilar to a large corporation. I’ve seen leaders (not even CEOs) push in a certain direction and it’s clear years later it made an impact.
These are ephemeral changes, the type that flap back and forth frequently with presidential changes.
That's why things like ACA are far more monumental - they're codified, much harder to undo.
Trust in media has been in steady decline for decades now.
Either could be reversed, as has happened in previous administration changes. Our tax code and rates are pretty malleable, if the last forty years is any indication.
You don't repeal laws, you nullify them. The ACA is small potatoes in that regard. They're not coming for the ACA, they're coming for the whole union.
What state gun laws are intended to supersede or nullify federal ones?
None of this is new or shocking. It's largely the way the republic has operated from day one.
Also his tax reform led to lower and middle class families paying significantly less federal income taxes while at the same time increasing treasury deposits.
Tax reform and criminal justice reform were part of his agenda and those were accomplishments.
He didn't wreck the economy like democrats do, but he didn't cut spending which is the only sane thing to do.
We needed a Ron Paul, not Trump. Unfortunately governments are a reflection of people and most people are pissed at the government. Trump didn't create angry people, he channeled the anti establishment sentiment like Berlusconi did 30 years ago in Italy. Most likely, once they became the establishment the found out the system is engineered to be impossible to dismantle from the inside.
The only way out of this increasingly huge government is collapse.
Government tends to grow under every administration because that's what all the incentives inside government encourage. You get what you incentivize.
Libertarianism is a political loser because a libertarian political platform would ultimately be about making politics and thus politicians less important. No career politician is going to really do that, and you can't get to high office without making it a career unless you're a fluke like Trump. I think a lot of people supported him for that reason, but unfortunately he was the wrong kind of fluke.
BTW the worst president of the last 100 years was not Trump. It was George W Bush for the Iraq war alone. Trump was obnoxious and might have been dangerous if he had more actual power, but he did not do anything to even approach the damage Bush did with that decision. I also doubt there would have been a President Trump had Bush not burned the US' reputation to the ground.
His entire term was a wake up: we have all tied ourselves to a ship that is not unsinkable.
That's what his supporters thought/hoped but I'd say that didn't really pan out the way they thought, either.
So it just means that Donald J. Trump is in their minds 'rent-free'; forever.
If classifying that as "rent-free" makes people feel better more power to them.
But more seriously it looks like the government is having a hell of a time convicting anyone there of more than mischief and trespassing.
Snark aside, the danger of Jan 6 was not shoving - It was people deciding to do the wrong thing in the name of gaining power.
The insurrectionists who organized January 6 (yes it was planned) were at the Willard Hotel in a number of suites they called a "War Room" (yes, their words). The entire plan was to delay certification of Joe Biden's victory to give state legislatures time to arrange an alternate slate of electors to be sent to the Capitol. This delay was achieved via a violent mob directed at the Capitol. A delay happened by it wasn't long enough, so the effort failed.
But it almost succeeded. They wanted to push Pence in the direction of refusing to certify Biden's 2020 win, thereby kicking the decision to state delegates, of which Republicans controlled a majority. Obviously they would have voted for Trump over Biden.
This is how autocracy happens in America: a president who loses both the popular vote and electoral college, appointed by a political party on the basis of fraudulent claims of fraud. No elections will be trusted by either side after that happens.
This is the Democrats fault. Their shoe-in candidate lost and they spent four years bleating that Trump was illegitimate and failed to prove it with a far reaching investigation. _That_ is where trust started to be lost.
I mean, this isn't even the product of some partisan hit job on Trump. This is the result of two Republican-led investigations. One, led by a fmr Republican FBI director appointed by a Republican deputy AG, who in turn was appointed by Trump himself; the other written by the Republican majority and chaired Senate Intel committee. It's really easy to dismiss this as a "conspiracy theory" or "witch hunt" as the then President tried very hard to call it, but Republicans and Democrats both agree on the facts in these reports. They are not lies. They are not conspiracy theories. And yes, they are also a nothing-burger, because the behavior is now normalized. That's how presidential campaigns will be run from here on out basically thanks to this whole issue, and no one should be surprised when Democrats do it.
And the fact that the Democrats argued that Trumps 2016 election and Bush’s election was “suspect” if not “fradulent” doesn’t do much to bolster your argument.
The pearl clutching is pretty obvious.
I'm gonna go ahead and put that "shoving" into the not-cool category.
Pretty crappy insurrection.
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.
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.
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.
The post says "we would prefer if people so antithetical to our values did not use and benefit from our labour", and that is clearly not a criticism of just the nature of the license violation, but the people who are violating it.
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.
For instance, if someone who eats steak tells me that studies show eating red meat causes heart disease, it’s not a fallacy to suggest that they should stop eating red meat.
Why would you suggest that, rp1? This is a place to discuss things. Our beliefs about appropriate ways to publicize license disputes are part of that.
You're going further than that, though, aren't you? You're impliedly suggesting they're a hypocrite. You're doing that to cast doubt on whether it's correct to invoke personal feelings when enforcing software licences by saying they are invoking personal feelings themselves when discussing that issue.
I suggest to you that this is an argument, and a blatant fallacy.
>For instance, if someone who eats steak tells me that studies show eating red meat causes heart disease, it’s not a fallacy to suggest that they should stop eating red meat
In your example, if you used the fact that someone who said red meat was bad ate red meat in support of the proposition that it is not bad to eat red meat, that would be a perfect example of the fallacy.
Their statement does not detract from their action.
Moreover, is there another Mastodon license violator who's getting away with it because of their ostensibly favourable politics? What does it mean for your supposition if there's only the one violator?
Maybe they will. As copyright holders, they are allowed to do that (though I don't think they have copyright assignation, so there would also be lots of _other_ copyright holders who could attempt different enforcement, presumably).
I was hoping for something more enforceable than that, but still interesting enough. Looks like half of all companies using JSON are in trouble (obviously it's subjective, don't think that needs to be said).
I wonder if Mongo DB and Elasticsearch are currently learning this lesson.
https://bipcot.org/
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/fyodor-terminates-sco-righ...
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
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".
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.
> 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.
>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).
This would immediately go away if they just posted a tarball of the almost certainly unmodified sources. I guess nobody running this understands what's going on?
This platform is going to be under continuous attack from all angles. The company has to be ready to be boycotted, licenses revoked, regulation enacted, smear campaigns run, deplatformed by infrastructure providers, etc. Their lawyers are going to be the more combative type, when they signed up it was pretty clear the sort of wild-eyed hate that the Trump brand is going to attract from established actors in the social media sphere.
My hope is they're just going to take 20 days to think about it then release the source code. But we'll see.
• licenses revoked – except with free software, this can only happen if you violate the license
• deplatformed by infrastructure providers – which is part of the reason we need not to have centralisation in the first place.
As much as I dislike this former president, I expect his social media site might actually have better moderation than his Twitter followers had; for PR reasons, if nothing else. I'd rather it wasn't around, but I don't think it's worth taking it down. (Enforcing the AGPL, however? That's worth something.)
They more or less already stated that any unflattering opinions will be deleted and the used banned from the platform.
Eh, there _are_ commercial licenses which would have a "don't bring us into disrepute" clause, but you'd imagine they'll probably avoid those. Mind you you'd also imagine they'd avoid violating the AGPL, and yet here we are.
I expect that any and all voices that don't lavish heaps on praise upon The Former Guy to be removed without any further justification.
If that's what you mean by "moderation".
The ulterior motive of this website is simple: the immediate interests of this guy. The ulterior motives of some other websites are harder to see.
> Their lawyers are going to be the more combative type
But probably not the more competent type, based on the prior adventures of Donald Trump. I mean, this is coming from the same people who brought you Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
If the closed beta was meant for a select few, but was found by someone else, that someone else doesn’t have a right to the code just because they managed to get access. Only the select few would be allowed.
The fact that it’s a public web server (with no access controls) does throw a wrench into things, but it’s not as simple as many here make it seem.
The license makes no such distinction. The website had no warning that it was a private test, was hosted on the presumed official domain and looked like it went live.
I never received an explicit authorisation by YC to use Hacker News and here I am. I wouldn’t call my access unauthorised even though it was never authorised.
That is true. I mention that in my last paragraph:
> The fact that it’s a public web server (with no access controls) does throw a wrench into things, but it’s not as simple as many here make it seem.
However, simply being accessible is not akin to authorization. If that company tool is accessible to the public through a misconfigured DNS, the courts probably won’t side with me asking for the source.
The law is not black and white (despite what many here think). Judges are humans and will apply judgement as to whether Truth was meant to be accessible or not.
There’s also the fact that the CFAA is a broadly worded law and could easily be wielded by Trump against the people accessing Truth prior to launch. Just say they weren’t authorized and were hacking. They’ll probably lose in court with that argument, but we won’t know until the ruling would come out
That’s a hard argument to push unless the judge is unbelievably biased. If the website is up and running on the expected domain, functions correctly and has no indication it’s a private beta, it’s hard to assume bad faith from the unintended users.
IIRC, the idea was tested in the early days of dial up systems and a system that was setup to not require authentication that had a “Welcome to this computer” banner was considered open enough the intruders were not considered intruders.
If you have a building and charge for entry, but there is no access control at the door, no ticket sales and no indication you need to pay to enter, can you complain someone wandered into the building without paying?
It’s a propaganda platform, not social media.
No it wouldn't. NOTHING short of shutting down would ever satisfy the people going after Trump.
Currently, the site is beset both by "people who are going after Trump" and "people who care about copyleft".
Posting the tarball would satisfy that second group.
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
My point was just that I don't think the TS terms that Mastodon quotes in its blog post are incorrect.
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?
If trump then boohoo boohoo
if #BLM I suspect that you would have proudly present it on your website because otherwise racist.
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.
You have to be able to say, with a straight face, that you really believe that they did the thing you’re accusing them of.
So just because it’s theoretically possible that there’s a path to the facts we see without violating the license, the fact that a license violation is a plausible explanation is enough to launch a court case.
After all, the court case including the discovery process and the trial itself are all about determining the relevant facts.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
This is an important detail; is this absolutely proven?
> Armed with the app developer’s name, the hacker told the Daily Dot that they were able to utilize Shodan, a search engine that locates servers exposed to the open internet, to track down the company’s digital footprint.
> The hacker was able to locate numerous web domains as a result, including one that appeared to be running the mobile beta for Truth Social.
> News of the public website quickly spread across social media after making its way to Canadian hacker Aubrey “Kirtaner” Cottle, who was able to set up faux accounts for numerous high-profile individuals such as QAnon guru Ron Watkins.
Whether that counts as misconfigured idk, but these are certainly not normal users doing normal user things.
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.
Anyway, it hasn’t launched yet, so 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...
There is no indication that the website will infringe on this licence yet… it hasn’t launched yet!
The website did exist. Users created accounts and demanded a copy of the source. They were refused, and so the license was infringed. Mastodon isn't threatening legal action. They're asking for that refusal to be reversed, thereby curing the infringement.
Here's the relevant clause in GPLv3:
> You may not propagate or modify a covered work except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to propagate or modify it is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License (including any patent licenses granted under the third paragraph of section 11).
> However, if you cease all violation of this License, then your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated (a) provisionally, unless and until the copyright holder explicitly and finally terminates your license, and (b) permanently, if the copyright holder fails to notify you of the violation by some reasonable means prior to 60 days after the cessation.
> Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice.
Basically- the website WAS in violation, and Mastodon is within their rights to permanently withdraw the license following their 30-day notice. I think the key here is the difference between "cease violation", with truth.social has done by taking down the site, and "cure the violation", which refers to correcting the earlier violation by distributing the source as it existed at that time. Without "curing" the previous violation, then truth.social cannot launch again with any modified version of Mastodon, as their license will be permanently revoked.
That said, there's leeway involved due to truth.social not being intentionally public. On one hand, "people were able to access it and make accounts", on the other hand, gaining access to some company's internal GPL tool because they misconfigured a VPN does not entitle you to source for that tool (and you violated the CFAA). It's a question for the courts, but it probably doesn't really matter because one of three things will happen:
1) truth.social will re-launch with no Mastodon code, and doesn't care if their Mastodon license is revoked.
2) truth.social will re-launch with Mastodon code, will provide their sources, and the whole thing goes away.
3) truth.social will re-launch with Mastodon code, will NOT provide the sources, and Mastodon has a much stronger legal leg to stand on.
either way, some people are already using the site and the license should apply - the source needs to be available to all of them
I don't think all conservatives are nazis by any means, but I'm not a fan of the "any vote we can get" tactics that are hesitant to admonish white supremacy
Having that said, nazism and republican conservatism are surprisingly different, say, nazis are anti jews, conservatives are anti mexicans. Again, there is a common ground.
I guess distribution is distribution even if it just handing a USB stick to a friend.
Regardless I just see this announcement as a pre emptive move by the developers of Mastodon to compel the owners of Truth Social to comply with their license moving forward.
That's precisely what Mastodon is trying to do. In fact, that's _all_ they're trying to do, as the article made clear.
it is clear that they are not interested in coopting them
> We pride ourselves on providing software that allows anyone to run their own social media platform independent of big tech, but the condition upon which we release our work for free in the first place is the idea that, as we give to the platform operators, so do the platform operators give back to us by providing their improvements for us and everyone to see. But that doesn’t only benefit us as the developers – it benefits the people that use these platforms as it gives them insight into the functionality of the platforms that manage their data and gives them the ability to walk away and start their own.
Edit: And what if I wrap it with another service, say a CDN, that changed some behaviour and styling (proxying, path rewrite, etc)?
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.
Rusulting Code will be public domain and easy to setup.
It was never about the code, it was always about the data.
To learn more or help, Please visit:
https://www.unturf.com and https://youtu.be/BgBrSLUgLH4
We reject political deplatforming.
We favor right-to-repair
We refuse single-use plastics
We belive in a platform by the people for the people.
My idea is to smash together Remarkbox, MakePostSell, Bittorrent, and Cloudflares R2 to build a durable network owned by the masses.
It was never about the code or the license, it was always about the data.
And that's a fantastic view to keep when trying to discuss anything, really keeping that mind open eh? Good luck with your project.
>> I don't think you have anything of value to protect with license.
You are wrong(hey, two can play this game)
>> You can't sue a person for creating software,
Sure, but that's not what I said, so you're making a point just for its own sake.
Also I kinda hoped you'd answer my question if you think any licences/copyright/legality don't matter on your permacomputer. But then you haven't even answered my other comment, so meh, maybe I expected too much.
"I will have to deplatform any site which does not follow the terms of service."
That's a pretty nice double standard you have there, complaining about deplatforming on an article about someone breaking terms of service.