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DannyB [soylentnews.org] writes:

Trump Given 30 Days To Have His Social Media Site Comply With Open Source License [techdirt.com]

Plenty of people have raised concerns [vice.com] that Donald Trump's sketchy new social media site, Truth Social, is just a lightly reskinned Mastodon, which is violating Mastodon's fairly strict AGPLv3 license. As we had previously discussed, [techdirt.com] the aggressive (and sloppy) terms of service for the site claim that the code is proprietary, and even claims that "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..."

Of course, part of the reason that Mastodon uses such a license is to encourage others to take the code and build on it if they abide by the terms of the license. And the nature of Mastodon's license [github.com] is that if you use it, you must make the complete source code available of what you build with it.

[....] the Software Freedom Conservancy has given Trump 30 days to bring the code into compliance [sfconservancy.org] -- specifically by providing the source code to Truth Social to the early users who were able to sign up -- or, under the license terms, Trump's "rights in the software are permanently terminated."

For those not familiar, the AGPL license [github.com] works like the GPL, but eliminates the loophole where GPL software can be used to build a web site without disclosing the GPL and all other related source code of the web site. With AGPL you can either disclose all of the code of your site as open source under AGPL, or you can take a commercial license to the AGPL code you are using.

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