Hiveway.io rips off of Mastodon and slaps a blockchain on top | Hacker News Reader

Hiveway.io rips off of Mastodon and slaps a blockchain on top

medium.com

53 pointsDeadSuperHero11 comments

From https://github.com/hiveway/hiveway/blob/master/COPYRIGHT

  The Hiveway source code is forked from Mastodon
  (https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon)

  Hiveway currently has the following differences over Mastodon:

  - Ethereum Blockchain integration
  - UI was redesigned to be more friendly and with less items
  - There is no Federated Timeline
  - Mastodon branding replaced with Hiveway branding

Link via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16516563

Thanks for linking this; unfortunately it doesn't exactly do a whole lot for this project or how its PR is posturing things.

It does, in fact, refute the "rips off" claim.

Section 5: a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.

And a (summary) reading of the license has no mention that retaining branding is required for "Conveying Modified Source Versions" and is probably a copyright violation if they did it.

The only thing I really see they did "wrong" is pulling commits without retaining the original committers ID and I'm not even sure that's even against the AGPL since that information would be lost if they distributed the sources as a tarball (which is perfectly fine).

The fact that its timeline is mainly showing toots from Mastodon and other AP/GNUSocial instances tells me this fancy blockchain moderation is not as robust as they think.

From what I've seen, no one involved really cares about how robust it is. It's a crypto-bandwagon cash grab.

I'm not super opposed. If it ends up bringing people into the fediverse, if it's still possible to follow people on different apps and platforms, why not? I don't have any big issue with participants in the space that have business models.

And of course, open source is meant to be forked, I don't see the need to call it a "rip off". As far as a changing the branding, that's practically required generally if you want to make a fork and not step on someone's brand/trademark.

It's a ripoff when they disobey the trunk project's licensing, remove all AGPLv3-required attribution, and overwrite commits to imply that their work is completely original.

Yeah, the whole IceWeasel/Firefox thing.

As far as "rewriting history" (giving them the benefit of doubt) I'd say they're cherrypicking patches that apply cleanly and modifying ones that don't just under their own git user ID instead of doing some git merge magic to ensure the original committer's ID is retained.

Calling bullshit on this accusatory article. Source code [1] clearly states and attributes credit/copyright to Mastadon. They seem to be fully compliant with the licensing requirements.

[1]: https://github.com/hiveway/hiveway/blob/master/COPYRIGHT

Is this submission flagged off the frontpage?

My first thought was just... who would have the combination of arrogance and poor judgment to do this, while still being able to actually do it?

The Hiveway platform raised more than a few eyebrows today with an announcement by none other than John McAfee...

Oh. I suppose once you’ve fried your brains on designer bath salts and murdered a neighbor, ripping off something like Mastadon for profit doesn’t even register.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com