Trump’s new social media platform found using Mastodon code
blog.joinmastodon.org
blog.joinmastodon.org
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...
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!
Reported violations of the Code of Conduct are sent to a Steering Committee, made up of members of the community, who determine if the reported project is in violation of the Code of Conduct. If so, the Committee takes steps to remedy the situation (e.g. realigning project with the Code of Conduct, or removing ml5.js from the project) — and if no resolution is found, the project falls out of compliance with the terms of the software license.
It's an interesting experiment.² Software is a tool to help us solve problems and reach desired outcomes. Licenses are also a tool to help us solve problems and reach desired outcomes. When desired outcomes exclude certain things (e.g. discrimination of marginalized communities, manipulation of public opinion, autonomous weapons, values antithetical to that of a community), it seems a Code of Conduct can also be a worthwhile tool to solve problems and support the outcomes that the community is working towards. (Of course, wisdom and governance are crucial and not to be taken for granted. Shout out DKP servers³ for showing some light there.)
¹ ml5.js Code of Conduct: https://github.com/ml5js/Code-of-Conduct/
² Analysis from KE Mitchell on ml5.js licensing: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/01/12/ml5js-Takes-a-Stan...
³ On Dragon Kill Points and governance systems in World of Warcraft: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=958945
Restricting software use to only people approved by the creators is a terrible idea. Society has to operate with some level of trust that even people we disagree with, using methods we don't approve of, have the potential to improve the world. Otherwise the situation will get worse.
The road to hell ... something something ... good intentions.
Who defines what 'marginalization of people' means (a strange term if you really think about it), and why would you think they would get that definition right?
The software creators, which seems very reasonable to me. This isn't some arbitrary judge deeming what is marginalizing or not. This is the creators of the software saying "We don't want to build something that complete dickweeds can use for evil."
Don't like their definition of "dickweeds" or "evil"? Fine, build your own shit then.
I understand that people want to look at this like a kind of slippery slope (if you can define one kind of restriction, why not define another and another - until you have closed source software by any other name) - but just because arbitrary restrictions mean something isn't colloquially "open" doesn't mean that certain specific restrictions might not still reasonably be compatible with something described as "open".
Certainly we should not accept a formalized definition of any language term like this; i.e. just because an OSI or other group wishes to claim the definition of open source doesn't mean we all need to use that definition. Specifically, let's not accept https://opensource.org/docs/osd as a kind of gospel truth. It's a fine initiative, but not necessarily the only possible one.
I'm not convinced that allowing a few restrictions would be a great idea, but then again, I'm also sure it would be dramatically different from the status quo, nor that is makes sense to no longer call such software open source.
On top of that, even if all the groups shared the same views you’d still need to suddenly spend a lot of time understanding each group before you used their software, and you’d need to continue to keep an eye on their views to ensure you are complying.
Thanks but I will stick to the plain old open source licenses like ISC, MIT, GPL, and Apache.
> The software creators
I don't understand how that could work. Would "marginalizing people" have any concrete legal definition at all or would it literally be anything the creator decides now or in the future?
Software creator says I'm marginalizing people, I deny it and refuse to stop using their library. How would a court sort that out?
Sure. Do what you want but don't try to claim that this is a good license. It's the opposite of a good license. It's ambiguous, capricious, and arbitrary.
That could be applied to *anything*, it doesn't have any substance.
>(Do Not)Use ml5.js to build tools that discriminate against marginalized communities
That could be better put as
>(Do Not)Use ml5.js to build tools that discriminate
By adding in "marginalized communities", they are creating loopholes. Some discrimination is good, as long as it is to people we don't like. Is discrimination against Chinese allowed? In the big picture, Chinese are the majority of the world population.
No, they are roughly 1/5th of it.
Population by Country China 18.47% India 17.70% USA 4.25%
I could take your argument and use it to say that Christians are not the majority even though they are 31.11% if looking at the religious population size.
By mostly my point was to highlight that you can spin and manipulate the CoC however you want, thus leaving the CoC Steering Committee either over worked trying to enforce the CoC of using selective enforcement where they only go after "bad" people.
Also: >(Do Not)Use ml5.js to build tools to disingenuously manipulate public opinion
Would ingenuous manipulation be acceptable? https://www.wordnik.com/words/ingenuous adjective Of honorable extraction; freeborn; noble.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So is fairness and justice I fear.
Also, I think a person has a mortal obligation to allow that their political position is at least partially flawed.
It cuts many ways.
(1) discriminating against marginalized communities
What does this mean? I bet I could get several different answers. Old people are marginalized by agism in tech, does this mean tech companies can't use this? How would they prove they don't marginalize old people?
(2) building tools that disingenuously manipulate public opinion
Ditto. To me this means no political party or marketing/advertising department can use this. Probably most news outlets as well.
(3) building tools of mass surveillance and prediction to repress the rights of people
Rights defined by whom? US Constitution? Right not to be offended? Rights granted by the Taliban or ISIS? Communist China?
(4) building tools that control weapons, including tools that automate the deployment, operation, and targeting of weapons.
I think most people can get on board with this one, unless we were attacked in earnest by a strong military foe.
All use of weapons and surveillance is abusive, so what you are saying "we" (who?) want is not something that I find reasonable.
No matter what you think, the authors might disagree, so you have no way of using the software in anything related to it. Worse yet, this can quickly change - the system you built that uses this software in the background might be totally fine to watch a womans shelter, but the license could be pulled any minute because the authors dislike that you also sold your product to a normal prison.
Why? I mean, don't you believe you have a say on who you grant permission to use your intellectual property?
> Also, I think a person has a mortal obligation to allow that their political position is at least partially flawed.
This assertion makes no sense. You should not be forced to help advance anyone's goals when they are diametrically opposite to what you believe in and can be outright hostile towards you and your loved ones.
If the author of some software has a general good-faith position that others should use their software, then the conditions they associate with that software fall on a continuum from "reasonable to "unreasonable".
The MIT license is at the reasonable end. Saying "give me ten million dollars for this ROT13 algorithm" is at the unreasonable end.
When the person you replied to said:
> They can, which doesn't mean they should.
I think they were saying they personally considered the terms of the license at the "unreasonable" end. I don't disagree- saying "you can use this for now, but have to stop immediately if I or anyone I might sell this to say so" seems at least borderline unreasonable.
It certainly isn't "free software", though being wrapped in what is otherwise the Blue Oak license they're kind of hiding their non-free-ness. I think this is where I mostly take issue- it feels like the project is attempting to portray itself as a free software project, when it is not.
The "good-faith position" weasel words only serve to try to fabricate and cast doubt on the morality of a decision on how your work can and should be used, and only because you find it inconvenient. For some reason, your argument completely eliminates the author from the decision process. Do you find that to be fair or in good faith?
Meanwhile, I never saw anyone attack musicians based on "morality" for refusing to authorize the use of their work by specific politicians or specific election campaigns, even when authors only claim personal preferences or even prefering other candidates.
As someone reading through this: Yes. I find that argument both reasonable and fair.
The author is free to ask for compensation up front in exchange for the tool they've built. They can also just simply refuse to license it in the first place.
But a license that I can violate if the author simply changes their mind is quicksand: Nothing of value can be built on it, because it might sink at ANY POINT.
It's literally unusable as a tool.
Where I personally draw the line is something being presented as a "general purpose tool", versus as an exclusive work.
When Stuart Stemple created a pink pigment and granted license to use it to "everyone except Anish Kapoor", I thought it was a great artistic statement, but as a practical matter I think it's unreasonable.
It's the difference between a whitelist and a blacklist. Saying "you can use this if you meet these criteria (e.g. having no criteria, having paid me money, etc)" is okay, but saying "everyone can use this EXCEPT if I decide I don't want you too" is not. In my opinion.
Isn't it "how they sell it" instead of "how they use it"?
Edit: Also, "how" doesn't necessarily mean "what for".
And way back then - when courts where a thing, but a broad tax base was not, and in any case society didn't have the kind of near-instant communication networks available now - that might even have made sense.
I agree with your intention, but there's a balance to be struck between individual contributions and those of wider society.
The creators are not simply the outcome of a populated space but of its navigation, through orientation, implying the sought, the accepted and the refused. Their «fruit» is produced accordingly - and not just "owing to society", but also "in spite of it" - and represents an intention, which is conditional to the product itself.
Contextually: the point is more like "we do not accept that these springs we build can be used in landmines". It ecompasses the literal point, yet it is different - at least, it refuses the purpose, not the person.
Purpose and person are hard to separate too. Like if you will sell cakes to anyone, except that nobody will be given a cake if it's for a gay wedding.
Marginalised communities are not protected by documents that claim to protect marginalised communities. Fat lot of good documents have ever done. What protects marginalised communities is actual tolerance of differing opinions, and actual freedom. Ditto what protects us from surveillance. Fat lot of good all the paper protections against surveillance have done. Look at what America has built! Let alone China. Once again, the problem is a knee-jerk overreaction and paranoia in the ruling class when the correct answer is tolerance. Ditto weapons. Did Afghanistan benefit from code of conducts? No, what it needed was a bulkwork of people who said "lets really stretch ourselves not to hurt people who dislike us" at a critical moment.
This license won't do what it claims. Best case, it is GPL+Fluff. Worst case, it becomes an exclusionary political tool. Ironically, it is likely that it will be wielded against marginalised communities.
It really is not. Unbounded tolerance is how free and open societies commit suicide and succumb to authoritarian regimes where intolerance is the norm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
> If they want to license their software however then good luck to them, but nonetheless attempting to encode illiberal political beliefs into a software license is the wrong direction. The GPL is exactly the right approach.
You're just asserting that refusing to help out authoritarian and outright xenophobic political movements further their goals "is the wrong approach" without any rationale or insight or argument at all.
Meanwhile, you're citing the GPL which is a highly political license.
And to allow discriminating against "wrong" opinions is how intolerance becomes the norm.
Do you feel that plotting to overthrow a democracy to install a totalitarian despot while discussing political assassinations is a grey area that's up for debate whether it's "wrong" or indeed undoubtedly wrong?
I mean, considering how this very same political group killed police officers during their coup attempt, where do you personally draw the line on murder?
Now, of course, I see the problem of letting people freely talk about killing people, overthrowing the government or running concentration camps. But forbidding this kind of speech is not going to prevent it if the pull is strong enough; even worse, it's going to strengthen their narrative about oppression. Instead, it should be possible to openly discuss why this is wrong. To understand why someone has an opinion and showing him why that trade-off is not worth it is far better than trying to forbid even thinking about it.
Now, I know that our action prevention might need some form of surveillance to prevent radical groups from taking actions and, at its worst, might fail to prevent some unnecessary violence. In my opinion, though, we can have much more freedom and maybe even prevent more people from radicalizing than by trying to censor wrong thoughts.
> It really is not. Unbounded tolerance is how free and open societies commit suicide and succumb to authoritarian regimes where intolerance is the norm.
This is a non sequitur. GP placed a bound on tolerance.
> You're just asserting that refusing to help out authoritarian and outright xenophobic political movements further their goals "is the wrong approach" without any rationale or insight or argument at all.
GP can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think he has asserted anything of the kind. In fact, I suspect he's somewhat opposed to the same, since he's opposed to "illiberal political beliefs" which are themselves quite aligned with "xenophobic political movements".
In any case, I think you've entirely missed the pragmatic points of the GP's post, which is that such illiberal policies are, throughout history, used against the marginalized peoples they are ostensibly intended to protect. Given your previous statement about unbounded tolerance, it feels like you should be in agreement with the GP on this point; unless you're saying we should just skip the tolerance and go straight to intolerance.
Actually, I believe everything works out if everyone is intolerant of intolerance. That would include suicide bombers.
People need to stop imposing on others.
What would you think would work if an authoritarian political movement plagued with xenophobia wants to use your work as a key tool to start imposing on tolerant people?
What do you mean? Which definition of 'liberal' are you using?
That licence is one shard about opinion (debatable instancing of «marginalized») and fundamentally about use.
Funny you mention that page, because before posting the question «Which definition of 'liberal' are you using» I went to that very page to try to try and find an interpretation that fit the context. But nothing answered it clearly. So, that remains insufficient.
If the use of 'liberal' was meant to refer to the defence of freedom of speech, there exist a problem in the discrimination between "speech" as intended in the formula and «manipulat[ion]» as written in that licence. But was that the idea? We should not be here to guess.
* Anti-democratic (in that they privilege the copyright holders political views)
* Anti-secular/anti-religious-freedom (in that they privilege the copyright holders values and would likely exclude people based on religious values in conflict with the CoC).
* Anti-free-speech (in that they would deny access to their work based on what people say).
* Anti-market economy (in that they aren't providing a tool/service to anyone equally based on a free market).
Which isn't to say they're bad people or anything, liberalism isn't the be-all and end-all. But the GPL is a neat embodiment of some very good ideas from the liberal tradition and this ml5js library license is much less liberal than the GPL. And also worse.
Indeed so, they have that right.
I personally wouldn't consider using code licensed like this, because even if I 100% agreed with the CoC and Steering Committee, both might change over time (the CoC says "We expect the Code of Conduct to be a living document") and I have no idea who'll be on the Steering Committee in 5-10 years time, and whoever it is will be able to pull the rug from under my feet at a whim.
A bit like paying $100 for some software but a year later being told they now think you should pay $5000.
Atlassian has a patent on that business process.
Yeah, and that's not called free software, Free Software is about empowering end users, not the creator.
Whether they're under a moral or legal obligation depends on the moral code (not the same across people in the same country, much less in different countries) and the legal code.
For example, if they had a condition that Women, Gays, Jews or Blacks should not use it? Can they "put any conditions they please" including the above? What would you say about this "morally"? I know what most would say: that they have a moral obligation to not put such a condition.
And it would not be legal either, in many jurisdictions at least.
So what? Why does it matter what they think?
Like all things intellectual property rights, the copyright's moral rights would have to be determined by a court of law in the copyright holder's legal jurisdiction.
Everyone is free to use the software. If a project is found to be in violation of the Code of Conduct (e.g. discriminating against marginalized communities, manipulating public opinion, automating weapons) than the community developing the software takes steps to remedy the problem with the reported violator, or the project falls out of compliance with the license.
I agree with your hesitance and apprehension of how it could could go wrong. There is significant responsibility in interpretation and governance, presumably (though in some cases, it could be pretty clear — like with weapons.). And in cases with consequences related to violence and weapons and oppression, it also seems like a step in the right direction.
In the context of some software, this may not fit or be useful. In other libraries, it could also be incredibly important and impactful.
It also requires stepping out of our innocence. It requires accepting responsibility for interpretation, decision-making, and governance — and that sometimes, some of our decisions may not be right. Sometimes, we have to make decisions even when the answers aren't clear. This is part of our personal lives, being in families, being in communities, being in companies. It's just decision-making at the end of the day — call it what you want (e.g. governance, licensing, restricting). Why shouldn't that kind of decisionmaking and responsibility be part of software and the communities building software — especially given its growing impact on the world around us?
> Society has to operate with some level of trust that even people we disagree with
This is well said. I would just note that ml5.js's approach leaves room for disagreement, and a pathway to hear and understand and reconcile disagreement, before any action is taken. The devil is in implementation — though it does seem wise, and the community has likely thought through and accounted for more of the problems than we have. They probably had discussions just like this, actually, with perspectives just like ours.
If mastodon had this in the code of conduct they’d not be able to use their own software haha. They banned Gab and arguably Trump has a marginalized base and as far as I’m aware never advocated for violence (if you believe the contrary, note that trump could have been arrested but hasn’t)
https://mastodon.social/about/more
Some of Trump's base is marginalized on one intersection or another, but they support ideologies and an ideologue that are not marginalized by any defensible definition.
The rest of your reply disagrees with your first sentence. It seems that only the people who share ml5.js values are allowed to use the software. There's no problem with that, but they should be clear about it. They should also state clearly that ml5.js is not free or open source software, as its license violates the first principle of Free Software:
> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
And the similar principle in the OSI definition of Open Source
> No discrimination against fields of endeavor: The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
Any can use the software only for purposes in line with ml5.js values.
So everyone is free to use the software, just not for all the purposes that any particular person might choose. It's something like a bar with a "no racist language" sign: anyone can use the bar, they just have to abide by the rules, and if they chose not to, they can find another bar.
There are 2 caveats to that:
1. they can change their values at any time
2. they can decide at their sole discretion that your use isn't in line with their values, and you have no recourse.
> It's something like a bar with a "no racist language" sign: anyone can use the bar
The difference is that one wouldn't use the bar as a platform to build a business on, whereas one might build a business on software.
Hitler literally saved puppies. He was a forerunner of animal rights. I don't know about the relationship between Trump and puppies but real people are more nuanced than a D&D alignment chart, and even despicable people can do good.
Can a weapon manufacturing company use ml5.js ?
There are 2 issues:
1. the CoC is a "living document" which is Silicon valley speak for "we're making it up as we go along" (see also HTML5). It can change at any time.
2. The membership of the Steering Committee can change over time (and they can also change the CoC). What if in 5-10 years time I have built a successful business on this software, and the SC is taken over by employees of a rival company that then denies me use of it. As far as I can tell, I am shafted with no recourse.
For this reason I would never use any software licensed like this to do anything serious, nor would I contribute to any software licensed like this.
Why do you think that would be the case? If the license doesn't achieve what the creator wanted, then they can just change it. It's not up to the greater community to decide what the best license is for other peoples projects.
It sounds like you have your own idea of what will "improve the world" and want other people to license their work to match with it.
No, you can't "just change it" if you have external contributors and you allow them to keep ownership of their contributions (the default). Many people object to CLAs on philosophical reasons and will refuse to sign them.
Now your "just change it" is a 6-12 months effort trying to chase down every single contributor and nitpicking your license change until everyone is happy, or rewriting a bunch of code due to licensing issues.
These above scenarios amount to handing criminals and bad actors powerful technological tools which allow them to increase harms done to society. This is a software company's choice, there is no law that states a company must provide its software to whomever, even if they have evil intent.
No, but there's a terrible slippery slope to have the creator able to make value judgments about uses of the software after the software is adopted and exert power over the users this way.
> To host child pornography sharing?
I think it's a bit of hyperbole once we're extending this value judgment to conduct that is already otherwise illegal. Is someone breaking the law to host child pornography and facing criminal charges going to be deterred by the possibility of civil damages from license noncompliance?
Of course it’s only a lie when your in-group defines it as such.
I recall at the beginning of the pandemic the CDC and surgeon general saying “masks weren’t necessary” and that “the lab leak theory is a conspiracy”. Of course both proved to be Noble Lies put out by the institutions.
I know it’s comforting to think of the world in terms of good/evil and truth/lies, but unfortunately it’s a messy complicated world and things are not as clear cut as we’d like.
I imagine an autonomous sentry-turret (Half-Life, Portal, etc) comes to mind. Obviously that’s right-out.
But what about airsoft or paintball? Those are recreational activities, but in some jurisdictions their respective “guns” can be legally considered weapons because they can still do serious bodily harm - as well as intimidate.
———
Another example is “Windows for Warships”: you could build this software for that, no? So, is a warship a weapon? Naval frigate? Merchant marine vessel that carries small-arms for self-defense? At what point does arbitrary hardware attached to the computer running this software become a “weapon” or not?
I’m not a rights-absolutist - I just think when writing a license with restrictions that are going to be open to interpretation get a gosh-darned lawyer involved and be as specific as possible, and then some. You don’t want a project getting bogged-down by internet nerds complaining about stuff like this. Not least an army of trolls who will spam your inbox with hair-splitting questions about the classification of firearms technology to gleefully waste your time. (“it’s not an ‘assault rifle’, it’s a ‘scary looking semi-automatic AR-15’”, “bump-stocks aren’t automatics lololol”, etc)
If activists can define "infrastructure" as social programs, they can define "weaponry" as end-to-end encryption, cryptocurrency, or just websites that express perspectives that they dislike. We all lose when people play language games like this.
Possibly. If the list of restrictions is ill-defined and ever-changing then it opens up a can of worms, which in practise means no-one will use the software.
Seems reasonable until you do something unrelated to offend the licensor and they decide to leverage a very loose definition of weaponry/munitions against you. For example, have a look at what is consider munitions for the purpose of export controls in the USA, and consider what additional items have been regulated as munitions in the past:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Munitions_List
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
Isn't that the whole point of author's rights/intellectual property in general and software licenses in particular?
No, not really. Author's rights and intellectual property are not a price tag on an open market. They establish that the author has exclusive rights over his own work, and thus anyone who is interested in accessing said work needs explicit authorization from the author and covering explicitly the intender use. You don't just press a button and get a license that the author did not specified.
... Generally called a monopoly, yes. (The original Copyright Act 1710 had a hard upper limit of 28 years on the duration, the modern near-eternal copyright is a recent thing; patents are around 20 years max even today, or using the LAME codec would still be illegal.)
While I don’t think I called it a price tag (if anything, it’s only the right to set one if desired), note that the practice of copyright assignment (required among others by most publishers, both of books and of periodicals) precisely amounts to selling this exclusivity at some sort of market-determined price. The Berne Convention’s inalienable “moral rights”, from what I understand, were intended exactly to limit the scope of this so that the author could at least receive acknowledgement even if they chose or were forced to give up any and all material benefits or other control over their creation.
... I’m not sure I entirely understand what you wanted to say, sorry, so this reply might be missing the point.
No, it really is not and this assertion makes absolutely no sense at all. Keep in mind that a monopoly refers to a single company or person selling something in a market being the only supplier of said thing. As it is easy to understand, monopolies have absolutely zero to do with this. This is a fundamental author's rights issue, where the author of any intellectual work has the right to decide who and how is allowed to use his own work, whether or not there is any sort of transaction or compensation.
You're talking about an entity that has a monopoly (generally in a market). Perhaps confusingly, monopoly is also the word we use to describe such an entity.
This is emphatically wrong. For at least two to three generations society has operated with a large part of it understanding that another large part of it is unethical and wrong (i.e. conscientious objectors and folks that sympathise but cannot bring up the courage to do so). If being so understanding is what made the world better, then 1930 would truly have been a golden age.
There is nothing wrong with making, let's say, a licence that prohibits the use of its adhered product for activities such as the development of nuclear weapons.
The parser had a cheeky requirement that made it incompatible with various software licenses:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3693108
Also the same Douglas Crockford on refusing to change JSONLint 2’s strictness:
This is similar nonsense. You might as well have a "Don't Be Evil™" code of conduct that is as follows:
1. You may not use this software to do evil.
2. I decide what is evil.
Only marginalised communities?
Proof by contradiction: if someone uses this software to discriminate against an apparently non-marginalised community, then that community would be being marginalised in at least one way (by this usage), thus making that community a marginalised community, thus making that usage against the licence.
With idealism I've discovered that words are rarely followed by action.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed...
>I've stated some of my views about other political issues, about activities that are or aren't unjust. Your views might differ, and that's precisely the point. If we accepted programs with usage restrictions as part of a free operating system such as GNU, people would come up with lots of different usage restrictions. There would be programs banned for use in meat processing, programs banned only for pigs, programs banned only for cows, and programs limited to kosher foods. Someone who hates spinach might write a program allowing use for processing any vegetable except spinach, while a Popeye fan might allow use only for spinach. There would be music programs allowed only for rap music, and others allowed only for classical music.
>The result would be a system that you could not count on for any purpose. For each task you wish to do, you'd have to check lots of licenses to see which parts of your system are off limits for that task.
>How would users respond to that? I think most of them would use proprietary systems. Allowing any usage restrictions whatsoever in free software would mainly push users towards nonfree software. Trying to stop users from doing something through usage restrictions in free software is as ineffective as pushing on an object through a long, soft, straight piece of spaghetti.
>It is worse than ineffective; it is wrong too, because software developers should not exercise such power over what users do. Imagine selling pens with conditions about what you can write with them; that would be noisome, and we should not stand for it. Likewise for general software. If you make something that is generally useful, like a pen, people will use it to write all sorts of things, even horrible things such as orders to torture a dissident; but you must not have the power to control people's activities through their pens. It is the same for a text editor, compiler or kernel.
>You do have an opportunity to determine what your software can be used for: when you decide what functionality to implement. You can write programs that lend themselves mainly to uses you think are positive, and you have no obligation to write any features that might lend themselves to activities you disapprove of.
How to define who is marginalized by whom? And by what actor? Creators of the code, users, customers? What if both groups think they are marginalized by the opposing one? Who can use the code then?
Forbidding manipulation of public opinion is also too lax of a term to use that way. Look for example into such polarizing topics like pro-life/pro-choice debate worldwide. Each side can accuse the other of manipulating the public while still believing they are in the right.
Controlling weapons is probably the point that could be easily defended in terms of being rather concrete, but I think it could be placed as some kind of custom license (IANAL).
Putting things that should be confined to decisions made by some kind of regulatory body like a country’s judicial system in a text file is rather a pointless signaling in my opinion, although it can be easily understood why somebody would want to include something like that.
Just a minor note, a license that works this way can't be accurately described as Open Source. It's more accurate to say that ml5.js is an Ethical Source license. See https://ethicalsource.dev/ for more details.
I'm sure this is a name that will get debated as it becomes more common. But personally, speaking just as an outside observer I really like the name Ethical Source. I think it gets across what the movement's priorities are (open access with ethical restrictions). I think it gets across the movement's connections to the Open Source movement and its origins. But it does so in a way that doesn't promote confusion around the fact that the movement does have different philosophies and is a separate licensing scheme. It's a movement that sprung out of a specific objection to Open Source licensing philosophy (https://opensource.org/faq#evil) and makes a targeted pivot (Open->Ethical) to address the concerns it has.
There's a meaningful difference between an Ethical Source license and, say, an Adobe License. There's also a meaningful difference between an Ethical Source license and a traditional Source Available license like Mongo's. Yes, they all fall under the umbrella of proprietary licenses, but it's reasonable for communities to want more specific terms that accurately describe what their priorities/goals are.
I object pretty strongly to people trying to co-opt the Open Source movement for their own ends, particularly when I think they're trying to redefine/undermine terms like Open Source or deny the legitimacy of Open Source definitions purely for their own promotional purposes. This has been one of my chief criticisms of Source Available licenses and the debates around software like MongoDB. I think it would be hypocritical for me to turn around and try to dictate how other communities describe their licenses. And honestly, I think that Ethical v Open is a really descriptive way to describe the differences between the communities, and your comment demonstrates that.
Immediately you're pushing back that Ethical Source licenses aren't Open, they're proprietary. You're right, they're not Open. So the Ethical/Open substitution is in a lot of ways a perfect encapsulation of what's different here. Open Source licenses preserve Open access, Ethical Source licenses (at least attempt to) preserve social ethics.
I really don't get what the objection is. If I thought that Ethical Source as a term was trying to trick people into believing that it was Open Source or deny that the software was proprietary, I'd be angry about that. But at least from what I can see right now, I don't think that's the case. Far from being cagey or deceptive, the term Ethical Source actually draws attention to the fact that it's diverging from Open Source. I don't see why I should have a problem with that, I think it's a good term.
In general, I don't give those arguments a lot of weight. There is no completely global agreed-upon definition of what "open" means, but used in the context of Open Source and software licensing, it represents a community-decided, longstanding set of values that are reasonably understood by most people to be at least adjacent to open access and user freedom.
When I think about Ethical Source licenses -- I'm in the Open Source movement, I think there are downsides to trying to dictate how people use software and what they can do with it, even evil people. I'm also somewhat skeptical that allowing individual owners to dictate what they mean by "ethical" is sustainable long-term. Part of the reason Open Source is still around is that we don't allow people to dictate what they mean by Open, we have a set of standards, and if your license doesn't follow those standards, tough luck, you're out. We don't allow a lot of ambiguity. Even though Ethical Source does have community structures in place to work more democratically, I still worry when I look at the Ethical Source licenses whether this is a community that can survive future schisms over its values.
But, having said that, I'm still hard-pressed to think of another word I would prefer over Ethical. Regardless of any disagreements over whether their approach is feasible or practical, it's still an accurate summation of what they're trying to do. These are licenses that dictate access based on a kind of moral adherence. There is of course a little bit of marketing going on with the term Ethical (in the same way that there's a bit of marketing going on with Open), and of course there is no completely global agreed-upon definition of what "ethical" means (same as with open/libre). But the point of terminology like Open/Ethical is not to perfectly encapsulate everyone's philosophical views of what those words mean, they're to describe coordinated movements that try to align themselves with those words.
Whenever some Source Available grifter starts complaining to me that the OSI shouldn't get to define what Open means for everyone, I try not to take the bait, I try to remind them that Open Source is a community with community-defined definitions, and as long as those terms aren't wildly deceptive we're going to keep using them, thank you very much. So I kind of have the same response here: people can disagree with whether the Ethical Source licenses are actually ethical (the same as they can disagree with whether Copyleft licenses are open), but ultimately, it's a community that's defining its own terms, and I think if it's not being obviously deceptive it has some right to do that.
It could also be a signal to end-users, community members, customers, and other stakeholders as well — who may prefer technologies built with Ethical Source, as compared to Open Source, which seems like it could be similar to patterns we see in the real world around "Fair Trade" and "Ethically Sourced" etc.
I think for many people that statement is too vague and hence the risk of using that software is too high.
This is code for promoting viewpoints that the creators dislike.
Who decides whether the license was violated? That is, what counts as discrimination, what counts as "marginalized", do those differ by country, what counts as "disingenuously manipulating public opinion", what counts as "repressing rights", what counts as "tools that automate the deployment, operation and targeting of weapons".
For instance, can a nuts and bolts manufacturer whose nuts and bolts might be used to assemble pieces of a weapon use that ML project to do quality control of their products? Seems like an unsolvable quagmire.
This isn't open source software, because the Steering Committee can arbitrarily take away anyone's right to use the software any time they like.
Furthermore, if non-compliance with the CoC means: " the project falls out of compliance with the terms of the software license" then the terms of the CoC are the terms of the license.
Now, one solution would just to be to grant the steering committee the power to revoke the license, but this is not clearly the case:
> If anyone notifies you in writing that you have not complied with the Code of Conduct, you can keep your license by taking all practical steps to comply within 30 days after the notice. If you do not do so, and the ml5.js Code of Conduct Committee (or its equivalent or successor) agrees that you are in violation of the Code of Conduct, your license ends immediately.
So, what if someone (anyone?) notifies you that you are in violation, but you don't agree? I'd argue "all practical steps to comply" in the case that you are not violating the CoC is to do nothing. Even if the steering committee does agree you are in violation, this is not the only condition for ending the licence:
> If you do not [take all practical steps to comply with the CoC], and the [Committee] agrees that you are in violation..
These things are usually written in legalese for a reason; the "and" is ambiguous, but the usual interpretation is that both conditions need to be true, hence the committee decision is irrelevant if the first condition is not met, and who decides that?
You're going to get a lot of companies that don't want to deal with the legal hassle of these special terms not contributing to open source software.
Whether the developers want that or not, I guess that's their choice.
Just imagine has much better the world would be!
That’s just not a free or open source license, period. Which is fine, as long as they don't pretend that it is either of those things, but it sounds like they do.
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.
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://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...
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?
AGPL can also not be "permanently revoked". It's not individually licensed to each user like proprietary software often is, it's one license addressed to anyone. Furthermore the AGPL is explicitly irrevocable. They can change the license to a proprietary one but this does not affect existing copies under AGPL.
Last I'd like to touch on "antithetical values". If Mastodon were to discriminate against persons, groups or fields of endeavor in their license they would no longer meet the definition of open source, but rather become a source available proprietary product.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html
Revoke may not be the legally correct word to use, but it's an informal blog post and not a legal document, and what they intended to say is clear enough.
I think that your understanding of how the licensure works is a bit off. Open source software is still individually licensed to everyone. The copyright holder retains copyright, and can terminate an individual's rights under the license as long as the license includes a termination clause. Which the AGPL does.
I did not take termination into account in the second paragraph. I was referring to AGPL being addressed to anyone instead of a specific party. This means that a full revocation of the license would revoke it from everyone, even though that's not possible with AGPL. This does not apply to terminating licensees as you mentioned which appears to be what they mean and is possible under condition.
But because of the lack of a violation a permanent termination in 30 days would still be invalid.
The license is addressed to anyone, but an individual user gets an individual license.
> Furthermore the AGPL is explicitly irrevocable.
The Mastodon authors can not choose to revoke the license, but the license itself contain clauses which specify revocation under certain conditions, and after a certain time delay. This is one of the areas in which the GPLv3 (and AGPLv3) is more lenient than the old GPLv2, which was automatically revoked instantly upon any license violation.
> Many users were able to create accounts and use it
> the AGPLv3 requires that you provide (to every user) an opportunity to receive the entire Corresponding Source for the website based on that code. These early users did not receive that source code
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/oct/21/trump-group-agplv...
Then again, I checked a random company, Fire Stick Tricks, and they donate to a bunch[1] of open-source projects. So maybe they're just companies that have extra money to give back?
Doing further research, Mastodon's sold out on those tiers of sponsors[0], so they're likely in the lucky position that they could pick and choose.
So you're not alone in your feelings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social_and_corp...
[0] https://www.android-x86.org/ [1] https://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.html
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.
Was going to post some prior discussion links, but there are over two pages of Google results for unique HN links on the topic: https://www.google.com/search?q=news.ycombinator.com+trump+m...
As I understand it, there's a few different possible paths here:
Currently, they are not due a punishment- they need either to publish the source code (whole thing goes away), or if they do not, then their license to use Mastodon is permanently revoked. If the use the code after that, then they might be subject to damages.
That said, it's likely that they would be able to successfully argue in court that the 30-day timer that has ostensibly started, is invalid. This would be because of the (IMO quite reasonable) point that the site was not intended for public access, and access that occurred was due to misconfiguration.
Frankly, it's annoying to me that this happened as it did, because the early access created this grey area of "does this count as a violation or is it just accidental", allowing people's personal politics to color how strictly this should be enforced. If the site had launched for real with the violation (or with the source code), everything would be much more clear-cut.
Mastodon mission has always been to provide users freedom from and alternatives to the giant faceless autocratic exploitative social media.
Or at least that is what I gleam from a search of Mastodon prior to when T ran for president.
To now state for the record that T is not supposed to use the software seems like a politically biased flip.
I also think that it is prudent to wait until launch to critique their compliance.
Usually marketing / legal comes up with copy and its get cut and pasted in.
It -may- change, it probably wont. We will have to wait and see.
I know I have replaced content for similar things right before someone hits the button and right aftwards.
I hope the organization does the right thing with attribution.
I have not visited yet, and I dont know much about Mastodons code.
If they have configured and setup an instance of Mastodon with their own graphics / content / resources. Is just that required to be published to be in compliance?
I presume people much smarter than me know they have added features and improvements to the code I certainly hope they share it.
I am 100% sure that there is a giant hoard of high profile lawyers who wants this case now and plenty of millionaires and billionairs who want to fund it. Mastodon will not have to finance the trials that might come.
Lastly the more T is seen as a martyr being kicked out everywhere the more devoted his cult followers become.
Having that said, enforcing the AGPL rules is an activity that should be done regardless of your political ideas, if someone is violating the AGPL3 the projects have every right to ask them to comply, especially when the offenders belong to powerfull corporate groups that do have the money and the resources.
Mastodon saying "we don't like them" is an expression of honesty IMO, but not the only reason to why they want to seek legal counseling.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
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.
> Notably, 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. Mastodon is free software published under the AGPLv3 license, which requires any over-the-network service using it to make its source code and any modifications to it publicly accessible.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Frankly, it’s disheartening I want to know what the communists, fascists, republicans, democrats, racists, religious, technocrats, etc want to say.
It’s so frustrating having everyone in bubbles and getting banned for speaking about topics. The most calls for hate and violence I’ve seen are on Twitter and not from the right lol...
I peeked at the Mastodon code and it gave me a headache before I got through the "required for installation" section. Makes me want to go set up an RBBS node again.
If you want a platform where people from all political sides come together (and fight via quote tweets and ratios), then Twitter is your best bet. But not everyone wants to have that experience, and I’ve seen people move to Mastodon to escape from that and have a more curated, closely-knit experience.
I guess I'm not sure the problem is technological any more. If public sentiment towards freedom of speech doesn't change it doesn't really matter if a truly free platform exists or not. If 99% of people don't want freedom of speech then these platforms will inevitably become radicalised cesspools only used by the 1% who have opinions which they can't express elsewhere. Subsequently if these platforms become popular enough they'll inevitably be censored in one way or another by the 99% who disapprove.
I'm with you, I like to know what the radicals are saying. I actually find a lot of the mainstream arguments against radical belief systems to be very poor and this actually re-enforces the beliefs these communities hold. I personally believe if we tried to understand some of the grievances these people have and then tried to actually provide solutions to their problems we wouldn't see half as much radicalisation. Instead we try to silence and shame these individuals then dismiss their grievances with stupid arguments which only demonstrate to them that we have no understanding or interest in their problems. It's really no surprise that radical online communities seem to be growing with censorship. No one changes their beliefs because someone censors and shames them.
That's called a proprietary software license. Usage restrictions disqualify software as free software or open source. This kind of restriction makes me cringe, and I wish someone would just defy these guys and dare them to actually take the issue to court. I don't think they would.
(disclaimer: not your lawyer, not law advice)
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.
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.
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.
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.Also Mastadon: "Lol Trumps social media site got hacked!"
Also Also Mastadon: "Changes to the look and feel of the site violate our license!"
OK that's not encouraging anyone to use their software. I have a feeling this is much more a knee jerk reaction to who is using their software rather than a well thought out complaint.
I think the most important part of this debacle is that the site itself wasn't supposed to be launched. This is the equivalent of someone leaking footage of (lets say) a baseball being thrown at a truck window, and the window breaking, and everyone going "oh well that's obviously rubbish" in Jeremy Clarkson's voice. Nevermind that the truck was obviously a mock-up.
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.
I always wonder why wokeism hasn't reached software licenses yet?
Just imagine the anger when it would come to a FOSS dev team's attention that <insert-evil-group> is using their product, successfully even...
"of course we would prefer if people so antithetical to our values did not use"
I mean just the effort involved by a lot of people in the dev community to dig something up:
"findings that various people have presented to us,"
While the stated proprietary licensing text could be easily just a beta version, or totally fine anyways (I'm not a lawyer), but definitely something other projects would get a pass for. You know, a nicely written e-mail not making any fuzz.
In a way this fuzz mastodon makes out of it, is exactly the PR a Trump would want, no?
Err, this is something a lot of FOSS dev' have been complaining about actually. There has been complain in the past directed toward Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon and many top-100 company for using free software without contributing anything back (code or financial support), or again, because they are disliked by the original FOSS team.
This "woke" word has been thrown around left and right at this point and is completely nonsensical, like SJW before that.
The license you’re waiting for was JSLint. It was brilliant and the effect it had on users was a hilarious thing to behold:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138866
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4762035
Nothing involving Trump’s projects will provoke the same sort of hilarity. A desire to avoid litigation on the part of the user, combined with at least a minimal, superficial concern over good and evil, are necessary for the gag to work.