Hacker News Reader

Comment by d_theorist | Hacker News Reader

Are the quoted terms actually incorrect or in violation of the license?

>all source code ... are owned or controlled by us or licensed to us, and are protected by copyright and trademark laws

That's correct isn't it? The mastodon code would be licensed to them under the AGPL. So I am not sure this should be a source of "worry" in and of itself.

The potential issue appears to be that they have modified the mastodon code without publishing their modifications, which I believe might be a violation of the licensing terms (although I am certainly not an expert).

View on HN

I'm not sure it's correct, since they're reusing mastodon they should be clearly indicating that parts or all of the work is licensed under AGPLv3. And the claims you quote seem at best weasely if the entire thing is derivative of mastodon (and thus not in any way owned by truth social).

Per my reading of the AGPLv3 (though IANAL), section 5 seems to be rather thoroughly violated:

5. Conveying Modified Source Versions.

You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:

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

b) The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under this License and any conditions added under section 7. This requirement modifies the requirement in section 4 to "keep intact all notices".

c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.

d) If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display Appropriate Legal Notices; however, if the Program has interactive interfaces that do not display Appropriate Legal Notices, your work need not make them do so.

Truth seems to violate:

- 5 (a) by not having prominent notices that it's a Mastodon fork (assuming there's actual divergences from mastodon aside from the —— illegal —— white-labeling modifications)

- 5 (b) by not indicating that parts of it (and which) are under AGPLv3

- 5 (c) by not providing licensing terms for the mastodon derivation it must license out

- 5 (d) by having actually removed existing legal notice entirely

I agree that - on its face at least - the platform is probably in violation.

My point was just that I don't think the TS terms that Mastodon quotes in its blog post are incorrect.

> On Oct 26, we sent a formal letter to Truth Social’s chief legal officer, requesting the source code to be made publicly available in compliance with the license. According to AGPLv3, after being notified by the copyright holder, Truth Social has 30 days to comply or the license may be permanently revoked.

IANAL, but this reads to me as if they don't comply in time[1], they might lose the license, rendering the statement incorrect.

[1] I don't know if they have to comply in 30 days, if the service is currently offline. Maybe they have 30 days after release?

Agreed that the statement would become incorrect if this outcome happens. Nevertheless, at the moment I believe the statement to be accurate.

Even if you don't modify the sources you have to provide them to anyone who uses the service.

There is no service.

"Not publicly available" is not the same as "there is no service".

People were able to access the service and create accounts. Those people are entitled to the sources.

This would immediately go away if they just posted a tarball of the almost certainly unmodified sources. I guess nobody running this understands what's going on?

> This would immediately go away...

This platform is going to be under continuous attack from all angles. The company has to be ready to be boycotted, licenses revoked, regulation enacted, smear campaigns run, deplatformed by infrastructure providers, etc. Their lawyers are going to be the more combative type, when they signed up it was pretty clear the sort of wild-eyed hate that the Trump brand is going to attract from established actors in the social media sphere.

My hope is they're just going to take 20 days to think about it then release the source code. But we'll see.

I doubt there'll be much boycotting; the people who might boycott won't want to use it in the first place. Certainly no regulation will be enacted. I doubt a smear campaign, either; if it's anything like Twitter, a simple screenshot of the homepage will be enough. So the only things are:

• licenses revoked – except with free software, this can only happen if you violate the license

• deplatformed by infrastructure providers – which is part of the reason we need not to have centralisation in the first place.

As much as I dislike this former president, I expect his social media site might actually have better moderation than his Twitter followers had; for PR reasons, if nothing else. I'd rather it wasn't around, but I don't think it's worth taking it down. (Enforcing the AGPL, however? That's worth something.)

> I expect his social media site might actually have better moderation than his Twitter followers had

They more or less already stated that any unflattering opinions will be deleted and the used banned from the platform.

> licenses revoked – except with free software, this can only happen if you violate the license

Eh, there _are_ commercial licenses which would have a "don't bring us into disrepute" clause, but you'd imagine they'll probably avoid those. Mind you you'd also imagine they'd avoid violating the AGPL, and yet here we are.

Sorry, I was grammatically ambiguous. Free software is the one where this can only happen if you violate the license, and it's an exception to “traditional” (proprietary) software licensing. Please read the “except” as a fancy “but”. (How dare you not pick up on my intonation‽ It was obvious in the timing of my keypresses!)

> I expect his social media site might actually have better moderation than his Twitter followers had; for PR reasons...

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".

I think that certain classes of massive blatant bigotry will be forbidden. Perhaps not as well as Twitter, thinking about it, but still probably better than some of the other sites out there that are tailored to this demographic.

The ulterior motive of this website is simple: the immediate interests of this guy. The ulterior motives of some other websites are harder to see.

_Any_ large social network which was violating the AGPL should expect trouble.

> Their lawyers are going to be the more combative type

But probably not the more competent type, based on the prior adventures of Donald Trump. I mean, this is coming from the same people who brought you Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

If you have no right to a computer service, you have no right to the AGPL code it runs. For example, a company is allowed to make internal GPL-based tools and not have to release their code. If I hack into their service and download the binary, I’m not entitled to the source code.

If the closed beta was meant for a select few, but was found by someone else, that someone else doesn’t have a right to the code just because they managed to get access. Only the select few would be allowed.

The fact that it’s a public web server (with no access controls) does throw a wrench into things, but it’s not as simple as many here make it seem.

> If the closed beta was meant for a select few, but was found by someone else

The license makes no such distinction. The website had no warning that it was a private test, was hosted on the presumed official domain and looked like it went live.

I never received an explicit authorisation by YC to use Hacker News and here I am. I wouldn’t call my access unauthorised even though it was never authorised.

> The license makes no such distinction. The website had no warning that it was a private test, was hosted on the presumed official domain and looked like it went live.

That is true. I mention that in my last paragraph:

> The fact that it’s a public web server (with no access controls) does throw a wrench into things, but it’s not as simple as many here make it seem.

However, simply being accessible is not akin to authorization. If that company tool is accessible to the public through a misconfigured DNS, the courts probably won’t side with me asking for the source.

The law is not black and white (despite what many here think). Judges are humans and will apply judgement as to whether Truth was meant to be accessible or not.

There’s also the fact that the CFAA is a broadly worded law and could easily be wielded by Trump against the people accessing Truth prior to launch. Just say they weren’t authorized and were hacking. They’ll probably lose in court with that argument, but we won’t know until the ruling would come out

> However, simply being accessible is not akin to authorization.

That’s a hard argument to push unless the judge is unbelievably biased. If the website is up and running on the expected domain, functions correctly and has no indication it’s a private beta, it’s hard to assume bad faith from the unintended users.

IIRC, the idea was tested in the early days of dial up systems and a system that was setup to not require authentication that had a “Welcome to this computer” banner was considered open enough the intruders were not considered intruders.

If you have a building and charge for entry, but there is no access control at the door, no ticket sales and no indication you need to pay to enter, can you complain someone wandered into the building without paying?

They win either way. If mastodon pursues the copyright claim, they get a ton of press and probably more money from donations to fight the “woke Marxists”.

It’s a propaganda platform, not social media.

> This would immediately go away if they just posted a tarball of the almost certainly unmodified sources.

No it wouldn't. NOTHING short of shutting down would ever satisfy the people going after Trump.

Sure, but those people and these people are different.

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.

They have been at least somewhat modified; the default distribution has a link to the source.

Besides the source code, attributions are missing if this quote is complete. The quote is not wrong I guess, but things are probably missing so the text in its entirety could be considered wrong, I guess too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com