There is no service.
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.