Trump’s Social Media Site Posts Open Source Code Already Available On GitHub To Avoid Being Sued
You might recall that Donald Trump was trying to launch a social media site, and ignoring the fact that it was almost immediately pwned by hackers, it used code from a open source code from a social media platform called Mastodon improperly. Which then led to threats of a lawsuit. It now seems Trump and company are now trying to quietly avoid being sued:
To avoid a lawsuit, Donald Trump’s social media site is quietly acknowledging the computer code powering the platform comes from Mastodon. Trump’s “Truth Social” site now features a dedicated section labeled “open source,” which contains a Zip archive to Mastodon’s source code. “Our goal is to support the open source community no matter what your political beliefs are. That’s why the first place we go to find amazing software is the community and not ‘Big Tech,'” the site adds. Truth Social created the section on Nov. 12, two weeks after social networking provider Mastodon threatened to sue Trump’s platform for violating its open-source license.
Since Mastodon is an open-source software project, anyone can use it for free. But if you do, the software license demands the code and any ensuing modifications to your Mastodon-powered platform be made publicly available, allowing the entire Mastodon community to benefit. (This doesn’t include publishing any user data or disclosing admin access, though.) […] However, it appears the uploaded Zip archive is simply a barebones version of the existing Mastodon source code you can already find on GitHub. The archive itself is only a mere 30MB in size. Nevertheless, Rochko said the Zip archive might “become more interesting” once Truth Social finally launches.
I seriously doubt that it will get more interesting because these humans clearly have no clue what they are doing. One just cannot spin up a social media site out of thin air as that’s something that takes the Facebook’s and Twitter’s of the world years to do. Take my word for it, this site is unlikely to see the light of day. And even if it does, it is likely to be a train wreck next to a dumpster fire.
February 21, 2022 at 8:29 am
[…] using outside the licensing terms and was looking at being sued. But then he kind of fixed that by publishing open source code related to the site. Though that was kind of […]