Trump's "Truth Social" is a Mastodon fork and is violating the terms of the AGPLv3. The Software Freedom Conservancy has give the Trump Media and Technology Group 30 days to comply with the license or face legal action.
Based on the fact this is AGPL, their case to release all source is going to be very strong, but I wonder what enforcement will look like.
The only big concern I have is whether a judge will view Conservancy as having standing.
@emacsen @atoponce So they need to make this more about protecting and enforcing the AGPL and protecting others that create works under that perhaps.
As in if one person can violate the AGPL then as I said it opens up a flood of others.
If nothing else, this will be in the news / media, and we will get clueless journalists trying to explain the AGPL and others., so we need to really push what all this means to the general population without giving too much publicity to trump.
> So they need to make this more about protecting and enforcing the AGPL and protecting others that create works under that perhaps.
That's not a legal argument and if they lose, it could harm license enforcement if they lose. In France and Germany, license enforcement has taken a hit lately.
Filing a lawsuit is always a dangerous gamble because if you lose, you create precedent. That's also why so many companies settle before it ever touches the news.
@zleap @atoponce
To go to civil court over something, you must be a party to it.
Let's imagine that Alice breaks Bob's favorite vase.
I can't go to court and say "Alice broke Bob's vase, so Alice must pay emacsen!"
Normally in a GPL violation case, the lawsuit is by the copyright holder, but that is not what's happening in the Vizio case, and unless one of the Mastodon devs has done a copyright transfer, not the case for Mastodon either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law)