I’m pretty sure mastodon has a copyleft licence meaning that it can be used for commercial use but the updated software also needs to maintain the same licence. That’s why I chose the word “stole”. They’re not honouring the licence so it’s stolen.
I don’t think that’s how the license works. You’re thinking of the general GNU licenses, not the Affero one which Mastodon uses.
To quote the license (from Mastodon’s repo):
The GNU General Public License permits making a modified version and letting the public access it on a server without ever releasing its source code to the public.
The GNU Affero General Public License is designed specifically to ensure that, in such cases, the modified source code becomes available to the community. It requires the operator of a network server to provide the source code of the modified version running there to the users of that server.
That sounds to me like at least Truthsocial users need to be able to access its source code.
Also, from the actual terms:
Conveying Non-Source Forms.
You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License
Mastodon is licensed under AGPLv3, where network use is distribution. The AGPL was explicitly designed to enforce mandatory code sharing for “web services” or “SaaS” scenarios.
I’m pretty sure mastodon has a copyleft licence meaning that it can be used for commercial use but the updated software also needs to maintain the same licence. That’s why I chose the word “stole”. They’re not honouring the licence so it’s stolen.
But they have to uphold the license if they publish the code. But if they don’t publish the code and use it only internally they don’t have to.
I don’t think that’s how the license works. You’re thinking of the general GNU licenses, not the Affero one which Mastodon uses.
To quote the license (from Mastodon’s repo):
That sounds to me like at least Truthsocial users need to be able to access its source code.
Also, from the actual terms:
Mastodon is licensed under AGPLv3, where network use is distribution. The AGPL was explicitly designed to enforce mandatory code sharing for “web services” or “SaaS” scenarios.
IANAL so I won’t dispute that.