Re:Truth Social broke software rules, says copyleft group
by kazinator on Friday October 22, 2021 @03:44PM
(#28961737)
> The Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) has 30 days to comply with the terms of the license before its access is terminated — forcing it to rebuild the platform or face legal action.
Is that true? Wouldn't the actual copyright holder of the software have to assert this? Are the SFC making this specific demand, and are they the copyright holders?
Moreover, before the copyright proprietor takes action, wouldn't there have to be a legitimate complaint from a user of the site, who wanted the source code but had been denied? Otherwise it's a one-handed clap.
I'm looking at a Mastodon repo on github. Is this the right thing?
This has serious issues. There is a LICENSE file in the root directory, but this doesn't mention any authors; it's just a copy of the AGPL. There is a copyright notice in it naming the Free Software Foundation, but that pertains to that file itself, not to Mastodon.
The presence of this file tells us that someone has put Mastodon under the AGPL, as a big umbrella license for everything in this tree.
However, individual source files lack copyright headers.
I see the AUTHORS file, but this is just a list of poorly identified github accounts and such. It's not clear who wrote what (unless we go digging through git history, I suppose). Anyway, these people don't seem to have assigned their copyright to the project, so the copyright proprietorship (who wrote what) boils down to looking at the git blame of every file to get the set of authors who touched any line.
In summary, this project appears to be a bit of a gong-show, in terms of licensing.
If I deployed this, and some copyleft group started harassing me, I'd ask them to write me another e-mail, this time from one of the accounts listed in the Mastodon AUTHORS file, and specifying a list of the files of which that account is an author, substantiated by git blame analysis.
If I had not modified any of those files, I'd reply "have a nice day".
Is that true? Wouldn't the actual copyright holder of the software have to assert this? Are the SFC making this specific demand, and are they the copyright holders?
Moreover, before the copyright proprietor takes action, wouldn't there have to be a legitimate complaint from a user of the site, who wanted the source code but had been denied? Otherwise it's a one-handed clap.
I'm looking at a Mastodon repo on github. Is this the right thing?
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/
This has serious issues. There is a LICENSE file in the root directory, but this doesn't mention any authors; it's just a copy of the AGPL. There is a copyright notice in it naming the Free Software Foundation, but that pertains to that file itself, not to Mastodon.
The presence of this file tells us that someone has put Mastodon under the AGPL, as a big umbrella license for everything in this tree.
However, individual source files lack copyright headers.
For instance, no copyright header in this randomly picked file: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/app/mailers/a...
I see the AUTHORS file, but this is just a list of poorly identified github accounts and such. It's not clear who wrote what (unless we go digging through git history, I suppose). Anyway, these people don't seem to have assigned their copyright to the project, so the copyright proprietorship (who wrote what) boils down to looking at the git blame of every file to get the set of authors who touched any line.
In summary, this project appears to be a bit of a gong-show, in terms of licensing.
If I deployed this, and some copyleft group started harassing me, I'd ask them to write me another e-mail, this time from one of the accounts listed in the Mastodon AUTHORS file, and specifying a list of the files of which that account is an author, substantiated by git blame analysis.
If I had not modified any of those files, I'd reply "have a nice day".