To avoid a lawsuit, Donald Trump’s social media site quietly acknowledges that the computer code that powers the platform comes from Mastodon.
Trump’s “Truth Social” site now has a special section labeled “open source,” which contains a zip archive to Mastodon’s source code.
“Our goal is to support the open source community, whatever your political beliefs. That’s why the community is the first place we find great software, 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.
While Truth Social has yet to launch, an early test version went live in October and users immediately noticed that it had taken several design elements from Mastodon’s software. But at the time, Truth Social made no attempt to credit Mastodon or publish the computer code behind it.
Since Mastodon is an open-source software project, anyone can use it for free. But if you do, the software license requires that the code and any resulting changes to your Mastodon-powered platform be made publicly available for the entire Mastodon community to benefit from. (However, this does not include publishing user credentials or releasing administrator access.)
“We release our work for free, first of all the idea is that as we give to the platform operators, the platform operators also give us back by giving their improvements to us and everyone to see,” Mastodon wrote in a blog post last month. posted.
However, Trump’s social media site claimed that all source code was “owned” and operated solely by Truth Social.
In response, Mastodon sent a letter to Trump’s social media platform demanding that the source code be published within 30 days or he would take legal action regarding copyright infringement.
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