“Former President Donald Trump’s new TRUTH social network is in violation of the software license it’s built on and must get in compliance, the holder of the license demanded this week. The company that holds the software license for the open source code sent TRUTH Social, the Trump-founded venture, a letter demanding compliance with its software license, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko said in a statement. Rochko told TPM last week that he believed an early version of Trump’s network was using open-source software that he developed, called Mastodon, without abiding by the terms of the license that make it available to use.”

“Rochko said in the statement that though he would ‘prefer if people so antithetical to our values did not use and benefit from our labour,’ the reality of open-source, free software means that “you give up the possibility of choosing who can and cannot use it from the get-go. “So in a practical sense the only issue we can take with something like Truth Social is if they don’t even comply with the free software license we release our work under,” Rochko said. The letter, sent on Tuesday, triggers a 30-day response period for Trump to comply with the terms of the license. The Mastodon license mandates that people who use the code for their own projects – including TRUTH Social – make a copy of the altered software publicly available. TRUTH Social does not appear to have done that. The company did not immediately reply to TPM’s inquiry regarding how it planned on responding to the letter” – Talking Points Memo.