Former President Donald Trump’s new social network TRUTH Social has 30 days to stop violating a free and open-source software licensing agreement before its access is permanently terminated or the platform faces legal action, the Software Freedom Conservancy said.
The Trump Media and Technology Group plans to go public via a SPAC. Although the company’s social media platform has not launched formally, it was briefly online last week when coding experts quickly determined the platform was built off the code of the decentralized social network Mastodon.
While platforms are allowed to reuse and adapt Mastodon’s open-source code, they must provide the source code to users and acknowledge any modifications, says the Software Freedom Conservancy, a non-profit that enforces free and open-source software licenses.
TMTG ignored the licensing terms and “once caught in the act, Trump’s Group scrambled and took the site down,” Bradley Kuhn, policy fellow and hacker-in-residence at the Software Freedom Conservancy, wrote in a blog post late last week. The Trump group has 30 days to comply with the licening requirements or risk losing access to the code permanently. Legal action by Mastodon against the Trump Group remains a possibility.
Meanwhile, shares of Digital World Acquisition — the SPAC that would take Trump’s fledgling media company public — took off like a bottle rocket last week, soaring as much as 1,225% at one point. IPO experts have said there is no rationality behind the stratospheric movement, and just today the stock has fallen from a high mark of $120 to $86.53 less than half an hour before the bell. Read more.
