Donald Trump’s social media network, TRUTH Social, is covertly admitting that Mastodon’s software powers it operations, in a bid to avoid a lawsuit.
The “open source” area of Trump’s “Truth Social” platform now includes a Zip archive containing Mastodon’s source code.
“Our goal is to support the open source community no matter what your political beliefs are. That’s why the first place we go to find amazing software is the community and not ‘Big Tech,’” the site adds.
Two weeks after social media site Mastodon threatened to sue Trump’s platform for breaking its open-source license, Truth Social launched the section on November 12.
Although Truth Social hasn’t officially launched yet, an early test build went on the internet in October, and users soon recognized it had included a number of Mastodon’s software design cues. Truth Social, however, did not at the time attempt to give credit to Mastodon or disclose the source code.
Read: Trump Team Launches Social Media Platform GETTR
Mastodon is accessible to everyone for free because it is an open-source software project. But if you do, the software license requires that the code and any improvements made to your Mastodon-powered platform as a result be made public, allowing the whole Mastodon community to gain from them. (However, releasing any user data or giving away admin access are not included).
“We release our work for free in the first place is the idea that, as we give to the platform operators, so do the platform operators give back to us by providing their improvements for us and everyone to see,” Mastodon wrote in a blog post last month.
Trump’s social media platform, however, had asserted that all of its source code was “private” and in the exclusive control of Truth Social.
In response, Mastodon wrote to Trump’s social media network requesting that its source code be made public within 30 days or risk copyright infringement lawsuit.
Check Also: Politics trumps business in Truth Social’s war on Big Tech
