Is it possible that the thin-skinned man with no sense of humor is going for irony? Since he left the White House, Donald Trump has been busy trying to get even with Facebook and Twitter for booting him off. We can see his point of view, what is a little failed coup between friends?
The Donald wants to be a tech giant now. Basically less-than-Truth Social is a Twitter wannabe. There are the tweets, ahem “Truths,” the retweets, “Re-Truths,” and lo and behold the “Truth Feed.”
Evidently, Trump not only copied the basic end-user part, he “borrowed” another company’s code, too. In other words, he stole the guts of someone else’s program. A big no-no in the tech industry.
Founder and lead developer of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko revealed that he had been ripped off, according to The Vice News:
‘Based on the screenshots I have seen, it absolutely is based on Mastodon.’
Rochko showed a screen with non-Truth Social’s error message. It even defaulted to Mastodon’s elephant logo. The company’s “focus [is] on user privacy and autonomy.”
One end-user captured a screenshot of the ex-White House resident’s web designation (HTML). Mastodon has a “generous open-source policy,” but those who use it must give the company credit.
Of course, Truth Social-Lite had no such compunction. It claims in its terms of service that “all source code” is proprietary. Image that.
Rochko said that Trump’s use of Mastodon’s code “indicate[s] a license violation.” He said the company would look into a possible “breach of terms,” according to The Talking Points Memo:
‘I do intend to seek legal counsel on the situation. Compliance with our AGPLv3 license is very important to me, as that is the sole basis upon which I and other developers are willing to give away years of work for free.’
‘I believe that as of this time Truth Social indeed seems to be using Mastodon code. If you look at these screenshots and compare them to any standard Mastodon installation it will be pretty obvious.’
Trump Media & Technology Group manages and owns unTruth Social. It told Gizmodo:
‘[T]he front-end of Trump’s new site looks quite similar to Mastodon.’
Mastodon’s owner decided to have some fun with thin-skin Don tweeting:
‘hey uh’
‘there we go’
At least Donald is being consistent. “And that’s the truth,” as Lilly Thomlin’s character Edith Anne said on the old Laugh-In TV show, The Orlando Sentinel reported.
Three White Lions podcast, Gloria Christie reads her week’s most important news/ commentary stories in the liberal online newspaper The Bipartisan Report. Gloria Christie Report her newsletter for people on the go. Written in her own unique style with a twist of humor in a briefer version of Bipartisan Report. Christie’s Mueller Report Adventures In Bite-Sizes a real-life compelling spy mystery. Find her here on Facebook.
