So Gab has decided that their own code that they spent $5M of investor money developing is so unsalvageably bad that they're going to use Mastodon's code instead, with the added bonus of leeching off of our apps (with Gab apps being banned from app stores)
This is an early warning to fellow admins to be vigilant and domain-block them on sight, when/if they appear (unconfirmed whether they intend to federate), and to app devs to consider if blocking Gab's domains from their app is necessary.
One has to wonder if their investors feel ripped off about this... After all, there are more than 2,000 installations of Mastodon and the costs begin at $5/mo, not $5M
@Gargron honestly my favourite is how their people clearly _do not understand anything on a technical level_ about mastodon (exhibit A: "we won't offer federation but of course apps that support it would" https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1133945078534299650 , exhibit B: the guy, in their blog post, clearly not understanding that the activitypub c2s protocol is not mastodons API)
@Prez_Cannady he writes that because they use activitypub, they can now use mastodon apps, which is the kind of casual mistake you make if you write about something that you have no clue about
Oh, didn't even see that. Well, maybe it's a typo.
@halcy There’s another reason to share the source. There’s almost no chance anyone is going to write something worth keeping proprietary. At least not something that requires deeply coupling to the forked source. So why not recruit free labor on both ends of the pipe?
@Prez_Cannady the reason companies like gab share the source when all their previous efforts were closed is is that they have to. everything else is generally post-hoc justification.
@halcy Sheer inertia, I suppose. But regardless of obligation Gab has certainly determined the benefits of going open source outweigh the costs of keeping things in house.
@Prez_Cannady they have no choice. They literally cannot run mastodon and keep their changes for themselves, that is how the affero gpl works.
Agreed. I'm just pointing out that this doesn't seem to be a problem for Gab. Sure, it cuts across the grain, but Gab doesn't really have anything to lose by being a good FLOSS citizen.
@Prez_Cannady right there:
as a bonus, there's also a "oh we're SO COMMITTED to TRANSPARENCY" which is the usual corporate (remember: they're a for profit corporation) doublespeak for "ugh it's copylefted so we have to share sourcecode"