So, Twitter made their algorithm open-source with a strong copyleft licence, AGPL-3.0. People are already spamming it with troll issues and PRs ...
And this is where you'd think I would say that doing stuff like that is bad and so on. But no. I would actually encourage it. Not because "twitter bad" but because them making the algorithm open-source is a performative action.
What? But it's AGPL-3.0 I hear you say. That's a great license, I hear you say! Yes, it is, but they require you to sign a Contributors License Agreement. While I haven't read Twitter's CLA terms myself (couldn't find it), these typically give the company all rights to the code you contributed, which also means that they can relicense the project at any time. That means that the AGPL-3.0 licence is practically pointless.
I'd suggest that instead of spamming pointless BS about Twitter sucking (do that on Twitter instead and @ Elon when you do it), we should instead spam about how having to sign a CLA is predatory.
Tell them to switch to using Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) instead which is what actual FOSS projects like Linux uses. They're as simple as signing the git commit. DCO prevent the company from taking all the work contributors put in and making the software proprietary in the future.
@meso Get lost, fascist.
@Reina I suspect that CLAassistant is lying anyway.
Who would even sign that sort of thing?
if I am really going to be frank
I see this move from twitter 100% as a marketing ploy to get more devs to give them free work. I see exactly why twitter would probably desire a CLA, for one twitter as an entity has way more control over said code with a CLA since (from what I assume) the cla makes twitter the sole copyright holder of the code (ie. who owns said code)
being that both ""foss"" and ""open source software"" have become ""memes"" in the sense that more companies are jumping on board exposing their code under very calculated terms, I see this as more or less of twitter trying to get a slice of the pie with a very important piece of their code. Licensing it under AGPL simply makes it so that other competing companies literally cant use it (most firms avoid the (A/L)GPL like its the plauge). I dont think twitter will change to a dco because it works against their interest
tl;dr its probably gonna stay that way, twitter just is using agpl to prevent corporate top-level competition