this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Yeah, my first reaction to this story was, why didn't they sue any of the other Twitter clones before this?
Because it's a big waste of time and won't get anywhere. The fact that mastodon has been a thing since 2018 (or earlier) unopposed means that they will have a really hard time proving that they ever had any trade ownership over the concept of microblogging.
Given how fast this thing was put together, it's very likely Meta actually DID use stuff from Twitter that was patented. Mastodon less likely, because it was built completely separate over a few years
Writing a Twitter clone isn’t exactly hard, especially for a company that practically o center social media and already runs Instagram and Facebook.
Considering how fast this was put together sounds like all the other shit Musk has done with Twitter. Fast and half thought through. So far this seems meaningless.
Because Elon wasn’t worried about those.
I think it's also pretty likely Meta is using actual code from Twitter, though. It's not an upstanding company and it put Threads together as fast as possible.
Mastodon was put together over several years using open-source software and keeping open-source, so it probably genuinely doesn't infringe on those patents.
I highly doubt that a company with the monetary force behind it that Meta has needs to steal code from Twitter. Besides, it's made evident more every day that Twitter is the code equivalent of spaghetti and duct tape after Musk had his way with it.
And what makes X upstanding in comparison to Meta? I mean I'm honestly not arguing in favor of Meta and Threads as much as I'm trying to paint the picture that this is Elon "I'll sign an agreement buying Twitter for $44 Billion and attempt to fight my way out of it before the ink dries" Musk that is on the other side of this.
Oh Elon's a piece of shit. It's just I am confident that in investigating either of them they are going to find any manner of bad behavior, but that if an open-source alternative had even a whiff of plagiarism it'd have been hit with takedown notices long ago.
Plagiarism is not patent infringement. You're probably thinking of copyright.
Why would they need to use code from Twitter or even want to? They have hundreds or thousands of engineers to write their own, don’t necessarily use the same languages or tooling, and already have had IG, which works on the exact same model as Twitter, for a decade.
You seem to be equating source code use with patent infringement. They're not really related.