this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Technology
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One of the "powers" of OSS is that the license usually required changes to be fed back upstream.
If Meta were not to do that the authors of Lemmy could ask someone like EFF to take legal proceeding against them.
Facebook can easily circumvent most requirements like that if the license isn't invasivively copyleft. Usually web standards have permissive licenses.
i'm not sure if ActivityPub is copyleft or not. meta might be able to build proprietary features on top of it if the license isn't viral.
If it is copyleft, they will probably try to reimplement it permissively.
ActivityPub itself is just a protocol, everybody can reimplement it. Lemmy and Mastodon are AGPL3 and thus copyleft along with "you must release source code for your server".
Though if Meta does anything, I'd expect it to be written from scratch and MIT licensed. Companies don't like to get near anything GPL as long as they can avoid it.