[I]n the last 24 hours, a development has come to light that might be harder for him to weather. It seems that he lifted the code for TRUTH Media without properly crediting the code's author. And the author is already making noises about taking Trump to court.

TRUTH Media claims to be built on "proprietary" source code. But Gizmodo's Lucas Ropek noticed that a number of early users of TRUTH Media discovered unmistakable similarities between TRUTH Media's code and that of the open-source social media platform Mastodon. [...]

In and of itself, this isn't a problem. Mastodon has an extremely lenient open source policy which allows users to modify Mastodon's code for their own purposes--provided that they give credit to Mastodon and make their forked code available for public inspection. Trump didn't do any of this.

Mastodon founder and lead developer Eugen Rochko told Vice that based on the screenshots he's seen floating around social media, Truth Social "absolutely is based on Mastodon"--and its claims to be based on proprietary software when it really isn't would amount to "a license violation." He even discovered another smoking gun--a 404 page using Mastodon's mascot.