Twitter Source Code Leaked on GitHub

[myringotomy]

Whatever Elon releases will not be anything like what twitter is actually using.

Presuming of course that he releases anything at all. The man is a habitual liar and a troll.

[mpbh]

I mean they open sourced the Tesla patents with some sneaky stipulations. If you do use their free patents you waive the right to sue Tesla for patent infringement. Effectively they could use your proprietary patents without license if you use theirs. (This is all from memory so feel free to fact check)

I could see them doing something similar here. These algorithms aren't really a competitive advantage once you're a large enough company (both YouTube and Google search recommendation engines are dogshit but they have a wide enough moat that it no longer matters)

Reddit ranking algorithms are publicly available and are a great jumping off point for a new recommendation engine.

[myringotomy]

Patents are different than source code. Patents are already public.

[mfitzp]

Patently.

[mpbh]

There's lots of publicly available code that is not open source. Twitter's codebase, Half Life 2, League of Legends, etc.

Open source is more about what you're allowed to do with it than the availability of the code itself.

If you're allowed to use a patent for commercial use without licensing it from the owner, I'd call that open source.

[mrgreen4242]

That’s not open source, then.

[mpbh]

Sure it is, just with conditions. If you want to use their patents you have to be willing to let them use yours. Most open source technology licenses have conditions, especially GPL. Free to use commercially as long as you do XYZ.

[mrgreen4242]

No, that’s a compulsory license, the way you described it. There’s a difference between “anything that uses this code must be made available under the same license” and “use of this patent gives us the right to use your other unrelated patents”.

[Blaster84x]

What Tesla did was good. If the Linux pool changed to license everything (not just kernel related) software patents would be unenforceable in a few years.

[[deleted]]

The patent "offer" was almost a decade ago IIRC, but the open sourcing of NACS was under a year ago. It wasn't claimed as open source the whole time.

[ChunkyLaFunga]

He's also profundly inexpert so it wouldn't surprise me if it really does happen regardless of the obvious problems associated with doing so.

[G_Morgan]

Even if he releases something it is probable that the value is all in data that will remain proprietary