@feld @Moon


Legal action for license violations are a mixed bag:

I'm young but old enough to remember when both FFmpeg and LibAV had a "hall of shame" list of projects that violated the LGPL license:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110315033544/http://libav.org/
https://web.archive.org/web/20110224020701/http://ffmpeg.org/

Despite the threat to sue none of these projects ever were and both projects discontinued their "Hall of Shame".

On the other hand, the company behind Ghostscript sued another company for an GPL violation and won:

https://qz.com/981029/a-federal-court-has-ruled-that-an-open-source-license-is-an-enforceable-contract

I doubt the developers of Mastodon or Firefish are going to pursue legal action or publicly shame a one user instance not sharing their code, regardless of what the AGPL says.