Funny you would think that using the fediverse. Discord has exactly the same problems Reddit and Twitter had where at any moment someone for whatever reason could alter the deal significantly.

Your point is that copyright law is easier to enforce than trademark law? I doubt it. I personally don’t care that the lawyers you will definitely need for this and for long do exactly.

If you take over a project of this scale you need to make this your job and thus get paid. There’s a good reason Louis hasn’t just pushed this out as his hobby project but hired developers.

If you can’t it won’t happen. My point is more: If it was possible to take over, would it really happen? Extremely unlikely.

Do you not see the contradiction in this statement? Where do you find the line of what is stealing and “working as intented”?

If you redistribute someone else’s open source code as open source but change nothing why would I get it from you and not the original developer? There is no incentive and no reward to “steal”.

If you make enough changes to create additional value I might and then it is “working as intended”

Exactly and the model of make changes and remove trademark has worked very well for them. Why not introduce arbitrary other limitations when they are clearly not neccessary?

The developer can yank the software from under you, he can change the monetisation model, or he can drop support for the software. With Free or Open Source software you could just take over the responsibility of maintainership or outsource it some other developer you can trust instead.

Sure, good point but in the real world this will never happen.

If Mozilla suddenly decides to implode you won’t just casually take over Firefox or hire another maintainer to develop it for you.

In theory this sounds nice but for any software that is of any real complexity (and thus use) it is pretty much irrelevant.