stinerman

Of course you can fork it, but you can’t call it Mastodon. That’s trademarked. Just like how you can fork Firefox but have to call it Waterfox or Iceweasel or Librewolf.

The confusion here is between Mastodon the company and Mastodon the software and instances of the running software. Eugen Rochko owns the first two. He also owns the instances mastodon.social and mastodon.online. Everything else is outside of his control.

It was never controlled by a single person to begin with.

The computer program called Mastodon was (and still is for now) completely controlled by Eugen Rochko. In the future it will be controlled by a non-profit.

See this and this for more info.

You can see exactly what he made in 2023. The report is available here.

€60k

the retailer is generally considered oblivious to the situation until proven otherwise they have zero incentive to vet the product.

In fact they are willfully ignorant because selling counterfeit merchandise helps line go up.