@mgebbe, I'm delighted that you've found a way to again construct a two-way bridge to Twitter with a federated Free Software service.
However, I'm completely befuddled at how you are in compliance with Twitter's API Terms of Service, which states:
You will not attempt or encourage others to … redistribute, or syndicate access … Twitter Content to any third party without prior written approval from Twitter.
and
Exporting Twitter Content to a datastore as a service or other cloud based service … is not permitted.
(Admittedly, Twitter Content appears to be a defined term, but it isn't, at least not in that document. But I think @-replies from third-parties almost surely qualifies under a reasonable definition of "Content".)
Meanwhile, I think your software also qualifies for the additional rules as well, which say:
Some Services or applications attempt to replicate Twitter's core user experience, typically by accessing the home timeline, account settings, or direct messages API endpoints or User Streams product. The following additional rules apply to Services or applications that fall within this category.
those additional rules contain:
not arrange for your Service to be pre-installed on any device, promoted as a "zero-rated" service, or marketed as part of a specialized data plan.
display a prominent link or button in your Service that directs new users to Twitter's sign-up functionality.
… both of which means your software can't be Free Software, because you must restrict it from being packaged for, say, Debian. Thus, if you were to GPL your software, everyone downstream from you would have a GPLv2§7 / GPLv3§12 problem.
Meanwhile, you also run into this problem right now. I think Pumpbridge.me is already violating this one outright:
not use Twitter Content or other data collected from end users to create or maintain a separate status update or social network database or service.
I think we all need to be realistic. Twitter is a proprietary, software freedom unfriendly service that's designed to stop Free Software social networking software from integrating with it. Yes, I know lots of people we want to talk to are on Twitter. That's the scam that Twitter is playing on everyone: make the place everyone wants to be, then make it expensive to be there. With network service software: if you aren't the customer of a product, you are the product.
Hubert Figuière, Freemor, jrobb, Nathan Smith likes this.
It's pretty obvious that Twitter doesn't want you to run a service that acts as a shell around it. On that aspect, the pumpbridge.me service has probably some worry to come.
However, I don't see how this limits the distributability of the code itself. The worst that might happen is that @mgebbe will lose his Twitter acount for violating the rules. However, in the spirit of Pump.io itself, I guess people could run their own instance for themselves, as I am not sure what legal recourse Twitter has to control code distribution. Their only option would be to block pumpbridge requests on their end.
Having just read GPLv2§7, I see your point. But I undertsand it only applies in the case of a court order forbidding distribution of the code alongside binaries (or, in this case, service).
Altogether, I guess Twitter could prevent single people from distributing the code by enforcing their user agreement, but what about non-Twitter users? I'm not sure there is much recourse there. And copying code is cheap.
"exporting" .. I think there is an exception for temporary caches in apps but no they don't like long term storage
if it doesn't redistribute the posts to other sites/services and only acts on behalf of a user logged in locally and using their own account at twitter/fb its behaviour and limitations is essentially the same as any other twitter/fb "app"
users often manually copy/paste content to/from there to/from everywhere else and there could be millions of such posts per day and there might sometimes be even a clash between their terms and terms on other sites something might have been copied from
I'm no lawyer but I suspect that might be a bit of a pandora's box even lawyers might prefer to avoid! (as well as a bad-publicity minefield!)
ok my reply is on a different comment (in the same discussion) but it wouldn't let me post under the other comment for some reason