Piero Bosio Web Site

It's a good approach, it's exactly how NodeBB operates as well.

We have a FOSS software and we sell managed services for those who don't have the technical know-how.

Win-win.

Even then, would rather my government contract out Mastodon hosting to a company based here in the UK than to use the American Hosted and moderated Elon tool.

TIL GNU Affero General Public License it a flavor that closes loopholes that were used to extend open software without actually open sourcing your contributions.

In some countries, corporations and government are basically the same entity. Free countries distinguish between them in a meaningful sense.

What keeps most of them away from free software is that they can’t write a contract with anyone with clear boundaries and guarantees.

They can. There are plenty of companies offering Mastodon hosting.

The code is AGPL. They can't do open core.

I wish government organisations would host their own Mastodon servers. Get off Twitter.

I remember when I wanted Mozilla to do that, since they had the organizational might, the money, and it fit perfectly with their mission when they created mozilla.social. On the one hand, it seems slightly less ideal to have the same organization that develops mastodon also providing hosting for it. On the other hand, they probably have a better chance of doing it well.