I think this may be carelessly worded in the article. It was publicly accessible, but I don't think it was intended to be publicly available to anyone who wasn't developing it. Am I misremembering the reporting on this?
It isn't an issue of whether the developers made an error or not, but whether this constitutes a "release". Both in terms of the license, and the general legality of the situation. I think they would have a hard time showing this was.
Section 5, which they are accused of violating, specifically mentions a release of the software in item (b). Item (c) does provide some ambiguity, but given that the access was unauthorized, regardless of how bad the OpSec was in the part of the developers, I can't imagine a judge enforcing a discovery subpoena. They may have had a case that it wasn't malicious access if they didn't use Trump's name as a handle and post "Pig Poop Balls" meme.
Software licenses apply to releases, and it is not clear this a release. This is the legal question I am asking about, i.e. Does the developers making this publicly accessible for testing constitute a release?
The access was not unauthorized. In addition to that, a lot of people thought the service was actually launched - there was no authorization step anywhere in the interface, nor mention that it was a "pre-release" or testing deployment.
> Does the developers making this publicly accessible for testing constitute a release?
This has nothing to do with what was done with the software by which users - they all have the same right to the source. All users have the same rights.
> Does the developers making this publicly accessible for testing constitute a release?
Yes. The software was available to users, therefore, those users have the right to see the modified code of the application they used, as granted by the AGPL3 license to which the website operators agreed.
No, software licenses apply to distribution of of software.
The developers made this publicly accessible to users interacting with it remotely through a computer network, in violation of the license. What the developers consider a "release" and their incompetence is irrelevant