Some drama on their licensing situation:
Comment on Alternatives to Mattermost
eksb@programming.dev 2 months ago
Mattermost is licensed under the AGPL. How are they enforcing a 250 user limit?
bdonvr@thelemmy.club 2 months ago
Comment on Alternatives to Mattermost
eksb@programming.dev 2 months ago
Mattermost is licensed under the AGPL. How are they enforcing a 250 user limit?
Some drama on their licensing situation:
starshipwinepineapple@programming.dev 2 months ago
Might be worth taking this and the original github issue. It isn’t actually agpl. They only grant access to the source code to build a compiled version which isn’t freedom. And beyond that some code is covered under a source available enterprise license which i think is where they would enforce their paywall
eksb@programming.dev 2 months ago
At the copyright owner, they are within their rights to release the source code under the AGPL, and also sell it under other licenses. Anyone is free to use the code under the AGPL. Nobody who releases code under an open-source license is obligated to provide binaries.
As the copyright owner, they are free to use the code along with other non-open-source code (e.g.: SSO integrations) to build a non-free product.
starshipwinepineapple@programming.dev 2 months ago
I feel like you didn’t read the post or issue i linked, nor their license.txt and are instead just trying to talk past me.
I don’t really care about this project or debating their intentionally ambiguous license structure. My point was that the grant of rights explicitly only grants AGPL access to create compiled versions of mattermost. That is not how FOSS licenses work and is incompatible with FOSS licenses because it lacks the “freedom” that even AGPL would typically grant.
I’m not saying that people can’t dual license or that they can’t release their product in other non-free ways. That’s not the issue here. The issue is that you are saying it’s AGPL, and it’s not–Not really. It’s only AGPL to create a compiled version of mattermost.
eksb@programming.dev 2 months ago
IANAL. I originally interpreted the license.txt as: all of the source code is AGPL (see lines 234-235), some of the source is also Apache 2.0, and the binaries are MIT; plus a trademark notice and contact info for getting a commercial license. After rereading it, my only conclusion is that this is a dumpster fire of a license.txt, and can be reasonably read several different ways.