Open-Source Slack Alternative Mattermost Gets $50M Funding
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Mattermost Licensing
SOFTWARE LICENSING
You are licensed to use compiled versions of the Mattermost platform produced by Mattermost, Inc. under an MIT LICENSE
- See MIT-COMPILED-LICENSE.md included in compiled versions for details
You may be licensed to use source code to create compiled versions not produced by Mattermost, Inc. in one of two ways:
1. Under the Free Software Foundation’s GNU AGPL v.3.0, subject to the exceptions outlined in this policy; or
2. Under a commercial license available from Mattermost, Inc. by contacting commercial@mattermost.com
You are licensed to use the source code in Admin Tools and Configuration Files (templates/, config/default.json, model/, plugin/ and all subdirectories thereof) under the Apache License v2.0.
So that means, only the binary provided by Mattermost is MIT, not its source code, the usage of 'MIT' in their website sounds deceiving.
[0] https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/blob/master/...
Ultimately if you're okay with running AGPL code you're okay with running Mattermost. Which means as long as you don't intend to fork it and not share your changes you should be fine.
That's not how [LA]GPL works. You are free to fork, and not share the changes. The modified source code can be provided only to the people whom you gave the binary (Edit: AGPL has bit more terms, as said in comment below), and you can make it private to the rest of the world (though you can't add additional restrictions).
As Mattermost is dual licensed under AGPL, anyone who uses it under the terms of AGPL can live safe as long as they obey AGPL.
Software pieces using GPL licenses can't add additional restrictions to the software, but of course authors are free to dual license under different terms.
Say for example some one can specify the following for their project: "We provides the project under the terms of MIT for you to modify and run for your own purposes." This might look a harmless statement, but it could mean something very different and may be intentionally written, that essentially makes it non-free. GPL doesn't allow such additional clauses.
Disclosure: IANAL. So I don't know how/if it works in court
From https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AGPLv3ServerAsUser
Of course you couldn't share any derived binaries without a valid copyright license, but for internal use there shouldn't be any problem.
It might work for your company's internal chatroom but not for selling Mattermost as a service.
That's the intention anyway, I'm not a lawyer, I don't know if AGPL was tested in court, and whether it would hold up.
In other words - you can't sell SaaS based on AGPL software + proprietary secret sauce, you have to share back your secret sauce with all users.
It doesn't prevent you from selling it as SaaS, I could sell vanilla Mattermost as a service under AGPL, my selling point might be that I provide high reliability and excellent support.
Do you have an example of that dual license?
I don't see how that would work, the first person you give an MIT license to can re-distribute it under MIT to anyone else, including corporations.
Usually for dual-license you have the opposite, you would have a restrictive license like AGPL for the public, and you would sell non-free licenses with no redistribution rights that allow modifications without sharing back, for corporate clients who want to add their secret sauce to the software without having to give away the secret sauce for free.
My understanding is that, Mattermost is okay with others making money from their software if they don't modify it - which will practically work for some, but not all, small companies, and will be very difficult for the big companies to use. If the big companies want to modify and use Mattermost-server for free they are forced to contribute back the changes to the OS project, and then can make as much money as they want. Or use option 2, pay Mattermost a bunch of money for the privilege of not contributing back code to the OS project. In other words FAANG and co can either contribute to Mattermost financially or in code - their pick.
https://www.mattermost.org/mattermost-contributor-agreement/
So you can do all those things, but I imagine that modifying is going to be harder than it would be with the source code.
The reason I say "potentially OK", though is I wonder if a binary can be assigned a copyright as distinct from the source. The binary is only a machine translation of the source after all. Not a lawyer, so I'm not certain, but it seems a bit odd. I can't imagine a situation where anyone would challenge you, though --- they are giving you extra rights, not removing them.
There is a request to implement collapsible threads[0] but I haven't seen any new updates address this.
I'm hoping this new funding round amps up a few developers to take on this much-needed feature.
[0] https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/sugge...
Sometimes multiple topics are being discussed at the same time in the same channel, threads are helpful here.
I miss the video conf functionality of HipChat, but other than that I think MM was the right decision for us. Everyone on the team seems to be happy with it.
> ...makes catching up on posts almost impossible.
Seems odd those 2 statements are in the same comment. How can you love a product that has such a big flaw in the basic workflow? For the record, I've never even heard of Mattermost until today, but just thought that was strange to read your comment.
I love the ford abc but the steering feedback makes it impossible to steer
I love the new Panasonic tv, but the way it shows black makes it impossible to watch movies
Twitter scaled up ads a whole lot to become solvent.
Moviepass went from an amazing deal to an okay one.
Netflix's content catalog and price went from great to okay.
Facebook went from "Myspace but with photos" to the massive advertising machine it is today.
The great-for-users but usually lossy beginnings of these companies are a play to acquire users, so they can pull the profit switch later on.
IIRC GitLab is "open core" which just means it's not fully open source and Mattermost is not really fully open source either, it its own confusing way.
The purpose of open source was to give users full and unrestricted power. To free them from lock in and allow them to be the masters of the software they use.
It seems that these companies view open source as a marketing trick and perhaps a way to save on development costs. They're making a mockery of open source and should probably be shunned for it.
Restrictions could be provided by people through OSS, these companies don't prevent these alternatives from existing. The lack of interest does. The same could be said about many OSS that strugle to receive donations.
I could agree that a world where only OSS without monetization exists, where people donate and keep people investing their time on improving OSS without needing restrictions. The reality is that without these restrictions, people are not willing to pay.
- We can fork it if we really don't like that direction, but think what's there is valuable.
- We can propose Merge Requests (as they are on GitLab) that might be higher priority for us personally than for the company, which might accept them just not have the resources to work on them itself as quickly as we'd like.
Honestly curious: In which way is Mattermost not Open Source? As far as I can tell the code is under AGPL, which may not be the most popular FOSS license, but is generally accepted as being one.
Gitlab CE is fully open source. Gitlab EE is proprietary. The same company produces both, but you can decide to use only the former, and remain fully in control.
This is certainly not the vision of the future that supporters of a fully-FOSS world like me wish to see, but seems strictly better than most proprietary companies, which still use FOSS code/libraries while contributing little or nothing.
From your link: "We ship GitLab CE which is open source and GitLab EE that is closed source."
Exactly what I wrote!
But for many organizations, they want unlimited viewing of the messages anyway, so E2E would be a non-starter.
It all depends on your needs.
Mattermost would never be a good solution for a global chat system, nor would it be a good fit for wide-open public/untrusted access chat either, both of those are where E2E type encryption would really shine.
Isn't E2E search mostly a client-side matter? Unless using homomorphic encryption, of course, which I don't think OLM is capable of?
Or are you planning on using another trick, similar to hashing the strings client-side when a new message is received, then sending the hashs and later searching those server-side?
I'm curious since I haven't seen that mentioned other than using pantalaimon as some kind of server-side search engine. I can ask or discuss this further in matrix(-spec):matrix.org as needed/preferred.
E2E search is entire client-side, and works thanks to https://github.com/matrix-org/pantalaimon/tree/search. We're not doing homomorphic stuff; instead we're thinking about encrypting the tantivy indexes and storing them serverside.
Would love to learn more if you have concerns about server hardware requirements.
The trend of commercial open source apps to be a major PITA to deploy & hack on is kind of tiresome imo.
Go hit this “Deploy to Heroku” button.
Alternatively, Mattermost also has a Docker container: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-docker
I did it trough Yunohost on my server, but I hear there is a handy Docker-ansible playbook, and that the Archlinux package works pretty well (synapse is also available trough pip). I guess someone could cook up a non-federating server implementation some day…
> Only the default GitLab SSO is officially supported. “Double SSO”, where GitLab SSO is chained to other SSO solutions, is not supported. It may be possible to connect GitLab SSO with AD, LDAP, SAML, or MFA add-ons in some cases, but because of the special logic required they’re not officially supported and are known not to work on some experiences. If having official AD, LDAP, SAML or MFA support is critical to your enterprise, please consider Mattermost Enterprise Edition as an option.
I am using it currently with freeipa with zero issues.
It makes me hopeful that we will be able to raise that kind of money soon for our platform. We also have AGPL dual license. However, our goal is more ambitious: we built a platform (https://qbix.com/platform) to let ANYONE build their OWN social apps and plugins, and then let communities host them. Like Wordpress + Plugins but for Web 2.0 (think Facebook rather than blogs).
I imagine building a Slack competitor would take about a month of focused work. And then anyone would be able to install it, on one machine.
But, we spent all these years building the tech and doing security audits. What are your recommendations business-wise, to take it from here to getting funding like this? (Without compromising the vision.)
Screenhero was an awesome product. I don't get why they are killing it.
Maybe there is a technical reason screen sharing is so wonky.
Electron is not native.
On the other hand, for enterprise plan users it would make sense to rely on Mattermost for app distribution, and they have the expertise to publish the apps and ensure they're approved in the respective stores. Would a reseller or MSP necessarily have that competency? I come from the IT world where the answer would definitely be "no", but I could see it being part of contracted out work. Who owns the app then after that contract is up?
Volunteer communities and nonprofits are no silver bullet either- they're great when they exist and function well, but they don't always, and are highly dependent on who's involved, how much, and why. If there's a big, strong, vibrant community behind something, that's a good sign for whatever that thing is, but very few projects rise to that level of centrality in people's lives. There's also no shortage of projects without funding which have terrible or nonexistent communities surrounding them. Usually good communities arise during the long tail of maturity, like years or decades after whatever it is has reached a plateau of collective usefulness. Good software leads to good communities, sometimes, eventually, but it generally doesn't go the other direction. Something has to be great for years before it becomes that critical and that supported of a piece of infrastructure. That's why it's good that open source is only a factor of the license, not who made it, not who maintains it, not why they maintain it, and not how it's funded. That's literally what is special about it and makes open source a useful and good thing.
For all of the people going to suggest Matrix or something else to me, hold your breath. The reason I haven't switched is because communities haven't switched and neither have companies.