Comment by netvarun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by netvarun | Hacker News Reader

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I have qualms on Mattermost too, particularly their licensing. Does it even qualify as open source?

I strongly would recommend Zulip - https://zulipchat.com/

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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.

We promise that we will not enforce the copyleft provisions in AGPL v3.0 against you if your application (a) does not link to the Mattermost Platform directly, but exclusively uses the Mattermost Admin Tools and Configuration Files, and (b) you have not modified, added to or adapted the source code of Mattermost in a way that results in the creation of a “modified version” or “work based on” Mattermost as these terms are defined in the AGPL v3.0 license.

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[1] https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/blob/master/...

It is absolutely open source. AGPL for source, MIT for the binaries. Both of those are free software.

Their enterprise version has a different license; the source for that one is not available and the binaries are released under a much more restrictive license, but that's nothing to do with the normal one.

Disclosure: I run Zulip, a Mattermost competitor that has intentionally avoided taking venture funding in part because we don't want to be forced by investors to be Open Core.

Venture-funded Open Core software like Mattermost is an awkward place for the terminology. The free version is distributed under an open source license, as so there is a thing that is "open source", but the clear intent of Open Core licensing policies is primarily to achieve the goals of: (1) Being able to market the software as open source. (2) Maximizing the portion of users who buy the paid/proprietary version.

While in theory open core can be run responsibly, the incentive structure is to intentionally not include features important for typical use cases in the "open source" version of the software that any similar community-driven open source project would have considered an essential, early feature.

FOSS means different things to different people, but my personal perspective is that venture-funded open core software like Mattermost feels like FOSS to me about as much as proprietary software with a free plan like Slack or GitHub does.

For Mattermost in particular, this thread is a good reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21820583. They made changes to the specific items mentioned there in response to the community pressure, but that doesn't change their fundamental business strategy.

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