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Comment by constantcrying | Hacker News Reader

You should read the license, it seems somewhat insane to be honest: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/blob/master/LICENSE...

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Looks pretty logical to me...

It is AGPL 3.0, except they give you slightly more rights with a promise not to enforce certain provisions in certain circumstances.

It's not AGPL 3.0. The binaries are MIT, the codebase (from where the MIT binaries are built from) is AGPL 3.0, except for the bits of the codebase that are Apache 2.0, and there's some kind of a promise about not enforcing a part of AGPL if you don't link to their platform directly and exclusively use the bits of the code that are Apache 2.0, and also don't make a modified version of the software. And also you can just license it commercially too.

What do you think about it sounds insane?

It says you "may be licensed" to use the source code under AGPL v3.0, but never actually makes an unambiguous statement that suchandsuch code is licensed under AGPL v3.0.

The concept of MIT licensing a compiled software artifact, but not the code used to generate the artifact, is also extremely strange.

Right, the correct way here is to simply grant _everyone_ a license to _everything_ under the terms of the AGPL (or whatever). You can then separately license portions under other terms.

You don't need to note the commercial licensing option in the license itself; it's irrelevant to that grant. You just state that elsewhere.

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