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Comment by dooglius | Hacker News Reader

The license seems perfectly clear in that it's multiply-licensed under AGPL, MIT, and corporate licensing based on different use cases. Maybe this guy has reading comprehension issues, but more likely he's just unhappy with the corporate part and wants to stir drama.

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It does create confusion because adding extra clauses onto whether you can use the AGPL kind of defeats the point of the AGPL, and creates a contradiction because the different flavors of the GPL generally all have language that tries explicitly to prevent such a thing, which is a pretty classic piece of confusion (I've had it when negotiating employment contracts and it's shocking how many people seemingly just never read the documents they're offering).

(EDIT: though, having read the whole document, it seems like there is just a trademark carve-out, which is explicitly allowed under the AGPL, so this seems reasonably straightforward, except for the strange 'we promise not to enforce copyleft if you don't modify the code' which seems entirely redundant. Oh, and the 'licensed to use source code to create compiled version' which seems like a very strange phrasing)

Hopefully I'm not violating copyright by taking this small chunk of their LICENSE.txt, but this appears to be the language that some want clarified:

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/blob/master/LICENSE...

----

    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 v3.0, subject to the exceptions outlined in this policy; or
    2. Under a commercial license available from Mattermost, Inc. by contacting commercial@mattermost.com

"Subject to the exceptions" conflicts with the "no exceptions" wording in the GPL licenses, so I don't even see how any of this constitutes a valid license

AGPL does not say "no exceptions". AGPL explicity allows exceptions:

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/blob/master/LICENSE...

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html

I read the exceptions as a grant of additional rights to mattermost's copyright (but not to third parties), I don't think that conflicts.

I'm not sure that they actually granted a GPL license at all though. I could see this document being read as an advertisement that one might be for sale instead of a grant...

(Not a lawyer)

Licensing should never be left to "reading comprehension". If there is any doubt about the terms, a clarification should be requested. A clarification was requested here. The requested clarification was declined. If this matter was really so simple that simple "reading comprehension" would solve it, the project maintainers could have said so. But they didn't. And that they didn't holds more weightage than what some random stranger has to say about "reading comprehension".

... also some parts are Apache, and the wording around the AGPL bit is very weird:

> ... licensed to use source code to create compiled versions ...

Why's it calling out compiling specifically? Are they trying to imply you can't modify/distribute/etc the source? Presumably that would be a "further restriction" per the AGPL and hence ignorable, but it's sloppy at best and misleading at worse, which isn't great for a license document...

They could simply say that, then, instead of saying you might be able to use it under the AGPL.

They didn't say you "might" be able to use it under the AGPL, but that you "may" be licensed to use it. Which, as a native speaker of American English, seems to be relatively clear in its meaning along the lines of what the GP poster stated. Of course, the various meanings of "may" in English might be subtle enough that I'd readily believe it's less clear to non-native speakers (or maybe even speakers of a different dialect), and it's unfortunate that Mattermost's lawyers aren't interesting in cleaning up the language.

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