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Comment by ethin | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't that license also violate the AGPL? I mean, it does say, in section 7:

> All other non-permissive additional terms are considered "further restrictions" within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term. If a license document contains a further restriction but permits relicensing or conveying

So, my interpretation is that I am free to license it under the AGPL; there is no "well, we might decide to do that", and I can strip all conditions they place upon me and comply only with the AGPL, and legally there is nothing they can do about it.

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yes, but that's not what happen here. this part of the AGPL is there to avoid people adding more restrictions, but here mattermost is loosening up the restrictions.

> > We promise that we will not enforce the copyleft provisions in AGPL v3.0 against you if your application ... [set of conditions]

I mean... I don't really see how they are. Technically they are but at the same time they aren't, because the set of conditions make the loosening of the AGPL a conditional thing. Which to me sounds like a violation of the AGPL because it's a further restriction: "We will (not) hold the AGPL against you... As long as you do these things..." I... Really don't think the AGPL was written to be... Abused? That way.

You can see the spirit of what they're going for also with the MIT binaries - that's also like saying the whole project is AGPL, but a loosening for using it as-is.

Given their goals seem to be

- Permissive use without modification, even in combined works ("MIT binaries"); but

- Copyleft with modification, including for the Affero "network hole", or commercial terms

could you suggest a clearer license option? AGPL triggers copyleft across combined works, LGPL doesn't cover the network hole, GPL has both problems. Their goals seem really reasonable, honestly, there should be a simple answer. It seems messy but I like it more than the SSPL/BSL/other neo-licenses.

I don't know anything more reasonable, but I would argue that this (isn't) reasonable precisely because it causes so much confusion due to the ambiguity and their refusal to clarify exactly what the terms really are.

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