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> And you can just self-host it. For free, too! (A weird thing to write, but the OSS chat app space has become very weird in many ways!)

Wait, what? There are open-source chat apps that you have to pay to host yourself? How does that work? Or did I misunderstand?

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Many otherwise open-source chat apps are "open-core," they tie certain features to a subscription. Can be things like chat history, voice calls, video calls, but a very popular one is SSO and AD/LDAP integration.

Yeah a lot of them like Mattermost become surprisingly limited unless you pay. It's very annoying.

Mattermost's licensing is a little confusing, but from what I understand, you're only really super-restricted if you use the prebuilt binaries (which have a different license than the source code).

IIRC if you build it yourself it's pretty much all AGPL, with few limitations.

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