Hey there,
I’m on the search for an alternative to Mattermost for a small institution I’m working with. Mattermost was the strongest contender for our needs, yet they changed their policy regarding self-hosted instances. The factor that killed it for us, is the hard cap on 250 registered users, as we potentially might need to commodate more than that.
Rocket.Chat has similar caps.
We found Zulip, and it seems as it might be what we are looking for, but we haven’t tested yet. Nonetheless, I wanted to address this community, as you may have another good idea?
Might be worth reading this and the original github issue. It isn’t actually agpl. They only grant access to the source code to build a compiled version which isn’t freedom. And beyond that, some code is covered under a source available enterprise license which i think is where they would enforce their paywall
At the copyright owner, they are within their rights to release the source code under the AGPL, and also sell it under other licenses. Anyone is free to use the code under the AGPL. Nobody who releases code under an open-source license is obligated to provide binaries.
As the copyright owner, they are free to use the code along with other non-open-source code (e.g.: SSO integrations) to build a non-free product.
I feel like you didn’t read the post or issue i linked, nor their license.txt and are instead just trying to talk past me.
I don’t really care about this project or debating their intentionally ambiguous license structure. My point was that the grant of rights explicitly only grants AGPL access to create compiled versions of mattermost. That is not how FOSS licenses work and is incompatible with FOSS licenses because it lacks the “freedom” that even AGPL would typically grant.
I’m not saying that people can’t dual license or that they can’t release their product in other non-free ways. That’s not the issue here. The issue is that you are saying it’s AGPL, and it’s not–Not really. It’s only AGPL to create a compiled version of mattermost.
IANAL. I originally interpreted the license.txt as: all of the source code is AGPL (see lines 234-235), some of the source is also Apache 2.0, and the binaries are MIT; plus a trademark notice and contact info for getting a commercial license. After rereading it, my only conclusion is that this is a dumpster fire of a license.txt, and can be reasonably read several different ways.
And, people have been asking them to clarify it and they just say, “no.”
They’re acting very suspiciously.
Agreed, very suspicious. I would feel safe assuming that I can use the code under AGPL, but I would hesitate to use it for anything other than personal hobby because it would not surprise me if they closed their github account and never released any more code.