this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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Mattermost is no longer Open-Source (github.com)
submitted 5 months ago by vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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[–] stuner@lemmy.world 36 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Eh, that post title is quite sensationalistic.

  1. Nothing regarding the license has changed in the last 2 years.
  2. It seems like they consider the non-enterprise code to be licensed under the AGPL:

Thank you for the community discussion around this topic. I do recognize that our licensing strategy doesn't offer the clarity the community would like to see, but at this time we are not entertaining any changes as such.

UPDATE Feb 2, 2026: To be specific, our license is using standard open source licenses, a reciprocal AGPL license and a permissive Apache v2 license for other areas. Both are widely used open source licenses and have multiple interpretations of how they apply, as showcased in this thread.

When we say we don’t “offer the clarity the community would like to see”, that refers specifically to the many statements in this thread where different contributors are confused by other people’s comments and statements.

For LICENCE.txt itself, anyone can read the history file and see we haven’t materially changed it since the start of the project.

If you’re modifying the core source code under the reciprocal license you share those changes back to the open source community. If you’d like to modify the open source code base without sharing back to the community, you can request a commercial license for the code under commercial terms.

Maybe we can hold the pitchforks a while longer, unless they actually make a negative change.

[–] IanTwenty@piefed.social 34 points 5 months ago (2 children)

The contention is that Mattermost say it's licensed under AGPL but then they add conditions which are incompatible with that license. So it seems they want to give appearance of AGPL but not give the actual rights that come with it. So therefore it's not AGPL.

[–] stuner@lemmy.world 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I think the problem is that the license grant (that has been in place for a decade) is not that clear.

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 [...]

I read it as releasing the binaries under MIT and granting people an AGPL license for the (non-enterprise) code. Some read it as not granting you the full AGPL rights.

To me, the fact that they advertise Mattermost as "open-source" and the statement on the "reciprocal license" above indicates that Mattermost also reads this as an AGPL license grant. However, they don't seem to be interested in fully clarifying the license situation. But, I think they would have a very hard time to argue in court that this license doesn't allow AGPL forks. And I haven't seen any evidence of them acting against any of the existing forks.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 6 points 4 months ago

AGPL is restrictive so actually having MIT is a backup option weakens the AGPL license. And in particular having the ability to ship closed source binaries if you wish to, under a commercial license, means AGPL means jack shit here to those who want everything to be copyleft

[–] 73ms@sopuli.xyz 2 points 5 months ago

which conditions on top of AGPL are they adding?

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 13 points 5 months ago

I Will never understand why the open source community hates the GPL license. Maybe they just haven't seen themselves how big corporations taking advantage of free individual independent developers. I still remember the core.js developer, whose code is in pretty much every giant framework out there basically begging for any sort of income for his work while his family was going hungry in Eastern Europe. Angular, react, all major frameworks absolutely depend on it and never gave them anything.

[–] Fmstrat@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

Eh, that post title is quite sensationalistic.

No it's not? The issue is on Awesome Self-hosted, where they had Mattermost listed in FOSS instead of non-free.

Also, if you read the ticket, you can see why people feel the way they do. They're skirting AGPL rules with the compiled requirement.