Comment by dooglius

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

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.