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Comment by throwaway89201

3 days ago

The counterpoint is that three sentences away, there's a clear "You are licensed to use the source code" for the non-server parts. It can certainly be argued that there's an intentional difference. Extended court cases have been fought over mere punctuation. In any case, the FUD that this creates is enough to make anyone think twice about reusing the server code, especially as they have refused to clarify for many years now.

Also, the ambiguity is not only in the "you may be" part, but also in the "to create compiled versions" part. Open source is more than creating compiled versions of source code.

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throwaway89201

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godelski  3 days ago 

  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

My read: We provide you with two options, either: 1. Follow Apache License 2. Pay us and you don't need to follow Apache License terms

This really seems like a dual license situation where they are saying "Let's encourage Open Source, but if you want to just use our work to make yourself rich and not even acknowledge you're using us then fuck you, pay us."

I expect this to become more common as companies routinely infringe on OSS licenses while simultaneously many companies are hesitant to use OSS because of licenses. This at least gives an out for the good actors and allow devs to make money (other than being reliant on donations, because... that's worked out...).

But maybe I'm misunderstanding? If so, I don't know what I'm missing

  • throwaway89201  3 days ago

    > But maybe I'm misunderstanding? If so, I don't know what I'm missing

    You're apparently missing the two points I made in the post you are replying to, or at the very least you're not responding to them. By which I don't mean to say they are necessarily valid points.

    • godelski  3 days ago

      My bad, I was confused given the context of the comment you responded to. Maybe I should quote the next line instead?

        You are licensed to use the source code in Admin Tools and Configuration Files (server/templates/, server/i18n/, server/public/, webapp/ and all subdirectories thereof) under the Apache License v2.0.

      So I read

        Apache (OSS):
    |- server/
    | |- i18n/
    | |- public/
    | |- templates/
    |- webapp/

  Not Apache (pay us/not OSS):
    |- api/
    |- e2e-tests/
    |- server/
    | |- bin/
    | |- build/
    | |- cmd/
    | |- enterprise/
    | |- scripts/
    | |- Makefile
    | |- path.go
    | |- this is not a complete list but you get the point
    |- tools/

      Part of the code is open source. Part of the code is source available (source visible).

      Again, I am open to misunderstanding but that's my read.