this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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Mattermost is no longer Open-Source (github.com)
submitted 5 hours ago by vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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[–] stuner@lemmy.world 15 points 2 hours ago (5 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 9 points 2 hours ago (3 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.

[–] 73ms@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

which conditions on top of AGPL are they adding?

[–] wilo108@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

My understanding was (perhaps wrong?) that the "Mattermost Team Edition" is offered under the AGPL, and then the "Enterprise" Editions (starting with the "Entry Edition") have additional restrictions (including the 10k message limit in the "Entry Edition" that everyone's been talking about). They do a good job of hiding the "Team Edition" (it's almost like the don't really want to have to offer an open-source editions... 🤔), but it is there if you can find it. https://docs.mattermost.com/product-overview/editions-and-offerings.html#mattermost-team-edition

[–] 73ms@sopuli.xyz 1 points 52 minutes ago* (last edited 46 minutes ago)

This seems like your standard open core/dual licensing, CLA controlled BS where open source is indeed treated like an inconvenience... Perhaps with more obfuscation than on average. Probably not really adding requirements on top of AGPL as such but they seem to be offering multiple releases under a more restrictive license either because they have the rights so they can do dual licensing or they keep certain components proprietary and don't offer those with the team/community editions.

So yeah, probably within their legal rights and I assume there is still a codebase/release that you can use under the terms of the AGPL but they do seem to be looking for ways to make it be used as little as possible.

I could be wrong if the AGPL and other open source parts aren't enough for actually compiling a functional version of this but this is what it mostly looks like to me.

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