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by contravariant 2542 days ago
Forgive me if I'm wrong but wouldn't you be allowed to fork it and not share your changes anyway? As far as I know a copyright license is only required if you do share it.

Of course you couldn't share any derived binaries without a valid copyright license, but for internal use there shouldn't be any problem.
1 comments
greenshackle2 2542 days ago
There might be problems even for internal use because it's licensed under AGPL not just GPL, so the source must be distributed to network users, even if you don't share the binaries with them.

It might work for your company's internal chatroom but not for selling Mattermost as a service.

That's the intention anyway, I'm not a lawyer, I don't know if AGPL was tested in court, and whether it would hold up.

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theturtletalks 2542 days ago
So if I understand correctly, AGPL allows single users to use the software but they cannot provide this software as a service? I've also seem some open source SaaS offer a dual license for single users and corporations. MIT or Apache for single users and GPL for corporations.
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greenshackle2 2540 days ago
You can provide the software as a service BUT you have to give the source code to all users, including your modifications if you have made any.

In other words - you can't sell SaaS based on AGPL software + proprietary secret sauce, you have to share back your secret sauce with all users.

It doesn't prevent you from selling it as SaaS, I could sell vanilla Mattermost as a service under AGPL, my selling point might be that I provide high reliability and excellent support.

Do you have an example of that dual license?

I don't see how that would work, the first person you give an MIT license to can re-distribute it under MIT to anyone else, including corporations.

Usually for dual-license you have the opposite, you would have a restrictive license like AGPL for the public, and you would sell non-free licenses with no redistribution rights that allow modifications without sharing back, for corporate clients who want to add their secret sauce to the software without having to give away the secret sauce for free.

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