Re:Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
by jsmthrowaway on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @04:47PM
(#16540228)
Mattermost is also an example of how not to license software, including a promise not to enforce provisions of the license they have chosen. If one needs a promise, one has probably chosen the wrong licensing structure.
Here's a fun one: say I use the MIT binaries, then debug a problem by reading the AGPL source code. What legal position am I in? (If you have an answer for that rhetorical question, by the way, you haven't thought of the problem long enough.)
They launched exclusively AGPL and then made MIT as a concession after discovering that a number of companies outright ban AGPL and won't pay for it unlike MongoDB, but licensing binaries differently than source code is not something you come across often.
Re:Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
by __david__ on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @05:33PM
(#16540609)
I must be slow because I'm not seeing the issue. Can you explain it how reading the source code affects your relationship with a binary you didn't build?
Here's a fun one: say I use the MIT binaries, then debug a problem by reading the AGPL source code. What legal position am I in? (If you have an answer for that rhetorical question, by the way, you haven't thought of the problem long enough.)
https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/blob/master/...
They launched exclusively AGPL and then made MIT as a concession after discovering that a number of companies outright ban AGPL and won't pay for it unlike MongoDB, but licensing binaries differently than source code is not something you come across often.