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A comment on Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack. Parent comment

Re:Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack by sneak on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @08:40PM (#21820977)
As I’m reading it, Mattermost (as source) is released under the AGPL, which makes it both legal and ethical (indeed, they have explicitly consented to allow you to distribute modifications) to stub out all the license checking and enable all of the enterprise functionality without any payments, tracking, or phone-home.

It seems to me this is the point of free/open source software: anyone can improve it and make it more functional and distribute those improvements. The first logical improvement, to me, is removing the unnecessary license checks that disable useful features of the software.

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/blob/master/...

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Re:Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack by henryfjordan on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @08:58PM (#21821068)
Yep, and this is why the AGPL is not for protecting your IP, only for ensuring that the code remains open forever.
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Re:Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack by Operyl on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @01:13AM (#21822315)
I believe they store the enterprise specific code in another git repo that has to be checked out, for one (from reading their Makefile).
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Re:Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack by sneak on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @04:05AM (#21823111)
The binaries they release (including that code) are MIT licensed according to their readme, which means that modifying those should also be no problem.
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Re:Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack by Operyl on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @12:55PM (#21827388)
This is true, you could probably edit out the publickey and then generate your own license pretty easily.
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Re:Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack by saagarjha on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @03:26AM (#21822921)
It is legal and ethical to remove the parts you don’t like, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay for it. You’re not required to, but if you find it useful you could consider it a donation.
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