[HN Gopher] Mattermost restricted access to old messages after 1...
___________________________________________________________________
Mattermost restricted access to old messages after 10000 limit is
reached
Author : xvilka
Score : 323 points
Date : 2025-12-25 11:03 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| bramhaag wrote:
| Mattermost is MIT licensed. What is stopping anyone from removing
| this restriction?
| jstummbillig wrote:
| I don't know, but that seems somewhat beside the point. The
| restriction obviously was not added to test peoples ability to
| remove it.
| Y_Y wrote:
| https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271#issuec...
|
| Wanting to use Mattermost's binaries rather than building from
| source?
|
| Re licensing see:
| https://isitreallyfoss.com/projects/mattermost/
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| It's not open source, it's "open core" SaaS.
| bfkwlfkjf wrote:
| The time and energy that it takes to do it and build it, and
| then make it easy for current users to move their automatic
| updates to the fork, then maintaining it etc.
| J-Kuhn wrote:
| The compiled binary is.
|
| The source code is... AGPL licensed? But not the admin tools.
| They seem to be licensed under the Apache License 2.0.
|
| --------
|
| Yeah, good luck. Contact your lawyer.
| bfkwlfkjf wrote:
| Explain please. This interests me and I'm extremely curious
| about what you mean.
| J-Kuhn wrote:
| Combining source code under different licenses into one
| product is a nightmare.
|
| You have to follow the AGPL "no additional restrictions"
| clause while also following the Apache License, and the
| Apache License might have require you to follow additional
| restrictions.
| pastage wrote:
| Honestly this has never been an issue for me, sure I have
| had to explain the limits of the licenses and check that
| I understand them. I guess it depends on your use case,
| so I am still uncertain when this has become a problem
| for you.
| true_religion wrote:
| AGPL and Apache are both open source licenses. So I'm not
| getting what the confusion would be as an end user, who won't
| be modifying the software or packaging it for sale.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| They're both FREE software licenses, which is more.
|
| https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
| dns_snek wrote:
| > Yeah, good luck. Contact your lawyer.
|
| Why? The intent seems pretty clear and they're legally
| allowed to do this because all contributors signed a CLA.
| csomar wrote:
| Nothing. Open Source is dying. The model to finance open source
| work (well-off suburban american dads or as a portfolio show
| off) no longer apply. The old generation that believed in this
| model is retiring and for the new generation it pays better to
| "network", leet code, or spam your resume to thousands of
| employers.
|
| Now couple that with the fact that supply-chain control is
| profitable (legally or illegally); I think the next 5-10 years
| will be interesting.
| Zacharias030 wrote:
| almost seems like there is now too much money in software.
| the old times felt like computer science was mostly a
| science.
| Ekaros wrote:
| There never was a model to fund open source. At least outside
| largest and most wide spread codebases. I think it is that
| reality is finally hitting. Free money has run out and now
| software must stand as either community efforts, wide enough
| used foundations or forced support.
| mort96 wrote:
| Maintaining your own fork is a ton of work. Even if it's just
| routinely rebasing on upstream and maintaining your own upgrade
| infrastructure and doing releases, that's far from trivial.
|
| The open source community really needs to stop with the "just
| fork it" mindset.
| derefr wrote:
| I don't think the implication is that anyone as an individual
| would fork it.
|
| I think the implication is that some other interested org
| could very easily step in and assume the role that the
| Mattermost org was in, and everyone would very eagerly switch
| and leave Mattermost itself speaking to an empty room.
| whatevaa wrote:
| Still need someone to do unthankful work, in which many are
| not interested, naturally.
| nlitened wrote:
| You actually don't have to maintain the fork and/or
| update to latest version if you don't need new features.
| mort96 wrote:
| You don't have to maintain the fork and/or update to the
| latest version if you don't need new features _or
| security fixes_.
|
| Most people want security fixes.
| regularfry wrote:
| Or patched vulnerabilities.
| integralid wrote:
| >The open source community really needs to stop with the
| "just fork it" mindset.
|
| The open source community really needs to stop with the "just
| do everything i want for free" mindset.
|
| I mean, open source does not mean you're entitled to free
| support, and free in free software is not about money. I
| think people depend too much on those projects and then act
| entitled.
|
| Of course the open source bait and switch done by companies
| is a shitty behavior worth calling out, but the companies
| exist to earn money and at this point this can be expected.
| mort96 wrote:
| I don't think I've expressed a "just do everything I want
| for free" mindset. In fact, I'm _pushing against_ the idea
| that someone should just fork Mattermost and maintain that
| fork for free.
|
| I do think this development represents a bait and switch
| though.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > Of course the open source bait and switch done by
| companies is a shitty behavior worth calling out,
|
| Yes, that's what we are doing here.
|
| > but the companies exist to earn money and at this point
| this can be expected.
|
| Expected != ethical. Also not a necessary, logical outcome.
|
| What is legitimately expected is a pro version that has
| more corporate features. We're not talking about
| $Xx/user/mo to enable SSO here, though.
| gsich wrote:
| From my observation Mattermost is not a software you buy
| "support" for. It either works and is self-manageable or
| you use something else. I guess Mattermost (as in the
| company) saw that too and now uses shitty practices to
| coerece people into buying it.
| yread wrote:
| I use MM for about a year. Forking it would be a major
| undertaking as the number of vulnerabilities for which you
| would need to backport is quite high like 5 a month?). Last
| time they removed features from free (group calls in v10)
| there was a lot of grumbling but thats it.
| jsiepkes wrote:
| > Maintaining your own fork is a ton of work. Even if it's
| just routinely rebasing on upstream and maintaining your own
| upgrade infrastructure and doing releases, that's far from
| trivial.
|
| Well I did it for Mattermost and for some other software as
| well. Sure, its some work, but it's not "a ton" of work and
| may not be "trivial" but it is also not "far" from trivial.
|
| Do it like Linux maintainers maintain a ton of patched RPM's,
| deb's, etc. Just keep a patch in GIT. For every release of
| Mattermost you do a GIT clone, apply your patch and build it.
| Most of the time the patch will just apply cleanly. Sometimes
| you need to make a few adjustments, you make them and put
| them in GIT. There is no extensive release management or
| anything. You just build a patched version for every released
| version.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| > The open source community really needs to stop with the
| "just fork it" mindset.
|
| It's right mindset. Just not applicable to projects that are
| made majority by the company because none of the contributors
| will move so it's essentially trying to make new team from
| scratch.
| compsciphd wrote:
| glancing through the code, it doesn't seem like it be that hard
| to remove limitations such as this.
| PostHistoryLimit/postHistoryLimit interpreted from License
| Limits. a little poke here and there and I'd guess the
| limitations would disappear.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| No. The binaries they prepackage for you are MIT. If you want
| the source it is AGPL or you pay for a proprietary license.
| acheong08 wrote:
| It's another level of insane to put hard limits for self hosted
| open source software. I'm surprised so few people in the thread
| have just changed the source code and build it themselves.
| dotancohen wrote:
| They probably found performance problems at certain limits and
| "resolved" the problem with a hard coded limit.
| danielheath wrote:
| ... a hard coded limit... for self-hosted software... which
| is removed for paying users?
| gmerc wrote:
| Did they take VC money?
| shafyy wrote:
| Yes. They are a YC company, too:
| https://mattermost.com/blog/yc-leads-50m-series-b-in-matterm...
| wltr wrote:
| Waiting for the thread to be marked as [flagged] and then
| [dead] then, I assume.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| Has HN ever showed bias in this way? I can't think of any
| occasions.
| bfkwlfkjf wrote:
| I think that the photos they have on their front page should be
| enough to tell you who is their target market.
|
| I've invented this heuristic: if the page that describes the
| project uses the word "solutions", then they'll attempt to use
| "open source" to obtain free labour, but will distribute the
| revenues only amongst those people who actually have control.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Black businesswomen? Firefighters? White servicemen? White
| software developers?
|
| I really don't get what you're implying. I don't see any
| problem with the photos on the mattermost front page.
|
| https://mattermost.com/
| bfkwlfkjf wrote:
| Everything you mentioned in that list in people who can
| pay. As opposed to people who code and they use what they
| code, and furthermore share it with other people who also
| code and use what they code.
|
| It's "open source" so that they save on developer costs,
| not for ideological reasons, and you can tell from the
| photos on their front page - that's what I was implying.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| I think this is kind of cynical. I often adopt open
| source tools because I want to avoid vendor lockin. And
| so do many. It's not like I say, "Wow. Another code base
| to dive into and spend hours trying to understand." Nope.
| I just want the assurance that I can do it if I ever need
| to do so.
| stavros wrote:
| I don't think the GP implied anything about race? The
| photos I see are war frigates, power plants, some sort of
| military operations center, and commercial airliners.
|
| Think "enterprise", rather than "racism".
| bfkwlfkjf wrote:
| Exactly. But some people think everyone else is racist.
| Those people's skin colour didn't even register.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I left every option open for OP to explain. I personally
| couldn't care less what skin colour are in any of the
| photos. Not a single one of them match my own.
| notarobot123 wrote:
| Governmental organizations and corporate firms is the vibe
| (or maybe that was obvious and you're just trolling).
|
| I think the point was that open source hasn't often been
| supported by companies serving these kinds of markets and
| the interests of the broader community are often sidelined.
| bfkwlfkjf wrote:
| What's mattermost? People in the GitHub comments say "I just need
| messages" but there's lots of self hosted messaging apps/servers,
| no? XMPP comes to mind immediately.
| figmert wrote:
| It's an open source alternative to Slack
| firesteelrain wrote:
| It's an IRC-like, group chat for Corporate that works in
| airgap. When HipChat was obsoleted, then Mattermost took over.
| loeg wrote:
| My employer migrated to it from IRC, for example.
| gus_massa wrote:
| From the readme.md
|
| > _A new compiled version is released under an MIT license every
| month on the 16th._
|
| What does than even mean? Is it equivalent to what we use to call
| "freeware". Is it legal to modify the binaries?
| dotancohen wrote:
| I'm not sure about MIT, but the GNU license specifically
| requires the application licensed to be available in source
| code (human readable and editable form or similar verbiage).
| tom_ wrote:
| The MIT licence does not require this.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| I'm not an expert, but I very much doubt this.
|
| The FSF calls it a "free license" [1] and I don't think
| they would if they didn't make the source code available.
|
| Source code available is necessary but not sufficient for
| Free software, see [2]
|
| > Freedoms 1 and 3 require source code to be available
| because studying and modifying software without its source
| code can range from highly impractical to nearly
| impossible.
|
| [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Expat
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
|
| EDIT Oh sorry, you mean for the LICENSE to be available.
| Never mind then.
| adastra22 wrote:
| You can compile MIT software and distribute the binary
| while saying "fuck you" to anyone who asks for the
| source.
|
| You are thinking of copyleft (e.g. GPL)
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| If that were true, the FSF wouldn't call it a free
| license.
| fn-mote wrote:
| You should have linked the MIT License on Wikipedia (or
| anywhere else) instead of Free Software.
|
| The license is only three paragraphs long. You can see it
| does not contain text supporting your claim.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| Well, I'm confused.
| spauldo wrote:
| The FSF has written extensively on why (in their opinion)
| you should prefer copyleft licenses over non-copyleft
| licenses, but they don't require a license to be copyleft
| in order to be considered free. It's worth spending a bit
| of time on their site to understand their point of view.
| Just be careful not to drink too much of the Kool-Aid or
| you'll become one of those annoying people who never shut
| up about the GPL on forums.
| squigz wrote:
| Don't listen to spauldo, GP. Drink the delicious Kool Aid
| that is free software. Bring that joy to everyone else
| you find.
| lelanthran wrote:
| It's actually very simple:
|
| MIT/BSD licenses are _pro-business_ - any business can
| take the product, change a few lines and redistribute the
| result _without_ making their changes available.
|
| GPL is _pro-user_ - anyone who gets the source, makes
| changes, and then redistributes the result has to make
| their changed sources available as well.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > If that were true, the FSF wouldn't call it a free
| license.
|
| It is true; the license gives you the source, to do with
| as you please, including closing it off.
|
| Famously, Microsoft included BSD licensed tools in
| Windows since the 90s and _did not distribute the
| sources!_
|
| And that is completely legal. If you want to force the
| users to distribute their changes to your open source
| product when they are redistributing the product, you
| need to use GPL.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| And you're entirely wrong. MIT just require attribution,
| not giving the source code.
|
| That is why companies and corpo programmers LOVE BSD/MIT
| code, they can freely steal I mean use it in their for-
| profit products without giving anything back but some bit
| of text hidden in about box
| Ekaros wrote:
| Broadly. You can do anything you want with MIT licensed
| software as long as you include the copyright and warranty
| notice.
|
| I suppose with "freeware" technically you could be prevent from
| redistributing or selling it. As there is no hard definition on
| that term.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > "Mattermost only got where it is today because of the open-
| source community."
|
| Not really? FOSS communities overestimate their importance on a
| daily basis.
|
| Case in point: Linux. 90%+ of commits were corporate sponsored...
| in 2004. The pure community member does almost nothing of
| importance for Linux anymore; or any of these projects.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| It's because you misunderstood the reason - they OSS part got
| them some free advertising and users that gave it a try and got
| on the subscription.
|
| Now VC's want their money so gotta make people that can't be
| bothered to get off it to migrate to paid plan
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| ... by adding a check to builds that anyone, using the source
| code, can easily patch out?
|
| FOSS never came with any guarantee of "builds must arrive in
| format most convenient for users." That's not in the license.
| Also not in the license, "FOSS companies can't charge money
| for their builds." Also not in the license, "FOSS companies
| must provide builds at all."
|
| If anything, it's quite a bit of entitlement that "FOSS
| companies must provide free code, and free builds, forever,
| or they are evil." Especially when they are getting VC money
| to presumably add features that otherwise would not exist and
| would have no code available at all.
| cantalopes wrote:
| Thank god i didn't convince my team to selfhost mattermost
| instead of using slack
| adastra22 wrote:
| ... slack is exactly the same, except without even the ability
| to self-host?
| krick wrote:
| I this this is the irony: mattermost probably is the right
| choice anyway, but you wouldn't want to be the guy who
| convinced others they should switch, because after something
| like this, it's him who will be blamed by everyone who he
| managed to convince.
| jamescontrol wrote:
| I looked at it for company chat and data, but those weird limits
| in functionality making in unusable was just too much, so them
| doing this too is not really surprising. Are they low on money?
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| You can switch to
| https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter which
| doesn't have the user limit crap.
| codefined wrote:
| We use Docker to deploy, do you know of any public forks that
| do Docker builds?
| dlkckvll wrote:
| You don't need Docker desktop to build a docker image. In
| linux, which everyone should use in their ci/cd, just run
| "docker build ."
| carolosf wrote:
| I used to use Mattermost. Highly recommend looking at Zulip as an
| alternative. (It's my favourite slack alternative and even better
| than Slack because it's the best at managing distractions IMO. It
| also has an interesting history was acquired by Dropbox and then
| back from Dropbox I believe)
| paper2d wrote:
| Zulip too has similar restrictions even on their self hosted
| plans. SAML/LDAP is behind paywall too.
| gtech1 wrote:
| What restrictions have you hit ?
| paper2d wrote:
| Seeing their pricing page, mobile notifications for upto 10
| users is too less.
| gtech1 wrote:
| But you mentioned similar...this is a discussion about
| message limits (and saml ?). Those are free for self
| hosted.
|
| Push uses _their_ services. That's why it costs $$$. But
| you can build your own apns endpoint and plug into that
| at that volume
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Push costs pennies. It's an arbitrary restriction.
| gtech1 wrote:
| Then you pay for it. Nothing stops you
| emptysongglass wrote:
| That's precisely my point. It's an arbitrary rent-seeking
| restriction.
| dlkckvll wrote:
| Publishing an app in popular app stores, for an
| organization, requires several $100 in annual fees.
| That's before any mobile app is even published.
| Volundr wrote:
| If you want to run your own push for pennies all you have
| to do is compile the client yourself.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| I'm not going to recompile and redistribute a binary
| outside the Play Store.
| Volundr wrote:
| Then your piggybacking on their infrastructure. I don't
| think they are unreasonable. "It can be done for pennies,
| but I won't" sort of implies that it does indeed take
| more than pennies worth of effort.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Just looked to their self hosted plans: -
| No limitation on search, members, etc. - 10 user
| limit for mobile notifications, can be relaxed via community
| (for non-profits, FOSS projects, etc.) - SAML/LDAP
| *support* is available, you can configure it. They won't
| provide answers to your questions. - Actually, all
| Zulip features are enabled sans Mobile Notifications, but for
| most of them, you're on your own. If you know what you're
| doing, it's not a problem, I assume.
|
| IOW, for self-hosted plans, you pay for _support_ , not the
| software. a-la early RedHat model.
|
| Ref: https://zulip.com/plans/#self-hosted-sponsorships
| Valodim wrote:
| This is false, SAML and LDAP are available. Zulip self hosted
| has all features with no restrictions, except for mobile
| notifications which require a subscription for $3.50/u/m
| (unless you are less than 10 users or are not a non-profit of
| any kind)
| RobotToaster wrote:
| > unless you are less than 10 users or are not a non-profit
| of any kind
|
| They only give free accounts to non-profits with zero paid
| staff.
| zukzuk wrote:
| It's a bit odd though that Zulip charge $ for mobile
| notifications but still don't have basic end-to-end
| encryption for those push notifications .
| Valodim wrote:
| The feature is deployed in the server, mobile clients are
| still pending the release iinm. But it's coming.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| It's a mix of "because they can" and "because they need
| to maintain infrastructure for mobile push".
| gtech1 wrote:
| I love Zulip too, use it daily, wrote some nice integrations
| for it. Never got why people preferred Mattermost over it
| j45 wrote:
| Hope Zulip's discoverability improves.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| In what sense?
| muppetman wrote:
| I assume they mean the fact I myself know what Mattermost
| is but I've never heard of... now I even have to go back
| and load up the comment to find it's name again, Zulip
| mort96 wrote:
| Zulip is a kind of annoying name, and every time I encounter
| it it's in the context of some open source platform hiding
| their community discussion forum behind a login. I'm left
| with a not very great impression.
| fittingopposite wrote:
| How does Zulip compare to Matrix/Element?
| constantius wrote:
| They're now a defense contractor, the copy on their website
| sounds like military cosplaying.... Probably chasing the stupid
| profits of Anduril and Palantir, and doing the old open source
| rugpull in the process.
|
| Zulip (for Slack) and Wekan (for Trello) are good replacements,
| save yourself the ethical and technical worries.
|
| https://zulip.com/
|
| https://wekan.github.io/
| firesteelrain wrote:
| mIRC was used during GWOT for military. They just didn't openly
| advertise it.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5147321
| huhtenberg wrote:
| What's GWOT?
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Global War on Terror
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Global War on Tankers
| constantius wrote:
| Knives were too, and yet I'm not calling people to use forks
| instead. There is a difference between military contractors
| and generic tools.
|
| Edit: sorry, hotheaded reply. I assume you mean that the
| creator of mIRC was encouraging it (though it's not mentioned
| anywhere). I still.stand by my analogy, but I see your point
| given your assumption.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| > I assume you mean that the creator of mIRC was aware of
| it and encouraging it.
|
| Like most licensed software, it was likely licensed by "US
| Government" or "Department of Defense". Plus, it was openly
| written about back in the day. It was well known. No
| clauses in their licensing to prevent its use for those
| purposes.
|
| Comparing to Mattermost and amplifying the original
| comment, Mattermost website is openly associating with
| PlatformOne.
| constantius wrote:
| Thanks. For context, this is what you're referring to
| (many entities with that name):
|
| https://p1.dso.mil/
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Yes, exactly.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| On Kanban, I would instead suggest cryptpad.fr.
|
| Crucially, it's end to end encrypted.
|
| You can self-host it, or pay for having it hosted (or use the
| hosted free tier).
|
| Has other things in addition to kanban.
|
| I got a 1 yr account.
|
| https://cryptpad.fr/
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| > Crucially, it's end to end encrypted.
|
| I don't think it's all that crucial for something that at
| most gets some ticket descriptions on it
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| It's a whole office suite.
|
| And even if you use it only for bug ticketing there are
| products that are big enough that it takes a long time to
| implement changes. You really don't want outsiders to be
| able to read open bug tickets for security vulnerabilities
| you are working on fixing for example. And you also don't
| want outsiders to read your planned features either,
| probably.
|
| I think it makes perfect sense to use e2e encryption for
| bug tickets considering this.
| sallveburrpi wrote:
| So so weird that we live in a timeline where Anduril and
| Palantir are military contractors of the US and other
| governments.
|
| I know it's somewhat of a tired observation by now but I still
| wonder every time how badly you have to misread LOTR to name
| your company after the witch kings cursed surveillance
| artefacts.
|
| I wonder when the first weapons manufacturing company calls
| themselves Angmar or Uruk-hai.
|
| The names are really dope though I have to give them that...
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > I wonder when the first weapons manufacturing company calls
| themselves Angmar or Uruk-hai.
|
| Luckily/unluckily, AngMar is one of those shady medical
| subcontracting firms instead...
| sallveburrpi wrote:
| I guess they are named after the founders (Angie and Mark)
| - but still an eerie coincidence...
| ahartmetz wrote:
| "Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment
| Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment
| Nexus"
|
| It was a Mike Judge type joke, aka ha-ha only serious.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| I don't think they misread it, I think they just liked sauron
| more than the good guys
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| > I know it's somewhat of a tired observation by now but I
| still wonder every time how badly you have to misread LOTR to
| name your company after the witch kings cursed surveillance
| artefacts.
|
| Have you considered that it is not "misread", they just see
| themselves on Saruman side ?
| basket_horse wrote:
| Do you guys really think Gondor was a democratic society
| with privacy laws?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Sauron's side, surely? Or else there is a need for a whole
| different question of "how badly you have to read LOTR..."
| erulabs wrote:
| Not to be "that guy" but Anduril is Aragorn's sword and is
| the most good-guy good-thing that could ever be fantasized
| about. It's used to defeat Sauron. And the Palantir stones
| are not "the bad guys tool", they were made by the Elves in
| ancient history and a few of them wound up in the bad guys
| hands. Misread LOTR indeed!
| scsh wrote:
| Yes, but the elf who created them is quite a tragic
| character himself. To the extent that his own mother chose
| to die after giving birth because she knew how much sorrow
| he would eventually bring. So I'd be careful to not paint
| them as a good thing either.
| erulabs wrote:
| you're right, and _definitely_ Palantir is a harder sell
| here. But to say "they named their weapons company
| Anduril, what are they, bad guys?" frustrates the nerd in
| me quite a lot.
| scsh wrote:
| Oh yeah, totally agree with you on that one.
| sallveburrpi wrote:
| That is fair even though I referred only to Palantir with
| that part. Did you name this account after Eru Illuvatar?
| sallveburrpi wrote:
| I specifically referred to the witch kings surveillance
| artefacts with misreading. I don't think their creation
| story is mentioned in LOTR, other than that they are
| extremely powerful and dangerous.
|
| But you are right of course about Anduril and if you take
| the whole silmarillion as background. I never really liked
| that part though
| mystraline wrote:
| Unsurprising, given that the CEO of Element/Matrix is also
| selling and creating primarily to that end as well.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46379589
| notesinthefield wrote:
| Ive seen MM instances across defense dev teams for quite a
| while specifically to avoid Teams bs in the air force, gov
| teams does not like mixing with other orgs. Now it seems
| they're actually going for contracts and Ill bet great money
| are mostly funded by USAF. Im very, very surprised.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I just read the copy on Mattermost's website. I believe you
| can't go more cringe than this for a group chat application.
|
| Wonder whether they do weapons integrations for this. Urgh.
| cess11 wrote:
| Every software development organisation I've been in that
| used Mattermost built integrations with monitoring, build
| pipelines, LDAP queries and the like.
|
| I'm sure organisations in war would do similar things, but
| with the tools of their 'craft'.
| Zephilinox wrote:
| so not only did they enforce a ridiculously small message limit,
| they also did it for the self-hosted version, and they did it
| without announcing it AND without a suitable migration path
|
| and still no one from that company has admitted to it being a
| mistake?
|
| very nice
| protimewaster wrote:
| In defense of them not admitting any kind of mistake, maybe
| it's not actually a mistake but instead a really well thought
| out, yet incredibly stupid, plan.
| creshal wrote:
| That'd be even more reason for them to have a solid PR plan
| prepared, to grind down opposition and gaslight everyone into
| giving up. Leaving all messaging about the issue to upset
| users is the _worst_ way to handle it. Even just closing the
| issue would 've been less damaging at this point.
| cwmoore wrote:
| The distinction isn't non-discriminating, but if it is then,
| what it is, I believe.
| g947o wrote:
| aka "it's a good idea to turn our productivity software into
| ransomware" plan
| pixl97 wrote:
| Isn't that just the Oracle method?
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| It works exceptionally well for Slack as we've seen over
| the years. Someone in your $group uses signs up for the
| free tier, gets people using it and then you've got to
| pay through the nose to access any history.
| happyopossum wrote:
| At least slack is clear upfront that this is going to
| happen, mattermost just did a rug pull and removed
| history from users who previously had access to it.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Yeah I'm mostly confused about their lack of communication.
|
| If they want to do that then, as every corporate "open source",
| they are free to do so but why not communicate that at least in
| the release post?
|
| Any potential free user who would consider going paid will now
| be starting off their relationship negatively.
|
| Really weird strategy.
| ekianjo wrote:
| what license do they use? If a true FOSS license it's time to
| fork...
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Appears to be "open core" agpl
| https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost?tab=readme-ov-file
|
| Not sure what isn't included in the core though.
| this_user wrote:
| Because it is almost certainly not a mistake. They also removed
| support for SSO via GitLab in the Community Edition in v11,
| which was the only SSO option still supported by the OSS
| version. They are pretty obviously trying to push users towards
| the paid plans.
| AmazingTurtle wrote:
| Well they announced it in their v11 release. They stated that
| you may stay on v10 for 12 months (EOL) and otherwise proceed
| with non-profit etc.
|
| Classic rug pull though
| brandensilva wrote:
| If this was intentional I'm going to uninstall it and encourage
| people never to use it. This is ridiculous.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| We migrated off them when they removed the license tier (there
| was cheaper self hosted tier that had LDAP feature we needed,
| and we really only got the enterprise version for) and
| essentially forced everyone to tier above.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Where did you migrate to, if I may ask? And has it worked
| out?
| nixgeek wrote:
| Discord. It's not self-hosted but it currently works fine
| for my needs. I guess if they start charging $15/mo per
| user we'll all migrate again.
| Zacharias030 wrote:
| I recently switched a bunch of friends from a project-oriented
| whatsapp chat to self-hosted mattermost, because I wanted
| permanent storage for messages and attachments, and threads,
| and did not want to pay slack in perpetuity.
|
| I feel that this idea is now in jeopardy, if I understand the
| 10k message history is the limit correctly.
|
| And there I thought I had a solution to slowly bring over
| project channels, family related things etc. that was as
| reliable as "my linux box will be reachable on the public
| internet" and I am willing to manage that it does.
|
| Seems I was wrong, but I don't know which other software has
| better future proofing.
| xethos wrote:
| So I guess it's my turn today to start the holy war. If
| Whatsapp was enough, but you want it to live on your Linux
| box, Matrix will do just fine. self-hosting has been fast,
| responsive, low-maintenance, and easy for me over the past
| several years.
|
| They're trusted by multiple government agencies to stick
| around and treat their users reasonably, and there are a
| plethora of clients to choose from.
|
| Now I'll step to the side for the next person to tear me down
| and sell you on XMPP.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Given that I've been using a self hosted Mattermost for 6+
| years, I haven't heard of either Matrix.or XMPP...so will
| now need to look these up.
| xethos wrote:
| The next guy's job is to tell you XMPP is lighter, _gen-
| er-ally_ viewed as simpler, with a wide array of clients
| and servers, optional encryption, and with a longer
| history (with that being viewed as rhyming with
| reliable).
|
| My "job" in this holy-war thread is to tell you Matrix
| has become lighter over time, the "default" server
| Synapse has less, but IMO more up-to-date documentation
| with a real corporation behind keeping it up-to-date and
| useful, has a blossoming ecosystem of clients, servers,
| _and bridges_ (allowing you to use it for other chat
| systems like Whatsapp and Telegram), has encryption being
| an enforced default for one-to-one mesasges (instead of
| XMPP 's bolted-on after-the-fact extension), and a paid
| team to make Synapse more robust, reliable, lighter,
| faster, and more secure.
|
| Take both arguments with a grain of salt, as I am biased
| as hell (to the point of donating a small amount monthly
| to Matrix, and starting flame wars like this one).
| dlkckvll wrote:
| The 10000 crippling messages limit is probably not chosen
| randomly, it's the same as Slack's. Not by accident.
| q3k wrote:
| diff --git a/server/channels/app/limits.go
| b/server/channels/app/limits.go index
| b13103898a..a8be8dd908 100644 ---
| a/server/channels/app/limits.go +++
| b/server/channels/app/limits.go @@ -36,17 +36,6 @@ func
| (a *App) GetServerLimits() (*model.ServerLimits, *model.AppError)
| { limits.MaxUsersHardLimit =
| licenseUserLimit + int64(extraUsers) }
| - // Check if license has post history limits and get the
| calculated timestamp - if license != nil &&
| license.Limits != nil && license.Limits.PostHistory > 0 {
| - limits.PostHistoryLimit =
| license.Limits.PostHistory - // Get the
| calculated timestamp of the last accessible post -
| lastAccessibleTime, appErr := a.GetLastAccessiblePostTime()
| - if appErr != nil { -
| return nil, appErr - } -
| limits.LastAccessiblePostTime = lastAccessibleTime -
| } - activeUserCount, appErr :=
| a.Srv().Store().User().Count(model.UserCountOptions{})
| if appErr != nil { return nil,
| model.NewAppError("GetServerLimits",
| "app.limits.get_app_limits.user_count.store_error", nil, "",
| http.StatusInternalServerError).Wrap(appErr)
| donohoe wrote:
| Or just this: $ sed -i -E
| '/maxUsers(Hard)?Limit.*0$/s/$/_000/' channels/app/limits.go
|
| Source:
| https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271#issuec...
| q3k wrote:
| This is a different limit.
| dlkckvll wrote:
| Would also be nice to remove the phone-home telemetry.
| compsciphd wrote:
| could be more complicated than this. the easiest thing (to me)
| would be to midufy the License() function so that it sets the
| Limits "correctly", as these type of things can be in multiple
| places.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I was wondering if this was even legal[0], so I went to the
| repo and noticed that their licensing[1] seems to be... a mess?
|
| It says you can use "compiled versions" under the MIT License.
| Then it says you can use the source code under AGPL 3.0. And
| then it additionally says that they won't enforce the AGPL 3.0
| copyleft if you haven't modified the source and don't link the
| Mattermost Platform directly. This is at best a bunch of
| tautologies that render the Affero clause moot and at worst
| enable a really stupid workaround to copyleft.
|
| First off, the Affero clause - number 13 - in the AGPL _only
| applies_ if you modify the source. There is no legal
| requirement to convey source code on a network server
| otherwise. So this is downgrading the license to GPL with extra
| steps.
|
| Second, "linking directly" isn't legally meaningful with
| regards to the GPL. GPL cares about whether or not your
| derivative work forms a single "program" - which is
| deliberately left ambiguous, but almost certainly does not
| refer to the concept of an address space alone, or even a Go
| import. I guess what they _wanted_ was to treat the Mattermost
| Admin and Configuration files under terms that are sort of
| LGPL-like? But that portion of the binary is already dual-
| licensed Apache 2.0. So there 's no reason to argue
|
| Third, and more importantly... the compiled versions license
| basically renders the source code requirement of the GPL family
| null and void. Like, in a normal use of the GPL, if you
| distribute binaries you're required to offer source. But here,
| they've weakened that clause.
|
| The most speculative argument I have is that one could
| disassemble a compiled Go binary to obtain a "compiled version"
| under MIT terms that is no longer subject to any copyleft
| whatsoever. This is obviously contrary to the intent of the
| license, so I'm not sure if a judge would bother listening to
| this argument, but it's still really bad drafting. I suspect
| this license document was written by a business strategy guy,
| _not_ a lawyer.
|
| [0] If this code actually expressed their license requirements,
| then posting this Git diff is a violation of DMCA 1201, and
| you'd be liable for jail time. Er, well, except GPL version 3
| (only) has a specific anti-1201 clause. But who knows if that's
| even applicable given the five different licenses at play?
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/blob/master/LICENSE...
| p2detar wrote:
| This seems to be only for the Enterprise edition. The "free" Team
| edition should not have this limit:
|
| https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271#issuec...
|
| Also one of the comments:
|
| > Would be a shame if someone with too much time on their hands
| dug into the binary and added a few zeroes to the message limit
|
| Can this be done via some binary-patch tool? Really curious. It
| would save recompile efforts.
|
| edit: link
|
| edit 2: I just realized, their Ubuntu repository only contains
| the Enterprise edition labeled "Free edition". This is really
| confusing. I does look like entishitification has started long
| ago: https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment-
| guide/server/deploy-l...
| bmacho wrote:
| Is it _legal_ to "patch" (remove a restriction) the binary?
| gsich wrote:
| yes
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| As with many things in adult life, the question is not really
| "is it legal" but "could I get in trouble for doing this".
| And we all know the answer.
| mort96 wrote:
| It seems like the Team edition has a bunch of other
| limitations, but it's hard to tell from how convoluted and
| incomplete Mattermost's various comparison pages are.
| petcat wrote:
| Am I understanding this right that the main complainant in that
| issue thread is an IT company that wants to resell the (free)
| version of Mattermost software and is now complaining that they
| have to pay?
|
| At first they tried to say that "we're a school" and then when
| the MM rep said they have an Education license, they admitted
| that they are not _actually_ a school, but rather a consulting
| company that is gouging schools by overcharging for open source
| software.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| No, you are not understanding this right.
|
| It's about rug pulling your users and cutting them off at the
| knees. I don't use mattermost but read the github thread in
| it's entirety.
| toxik wrote:
| The good brand of open-source software is basically being
| abused to do basic rug pull schemes. Sad.
| lexicality wrote:
| > an IT company that wants to resell the (free) version of
| Mattermost software and is now complaining that they have to
| pay?
|
| A user that was following the letter of the license and has
| suddenly had their access to the software restricted without
| warning.
|
| Open source software means people are entirely within their
| rights to sell it to others, perhaps creating value by
| providing the warranty that all licenses expressly disclaim.
| petcat wrote:
| I'm aware of what open source software is.
|
| And there are 3 things that you can do when in this
| situation:
|
| 1) Pay the fee, if that is what is required for it to
| continue to be easy for you to re-sell the software.
|
| 2) Fork the project, remove the restrictions, and maintain it
| yourself.
|
| 3) Stop using the software.
|
| All of those are perfectly within the spirit of FOSS.
| margalabargala wrote:
| The user who is the IT company is not the same user who started
| the thread and claims to be a school.
| hluska wrote:
| I'm having a lot of trouble with your comment. The word
| 'resell' doesn't appear anywhere in the issue - there is
| absolutely nothing about reselling it anywhere within the
| linked issue.
| yard2010 wrote:
| So, they limit the access to data on self hosted instances after
| upgrade? Sounds like a ransomware with extra steps.
|
| Enshitification ensues.
| lousken wrote:
| For all the bad press element/matrix has been getting, I am happy
| that at least I don't have to deal with this as well.
| anotherevan wrote:
| We've been using Element/Matrix for quite some time now and are
| fairly happy with it for the most part. The only major hiccup
| was hosting providers, not the software itself, per se.
|
| We originally signed up with element.io back when they were
| called vector.im. Service was good, but a year or two in they
| decided they wanted to focus on those sweet, sweet enterprise
| licences and the pricing changes were untenable for our little
| 15 person operation. (I bear them little ill will for this,
| gotta do what you gotta do and all that, but it was a real PITA
| at the time.)
|
| We moved to etke.cc who have been quite good. They were
| responsive to my modest support requests, and apart from being
| initially a bit surprised we wanted an unfederated server
| (which to their credit they dealt with with alacrity and
| aplomb) it's been a service we've just used and not had to
| otherwise think about.
|
| The only sticking point was there was no way to migrate our
| messages from the older service. If memory serves, this was due
| to a deficiency in either Matrix or Synapse due to changing
| domains (originally an element.io customer subdomian). So
| always your own subdomain if you can is the moral of the story,
| I guess. I don't know if the migration story has improved in
| the years since.
|
| If we had to leave Element/Matrix for whatever reasons I would
| definitely look at Zulip based on the many recommendations I
| see for it here. I think back when we went with Element I was
| quite interested in Zulip, but there just wasn't any good
| hosting options at the time and we didn't want to go with self-
| hosting (time-sink vs $$-sink).
| garganzol wrote:
| Bait contributors by a FOSS-like model, then switch the mode to
| sell the results of their contributions without paying them back.
| What a classic.
| cletus wrote:
| Story time. This has basically nothing to do with this post other
| than it involves a limit of 10,000 but hey, it's Christmas and I
| want to tell a story.
|
| I used to work for Facebook and many years ago people noticed you
| couldn't block certain people but the one that was most public
| was Mark Zuckerberg. It would just say it failed or something
| like that. And people would assign malice or just intent to it.
| But the truth was much funnier.
|
| Most data on Facebook is stored in a custom graph database that
| basically only has 2 tables that are sharded across thousands of
| MySQL instances but most almost always accessed via an in-memory
| write-through cache, also custom. It's not quite a cache because
| it has functionality built on top of the database that accessing
| directly wouldn't have.
|
| So a person is an object and following them is an edge.
| Importantly, many such edges were one-way so it was easy to query
| if person A followed B but much more difficult to query all the
| followers of B. This was by design to avoid hot shards.
|
| So I lied when I said there were 2 tables. There was a third that
| was an optimization that counted certain edges. So if you see
| "10.7M people follow X" or "136K people like this", it's reading
| a count, not doing a query.
|
| Now there was another optimization here: only the last 10,000 of
| (object ID,edge type) were in memory. You generally wanted to
| avoid dealing with anything older than that because you'd start
| hitting the database and that was generally a huge problem on a
| large, live query or update. As an example, it was easy to query
| the last 10,000 people or pages you've followed.
|
| You should be able to see where this is going. All that had
| happened was 10,000 people had blocked Mark Zuckerberg. Blocks
| were another kind of edge that was bidirectional (IIRC). The
| system just wasn't designed for a situation where more than
| 10,000 people wanted to block someone.
|
| This got fixed many years ago because somebody came along and
| build a separate system to handle blocking that didn't have the
| 10,000 limit. I don't know the implementation details but I can
| guess. There was a separate piece of reverse-indexing
| infrastructure for doing queries on one-way edges. I suspect that
| was used.
|
| Anyway, I love this story because it's funny how a series of
| technical decisions can lead to behavior and a perception nobody
| intended.
| Zacharias030 wrote:
| Merry Christmas! This is why I like hackernews.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| This seems like a poorly hashed out plan, but I do have some
| sympathy...
|
| in the face of competitors with _many_ more employees and
| seemingly endless piles of VC money, how do open source projects
| like this fund themselves? What could Mattermost do instead?
| Should they take more money and race everyone towards the same
| cliff?
|
| Are projects like this doomed to a small niche of people who
| understand the implications (and meanwhile can't contribute
| enough to ensure development keeps pace)?
|
| Everyone else is just going to keep using Slack, and arguably
| outside of these niche concerns, it's a better funded and higher
| quality product.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| It's not really open source project. They always gated a bunch
| of features, require CLA (so even if someone does contribute,
| boom, your code is theirs and they will probably close it down
| behind enterprise license if it is useful enough), and have
| pretty complex licensing scheme
| https://docs.mattermost.com/product-overview/faq-mattermost-...
|
| > Everyone else is just going to keep using Slack, and arguably
| outside of these niche concerns, it's a better funded and
| higher quality product.
|
| They had niche when their lite enterprise license (just basic
| LDAP and some other small features) was $2.5 per user.
|
| Now they are basically on slack pricing, why would anyone
| bother...
| liviux wrote:
| Another project bites the dust. They will return after a fork
| will get way popular. In time
| october8140 wrote:
| GitHub needs a better flag for license stuff like this. Open
| Source doesn't mean what it used to.
| xandrius wrote:
| Open source doesn't imply no limitations.
| nfkkfkkc wrote:
| Anyone can sue anyone for anything. Even if the case is
| laughed out of court.
|
| Btw I hope you didn't forget to pay the Linux license fee to
| SCO.
| pwdisswordfishy wrote:
| Why would GitHub step in (or even care)? GitHub isn't open
| source.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| Years ago I used to work at a company that used Mattermost for
| internal chats.
|
| Being laid off from there was sad, but at least I didn't have to
| use Mattermost anymore.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| An ex-coworker used to call it "matterworst".
| Zacharias030 wrote:
| can someone clarify the situation that self-hosted free (as in
| beer) community mattermosts are/will be in?
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| They have been slowly removing features from it and this is
| another one removed
| Zacharias030 wrote:
| I recently switched a bunch of friends from a project-
| oriented whatsapp chat to self-hosted mattermost, because I
| wanted permanent storage for messages and attachments, and
| threads, and did not want to pay slack in perpetuity.
|
| I feel that this idea is now in jeopardy, if I understand the
| 10k message history is the limit correctly.
|
| And there I thought I had a solution to slowly bring over
| project channels, family related things etc. that was as
| reliable as "my linux box will be reachable on the public
| internet" and I am willing to manage that it does.
|
| Seems I was wrong, but I don't know which other software has
| better future proofing.
| ptman wrote:
| Use matrix instead. Or zulip. Or xmpp. Or IRC
| DrStartup wrote:
| The good ole VC OS Rug Pull. Classic.
|
| It'd be nice if Mozilla (or a similar foundation) could create a
| baseline OS platform for a business communications suite.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| I'd be nice for anyone but Mozilla to do it. They can barely
| keep FF competitive
| Certhas wrote:
| FF is plenty competitive on the technical and feature front.
| It's market share is not a reflection of technical merit.
|
| What's more, next to Linux itself it is maybe the only case I
| can see where a major piece of user facing software is kept
| competitive with the Apple/Google/MS tools.
|
| LibreOffice or Nextcloud are technically far further behind
| Office and Google's online offerings.
|
| Which therefore begs the question: Who else is in a position
| to do this?
|
| At first glance, Moz with Firefox + a suite of self-hosted
| team and productivity stuff that works well in Firefox would
| make a ton of sense...
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Feel like then people would just have one more thing to
| complain about the Mozilla Foundation over.
| mort96 wrote:
| If Mozilla did that, we'd have monthly news stories about them
| adding ads into the client, removing features people depend on,
| cramming in AI where it doesn't belong, abruptly making all
| sorts of controversial ToS changes, going back on old promises,
| and all kinds of other things we know and love Mozilla for. All
| before they'd get bored and discontinue the product after a
| couple of years.
|
| Or maybe they'd just buy some existing closed source Slack
| competitor, promise to open source it, and then just never get
| around to it. You know, like how they bought Pocket in 2017,
| promised to make it open source, but somehow never got around
| to it before discontinuing it in 2025.
| wltr wrote:
| I was about to propose to deploy this as a company chat to my
| current boss, the self-hosted edition. So, is this still the best
| option (considering this can be reverted back, I assume), or
| should I just seek elsewhere now?
| xvilka wrote:
| Zulip is recommended by many here. Their mobile app is
| atrocious though...
| wltr wrote:
| 10 users for mobile notifications is a non-starter for me.
| I'd rather host XMPP then, I guess. Or a Matrix server, it
| seems like it allows the mobile notifications.
| fittingopposite wrote:
| Have you worked with both Matrix and Zulip? Looking at both
| for a small team and wondering which way to go with. Matrix
| seems more complex to set up and less tailored to function
| as a Slack alternative. What has been your experience?
| yunohn wrote:
| Y'know I'm starting to think that every single migration from
| paid to free software, will end up in the same cycle of becoming
| feature-locked. People time and again fail to understand that you
| need to financially support projects you use for sustainable
| futures. But alas, here we are...
| steanne wrote:
| this is not the only such recent change. can't make voice calls
| in public channels anymore either, only pms.
| pmdr wrote:
| IRC, email and XAMPP solved messaging a long time ago. Derivative
| products built on these protocols should have solved the chat
| problem for most orgs, but we got complacent and thus vulnerable
| to nickle and diming by the likes of Saleforce and Microsoft. Now
| rug pulls by faux-opensource projects that basically want free
| labor for their commercial project so they can sell it to bigger
| fish.
|
| It's not people wanting to make more money that I despise. Fine,
| make your commercial version ten times better, I don't care. But
| the practice of crippling your opensource offering by removing
| features or adding limits is evil and shameful.
| davisr wrote:
| "Fauxpensource", if you will.
| xinayder wrote:
| Another option is the open source Rocket.Chat.
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