I highly suggest not moving forward with the change to limit open source Mattermost usage by number of users. Such limits are generally frowned upon in the open source world and feels like such a betrayal to the community that has given so much to Mattermost, Inc. Users should be free to decide how much risk they are willing to take on and if they need the additional protections offered in Enterprise Edition. I understand Mattermost, Inc. is trying to increase sales but this isn’t the right way to do it.
A warning banner (Implement Admin Warning Banner for Large Team Edition Installations (500+ Users) to alert of risks of large install · Issue #25291 · mattermost/mattermost · GitHub, Implement End User Warning Banner for Large Team Edition Installations (5000+ Users) regarding application availability and data protection. · Issue #25292 · mattermost/mattermost · GitHub) was only first proposed in November and it appears that has quickly progressed to lockout as of [MM-56318] Global warning banners of user limit for admins by M-ZubairAhmed · Pull Request #25797 · mattermost/mattermost · GitHub - “Upgrade to Mattermost Professional or Mattermost Enterprise to continue using Mattermost.” Such a change in 9.5 would be a breaking change in a minor release.
Ian, Mattermost CEO states in https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/pull/25797#issuecomment-1884998597 that “we started with safety warning banners” but it appears they actually haven’t been implemented yet? Also regarding “moved to implementing user limits after speaking to our largest deployments … we received surprisingly positive feedback”, where was this feedback collected? There are only a few public mentions all recently that I can find of this proposal and any private interactions are likely largely with existing paying users who would be unaffected and frankly probably benefit from the change despite it going against generally agreed upon on source practices.
My suggestion is, implement the warning banners and not the functional limits. The warning banners will help achieve the stated goals of reducing brand risk and moving users toward paid versions of Mattermost. It’s probably worth noting that in many cases it may drive them to competition like Slack and Microsoft Teams instead though.
Regarding, “It moves larger deployments to either our commercial or nonprofit offerings earlier in their lifecycle” the limits may make sense for new instances and with various warnings along the way so they are not one day caught by surprise when the instance can no longer accept new users. For existing instances such limits just appearing one day will be extremely frustrating and fall on to the shoulders of poor system admins with no purchasing influence. In those cases the options for instances appear to be:
- continue running the last version without limits thus leaving it vulnerable to future CVEs,
- shutdown, or
- have difficult conversations with leadership about upgrading