Playbooks + MM 10.x+

After a decently-smooth Slack → Mattermost migration (it had a handful of hiccups), we were excited to use Playbooks but were waiting until the adoption period was successful.

As we went to start implementing Playbooks this week, we noticed the change to the previous documentation that used to support Playbooks for all versions now says Playbooks are now going to be “v2” and only supported on paid/Enterprise plans going forward.

https://docs.mattermost.com/guides/repeatable-processes.html

And yes, I see the 9.X ESR notes about v1 support, but that is only good until at most “mid 2025” based on the ESR release policy.

This is extremely unfortunate and really tarnishes the idea we had of what Mattermost can offer. It’s understandable to need to turn a profit, but to lock Playbooks behind a paywall seems out of character and a bit extreme. If anything, only the “troublesome/actual enterprise features related to Playbooks” should be paywalled. (We should all have basic features and security updates, the enterprise Playbook users can pay for their enterprise Playbook features… maybe make it a seperate paid feature on top of Mattermost that non-enterprise users can opt into, giving you another potential revenue stream that some “non-paid” users would pay for… :hamburger: for :thinking: …)

We’ve been having internal discussions about getting some of our devs up to speed on Go so we can potentially contribute to plugins, if not core. We understand that open-source can’t be sustained for free, but this seems like an overly-dramtic adjustment to your feature set.

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Heya Josh! Thank you for sharing your feedback, and I completely understand your concern regarding the Playbooks feature shift. We’re always striving to balance feature availability with sustainability, and your suggestions about making certain features available as optional add-ons are valuable. I’ll be sure to share this with the rest of the team for you. We appreciate your continued support!

@jmartenspint

There’s also an ongoing discussion related to this, on reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Mattermost/comments/1fjnykj/is_v10_the_practical_end_of_free_and_open_source

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