Export plugin E20 license requirement

[loleg]

Owning your data is a basic ask in running an open-source / self-hosted service, and this plugin is in my opinion quite central to the ability to extract and archive chat data in an accessible way. The License requirement to have an E20 "High Availability" license has no technical merit, in my view, and may well be seen as an exploitative business decision. Preventing unlicensed, or even E10 or lesser license-level, maintainers of Mattermost from owning their data and exporting channel content is a very disappointing limitation for an open source platform to have. I humbly ask for this condition to be expeditiously reviewed.

[loleg]

In the background documentation it seems like this export might be a legacy feature https://docs.mattermost.com/comply/compliance-export.html

See also https://docs.mattermost.com/manage/bulk-export-tool.html for an alternative data export mechanism, which does not quite have the convenience of this plugin, but seems to be widely supported.

[simsnet]

Wrote this for my instance. mattermost-channel-export

NOTE: Playing with the database is not recommended. Only use this if you've worked with MySQL before and have an understanding of it.

[ThiefMaster]

AFAIK this plugin is EE-restricted because it was originally written to be used with Playbooks which was EE-restricted at that point.

It would be great if Mattermost Inc could consider making this plugin Open Source; it'd make a great basis for a more generic way to archive messages from a channel (to a more human readable format than the CSV (I think) the plugin currently generates).

For example, as a user I may want to download a nice HTML dump of a conversation I had on some Mattermost server.