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Comment by Arathorn | Hacker News Reader

Getting the balance of this right to prevent a tragedy of the commons turns out to be hard. Element (who funds most of Matrix dev) has released almost everything we do as permissive-licensed FOSS open source. As a result, there's a huge ecosystem of folks building commercial solutions on Matrix. But surprisingly little $ actually gets back to Element (or the Matrix Foundation) from those commercial solutions, if any.

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I don't have any proof but I'm certain Germany must have made some sort of funding for matrix

https://matrix.org/blog/2021/07/21/germanys-national-healthc...

The messengerfor German armed forces is based on matrix

https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Bundeswehr-setzt-kue...

> TI-Messenger is gematik’s technical specification for an interoperable secure instant messaging standard. The healthcare industry will be able to build a wide range of apps based on TI-Messenger specifications knowing that, being built on Matrix, all those apps will interoperate.

The ones getting most of the money will probably be third-party developers integrating Matrix into their gematik-certified healthcare products.

Ironically very little of the $ seems to be propagating back to Matrix itself…

It's disappointing that Germany decided to go their own way rather than joining DirectTrust and working on the Trusted Instant Messaging Plus open industry standard. It's specifically designed for healthcare.

https://directtrust.org/standards/tim-plus

It’s definitely unfortunate that there’s a schism between e2ee matrix and e2ee xmpp there.

Looks like it's based on the established and mature standard XMPP. Not disappointing to me.

Which somewhat highlights the problem with "permissive" licences, as opposed to copyleft ones like AGPL.

But would AGPL have gotten traction in the first place? I guess we can’t say for sure, but my guess is no. I think it safe to say that at minimum it would be an additional barrier to entry.

Mastodon and peertube are both AGPL

I’d say the jury is still out on Mastadon (and anyways would not be competitive except for Twitter imploding), and I haven’t even heard of the other one, so I’m not sure this is a compelling argument.

the problem of AGPL for Matrix is that it would have likely impeded uptake significantly. But yes, it’s something we’ve considered.

Perhaps its actually good that one company can't capture significant ammounts of money when the goal should be to move away from single-company communication tools. Of course the Foundation does need funding and I think it would be in Germany's / the EU's interest to secure that.

Agreed. Ideally, the official policy should be introduced to either fund or contribute to FOSS used.

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