well, the problem is that while big folks are adopting Matrix, it looks like we have a nightmare feedback loop in progress: now that Matrix is good enough for everyone to run it at scale, most of the commercial orgs doing so don’t feel the urge to route any of the $ they get from selling Matrix services back to the core team (or to Element, which fund 98% of the core team today). In fact, the better we’ve made Matrix, the less likely folks are to fund the core team to help them run it!

So while superficially it looks good, we are not in a great position. Element has had to do a 15% layoff (impacting the Matrix core team) due to losing business to non-Matrix specialists who claim they can provide Matrix solutions “because it’s all open source”.

Therefore either we need to persuade those folks to support the Foundation to keep core dev going - or Element ends up forced into an increasingly open core model in order to keep the lights on, which is hardly in the spirit of open source or Matrix. :(