Comment by Arathorn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arathorn | Hacker News Reader

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No, the rough timeline is this:

* 2014: Matrix core team creates Matrix, writes Synapse and other implementations, starts writing the Matrix spec

* 2017: Matrix core team wants to be able to focus on this exclusively as their dayjob; creates New Vector (aka Element) to fund their work.

* 2018: Matrix core team establishes the Foundation as a neutral custodian of the standard on behalf of everyone in the ecosystem. Element transfers all its core Matrix IP to the Foundation, and (uniquely) continues to donate its future contributions to the Foundation, hoping that by letting the whole ecosystem build on top, including proprietary forks, Matrix will spread as far and wide as possible to the benefit of everyone, and Element will make enough $ selling Matrix hosting/distributions to keep hiring the core team to work on Matrix.

* 2022: Matrix has spread far and wide, but turns out that in the commercial space, huge companies who bear no cost for supporting the Matrix ecosystem whatsoever discover they can sell proprietary forks for many $. Meanwhile, Element spends its life funnelling most of its time & energy into doing core Matrix ecosystem work, and it turns out that trying to compete with the big guys while all your energy is going into the commons doesn't work.

* 2023: Element decides it can't afford to contribute as Apache any more, and switches to AGPL + CLA, thus requiring the big guys to either opensource their proprietary forks as AGPL or arrange a paid license from Element. Yes, this means that contributors to Synapse will need to sign a CLA to Element, and it's depressing if this hinders community contributions, but it's the least worst solution we can see.

Thank you for that clarification. I would echo the other comment- What "huge companies who bear no cost for supporting the Matrix ecosystem whatsoever discover they can sell proprietary forks for many $"? Please call these "huge corporations" that are making a fortune selling proprietary forks of Element/Synapse out? A huge part of the reason Matrix has spread far and wide is because it was open source, under a foundation, and had quality, liberally licensed open source implementation. If it weren't for these facts (I grant there may be some debate on how much the liberality of the license played into it, but I am pretty confidant it has been a significant factor) I doubt it would have grown nearly as much, and Element corp would either not exist or be much smaller. I think this change is a huge mistake, and I only hope that the Matrix protocol survives this mistake, hopefully the Matrix Foundation will continue to be a good steward of the protocol.

Something I don't understand is: how is other companies making money an existential threat for Element? It seems rather that Element's hopes of making enough money (to fund development) by selling hosted/managed services was misplaced.

In a market, you're always competing on cost/return.

Competitors can just take the open source parts of the matrix projects without contributing code or funding back.

As result, in a bid between Element and competitors, Element will lose because Element actually pays for maintaining these open source projects.

Not necessarily. There are a lot of things that folks look for when buying hosting or a support contract. For example, trust and confidence. I trust the primary maintainer of a open source project to be able to support me better than some one else maintaining a proprietary fork. In fact, the fork being proprietary means I am not going to use it when there is an open source alternative. However, I also distrust a project that is AGPL/GPL with a CLA to a corporation. If there were no good alternatives, I would probably choose the open source option to proprietary one... but I would try to find some one else to support it. Prior to this change, I would have defaulted to using Element/Synapse software, and paying Element corp for any services I require. After this change, I am looking for alternatives not only to Element corp, but to Element/Synapse the software. Even if I continue to use Element/Synapse, I am unlikely to pay Element corp for support services. I will look for an alternative.

Unfortunately most of their big customers seem to be governments, who are often bound by law to do things like select the lowest bidder.

And where criteria like “trust and confidence” are too often cover for corruption and favoritism.

Governments are a whole other ballgame, your right. They often have very particular requirements that not every company is going to be able or willing to meet, though. I don't know enough about their particular business to say without a more complete analysis, but even with governments, just having a cheaper product is not always enough to get your bid accepted.

But they were not in the business of private forks, as per their statement. They were in the business of providing hosted instances, and services.

So I don’t see how someone acting in a different market had any bearing on their business at all. Unless they were indeed in that market, but that doesn’t seem clear to me at all from their messaging.

> huge companies who bear no cost for supporting the Matrix ecosystem whatsoever discover they can sell proprietary forks for many $

What, exactly, are you talking about here, Matthew?

Well, I’m not going to name & shame them given we’re trying to sort out alternative licensing so they can continue their forks…

eventually we're not going to be able to continue this "just trust me, it's cool" line, man, this stinks.

What?! I'm not making up the forks!!

I already mentioned a bunch of them at the top of https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update... when trying to get folks to donate to the Foundation. While this helped with new players, it didn't help with existing ones (although one did send us $500). So switching to AGPL is the next line of recourse.

That post mentions a few big companies using the Matrix protocol, but are any of them using proprietary forks of Element/Synapse/Dendrite?

Another thing not clear from that post was the layoffs- were those layoffs at the Foundation, or Element corp? Either way it was a loss to the Matrix community, for certain!

Yes, the commercial Matrix vendors are all using proprietary forks.

The layoffs were from Element; the Foundation has only a managing director as an employee (who started a few months ago). And yes, the layoffs have been a nightmarish loss for Matrix - as a result P2P Matrix, Third Room, Low Bandwidth Matrix and many other more ambitious projects are currently shelved.

The point of the licensing change is to try to break even and avoid further layoffs, by requiring third party commercial forks to contribute financially.

The amount of hate for doing so is astonishing, but hey.

The thing that's so upsetting to me is that since I started using and developing against Matrix.org in 2016, Synapse has always been positioned as a reference implementation, it has always been a wedge to get others to come play in your sandbox, a gift to the community to encourage growth, a positive-sum engine, even if companies like Discord or whoever are trying to use Synapse behind the scenes to implement Matrix.org interop. To enclose that now because your business model relied on the good graces of other corporations just causes those proprietary forkers to not trust neither Matrix nor Element.

y'all are trying to get this shit IETF standardized and cram Matrix interop through via DMA while tying down your reference implementation, think about how that looks. that code should be as permissive and easy to integrate with as possible! who wants to pay a protection racket to an organization who's proven itself this fickle?

sure sure, enclose dendrite and the Element product family, things you explicitly built for scaling the matrix.org server and "Element the product" but Synapse should always have been seen as a loss-leader, a hulking mass of Tornado code that says "here's how you could implement this standard and it works well enough for operators of small or medium sized communities but wouldn't it be nice if you did it this more sustainable/scalable way? give us a call"

It just shows to me a lack of creativity or courage and instead says "well we parted ways with our corporate sponsor a few years ago without enough of a business plan and now we're hungry"

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