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Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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