Why does anybody want to host large scale Matrix servers anyway? Aren't they already helping just by providing infrastructure to run the software at all?
Is anybody anywhere - Deutsche Telekom included - actually making money here?
Is anybody anywhere - Deutsche Telekom included - actually making money here?
Some massive organisation (government agency, healthcare provider, network of schools etc) says: "Wow, Matrix is great, we should run our own instance rather than be dependent on Teams/Slack/Workspace. I'll put out a public tender for suppliers to provide this for us!"
Then, all the system integrators who are geared up to sell big IT projects to large organisations jump on the tender and say "Sure, we can do this for you, and we're best qualified to do so because we're an enormous trusted system integrator with loads of people in the right geography, got all the right compliance checkboxes, and we do this sort of thing all the time. It'll cost you $xM a year."
The upstream developer (Element) then reaches out to the integrators and says: "Oh hi! Are you planning to bid on this contract? If you want this to be successful, you should use our commercial offering, as then we'll be able to use that $ to keep upstream development alive".
The integrator then looks bewildered, and says: "But... we've been using your opensource distro off github and it seems fine? Why would we pay you guys anything? The additional cost will just make our bid too expensive and we won't win, or it'll kill our profit margins. Sorry, we'll go ahead without you and maintain the software ourselves if needed."
Given the main paying customers for Matrix are big organisations wanting digital sovereignty, this means the available $ disappears into the integrators rather making is way to fund the actual upstream dev - which then ends up stagnating, stalled, and completely at risk - putting all of these projects at risk. facepalm.
A variation on the problem is where the massive org decides to do the project in-house rather than via an integrator... but then still chooses to YOLO and freeride and given it'll cost less than using the commercial offering from the upstream. I can list at least 4 national governments who have taken this route.
To solve it, options include:
* The buyer could mandate that suppliers for the tender have to use the commercial offering from the upstream product rather than freeride on opensource. This is probably the easiest solution, but seems staggeringly rare - the only instance I know of who have taken this principled stand are ZenDiS in Germany (https://zendis.de) and we are very thankful for it.
* The upstream could make their commercial offering more valuable than the FOSS offering - e.g. additional domain-specific functionality: what we've done with Synapse Pro.
* The upstream could make the FOSS licensing less permissive, to force integrators to contribute back. We already did this with AGPL Synapse in 2023: https://element.io/blog/element-to-adopt-agplv3, and it has helped a bit... but in practice, we just saw a fleet of major Matrix tenders go to system integrators who then apologetically cut Element out, despite AGPL - putting Element's funding for 2025 directly at risk.
Which is why we're putting out brutal blog posts saying "Look, big organisations: if you try to freeride on FOSS your projects will fail" - and providing a quantified explanation of the value that the commercial offering provides... so that we can then take the $ and hopefully keep the primary FOSS project on the road.
> but in practice, we just saw a fleet of major Matrix tenders go to system integrators who then apologetically cut Element out, despite AGPL - putting Element's funding for 2025 directly at risk.
I appreciate the transparency and you totally don't have to but not sure I fully understand this sentence, do you mind explaining that further?