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A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
11–20 of 304 posts
Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
#12So, what's the next best alternative to Matrix?
Depends on what you want.. XMPP as a protocol is somewhat comparable, but I like the Matrix model better. You can still use the Matrix protocol without adopting this new corporate fork, though.
Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
#13This really sucks. I have always had great hope for the Matrix protocol. The AGPL isn't my favorite open source license, but it has its place... but a CLA? That is a complete nonstarter. No one should ever sign a CLA that gives a company more rights to your contributions than you get from theirs.
What’s the deal with CLAs? I’m not familiar with them.
Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
They say the original repositories predate Element. But no idea on who owns them or who's being forked _from_?
If I'm not mistaken: The two projects were started by the people that founded Element. When they founded Element, they transferred the projects to the Foundation, to make them more independent. Now, they're taking them back and relicensing them with a reciprocal license (AGPLv3 + CLA) instead of a permissive one (ALv2). I assume this is about other companies using Synapse and Dendrite without contributing back, so no…
The CLA isn't reciprocal. Reciprocicity is only one way when you require a CLA.
Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
#15They keep open source license, so why not. If money's involved, it's gotta be messy either way and matrix is too convoluted and complex to be developed without money envolved.
Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
#16Well, the best of luck to them. All I'm really interested in is whether the new (read, old) overloards at Element have serious plans to revive p2p efforts or not. Going off their behavior on certain github issues, I won't hold my breath and will continue to use briar instead.
I contacted the foundation funding channel, multiple times,specifically about becoming a member to support p2p development and they don't even have the decency to respond.
Honestly this whole thing feels like a bait n switch. Get the community based matrix popular and cozied up with the public sector and then lock that shit down under the element Corp.
The foundation, who's job it is apparently to protect/guide matrix outlook and development, now has no ability to actually govern said project.
Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
#17I’m confused. Synapse and Dendrite projects are forked. Ok. But then they say they won’t be continuing to fund development and “They’ll need to get their upstream releases from Element’s repositories going forward.” that seems to mean that future downloads should come from Element? That sounds more like a handoff than a fork. Can someone clarify this a bit?
The old repos "belong" to the matrix foundation, but the work on them was mostly done by the element team. This is them officializing that synapse and dendrite are element branded projects, not matrix (so yes, it is indeed a handoff), except they are branding this as a fork because the license is changing.
They also are changing licences to require downstream forkers to also open-source their changes, ensuring corporate users of matrix contribute back upstream if they modify their implementation (beeper might be in some hot water, though they can very well continue using and maintaining their own fork from the matrix foundation repos with the old licence).
Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
#18This really sucks. I have always had great hope for the Matrix protocol. The AGPL isn't my favorite open source license, but it has its place... but a CLA? That is a complete nonstarter. No one should ever sign a CLA that gives a company more rights to your contributions than you get from theirs.
What’s the deal with CLAs? I’m not familiar with them.
When you try to contribute code back upstream, the company will require you to grant them broad rights to do whatever they want with it, including to relicense the code you are contributing under a proprietary license. You do not get the same rights in return to the upstream code. So the company can yake your contributions and go proprietary and you have no recourse.
Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
#19They keep open source license, so why not. If money's involved, it's gotta be messy either way and matrix is too convoluted and complex to be developed without money envolved.
The biggest problem isn't the new license... not a fan of it at all... but the biggest problem is the CLA.
Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
#20This really sucks. I have always had great hope for the Matrix protocol. The AGPL isn't my favorite open source license, but it has its place... but a CLA? That is a complete nonstarter. No one should ever sign a CLA that gives a company more rights to your contributions than you get from theirs.
What’s the deal with CLAs? I’m not familiar with them.
One example is Linux. You don't need to sign CLA to contribute to Linux. It has contributions from thousands of developers all over the world. It means that to switch Linux license to, say GPLv3, you would need to get permission from all of those developers or rewrite their contributions which is not possible in practice.
To avoid this situation, some projects require their contributors to sign contributor license agreement. Terms might differ, but generally you allow your contribution to be relicensed in any way in the future. So today Matrix's AGPL, tomorrow they can go proprietary and you're OK with that. Also they want to sell their source code with proprietary license (so buyer's not obliged to open his modifications) and they also need contributor permission to do that.
Basically it's a commercial project which is not interested with external contributions.