This 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.
they allow the company making you sign the CLA change the license the entire project with your contribution in it to what they like, including making it proprietary.
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 ag…
> tomorrow they can go proprietary and you're OK with that
That depends on the CLA's wording. A CLA could allow the right to sell commercial licenses to the code while always keeping the same code under the AGPLv3.
They 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.
They want to sell sources with alternative license, it's part of their business plan, so CLA is unavoidable.
I’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 corpor…
It requires all users, whether corporate or not, to release all changes under AGPLv3... the whole point of the Matrix protocol is to talk to other users... so basically everyone triggers the AGPLv3s "network" clause. However, releaseing your code under the AGPLv3 is not the same as upstreaming it. In order to do that, you additionaly have to sign a CLA granting the Element corporation broad and expansive rights to do whatever they please with your code... but you don't get the same rights to their code.
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.
I don't think they're saying the CLA is reciprocal, that's a reference to the AGPL which requires you to share any changes you make.
So does this pretty much boil down to "we are re-licensing Synapse and Dendrite from Apache to AGPL"? In what way is the "owner" of the code significant, in this case, other than being a proxy for the maintainer of the most popular fork? These projects are open source, so the only thing this code is really attached to is the license. Whatever entity controls the majority of developer effort effectively controls the f…
> Whatever entity controls the majority of developer effort effectively controls the future of the project.
Yes, but that doesn't preclude others from stepping up with developer effort on the originals, should they want to. Given the widespread use of matrix, this does seem like a possibility.
Such a casual blog post for what is essentially the announcement of the death of the matrix project.
Is it the death?
I definitely felt like something was wrong, given that the protocol seems to have lots of problems and Dendrite has been in 0.x beta since basically forever. But I don't know what this means practically for Matrix.