Oh wow, this is laudably frank in my opinion. They are quite up front about the motivation behind this change. Two relevant excerpts:
> Over the last year or two Matrix has evolved from ‘explosive growth’ to being a ‘category’ in its own right. In other words, ‘Matrix-based’ is now specified as a requirement in massive public and private sector tenders - in which multinationals compete to provide Matrix-based products and services.
and
> Today we have arrived at a crossroads. We have succeeded in making Matrix wildly successful, but Element is losing its ability to compete in the very ecosystem it has created. It is hard for Element to innovate and adapt as quickly as companies whose business model is developing proprietary Matrix-based products and services without the responsibility and costs of maintaining the bulk of Matrix. In order to be fair to our customers, we need to be able to put more focus on them and their specific requirements.
So basically, Element can't compete with other companies for the contracts that only exists because of Element's work, because the other companies can focus just on making proprietary extensions for code that Element has more or less the sole burden of maintaining. So Element is saying to those companies, hey, either AGPL your modifications and extensions (AGPL is relevant since if you're running eg sidecar services with Synapse or Dendrite, this will still hit those sidecar services), or pay for a license for our code. This seems fair to me, to be honest.
And yeah, I understand people's moral objections to the CLA, but it's necessary for Element's strategy to work. And maybe I'm naive but I do believe Element and the team have Matrix's best interests at heart, they're just also grappling with making money and being self-sustaining, and so I hope that they succeed in that for the sake of the broader Matrix project and ecosystem.
This change also does not seem likely to me to affect open-source work or the broader Matrix community for the most part. If you want to self-host a Matrix server this shouldn't change anything for you. All the code you're running is already open-source, you don't need to do anything. Matrix as a protocol and an ecosystem of servers and clients and users won't be affected by this, just companies selling services that are based on Element's open-source code.
And protocol governance hasn't changed, it's still in the hands of the Matrix Foundation, and this won't change that. And you can say, hey, Matrix protocol development has always been driven by Element and its priorities and interests—yes, that's absolutely true. But this change won't affect that either! And in fact, if the CLA pushes pushes community development efforts away from Synapse/Dendrite and toward other projects like Conduit[0], then this might even be good for the ecosystem and community governance by decreasing Element/Synapse's influence over the direction protocol, which I'd be happy to see.
So yeah, as someone who is self-hosting Synapse and really rooting for an open, free, community-centric Matrix protocol to succeed, I'm not heartbroken over this change. I'm actually even a bit hopeful about what it means for Element and Matrix going forward.
[0] https://conduit.rs/