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A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

element.io

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Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#281

Post by camgunz »

krageon wrote: post #271
camgunz wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of your comment is speculation and unfounded accusations. > This makes it clear that they intent to ship under some alternative license, for a fee. It makes it clear they intend to ship under the AGPLv3. What's wrong with that? They can change the license at a later date? Just fork! > I wouldn’t consider any of this open source any more. This is bananas; the AGPLv3 is extremely open source. And again, nothing pr…

> They owe you precisely nothing. This is true. And nobody owes them anything either, something the GP was trying to make clear to the reader (with a reminder that if they do this thing how that will be used). I think this is a reasonable stance to take when any party pulls out the lawyers. Such a move must be mistrusted, lawyers are a mistrustful tool.

> And nobody owes them anything either, something the GP was trying to make clear to the reader (with a reminder that if they do this thing how that will be used).

Element's not demanding anything from anyone. I don't understand your point.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#282

Post by Arathorn »

lrvick wrote: post #274
proto_lambda wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forced open source for everyone but them . They retain copyright and will continue to sell proprietary adaptions, while forbidding everyone else to do the same.

I will only pay for chat servers with all public code. If they go proprietary they lose my money and support. I would find/fork a LibreMatrix and direct myself and all my clients to use that instead. Openness and accountability is why I use matrix, and expect many others feel the same. It is in the best interest of Element to stay open. After all, end to end encryption is impossible to trust if a central party contro…

The reason for the CLA is so we can sell AGPL exceptions to those who are allergic to AGPL, not so we can further relicense down the road.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#283

Post by Arathorn »

xinayder wrote: post #279
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #96

So AGPL+CLA: > The benefit of switching to AGPLv3 is that it obliges downstream developers to contribute back to the core project - either by releasing their modifications as open source for the benefit of the whole Matrix ecosystem, or by contacting Element for an alternative license. Future code contributors to Synapse will need to sign a contributor license agreement (CLA) This makes it clear that they intent to s…

> What they are doing is a required step to pull the same stunt as terraform. Except that Terraform never had a strict open source license like the AGPL, they had MPL which doesn't require you to distribute your changes with the same license as the project. I don't see this as hostile and I believe it's more targeted towards Beeper (created by the Mautrix bridge devs), who maintain a closed fork of Synapse and will e…

fwiw, it’s not targeted at Beeper, who support Matrix via the Foundation, and who I believe are happy to publish their synapse changes under the AGPL. It’s targeting companies and governments with many billions of dollars at their disposal who commercialise Matrix without contributing anything back at all.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#284

Post by Arathorn »

freedomben wrote: post #51
ensignavenger wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the AGPLv3 is a poor choice for what is essentially the reference implementation of the Matrix Protocol. The whole point of a protocol is to allow different implementations. Having a base implementation that others can freely fork and develop into whatever they want with whatever license model they want is a good thing for the protocol. I can understand if the Foundation were to maintain a very basic referenc…

This is an interesting point and does sound good in theory, although in practice it's just the for-profit proprietary companies who are doing the forking and expanding, and then making a ton of money and not contributing anything back to the reference implementation. I do also dislike the CLA, but I'm torn because if anybody should be making the money from these custom extensions/implementations, it should be the com…

fwiw, the main problem with the CLA seems to be that folks have assumed the intention is to use it to switch Synapse & co to a closed license in future - which I honestly hadn’t even considered as a possibility. For one thing, we could have done that already under the Apache license; instead, we deliberately did the opposite - to move to AGPL. The reason for the CLA is purely to allow us to sell AGPL exceptions to commercial forks.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#285

Post by Arathorn »

goku12 wrote: post #37
ensignavenger wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with your assessment of the AGPL-CLA combination. But the initial part seems to be about the Matrix protocol. The projects that were forked and re-licensed are the servers - Synapse, Dendrite, Sygnal, Sydent and MAS. The protocol itself is still under Apache 2.0 ( https://spec.matrix.org/latest/ ), though they seem to have added CLA to it. If so, the protocol doesn't have the problem you pointed out. You coul…

the spec has no CLA, and I don’t believe the Foundation has plans to add CLAs.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#286

Post by Arathorn »

COGlory wrote: post #67
Arathorn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's any consolation, the fundamental asymmetry replaces a previous asymmetry that Element uniquely donated all of its core Matrix code, including ownership, to the Foundation. But yes, I wish that the economics balanced without a CLA. But they don't.

I have high hopes for the future of Matrix in large part because of the Matrix Foundation. But what happens at Element when you and Amandine leave? What stops Element from being bought by a huge corporation that takes the whole thing proprietary and kills it? I'm sympathetic to the position that you find yourself in here (I have a standing recurring donation to the Matrix Foundation). But this seems substantially les…

If Element explodes by whatever mechanism, other folks can fork the AGPL code to keep it going. We’re looking into mechanisms to ensure CLA’d code stays published under an OSI compatible license regardless of the type of explosion, which I guess is a kind of dead man’s switch.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#287

Post by Arathorn »

ensignavenger wrote: post #221
Arathorn wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What?! I'm not making up the forks!! I already mentioned a bunch of them at the top of https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update... when trying to get folks to donate to the Foundation. While this helped with new players, it didn't help with existing ones (although one did send us $500). So switching to AGPL is the next line of recourse.

That post mentions a few big companies using the Matrix protocol, but are any of them using proprietary forks of Element/Synapse/Dendrite? Another thing not clear from that post was the layoffs- were those layoffs at the Foundation, or Element corp? Either way it was a loss to the Matrix community, for certain!

Yes, the commercial Matrix vendors are all using proprietary forks.

The layoffs were from Element; the Foundation has only a managing director as an employee (who started a few months ago). And yes, the layoffs have been a nightmarish loss for Matrix - as a result P2P Matrix, Third Room, Low Bandwidth Matrix and many other more ambitious projects are currently shelved.

The point of the licensing change is to try to break even and avoid further layoffs, by requiring third party commercial forks to contribute financially.

The amount of hate for doing so is astonishing, but hey.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#288

Post by Arathorn »

lifty wrote: post #54

I welcome this change, with the hope that they will be able to release higher quality server implementations resulting from this change. Question to @Arathorn: is there a plan to consolidate and have a single server implementation? I would love if Dendrite would become the reference implementation and have something works both for self-hosters and big deployments.

no plan to consolidate; current plan is to keep improving Synapse as a mature & stable server, and use Dendrite as a test bed for new ideas (eg account portability)

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#289

Post by Arkanosis »

Legogris wrote: post #272
gtirloni wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AGPL is not the issue. The CLA is. It allows the project to change licenses at will, without going back to all contributors and asking for approval.

They would still have to go back to past contributors prior to introducing CLA. Source: My PR was merged in 2021, the changes are still part of Synapse, and I never signed any CLA. I don't think they'd be able to get enough sign-offs from historical contributors to pull off any actual shenanigans with the Synapse license.

I understand that pre-fork code is under the ASL, not the AGPL, so anybody can use it within derivative works under any license — no CLA needed.

Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

#290

Post by Arathorn »

COGlory wrote: post #242

I have never seen as much negativity for an open source project on Hacker News as I have seen in every single Matrix thread . It is unbelievable. The only thing that might come even close is FlatPak. It's been going on for years and years. If anyone doesn't believe me, just click Arathorn's post history and start browsing. I've never understood what Matrix did to deserve this. It's a fantastic project - I've been usi…

It's an interesting pattern to be sure. It's not all negative though (e.g. this thread has a few moments of positivity mixed in with all the folks jumping to the conclusion that we're trying to pull a Hashicorp). I have a few theories as to why it happens:

1. Communication is an intensely personal and social (even intimate) thing, and people get irrationally attached to how they do it - and so end up defending their favourite system, attacking ones which threaten it, or attacking their ex-favourite if they feel let down and/or betrayed.

2. I think this effect gets amplified in a feedback loop if you use the platform to build the platform itself. This is true of course for operating systems, desktop environments, programming languages etc. too - but it seems to be particularly the case for chat systems. Perhaps this is because it's intrinsically accelerated by the higher emotional/dramatic/intense characteristics of realtime chat - it's effectively mixing the intensity realtime interactive social interaction with programming. So if you spend all your life sitting in a chat system talking about and building that chat system, then spirits can run disproportionately high. You see the same levels of jingoism in IRC and XMPP too.

3. Culturally I think Matrix has picked up both good and bad cultural vibes from IRC - and for better or worse, one of the things that defines IRC is a somewhat elitist vibe: it's a fringe subcommunity for folks who are smart and informed enough to navigate the by-geeks-for-geeks interface. As a result, folks get tribal about it - both Matrix (although I pray that we eventually get mainstream), IRC and XMPP.

4. Matrix has been going for over 9 years now, and it's still not as good from a plain UX perspective as a centralised system like WhatsApp (although I'd hope that we've improved a lot recently, especially with Matrix 2.0 and Element X). As a result, there's been a lot of expectation and hype over the years, which hasn't always materialised as rapidly as you'd hope. So there are certainly those who feel let down.

5. Matrix wouldn't exist if previous projects had not hit a plateau and got stuck, and so folks who are still working away on previous projects are understandably irate.

6. I talk too much on HN and it pisses people off.

anyway, thanks for the words of support :)

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