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Reminder - https://conduit.rs/ Rust implementation of the matrix server stack
There are two related but separate issues here that need to be considered: 1. Relicense to AGPLv3 2. New CLA in place for contributions. For a project like Matrix, the move to AGPLv3 seems clearly a good one. This is not just a library that you add to your app, it's a product in and of itself, and it's been getting abused by proprietary companies who are robbing the ecosystem. From the blog post from Element[1][2]: >…
Everything that you side was said of Terraform months back, and of some other organisation before that. It is very unambiguous that this is part of a move to an open-core model. I would not consider this project open source any more, even though it still technically is so for now.
Element has existing contracts with companies and governments about permissively licensed software. They can't relicense to AGPL without a CLA to honor their existing contracts without much work.
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Realistically they probably do like 95% of the real work themselves so it makes sense.
Realistically, if they started as proprietary in the first place, they wouldn't ever grow to this size (just another closed chat app competing with Discord and Messenger), so they still benefited from being open-source. Now they are reaping the benefit and monopolizing it.
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> I wouldn’t consider any of this open source any more. If this was BSL I agree with you, but that is not the case. AGPL is about as open source as it gets. It is forced open source. I recommend AGPL to any of my clients open sourcing anything in a competitive environment these days. Free for the public, but greedy corpos that do not want to share changes and be part of the community are forced to pay to support the…
There are many of us who regard the AGPL as a nonfree license. It’s just the FSF zealots who regard the ability to run a services business with free software as a “loophole”.
Nothing is stopping anyone from setting up a competing service and charging for it. The only thing they can't do is provide their _modified_ version as a service without providing the source code. Which is just the GPL's usual distribution clause updated for how modern software is distributed. Bear in mind that said source code could literally be a zip file that is emailed when someone requests; there's no requirement to post it publicly on an ongoing basis.
I don't consider myself a FSF zealot; far from it in fact. Most of my software to date has been permissively licensed. The difference in this particular case is I'm not just building a tool or a library, I'm building out a complete product and putting a LOT of my hard-earned time and energy into it. Enough that I want to actually put in writing that any modifications should also be open-sourced.
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…
BitTorrent the client went full proprietary, but that did nothing to the adoption of BitTorrent the protocol, because open-source implementations are all over the place.
That's at least what I hope is the worst case here.
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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.
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The CLA ennsures their monopoly, it increases the asymmetry over time. Forks will have to share all improvements with Element, but Element will be able to provide proprietary improvements, which means more people will chose it. Then they can at any moment relicense and take the whole app proprietary.
`Apache-2.0` allows Element the same power right now. No organization is maintaining meaningful community forks of Synapse and/or Dendrite with their own proprietary modifications on top. Element hasn't used their power to take the vast majority of their modifications private so far. If Element decides to go proprietary, which they could already decide to do , then the community is now left to fork an `AGPL-3.0` proj…
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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 b…
y'all are trying to get this shit IETF standardized and cram Matrix interop through via DMA while tying down your reference implementation, think about how that looks. that code should be as permissive and easy to integrate with as possible! who wants to pay a protection racket to an organization who's proven itself this fickle?
sure sure, enclose dendrite and the Element product family, things you explicitly built for scaling the matrix.org server and "Element the product" but Synapse should always have been seen as a loss-leader, a hulking mass of Tornado code that says "here's how you could implement this standard and it works well enough for operators of small or medium sized communities but wouldn't it be nice if you did it this more sustainable/scalable way? give us a call"
It just shows to me a lack of creativity or courage and instead says "well we parted ways with our corporate sponsor a few years ago without enough of a business plan and now we're hungry"
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…
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…
> It makes it clear they intend to ship under the AGPLv3
The blog post says literally:
"or by contacting Element for an alternative license."
So, that's what's on their mind. And that's for a fee [1].
(Not saying anyone is doing anything wrong — I'm using AGPL myself for some software I'm developing, + a CLA.)
[1] See this comment below: "The reason for the CLA is purely to allow us to sell AGPL exceptions", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38181368
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…
> > 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 The blog post says literally: "or by contacting Element for an alternative license." So, that's what's on their mind. And that's for a fee [1]. (Not saying anyone is doing anything wrong — I'm using AGPL myself for some software I'm developing, + a CLA.) [1] See this com…