A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
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Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
#2I’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?
Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
#3Well, 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.
Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
#4I’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?
They say the original repositories predate Element. But no idea on who owns them or who's being forked _from_?
Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
#5I’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?
From how I understand this: Synapse and Dendrite were Foundation projects, but the contributions came almost exclusively from Element.
Element is forking the two projects, and is redirecting their maintenance efforts towards their own forks. This means that the Foundation versions of the projects will not receive active maintenance anymore, and the Foundation does not have the funding to invest in the development themselves.
It's a de-facto handoff, unless someone wants to invest significant resources in development of the pre-fork versions of the projects.
Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
#6So 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 future of the project. So far, that entity has been Element, and the features being worked on in the client and server applications have been and will be influenced by the customers of Element and the sponsors of the Foundation (for an example of this influence, see the biometric/PIN lock introduced in the Element X mobile applications).
Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
#7Such a casual blog post for what is essentially the announcement of the death of the matrix project.
Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
#8So, what's the next best alternative to Matrix?
Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
#9This 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.
Re: A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends
#10I’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?
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 now Element wants to be able to sell licenses for the projects, or get contributions. See https://element.io/blog/element-to-adopt-agplv3/ for more details.