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Comment by 9283409232

2 days ago

Wasn't there a big falling out between the Matrix team and Element or am I misremembering what happened?

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9283409232

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Arathorn  2 days ago

Element is the company formed by the team who created Matrix to work on Matrix, almost all of whom are still there; there is no falling out :)

The Matrix Foundation is the non-profit set up by the Matrix team in 2018 to keep Matrix itself independent of Element and other Matrix vendors - to act as a steward of the protocol and a standards body. Originally Element donated almost all of its code on Matrix to the Foundation (e.g. Synapse, the original Matrix server) as permissive Apache-licensed FOSS, assuming that if Matrix was successful, folks would want to fund it.

In practice, by 2023, Matrix was very successful... but it transpired that the vast majority of folks commercially building on the Foundation's Apache licensed code failed to route any funding back to the Foundation (as the hosting body) or to Element (as the primary code contributor), despite many polite requests. As a result, there wasn't enough $ to pay folks at Element to keep working on the core Matrix projects as their day job. So, to keep the lights on, Element stopped donating their work to the Foundation, and changed license to non-permissive AGPLv3 in order to sell AGPL-exceptions to the folks commercialising it. This has helped the situation somewhat (although Element isn't at breakeven yet). Meanwhile, it's left the Foundation focused on governance, the Matrix standards process, trust & safety and hosting core libraries like E2EE and matrix-rust-sdk.

There's no beef between the Foundation and Element over this. In a utopia the projects would certainly have stayed as Apache licensed code in the Foundation - but then again, other standards bodies like W3C or XSF don't publish code these days: it's a phase that a given protocol grows out of once third party organisations get busy building implementations.

Disclaimer: i'm conflicted on this, being project lead/co-founder for Matrix, and then CEO/CTO at Element.

  • ants_everywhere  2 days ago

    I say this all the time, but the point of the permissive licenses is you're making a donation to private industry.

    There are reasons to do this, for example if you believe that private industry adopting some technology is good and you want to make that happen.

    But people keep seeming surprised by the fact that these donations aren't reciprocated (or at least people don't seem to plan for them to never be reciprocated). It sounds to me like the AGPL license was more consistent with their goals.

    • bigstrat2003  2 days ago

      Not quite. The point of permissive licenses is that you're making a donation to everyone. If private industry uses your donation fine, if not that's fine too. But it's certainly true that if you have a problem with private industry using something you freely gave them, permissive licenses aren't for you.

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  • freedomben  2 days ago

    FWIW I think AGPL is the right license choice for you. The more experience I gain the more I lean toward AGPL for products, MIT for libraries.

    • bigstrat2003  2 days ago

      I don't think there's anything wrong with permissive license for a piece of software. But if you're running a business that needs to pay developers, it's really not a good idea. Very few, if any, people are going to donate to your project out of a sense of duty to help you keep the lights on.

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