Synapse and Dendrite relicensed to AGPLv3
, and this is just the beginning.
It’s bad omen to criticize an opensource project, I know, but in my eyes Matrix is a big technical and organizational failure, for not having succeeded in stabilizing the protocol after a whole decade of unsuccessful explorations, and for having its leadership consistently fail to define clear goals and steer the project towards them (just get it done and working well before trying to make it “peer to peer” or “in the metaverse”).If this is the electroshock that Matrix needs to reconsider its design and directions? good for them. If that kills them? Well too bad, but it’s not like they are the only cool kid in town.
Matrix is not an “open source project”. It’s a VC funded company.
This is pretty bad in terms of software freedom. However I see why they did it.
What needs to happen is that Matrix need to focus stability and user friendliness. Right now no major group or company wants it because its a mess
Right now no major group or company wants it
most people beyond the tech field [don’t] know what Matrix isWrong
- Matrix.org - Matrix and Riot confirmed as the basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger app
- Matrix.org - Germany’s national healthcare system adopts Matrix!
Amongst others…
Why you think this is bad for software freedom?
It allows for proprietary use of a FOSS. Its true that almost all of the contributions are from element but that doesn’t make it right.
Element is in trouble and they are trying to stay afloat
Quite the opposite. Synapse was licenced under Apache licence, which allowed everybody to make proprietary fork.
Now only Element can do proprietary fork, as they are the copyright owners and owner of the work can relicence the software as they want.
The CLA that Element require to contribute changes to their Synapse version is the controversial thing. Because if you contribute, the lines of code you made are your copyright, so if Element takes at least one community contribution the would be locked to AGPL. What CLA does is that you sign off those rights.
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‘Matrix-based’ is now specified as a requirement in massive public and private sector tenders
I’m pretty sure that most people beyond the tech field know what Matrix is. At least not by name
