4 ms·

What endgame do you think your company has other than eventually selling out its userbase in one way or another ?

Arathorn 6y ago
Matrix isn’t a company, it’s a non-profit foundation, expressly set up to protect its users: see https://matrix.org/foundation https://matrix.org/foundation for details. Riot is a Matrix client made by New Vector (https://vector.im https://vector.im), the company started by the team who originally created Matrix. The endgame there is to sell Matrix hosting (https://modular.im https://modular.im), support and other value-added services for Matrix. We are categorically not going to sell out our userbase - and we have no reason to; if we did, they’d just move to a different Matrix service provider.
- seemslegit 6y ago
  I can imagine keybase delivering a similar statement back in the day, good luck.
  - Legogris 6y ago
    I think a key difference here is fully open and collaborative specs, with Apache-licensed reference implementations for server and client that they dogfood themselves. It's also getting federated. So protocol, tech and network can live on regardless of who's running the servers people are using or driving the development of implementations.
    - seemslegit 6y ago
      Until one day the foundation decides federation is not in the best interest of the community, the standards and reference implementation start to reflect closely the interests of the leading player[s] with other implementations having to play catchup. It would have been a very cynical take if it wasn't business as usual in our industry.
      - Arathorn 6y ago
        That would be like the W3C declaring that interoperable hypertext is not in the best interest of the Web community. Or the Linux Foundation declaring that the Linux being open source is not in the best interest of the community. It would be utterly sabotaging, and in the case of the Matrix Foundation, the Foundation is independently regulated by the UK Government as a Community Interest Company - and so anyone would be welcome to complain to the regulator (via https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-of-the-regulator-of-community-interest-companies/about/complaints-procedure https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-of-the-re...) that the Foundation was breaking its charter, and the Directors would face fines and/or legal action. This is why Matrix is in a fundamentally different situation to Keybase, or Zoom, or pretty much any other communication project out there, and why we spent so much time (and money) setting it up properly as a non-profit Foundation.
      - ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
        your scenario really makes no sense to me, maybe you're not familiar with what Matrix is?
  - dancemethis 6y ago
    Keybase was always grey area since the server-side was proprietary. Matrix is 100% Free Software and you can run a server yourself.

Matrix isn’t a company, it’s a non-profit foundation, expressly set up to protect its users: see https://matrix.org/foundation https://matrix.org/foundation for details. Riot is a Matrix client made by New Vector (https://vector.im https://vector.im), the company started by the team who originally created Matrix. The endgame there is to sell Matrix hosting (https://modular.im https://modular.im), support and other value-added services for Matrix. We are categorically not going to sell out our userbase - and we have no reason to; if we did, they’d just move to a different Matrix service provider.

seemslegit 6y ago
I can imagine keybase delivering a similar statement back in the day, good luck.
- Legogris 6y ago
  I think a key difference here is fully open and collaborative specs, with Apache-licensed reference implementations for server and client that they dogfood themselves. It's also getting federated. So protocol, tech and network can live on regardless of who's running the servers people are using or driving the development of implementations.
  - seemslegit 6y ago
    Until one day the foundation decides federation is not in the best interest of the community, the standards and reference implementation start to reflect closely the interests of the leading player[s] with other implementations having to play catchup. It would have been a very cynical take if it wasn't business as usual in our industry.
    - Arathorn 6y ago
      That would be like the W3C declaring that interoperable hypertext is not in the best interest of the Web community. Or the Linux Foundation declaring that the Linux being open source is not in the best interest of the community. It would be utterly sabotaging, and in the case of the Matrix Foundation, the Foundation is independently regulated by the UK Government as a Community Interest Company - and so anyone would be welcome to complain to the regulator (via https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-of-the-regulator-of-community-interest-companies/about/complaints-procedure https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-of-the-re...) that the Foundation was breaking its charter, and the Directors would face fines and/or legal action. This is why Matrix is in a fundamentally different situation to Keybase, or Zoom, or pretty much any other communication project out there, and why we spent so much time (and money) setting it up properly as a non-profit Foundation.
    - ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
      your scenario really makes no sense to me, maybe you're not familiar with what Matrix is?
- dancemethis 6y ago
  Keybase was always grey area since the server-side was proprietary. Matrix is 100% Free Software and you can run a server yourself.