The situation has been brewing throughout the last year, but as the post tried to explain, we’ve seen a pattern where Matrix has become much more popular… but m

The situation has been brewing throughout the last year, but as the post tried to explain, we’ve seen a pattern where Matrix has become much more popular… but massive deployments choose to DIY or work with local vendors rather than work with the core team. This is a major shift from the past; perversely it turns out that the reward for the core team for having improved synapse’s scalability and performance and generally improved Matrix is to undermine our primary route of funding. The initial “funding Matrix via the Matrix.org Foundation” blogpost got very little feedback (other than complaints from the community that it was biased against indie contributors participating in the foundation, which was not remotely the intention). Meanwhile it’s become increasingly apparent that while it’s viable for a 3rd party matrix vendor to build a sustainable business on top of Matrix… it’s not so viable if you are also shouldering the costs of almost all the underlying core Matrix dev. Hence trying to explain to folks unambiguously that we need a sustainable way to support the Foundation, and sending up distress flares in the xmas blog post. I am very bemused that some of the reaction has been resentment about the blog post being “scary” and “unsettling”. I’m afraid that we default to transparency, and while this may seem abrupt, this is because we’ve shifted our assumption that large govt-scale deployments will support the core team by default (unless we explain very unambiguously how important it is.) Sorry if this upset anyone’s christmas, but imagine how the core team feels (not to mention those whose jobs were impacted).