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I sincerely wish you good luck with building -- hope people find this new product useful. This bait-and-switch leaves a really bad taste for me though; I now f

I sincerely wish you good luck with building -- hope people find this new product useful. This bait-and-switch leaves a really bad taste for me though; I now feel silly for having advocated for Matrix, and will cease henceforth. You can lament the free-rider problem all you like, but suddenly making it a big deal now betrays that you do not take seriously enough your own promises, and were clueless about the fundamentals all this while. This is not meant to be vindictive (I wish Matrix success as a product; it's certainly useful), but simply making clear that the expectations and standards are different for a "community" -vs- simply a business that sells a product. It seems to me like this disqualifies Matrix from consideration for "public infrastructure" IMHO. It would have been better if the differentiation between the paid and free versions wasn't scaling, but some other features not critical for public use (or provided as a non-free plugin), but something that enterprises would consider useful.

Arathorn 2y ago
> It seems to me like this disqualifies Matrix from consideration for "public infrastructure" IMHO. Please don’t conflate Synapse with Matrix. Yes, if a govt has a “we must only spend money on pure open source products” policy then they won’t buy Synapse Pro. Perhaps they’ll end up scaling by running hundreds of separate smaller FOSS instances instead. Perhaps other server implementations will step up as FOSS (and probably promptly be undermined by the same freerider problem). > It would have been better if the differentiation between the paid and free versions wasn't scaling, but some other features not critical for public use (or provided as a non-free plugin), but something that enterprises would consider useful. We’ve tried that (https://element.io/server-suite https://element.io/server-suite) and it hasn’t been enough.
- AAAAaccountAAAA 2y ago
  > We’ve tried that (https://element.io/server-suite https://element.io/server-suite) and it hasn’t been enough. Will this finally be enough, or will it end up so that even more features are going to be available only on the proprietary version?
  - Arathorn 2y ago
    I have no idea. I hope it’s enough. Obviously we want to keep as much implementation work as FOSS as possible.
- ssivark 2y ago
  > Yes, if a govt has a “we must only spend money on pure open source products” policy then they won’t buy Synapse Pro. I imagine anything else would be quite irresponsible in a geopolitical climate where sanctions could pull the rug out on critical communications infrastructure. eg: https://element.io/blog/senators-implore-department-of-defense-to-expand-the-use-of-matrix/ https://element.io/blog/senators-implore-department-of-defen... If Matrix is just "yet another service (SaaS)" competing with Slack, MS Teams and the like it becomes a much less compelling argument for public infrastructure. You better have a product that is so much superior in functionality that it is worth the switching cost for customers.
  - Arathorn 2y ago
    > I imagine anything else would be quite irresponsible in a geopolitical climate where sanctions could pull the rug out on critical communications infrastructure. I'm not sure I follow the logic here: Governments can self-host their own infrastructure and avoid potential sanctions without it having to be open source. Meanwhile, empirically, all Governments continue to spend eyewatering amounts of proprietary software - whether that's from Microsoft or Adobe or Google or whoever. It's excruciating that in practice, only a miniscule proportion of that gets routed to open source - and even then, it's typically on a "we'll pay for features, but not maintenance" basis. So I'm not seeing any “we must only spend money on pure open source products” in practice; the closest is "if we're paying for something to be built, it needs to be open source" (which makes perfect sense, imo). > If Matrix is just "yet another service (SaaS)" competing with Slack, MS Teams and the like it becomes a much less compelling argument for public infrastructure. Matrix is an open protocol - it's not remotely "yet another SaaS". There's already a selection of different server implementations; some FOSS, some proprietary. You can switch between servers, and switch between clients. The fact that one server has added acceleration to enable successful massive-scale implementations and kept that as proprietary (for now) does not undermine the protocol - or stop govts from purchasing it, imo. I think we may need to agree to disagree on this one tho :)
    - ssivark 2y ago
      Thanks for engaging. Your comments point to a different mental model for thinking about government procurement of software. Not sure whether I'm convinced, but it's certainly food for thought.

Arathorn 2y ago

> It seems to me like this disqualifies Matrix from consideration for "public infrastructure" IMHO. Please don’t conflate Synapse with Matrix. Yes, if a govt has a “we must only spend money on pure open source products” policy then they won’t buy Synapse Pro. Perhaps they’ll end up scaling by running hundreds of separate smaller FOSS instances instead. Perhaps other server implementations will step up as FOSS (and probably promptly be undermined by the same freerider problem). > It would have been better if the differentiation between the paid and free versions wasn't scaling, but some other features not critical for public use (or provided as a non-free plugin), but something that enterprises would consider useful. We’ve tried that (https://element.io/server-suite https://element.io/server-suite) and it hasn’t been enough.

AAAAaccountAAAA 2y ago
> We’ve tried that (https://element.io/server-suite https://element.io/server-suite) and it hasn’t been enough. Will this finally be enough, or will it end up so that even more features are going to be available only on the proprietary version?
- Arathorn 2y ago
  I have no idea. I hope it’s enough. Obviously we want to keep as much implementation work as FOSS as possible.
ssivark 2y ago
> Yes, if a govt has a “we must only spend money on pure open source products” policy then they won’t buy Synapse Pro. I imagine anything else would be quite irresponsible in a geopolitical climate where sanctions could pull the rug out on critical communications infrastructure. eg: https://element.io/blog/senators-implore-department-of-defense-to-expand-the-use-of-matrix/ https://element.io/blog/senators-implore-department-of-defen... If Matrix is just "yet another service (SaaS)" competing with Slack, MS Teams and the like it becomes a much less compelling argument for public infrastructure. You better have a product that is so much superior in functionality that it is worth the switching cost for customers.
- Arathorn 2y ago
  > I imagine anything else would be quite irresponsible in a geopolitical climate where sanctions could pull the rug out on critical communications infrastructure. I'm not sure I follow the logic here: Governments can self-host their own infrastructure and avoid potential sanctions without it having to be open source. Meanwhile, empirically, all Governments continue to spend eyewatering amounts of proprietary software - whether that's from Microsoft or Adobe or Google or whoever. It's excruciating that in practice, only a miniscule proportion of that gets routed to open source - and even then, it's typically on a "we'll pay for features, but not maintenance" basis. So I'm not seeing any “we must only spend money on pure open source products” in practice; the closest is "if we're paying for something to be built, it needs to be open source" (which makes perfect sense, imo). > If Matrix is just "yet another service (SaaS)" competing with Slack, MS Teams and the like it becomes a much less compelling argument for public infrastructure. Matrix is an open protocol - it's not remotely "yet another SaaS". There's already a selection of different server implementations; some FOSS, some proprietary. You can switch between servers, and switch between clients. The fact that one server has added acceleration to enable successful massive-scale implementations and kept that as proprietary (for now) does not undermine the protocol - or stop govts from purchasing it, imo. I think we may need to agree to disagree on this one tho :)
  - ssivark 2y ago
    Thanks for engaging. Your comments point to a different mental model for thinking about government procurement of software. Not sure whether I'm convinced, but it's certainly food for thought.