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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 Found

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 2y 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 2y 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.
  - ants_everywhere 2y ago
    If you wanted to make a donation to everyone, you'd use a copyleft license. The point of permissive licenses is to grant the ability to exclude people from the enjoying the benefit of improvements. I.e. they're not for creating public goods. They're grants for making it easier to create excludable goods.
    - ranger_danger 2y ago
      > The point of permissive licenses is to grant the ability to exclude people from the enjoying the benefit of improvements. I find this comment to be incredibly disingenuous, and just plain false. Excluding people would only be done if someone took a permissive license and then re-licensed it to something more closed... you've entirely made up a malicious assumption about what people do with the software. And you're even assuming people ARE doing something like this with the software. A permissive license simply lets you do just about anything you want with it. Some will agree this is more "free". But, freedom TO vs freedom FROM is a common argument.
      - ants_everywhere 2y ago
        You don't need to re-license permissively licensed software to include it in your code. Apple, as far as I know, doesn't release the FreeBSD fork they use in Mac OS. Companies generally use a ton of permissively licensed software and don't release forks of it under any license because the entire point of the license is that you can take the code, make modifications, and you have no obligations to give anything back when doing so. There was an attempt to rebrand "free software" -- meaning software focused on user freedom -- as "open source" -- referring to software permissively licensed for use by corporations. This was the point of the OSI. [0] > The “open source” label was created at a strategy session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California, shortly after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code....The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label “free software.” Brainstorming for this new label eventually converged on the term “open source”, originally suggested by Christine Peterson. So literally a decision by a committee of industry folks to play down the idea of freedoms or giving back and focus instead on the business case. So they killed the ethical argument that favored copyleft licenses in favor of the business argument that favored permissive ones. Now people are saying "hey it's unfair that you're not giving back." Fair enough, but that's an ethical argument. That's what the OSI was trying to get rid of. The OSI approach has its place. We wouldn't have Mac OS or Google or Meta without it. But its place is allowing industry to standardize and to reduce costs. Those benefit consumers indirectly since we have fewer competing standards and reduced development costs can imply reduced end user costs. But that only works because each company can make improvements and exclude others from using those improvements; i.e. they can make proprietary improvements. [0] https://opensource.org/history https://opensource.org/history
freedomben 2y 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 2y 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.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    I don't disagree, but I think the bigger risk is just that big companies who can and should throw some financial support your way, just won't if it's permissively licensed. They've demonstrated repeatedly that they'll just take the software and use it, including making (sometimes substantial) money on it, and none of that will flow back up.
- capitol_ 2y ago
  The LGPL hits the sweet spot for libraries in my opinion.
9283409232 2y ago
I understand now. Thanks for clearing that up for me.

ants_everywhere 2y 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 2y 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.
- ants_everywhere 2y ago
  If you wanted to make a donation to everyone, you'd use a copyleft license. The point of permissive licenses is to grant the ability to exclude people from the enjoying the benefit of improvements. I.e. they're not for creating public goods. They're grants for making it easier to create excludable goods.
  - ranger_danger 2y ago
    > The point of permissive licenses is to grant the ability to exclude people from the enjoying the benefit of improvements. I find this comment to be incredibly disingenuous, and just plain false. Excluding people would only be done if someone took a permissive license and then re-licensed it to something more closed... you've entirely made up a malicious assumption about what people do with the software. And you're even assuming people ARE doing something like this with the software. A permissive license simply lets you do just about anything you want with it. Some will agree this is more "free". But, freedom TO vs freedom FROM is a common argument.
    - ants_everywhere 2y ago
      You don't need to re-license permissively licensed software to include it in your code. Apple, as far as I know, doesn't release the FreeBSD fork they use in Mac OS. Companies generally use a ton of permissively licensed software and don't release forks of it under any license because the entire point of the license is that you can take the code, make modifications, and you have no obligations to give anything back when doing so. There was an attempt to rebrand "free software" -- meaning software focused on user freedom -- as "open source" -- referring to software permissively licensed for use by corporations. This was the point of the OSI. [0] > The “open source” label was created at a strategy session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California, shortly after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code....The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label “free software.” Brainstorming for this new label eventually converged on the term “open source”, originally suggested by Christine Peterson. So literally a decision by a committee of industry folks to play down the idea of freedoms or giving back and focus instead on the business case. So they killed the ethical argument that favored copyleft licenses in favor of the business argument that favored permissive ones. Now people are saying "hey it's unfair that you're not giving back." Fair enough, but that's an ethical argument. That's what the OSI was trying to get rid of. The OSI approach has its place. We wouldn't have Mac OS or Google or Meta without it. But its place is allowing industry to standardize and to reduce costs. Those benefit consumers indirectly since we have fewer competing standards and reduced development costs can imply reduced end user costs. But that only works because each company can make improvements and exclude others from using those improvements; i.e. they can make proprietary improvements. [0] https://opensource.org/history https://opensource.org/history

freedomben 2y 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 2y 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.
- freedomben 2y ago
  I don't disagree, but I think the bigger risk is just that big companies who can and should throw some financial support your way, just won't if it's permissively licensed. They've demonstrated repeatedly that they'll just take the software and use it, including making (sometimes substantial) money on it, and none of that will flow back up.
capitol_ 2y ago
The LGPL hits the sweet spot for libraries in my opinion.

9283409232 2y ago

I understand now. Thanks for clearing that up for me.