[Arathorn]

I think your vitriol is better directed at me (as Matrix project lead & founder) rather than Josh, whose role as MD for the Foundation is to ensure it gathers $ and distributes it as effectively as possible to support Matrix. The original post here is written by Josh because he took over diplomatics with Libera to give it a fresh start as an independent, given the breakdown in trust on both sides.

In terms of Matrix dying, killed by Element: I’m afraid rumours of Matrix's death are highly exaggerated. And Element spends its life helping Matrix come to life rather than death, for better or worse.

The reason the spec trails the implementation for months is precisely the same reason that the formal HTML5 spec trails the implementations for years. It's not some grand conspiracy that Mozilla ships CSS Flexbox behind a vendor prefix for years (decades?) ahead of the feature being finalised in the spec. Instead: the point is that you get to play with the spec change in the wild, prove that it works, iterate on the design, and then eventually propose it for merge into the spec itself.

Personally, I think this is one of the bits of Matrix that we've got right. The spec process doesn't evolve as fast as it could, but that might well be a feature (just like it's a feature that HTML5 moves slowly too, but doesn't stop folks experimenting all over the place on it). https://spec.matrix.org/proposals/ explains the full process and the workflow, in case you want to understand it.

[Zetobal]

If your intention was to suffocate competition you got it right.

[Arathorn]

If you're talking about Element switching its contributions to Synapse from Apache to AGPL, the rationale is that folks who want to commercialise Synapse will either have to a) opensource their changes, b) pay for an AGPL exception from Element, c) use a different server (e.g. Apache-licensed Conduit from https://conduit.rs) or d) write their own server.

This hardly feels like suffocating competition.