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by jdenning
517 days ago
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But it seems like this move incentivizes you to not improve the open source server, at least such that the open source server is always inferior to the pro version. If someone makes a new, more performant, open-source server, and it touches your bottom line then you're strongly motivated to "embrace, extend, extinguish". The thing is, we've all heard this before, and it always ends up the same. I hope you prove me wrong, but I wouldn't bet on it. |
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The idea is that we absolutely improve FOSS synapse in all ways - other than supporting enormous deployments. For instance we continue to land perf improvements to FOSS synapse and make average sized servers as snappy as conceivably possible. And all features land in FOSS synapse, etc. If we don’t it would harm the public Matrix network and we obviously don’t want that.
> If someone makes a new, more performant, open-source server, and it touches your bottom line then you're strongly motivated to "embrace, extend, extinguish".
Rather than EEE, I’d expect us to simply compete with that server - adding more features, better perf, better commercial support, etc. For Matrix’s sake, I hope that we end up in that situation tbh.
> The thing is, we've all heard this before, and it always ends up the same. I hope you prove me wrong, but I wouldn't bet on it.
I think the difference is that typically folks doing this are being greedy to grow a profitable (or could-be-profitable) company as aggressively as possible. Whereas here the motive is simply to pay for our FOSS dev and get to breakeven and be able to sustainably grow Matrix for the benefit of the whole network. If in the end a bit of proprietary software is the necessary evil to get there, sobeit.
Of course this could change in future, eg if mgt changed, but that’s true of anything. But the intention is categorically not to EEE (and on the Matrix Foundation side, the governance and spec process is set up to stop Element from being able to EEE even if it wanted to).