Technology

In today's episode of Kill The Messenger, Matrix co-founder Matthew Hodgson reveals how full of bullshit is the writer of the original article.

The messages were published in the Office of the Matrix.org Foundation room: https://matrix.to/#%2F%21sWpnrYUMmaBrlqfRdn%3Amatrix.org%2F%24XpQe-vmtB7j0Uy1TPCvMVCSCW63Xxw_jwy3fflw7EMQ%3Fvia=matrix.org&via=element.io

https://paper.wf/alexia/matrix-is-cooked is fascinatingly incorrect

Until the 6th of November 2023 when they—in their words—moved to a different repository and to the AGPL license. In reality, the Foundation did not know this was coming, and a huge support net was pulled away under their feet.

fwiw, the Foundation had a front-row seat in the fact that Element (as incorporated by the folks who created Matrix) had donated $$M to the Foundation over the years, but wasn't going to survive if it kept giving all its work away as apache-licensed code - which in turn would have been catastrophic for the Foundation.

Yes, the high expenses for the Matrix.org homeserver are largely because they are still managed by Element, just not as donated work but instead like with any other customer.

nope, Element passes the hardware costs (and a fraction of the people costs) of running the matrix.org server to the Foundation without any overheads or markup at all.

Either way it shows that Element is seemingly cashing in on selling ,Matrix to governments and B2B as a SaaS solution without it going back to the foundation

Element has literally put tens of millions into the foundation, and is continuing to do so - while some of the costs get passed to the Foundation, Element donates a bunch too (e.g. by funding a large chunk of the Matrix conference as the anchor sponsor, and by donating time all over the place to help support trust & safety etc)

At the same time I can't help but think that this could have been prevented. Even Matthew himself recognizes that putting the future on Matrix on the line with VC funding and alike was not the best idea for the health of Matrix.

No, even Matthew knows that Matrix would never have been funded without routing the VC funding from Element into... building Matrix. We tried to fund it originally purely as a non-profit, but failed (just as it's a nightmare to raise non-profit for the Foundation today even now that Matrix exists and is successful!). If you need to raise serious $ for an ambitious project, you either need to get lucky with a billionaire (as Signal did with Brian Acton) or you have to raise on the for-profit side. Perhaps it would have have been best for Matrix to grow organically, but I suspect that if it did, it would have failed miserably - instead, it succeeded because we already had a team of ~12 people who could crack on and jump-start it if they could work on it as their dayjob; the team who subsequently founded Element.

Ultimately, for-profit companies will do what makes them profit, not what's the best option. Unless the best option happens to coincide with making the most profit.

No, Element is not profitable. Nor is it trying to maximise profit. Right now it's trying to survive and get sustainable and profit-neutral (i.e. break-even) - while doing everything it can to help keep Matrix healthy and successful too (given if Matrix fails, Element fails too).

Unfortunately, supporting the foundation through anything more than “in spirit” and a platinum membership is out of their budget, apparently. I think that morally they owe a lot more than that.

wow.

the FUD level is absolutely astonishing, and I really wonder what the genesis of this is

so, absolutely, spectacularly, depressing

this, my friends, is why we can't have nice things.

In response to an other person suggesting that the publisher is also known as a reasonable person on the platform:

Interesting, the matrix handle that seems behind this blog seems always to have been quite a reasonable person

somewhat why i’m wondering what the backstory is, and whether this is an unfortunate example of spicy lies outpacing the boring truth