Wow, this has definitely been a great year for Matrix! It's very encouraging to see that big names are adopting the standard within their software.
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well, the problem is that while big folks are adopting Matrix, it looks like we have a nightmare feedback loop in progress: now that Matrix is good enough for everyone to run it at scale, most of the commercial orgs doing so don’t feel the urge to route any of the $ they get from selling Matrix services back to the core team (or to Element, which fund 98% of the core team today). In fact, the better we’ve made Matrix, the less likely folks are to fund the core team to help them run it!
So while superficially it looks good, we are not in a great position. Element has had to do a 15% layoff (impacting the Matrix core team) due to losing business to non-Matrix specialists who claim they can provide Matrix solutions “because it’s all open source”.
Therefore either we need to persuade those folks to support the Foundation to keep core dev going - or Element ends up forced into an increasingly open core model in order to keep the lights on, which is hardly in the spirit of open source or Matrix. :(
Why in the world would anybody use Matrix if you made it closed-source (as you've so cleverly disguised it, """open""" core)? I use it daily to talk to pretty much everyone I know. It isn't as good as other open-core messaging projects. You guys based your entire value pitch on "OtherPlatform but Actually in the Spirit of Open Source."
You aren't as good as Signal at being secure.
https://nebuchadnezzar-megolm.github.io/
You aren't as good as Telegram at being useful or comfortable, and you're especially not as good for groups.
Signal is in practice open core, given how little they do source releases of the server. Telegram keeps their clients open source, mostly, but not the server.
The value you provide is from the fact that it's open source and also easy to develop for, but you aren't even as easy to develop for as IRC.
Laying in bed with the wolves of capitalism is stupid for a project like yours. Bid on government projects and grants, fundraise based on features, or figure out projects that benefit from economies of scale that would leave you competitive (P2P Matrix dedicated hardware would be an easy sell to some governments and much of your audience) while not closed. Don't fool yourself into thinking destroying the thing that makes your creation valuable is the way to succeed. It's not.
If you've already started with layoffs, the damage might already be done.
> Why in the world would anybody use Matrix if you made it closed-source (as you've so cleverly disguised it, """open""" core)?
Matrix is a protocol. People can use it whatever the license of the implementations. "Open core" means that implementations would have to start holding back the stuff useful for commercial deployments as proprietary. Unless you happen to be running a deployment for a government or a similar-sized enterprise, I suspect you'd be unaffected.
> You aren't as good as Signal at being secure.
All software has vulnerabilities, and anyone who claims otherwise is lying. Signal has had spectacular disasters (much worse than the RHUL stuff, imo) like https://thehackerblog.com/i-too-like-to-live-dangerously-acc....
> You aren't as good as Telegram at being useful or comfortable, and you're especially not as good for groups.
Agreed. This is why the original post fixates on how to address that.
> The value you provide is from the fact that it's open source and also easy to develop for, but you aren't even as easy to develop for as IRC.
Respectfully, that's bollocks.
> If you've already started with layoffs, the damage might already be done.
Merry Christmas to you too :)
A very basic IRC client can be made literally with pretty much ten lines, netcat, head, echo, cat and a named pipe. It's not bollocks. IRC is super easy to develop for.
Even doing basic stuff with Matrix, on the other hand, while still better than most, requires a lot more effort. The docs are decent, though.
Here's me literally writing a working Matrix client by typing ~7 lines of bash into a HN comment box: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20948530