The Matrix.org Foundation is a non-profit and only relies on donations to operate. Its core mission is to maintain the Matrix Specification, but it does much more than that.
Non-profit… only relies on donations…
This was taken quite literally at the bottom of that article.
The context in the article is important. Similar to what FUTO preaches-- people don’t donate. That’s why corporate solutions usually win. Better to charge a bit of money so we can have nice things.
I used to have $5 on Patreon… but it seemed dead. I wrote a message asking what’s up, but no response.
The whole org is a shitshow from what little pieces of info I have, still waiting for Dendride, hoping the front-ends will stabilize.
I’ve been using Matrix selfhosted as my primary communication tool since 2017, not connecting it to matrix.org (tried once, deleted instance afterwards), and I love it, but the org… meh.
People deserve to get paid on their work, and currently the best way to do that and survive in America is to work on completely closest source products that don’t respect their users. Open source is probably the most respectful but doesn’t work well as a business. We need something that works reliably for delivering real products that will achieve mass adoption. I think these source available licenses are that.
Non-profit… only relies on donations…
This was taken quite literally at the bottom of that article.
At some point donations become unsustainable. Like literally their options are to start charging or close up shop.
The smarter thing to do would be to rotate instances on sign-up to decentralize the Matrix-verse but it’s probably too late now.
Ads win out in the end, more lucrative for the business model, and thats usually when enshittification occurs.
The context in the article is important. Similar to what FUTO preaches-- people don’t donate. That’s why corporate solutions usually win. Better to charge a bit of money so we can have nice things.
I used to have $5 on Patreon… but it seemed dead. I wrote a message asking what’s up, but no response.
The whole org is a shitshow from what little pieces of info I have, still waiting for Dendride, hoping the front-ends will stabilize.
I’ve been using Matrix selfhosted as my primary communication tool since 2017, not connecting it to matrix.org (tried once, deleted instance afterwards), and I love it, but the org… meh.
The same people that enshitified open source licences ?
People deserve to get paid on their work, and currently the best way to do that and survive in America is to work on completely closest source products that don’t respect their users. Open source is probably the most respectful but doesn’t work well as a business. We need something that works reliably for delivering real products that will achieve mass adoption. I think these source available licenses are that.
You know what else source-available licences do ?
Put restrictions like you cannot make money from the forks. Forks are the lifeblood of FOSS.