Element The company and lead developer behind the decentralized communication protocol known as Matrix, has announced a significant licensing change that will make the open source project a little less attractive to companies looking to build on top of it.
The London-based company revealed that the Matrix central server, Synapse; your alternative server implementation dendrites; and several related server-side projects, such as Sydent identity server, and the rest are moving from permissive mode Apache 2.0 License to Affero General Public License (AGPL) v3.
Client-side projects developed by Element will not be affected by these changes.
Cost
Element said the cost of maintaining Matrix, to which it claims to make more than 95% of all code contributions, has forced it to rethink its strategy and create a "level playing field." This comes at a time when decentralization and interoperability are becoming increasing priorities for governments, businesses and consumers in general.
"Today we have reached a crossroads: we have made Matrix a huge success, but Element is losing its ability to compete in the ecosystem it has created," Element wrote in a entry in your blog. “It is difficult for Element to innovate and adapt as quickly as companies whose business model is to develop proprietary products and services based on Matrix without the responsibility and costs of maintaining the majority of Matrix. To be fair to our customers, we need to be able to focus more on them and their specific needs.”
In the coming days, Element said it will introduce new repositories under its organization's GitHub domain which contains forks of those that currently exist on the Matrix.org GitHub domain.
Enter the Matrix
As a brief summary, Matrix was initially developed within a software company. Amdocs by Matthew Hodgson and Amandine Le Pape in 2014, before leaving Amdocs to focus on growing Matrix as an independent open source project. In parallel, the duo also attempted to commercialize Matrix, originally through a company called New Vector, which was later folded. renamed to Element. About five years ago, Hodgson and Le Pape also launched the Matrix.org Foundation to support everything related to Matrix, including protecting its intellectual property, managing donations, and advancing the Matrix protocol.
Element is therefore essentially the flagship model of Matrix, used by companies and governments seeking more secure messaging and internal communications than those offered by American tech giants. And anyone is free to use the underlying Matrix protocol to create their own decentralized applications. For example, in 2021. the agency responsible for the digitalization of the German healthcare system The transition to the Matrix began so that thousands of individual entities, from hospitals to insurance companies to clinics, could communicate with each other, regardless of which Matrix-based application they used.
As Europe presses ahead with new regulations stipulating that big tech platforms must make their messaging apps interact with each other, and the Twitter debacle sheds light on the need for social networks that don't block users, this has positioned companies as well as Element, and the Matrix protocol that it develops, with force.
The Matrix project recently announced that at least 115 million users communicate through the protocol, almost double the previous year. That same day, Automattic, parent company of WordPress.com, revealed that it had purchased all-in-one messaging app Texts.com for $50 million, building on other efforts it had made recently to embrace interoperability, including purchasing an ActivityPub plugin to help blogs join the decentralized “Fediverse.” It's also worth noting that Automattic has invested in Element in several funding rounds over the years.
All of this brings us to today, with Element changing the terms of commitment, placing greater responsibility on developers to contribute to the project... or pay Element for a commercial license to continue using it.
Synapse is the most used Matrix server implementation and is responsible for handling user accounts, message history, chat rooms among other functions. In its current Apache 2.0 license, developers and companies were free to use Synapse however they wanted, including implementing it in fully proprietary closed source applications. For this reason, the Apache 2.0 license is an attractive proposition for enterprises and large technology companies, as they have more or less complete freedom.
The new AGPL license, however, is what is known as "copyleft", meaning that any derivative project that uses Synapse would have to be released under an AGPL license. Of course, it forces companies to adhere to the spirit of open source, but at the same time it is less attractive for companies that do not want to create their own open source software.
A bait for change
There have been many recent examples of companies changing their licenses to protect their business interests, including Elastic in 2021 what changed Apache Elasticsearch 2.0 to a duo of available source licenses: This was to prevent third parties like AWS from offering their own version of Elasticsearch “as a service” to their own customers, particularly when they don't contribute anything significant.
Similarly, Grafana has made the transition from its core product from Apache 2.0 to AGPL, keeping its core technology as open source projects but forcing its users to make a decision: “embrace the spirit of open source in its entirety or pay us for our hard work,” is the idea. general. And that's essentially what Element is doing now as well.
"The benefit of switching to AGPLv3 is that it forces subsequent developers to contribute back to the main project, either by releasing their modifications as open source for the benefit of the entire Matrix ecosystem or by contacting Element for an alternative license," Element wrote . . "We believe this is the fairest possible approach: preserving the free and open source nature of these Matrix implementations under an OSI-approved open source license (AGPLv3), while encouraging proprietary forks to contribute to costs." development of the underlying project.
The existing Synapse and Dendrite repositories will remain as is on Matrix.org's GitHub domain, raising the possibility that a third party may decide to fork them and continue to maintain them under their current open source license. However, that would be a resource-intensive effort that few companies would likely undertake, especially since all of Matrix's current developers will essentially work for Element now.
This also raises “what happens now” questions for the Matrix Foundation, which until now has been tasked with managing the Matrix project in a blog post Differently the Matrix Foundation said it refuses to “compete with an actively maintained open source project” and, although it is still unsure about its future, suggested that R&D could be an avenue it could explore.
"As things stand, the Foundation does not plan to begin funding active development of the current Synapse and Dendrite projects," the organization wrote. “Even if it made sense to do it, we don't have the resources. That said, the Foundation plays a role in funding research and development of open source software for the Matrix ecosystem. We believe the most effective way to fulfill that role is to address the gaps. With that principle in mind, we direct our scarce resources towards things like Trust and Safety and providing community infrastructure.”
