It's a SaaS offering hosting for FOSS. If you want to be able to patch and change and manage the running homeserver, than you're just manually managing the homeserver, which would be self-hosting! Which is a great thing to do, but then there's no point in buying this service, just rent a VPS. The entire point of this service is that they do the management for you - if you would rather do the management yourself, you totally can. People running their own homeserver are very much first-class citizens on the Matrix network, and managing it yourself is cheaper. The extra expense here is entirely to get them to manage it for you, which seems to be the opposite of what you want.
> The entire point of this service is that they do the management for you - if you would rather do the management yourself, you totally can.
I want them to manage it and also let me upload patches.
I want the setup, DNS, storage, hosting, all the sysadmin stuff... and still be able to patch the software. I want them to be able to `git pull` an update over my patches, and have it carry forward after updates.
I want the agency of FOSS but still pay for the management, simply put.
> It's a SaaS offering hosting for FOSS.
I can't modify the software, so it's not free software. If they provided some sort of "patch app store" or patch download, it would be free software.
Interesting - do you know of any service that does this?
I'm curious as to how exactly you want it to work. Rereading your comment, I agree DNS and backups make sense, but upgrading the application itself still seems somewhat fraught. If your patch doesn't apply on an update, what should happen? Don't upgrade and send you an email? Do they upgrade the rest of the system it runs on? Do you want to be able to run other programs on the server as well, and if so, how would distro updates work?
I think we disagree pretty fundamentally, but you've got me curious now about how your idea would work, and I'd like to hear more.
As amusing as it'd be to let people patch their synapses with buggy/vulnerable code and wreak havoc in our datacenter, we're not going to. If you want to run a custom server, run it yourself.
> As amusing as it'd be to let people patch their synapses with buggy/vulnerable code and wreak havoc in our datacenter, we're not going to.
Each Matrix instance is isolated and "dedicated", so one can only wreak havoc on their own instance. Just provide backups and revert when people mess up.
