> The bridge itself is not going to drop into the open-source Matrix code any time soon. Hodgson explained: "This is an entirely new bridge that we've built as Element exclusively for Element Matrix Services, which is the SaaS hosting platform we provide in order to keep the lights on for Matrix development and for Element in general.
> "We are taking the position that people who are rich enough to buy into Team's ecosystem and throw lots of money to Microsoft might as well throw a little bit of money to Element to keep funding Matrix development."
Oh man, what an unfortunate view. As a user, I wanted the freedom to set this thing up so I could have a teams client that doesn't use 100% of my CPU at idle, but of course I am an end user at my company. It doesn't matter how deep my personal pockets are, I'm not able to make a company-wide decision. It's impossible for me to pay them for this, even if I wanted to.
I think that's a mischaracterization of what's happening.
Matrix the protocol is fully open source. Element the matrix client is fully open source. Synapse the matrix server is fully open source. Dendrite, the next generation matrix server, is fully open source.
All of these are developed by the New Vector team. The only thing here that isn't open source is an external bridge to microsoft teams, a platform that itself is already closed source.
In this case, "open core" would probably look like the Matrix team closing the Element client and Dendrite homeserver, and then extending them with closed matrix event types.
Honestly, they could probably pull it off, but I doubt they want to go that route. They've been dedicated to federation since the beginning.
Yeah, "Open core" doesn't have a great definition. Certainly I agree this is a pretty contained feature, and I shouldn't have written "switching ... to an open core model" given the evidence in this thread.
But "Element Matrix Services" (aka New Vector) launching and marketing a product/feature that is not open source is AFAIK something new, and it'd be very surprising if this is the last such feature they announce.
(Before today, they were one of the very few examples I knew of a VC-funded open source company where their product remained entirely open source.)
This is definitely an "open core" business model and you were right to call it what it is. While right now, the "core" is still fairly large and the proprietary addons are fairly small, it is not hard to see New Vector making more features proprietary additions.
This may be a matter of definitions, but I really don't think that it's correct to describe this as open core.
First of all, Matrix itself is a non-profit foundation, and absolutely everything it does is FOSS, and accepts contributions from everywhere. The majority come from Element (formerly New Vector) though, the for-profit that the original Matrix team set up in order to work on Matrix full time.
Element has always had some closed-source bits in addition to all the FOSS work we do for Matrix. For instance, the EMS hosting platform itself (lots of stripe + kubernetes) is all proprietary and always has been. The default integration manager (codenamed Scalar) is too. And occasionally we've built random apps and bots and bridges which we chose to keep closed source - e.g. we've had a closed-source Sametime bridge for ages, and we have closed-source border gateways, cross-domain controllers, audit bots, etc too. However, *this doesn't make Matrix open core*, any more than the existence of closed-source webapps makes the Web "open core". It also doesn't make Element "open core", any more than (say) Mozilla is "open core" just because they haven't released the source for some of the random services they run too.
In an ideal world, Element would release all of its IP as FOSS - and it's quite possible that we'll do that in future. But right now we're still experimenting with the right balance.
You changed the name of the company to match the renamed client? Besides the weird use of a nonprofit to distract from your for profit business, for unknown reasons since there's nothing shameful about making profit to support your endeavors, your business has the absolute worst and most confusing branding I've ever encountered.
Matrix was never a great name, and confuses people. Riot was named after violence, but Element sounds like nothing, and now you've introduced a namespace collision for no good reason between the renamed product and the company.
What's next, rename Synapse to Element Server and Matrix to The Element Protocol?
I feel flattered that you registered a throwaway just to rant about the horror of a company who shares the same name as their product :D (c.f. Slack, Mattermost, Rocket.chat, Zulip, Airtable, Figma, Sketch... in fact, it's hard to think of a company outside old school megacorps like Microsoft and Adobe who don't name their company and product the same thing!)
I'm not sure if I would go so far as to say this is an open core model. This is more like someone developing a proprietary WordPress plug-in, but WordPress itself is completely FOSS.
I didn't really think about it like that, though i guess accurate.
Matrix, the spec is open, and synapse the server is open. anyone can make a bridge, they are pluggable, and the author can choose their license.
I guess you could call Matrix+spec the core.
> "We are taking the position that people who are rich enough to buy into Team's ecosystem and throw lots of money to Microsoft might as well throw a little bit of money to Element to keep funding Matrix development."
This is a mistake. If they're already paying for Teams, then what exactly is the incentive to "throw a little bit of money to Element"? They aleady have a communications tool (Teams), so a) why are they going to pay for another one, and b) people who already bought Teams most likely do not care about the values Matrix stands for.
It would remind the community that Freedom(R) is very important. I think the least they could do is release it under the AGPLv3. That license is accepted by the Free Software community while being universally rejected by business as toxic and dangerous. No business will pick up the bridge and use it, while Free Software people can still use it for their own purposes (whatever those might be).
It's a bridge to a proprietary service. Free software adherents don't have MS Teams subscriptions, and those with MS Teams subscriptions aren't going to care about the bridge being proprietary.
There are people who might have to use Teams due to network effect, but prefer to keep closed source crap off their machines. Such people like myself might use Reddit (closed source for some time now), but use open source app like Slide or plain old Firefox.
For such people, an open source element bridge to teams is best of both worlds.
> The bridge itself is not going to drop into the open-source Matrix code any time soon. Hodgson explained: "This is an entirely new bridge that we've built as Element exclusively for Element Matrix Services, which is the SaaS hosting platform we provide in order to keep the lights on for Matrix development and for Element in general.
> "We are taking the position that people who are rich enough to buy into Team's ecosystem and throw lots of money to Microsoft might as well throw a little bit of money to Element to keep funding Matrix development."