The #Matrix main organizations ( Vector Ltd / Element / Matrix Foundation ) are experiencing some financial issues and have laid off some employees. The blog post is at https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update-2022/ [matrix org]

They note that they provide everything under permissive licenses and then wonder why giant corporations adopt their technology without giving anything back.

Well, that is something that MongoDB and some other no-SQL databases have had to deal with. Their userbase insists on permissive licenses, then the largest and most profitable users refuse to support the organizations that pay the developers. In many cases, the result is some custom non-free license (generally masquerading as “open source” but neither free software nor open source software) meant to extract money out of users who make money using the product.

Personally, I’d rather see #GPLv3 / #AGPLv3 without a “buy a commercial license to avoid responsibilities” plan going into widespread use, but that’s sure to greatly reduce revenues. It probably means paid support is the main funding model.

But anyway, I think that Matrix has done really well for something that is inherently inferior to #XMPP, but has a pretty face and good marketing team.