alt Hacker NewsIn a healthier ecosystem with many stakeholders and sponsors this is less of a concern. However, instead of Matrix Foundation gaining more independence, it seems like almost everything moved out of the Matrix Foundation and into a for-profit company. Clearly, things didn't go according to plan.
Most of us just running homeservers are just random people who have no power over this situation and not enough money to make a dent in their budget needs. For us, Matrix was sold as an open E2EE chat system, and we bought in. Does us buying in do anything for Matrix Foundation/Element? I dunno. Maybe it helps sell Matrix to get broader adoption. Either way, we took a gamble on it, potentially instead of other solutions.
Now the free and open source Matrix homeserver has to compete with a closed source commercial one. I sort of hope there's a happy ending on this one, but it sure looks dicey to me right now.
I get the frustration that Dendrite dev has stalled, but the fault here is not of an evil take-over by Element (given Element wrote both Dendrite and Synapse in the first place) but simply neither Element and Matrix Foundation having the $ to do be able to maintain two homeservers simultaneously.
> Now the free and open source Matrix homeserver has to compete with a closed source commercial one
This isn't really the case - normal open source Synapse is the core focus for Element, and the vast majority of work is going into that, including performance work. Synapse Pro is "just" for scalability and HA for big government-scale deployments - https://element.io/blog/scaling-to-millions-of-users-require... etc. But all the schema work etc which supports that goes into FOSS Synapse.