Matrix is a fantastic project and I'm glad it hasn't yet been encumbered by open core or any other licensing nonsense. It truly is one of the best open source initiatives in the space and a huge shout out to Matthew for what he's done here. I just wish the team leads were more receptive and responsive to certain UX issues. I work at a company that pays over a million dollars a year for Slack. There is so much money being left on the table. It's just nowhere close to being in a state where any company of our size can move over to it.
I loved reading this, thanks for the collection.<p>The funding trouble is somewhat surprising. Has anyone gone through and done a deep dive comparison of other open source projects that are doing fine.<p>Mastodon, doing fine on donations because the product small and well defined ?<p>IPFS, from the start they planned to make money with fileCoin and IPFS is a supporting service they develop because it is useful for fileCoin?<p>Elasticsearch, well defined product with traditional enterprise feature split and users who are very accustomed to paying for this kind of a product ?<p>MongoDB, well defined product and much more restrictive license ?<p>Supabase, much less to develop because they are mostly gluing existing code together. But they are bringing out some great new things and the glue has value . And again its a database so people are accustomed to paying ?<p>gitlab, nginx...<p>There are actually countless open source companies doing well when they are in a category of product that people are accustomed to paying for.<p>How far away would matrix be from becoming something like Cloud Native Computing Foundation or Linux Foundation. I suppose larger tech companies need to start making money with Matrix not Goverments or smaller anti capitalism groups.
>Usually the Matrix organization posts such an update, but I felt like this years update was a bit scary and also light on community projects.<p>I noticed that while reading it as well. The call for funding ap few weeks ago did not sound nearly as dire. I wonder how things are going with that. I had wanted to donate to Matrix a number of months ago, but there was no easy, non-Patreon way to do that. I guess I assumed that with the new ask for donations and setting up DonorBox would have a pretty large response.<p>It's also strange how quickly this situation developed. I read every TWIM (at least I did before RSS broke recently) and follow the project and some developers on Mastodon, and don't recall hearing anything about financial woes. If anything, it seemed like at least New Vector was doing well financially. It isn't clear to me whether the financial issues are with Matrix directly, or New Vector. I don't think this is mentioned for the two developers who were laid off either.<p>Overall, the tone and urgency of the 2022 update struck me very off guard - not what I was expecting.
I chose Zulip over matrix. UX in quite bad in matrix element and offers no new features compare to others. Zulip topic based discussion model is really powerful and it gives a lot of ways to manage the team asynchronously. What worse is performance, matrix is quite slow compare to Zulip because it's choice of underlying framework not asynchronous , where Zulip uses Django 4x and tornado framework.
Anyone here know when we can see fruits of EU DMA viz matrix-whatsapp communication without having an account in WhatsApp and bridging them?<p>Any public roadmap for that?