While it’s great to see more
high profile deployments of Matrix, this is another instance of the failure mode described at https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update... where an organisation with massive funds depends on an open source project like Element and Matrix for critical infrastructure… but doesn’t contribute a cent to the underlying development (yet, at any rate). As a result, Matrix funding continues to be at risk - and basically forces us increasingly down an open core model like the one described by Sid at https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-04-red-hat-model-only....
It’s incredibly frustrating; in this instance we’ll reach out to Poland and see if we can find a way for them to contribute by donating to the Matrix Foundation, or by buying stuff from Element, or both.
I hope that Matrix will be for IM what email has become. The ability to control your own data and use a client of your choice is incredibly valuable. Surely, there are costs and labor associated with running a Matrix homeserver for your organization, but for organizations that can support it, this is truly becoming a viable alternative to Slack.
A lot of protocols took off in part because of university adoption and it took off from there. It wasn't the only thing but it certainly planted seeds in impressionable minds.
If universities and governmental orgs start reliably running their own Matrix servers like they did with email before contracting that out I think it will happen.
It’s incredibly frustrating; in this instance we’ll reach out to Poland and see if we can find a way for them to contribute by donating to the Matrix Foundation, or by buying stuff from Element, or both.