✧✦Catherine✦✧Jan 20, 2025

the business model of element evidently is "write shitty code then extract rent from governments and cops to make it less shitty"

is there any wonder it's as bad as it is

https://m.unix.house/@jmc/113857052951936006

Joshua M. Clulow (@[email protected])

I know Synapse has few contributors outside of the Element company, but I just read this blog post about how Element is keeping the good Synapse code, increasingly rewritten in Rust so that it doesn't perform like a garbage barge, completely proprietary: https://element.io/blog/scaling-to-millions-of-users-requires-synapse-pro/ Why would *anybody* contribute to the legacy Python code which this post makes clear is not scalable and is not good enough to sell? Surely it's a self fulfilling prophecy.

m.unix.house
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Jan 20, 2025

it disgusts me when companies make "community [project]" mean "a shitty useless version of proprietary [project] we actually care about"

it also disgusts me that AGPL mostly enables that

Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Jan 20, 2025
it's a transparent (and often successul) attempt to exploit unpaid labor by attracting people who want to improve the commons with the "open source" label and then selling the work they contribute, or using it to fundraise
Show threadmaswanJan 20, 2025

@whitequark Wouldn't the AGPL work against this by forcing them to not use anything contributed to the free version in their proprietary one?

Assuming of course that they aren't a shit project with copyright reassignments or CLAs, of course. But that's a clear warning flag to anyone to not bother contributing.

Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Jan 20, 2025
@maswan
Show threadPuercoPop
@whitequark @maswan Isn't the CLA the part that is enabling the stealing? AGPLv3 for thee but not for me.
Jan 20, 2025 at 3:49pmWeb
Show threadmaswanJan 20, 2025

@PuercoPop Yup. They are a pox on free software.

@whitequark