✧✦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 thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Jan 20, 2025

yes, element does have a CLA, which they adopted simultaneously with AGPLv3 https://element.io/blog/element-to-adopt-agplv3/

(i consider AGPL a regressive force on the whole, and this kind of stuff is why. GNU even encourages it!)

A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

Element has chosen to pursue future development of Synapse, Dendrite and associated server-side projects under the terms of AGPLv3.

Element Blog
Show thread🏳️‍🌈🎃🇧🇷Luana🇧🇷🎃🏳️‍🌈Jan 20, 2025

@whitequark It’s funny because this is not even true lmao.

People can make downstream contributions without signing their CLA and Element won’t be allowed to merge them lmao. The ONLY advantage for Element on this is being able to sell proprietary forks of peoples open source contributions. People don’t actually need to contribute back if they don’t want, and I’m so fucking hoping we see this happening: open source downstream forks of matrix with contributions that element cannot use unless they cut their bullshit.

Show thread🌸 lumi-nhac    🌱
@luana @whitequark GPL/AGPL is amazing, it keeps code outside of proprietary software

a CLA completely breaks that. you need to have contributions from many people under their own copyright to make it impossible to make the code proprietary
Jan 20, 2025 at 4:47pmWeb