Synapse and Dendrite projects are forked. Ok.
But then they say they won’t be continuing to fund development and “They’ll need to get their upstream releases from Element’s repositories going forward.”
that seems to mean that future downloads should come from Element? That sounds more like a handoff than a fork.
Can someone clarify this a bit?
They also are changing licences to require downstream forkers to also open-source their changes, ensuring corporate users of matrix contribute back upstream if they modify their implementation (beeper might be in some hot water, though they can very well continue using and maintaining their own fork from the matrix foundation repos with the old licence).
My understanding is that they are doing the opposite: by making contributors sign a CLA, they are free to sell corporate users their own private licenses, so those corporations can each keep a proprietary fork of Element's AGPL source.
Beeper’s Synapse fork is already open source. Element has not had any license changes as far as I know and their applications are hard forks, meaning that even if the license changes in the future, they are safe from it.
Not sure if AGPL’s “network use is distribution” is a concern but most of their bridges are open source as well.
Disclaimer: Currently working part time for Beeper. I specifically asked the founder about this after reading the article.
Element is forking the two projects, and is redirecting their maintenance efforts towards their own forks. This means that the Foundation versions of the projects will not receive active maintenance anymore, and the Foundation does not have the funding to invest in the development themselves.
It's a de-facto handoff, unless someone wants to invest significant resources in development of the pre-fork versions of the projects.