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The asymmetry only lasts as long as their branch is better than some community fork.

That’s approximately as long as we have between now and when they stop investing in improving the end user experience.

This is pretty close to ideal IMO.

The CLA ennsures their monopoly, it increases the asymmetry over time. Forks will have to share all improvements with Element, but Element will be able to provide proprietary improvements, which means more people will chose it. Then they can at any moment relicense and take the whole app proprietary.

`Apache-2.0` allows Element the same power right now. No organization is maintaining meaningful community forks of Synapse and/or Dendrite with their own proprietary modifications on top. Element hasn't used their power to take the vast majority of their modifications private so far.

If Element decides to go proprietary, which they could already decide to do, then the community is now left to fork an `AGPL-3.0` project instead of an `Apache-2.0` project. Oh no, we'll be protected from this happening again in the future, wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Apache-2.0 gives everyone those rights. The CLA makes Element the only one who can build proprietary modifications on top. Monopolization of the position they gained by advertising as open-source.

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