Whatever you think a “rug pull” is, this ain’t it.
FOSS owes you literally nothing. Go build what you want for yourself, geez. Oh, and feel free to give it away to the world… OR NOT!
FOSS owes you literally nothing. Go build what you want for yourself, geez. Oh, and feel free to give it away to the world… OR NOT!
There's a lot of moral support and ecosystem gain (eg bridges) from the community. Why bother with that anymore if we're just getting the "broken implementation"?
I think part of the issue here is that they're trying to compete with the enterprise IM solutions. That doesn't really work as the others are way better funded and have benefits that element can't deliver (such as the wide Microsoft M365 + EntraID ecosystem). A Microsoft shop is never ever going to choose this over teams (horrible as the latter is).
You’re not. All work (other than stuff which primarily benefits scalability for enormous deployments) should land on FOSS Synapse - particularly core performance improvements like faster state res. This is just trying to fund it.
And no, this is not us trying to compete with Teams - this is us trying to force big Matrix deployments to actually route $ to Element to fund upstream dev, rather than use System Integrators who win the big tenders and then mysteriously fail to route any $ to us.
But anything that could be considered public infrastructure better be able to scale to millions of users!
I wish you had chosen to gatekeep some other features to differentiate between enterprises (with members numbering in 10^1 -- 10^6) the open version; public infra should ideally be able to handle >>10^6 members.
What did you think was going to happen? That's their profit.
Professional software developers work for the customers that pay them. Doing free work isn't a sustainable businesses model, not for anyone.
If they're not paying you then they're not your customer and you don't owe them anything.
Professionals build products. Don't waste time/money building anything but the best possible product. The best product creates the most value for users and customers pay for that value. This functions like a corporate tax on profit.
Software has zero marginal cost which let's people who aren't generating much if any economic value benefit. It's nice but it's not a business.
Everyone benefits from a healthy ecosystem where developers are paid and build products that end enriching the public domain sooner or later. Align your incentives with your paying customers and you will prosper.