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Hi there! I'm the Managing Director of the Foundation. That owing balance is down to the many services for which we rely on Element.
The Foundation has a Master Services Agreement (MSA) with Element which includes administrative services, operation of the matrix.org homeserver, and secondment of several personnel whose responsibilities include advocacy, program management, standards work, and trust and safety. The MSA also includes provisions for the Foundation to reimburse Element for any bills they pay on our behalf.
More details and context in my official reply: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/571#issueco...
Happy to address any other concerns or questions you may have.
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Luckily, it doesn't matter what individuals expect. There is written documentation on what the foundation is supposed to do or not to do: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/mai...
Notably, "Code Core Team members must arrange their own funding for their time", which I understand as such that the Foundation does not pay directly the developers (same as other standards organizations like IETF).
Main tasks of Matrix.org Foundation is maintaining the spec, documentation, owning IP, promotion and the matrix.org home server. The home server is "generously hosted" by UpCloud (i.e. is not using New Vector EMS), at least according to the matrix.org website.
Looking again at MSC1779, I noticed it says that one function of The Matrix.org Foundation is "Owns the copyright of the reference implementations of Matrix (i.e. everything in https://github.com/matrix-org). By assigning copyright to the Foundation, it’s protected against New Vector ever being tempted to relicense it." That protection apparently wasn't very effective, but also notably, New Vector and their leadership clearly have shown to not stand behind the goals of the Foundation. As the leadership of New Vector is also part of the leadership of the Foundation, I see some huge potential for COI here.
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NextCloud does exactly this: AGPL, no CLA.
https://github.com/nextcloud/server#contribution-guidelines-
>Nextcloud doesn't require a CLA (Contributor License Agreement). The copyright belongs to all the individual contributors. Therefore we recommend that every contributor adds the following line to the header of a file if they changed it substantially:
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Why not Matrix? Here's one reason: it has incredibly hard-to-debug edge cases, and plenty of bugs. One of my favourites is the one where people are kicked out of your room at random, which was reported a year ago[0]. It wasn't fixed, however, because the head of the Matrix foundation (Matthew) presumably didn't like the issue being posted on Twitter.
This is honestly really disappointing behaviour from a platform owner.
[0]: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/14481
