Discord is one of the best places to host communities, but let's talk about the nastier dark side of the social giant. We like to be proactive with things, s...
I don’t get how people think this VC funding is a good thing. Matrix like Discord is run by a highly over VC funded for-profit company and both will turn on their users for profit extraction sooner or later.
XMPP and IRC are the real alternatives. Matrix is the the uber of IRC :(
It’s worth keeping an eye out for, but as long as the profit or value extraction is just making Matrix a communication tool they can use without licensing fees associated with other team communication tools, that’s fine. It’s not like the capital behind Linux development has driven Linux in any way towards extracting money or value from end users.
Yes lets see, but VC funding is significantly different then corporate sponsoring as in the case of the Linux Kernel. VC funding basically means the company has to bring in extremely high returns of investment (500% or more) or go bust trying to reach that.
This is true, if it’s truly a VC investment rather than simply an investment with an expectation of bringing a technology up to usable standards then it’s a little concerning. I admit, I have no idea if that is the case.
AFAIK the current 30 million mostly come from a medium tier investment company that probably itself isn’t interested in profit extraction from users yet, but will rather look into making New Vector look pretty for acquisition of a large tech-company like Microsoft or some sort of IPO on the stock market.
Seems like a dubious proposition to me, though I’m far from an expert in that regard. Hopefully they use the money to pay developers to make rapid improvements and the commercial ambitions of the firm don’t pan out. ;)
I think it is quite realistic to expect a buy-out from a bigger European tech company (SAP? German Telekom?) that thinks it can siphon off more government contracts and pretend to catch up to the US tech giants in front of their shareholders. And as shitty as that probably sounds, this is likely still among the “best” possible outcomes. The open-source community can only lose in this setup and are fools for cheering about this money injection.
exactly, and the company behind element already surprisingly seems quite financially successful so I doubt this much money will change things massively.
NEW VECTOR LIMITED is located in LONDON, United Kingdom and is part of the Computer Systems Design and Related Services Industry. NEW VECTOR LIMITED has 16 employees at this location and generates $5.18 million in sales (USD). (Employees figure is estimated, Sales figure is modelled).
This is also all with the support of the core people behind matrix and element, so if anything was nefarious it would be stuffed either way as the team would be corrupt.
Money is good as a function of our economy, but the issue you point out is concerning. It really depends on the conditions attached to the funding, like will it compromise the project somehow. The funding is just as likely to be from an intelligence agencies VC arm to alter the code for their benefit. I have seen mentions that Matrix is being used now in things that “can’t” be mentioned. Ideally open source should be able to circumvent such interference but not easily I think.
I don’t get how people think this VC funding is a good thing. Matrix like Discord is run by a highly over VC funded for-profit company and both will turn on their users for profit extraction sooner or later.
XMPP and IRC are the real alternatives. Matrix is the the uber of IRC :(
It’s worth keeping an eye out for, but as long as the profit or value extraction is just making Matrix a communication tool they can use without licensing fees associated with other team communication tools, that’s fine. It’s not like the capital behind Linux development has driven Linux in any way towards extracting money or value from end users.
Yes lets see, but VC funding is significantly different then corporate sponsoring as in the case of the Linux Kernel. VC funding basically means the company has to bring in extremely high returns of investment (500% or more) or go bust trying to reach that.
This is true, if it’s truly a VC investment rather than simply an investment with an expectation of bringing a technology up to usable standards then it’s a little concerning. I admit, I have no idea if that is the case.
AFAIK the current 30 million mostly come from a medium tier investment company that probably itself isn’t interested in profit extraction from users yet, but will rather look into making New Vector look pretty for acquisition of a large tech-company like Microsoft or some sort of IPO on the stock market.
Seems like a dubious proposition to me, though I’m far from an expert in that regard. Hopefully they use the money to pay developers to make rapid improvements and the commercial ambitions of the firm don’t pan out. ;)
I think it is quite realistic to expect a buy-out from a bigger European tech company (SAP? German Telekom?) that thinks it can siphon off more government contracts and pretend to catch up to the US tech giants in front of their shareholders. And as shitty as that probably sounds, this is likely still among the “best” possible outcomes. The open-source community can only lose in this setup and are fools for cheering about this money injection.
I don’t really see how much bad could come of it. Maybe they start trying to hamfist ToS or license changes into the code, but then it’ll be forked.
At worst they do some crazy data harvesting on the main instance, causing an exodus of users onto either self-hosted or other public instances.
exactly, and the company behind element already surprisingly seems quite financially successful so I doubt this much money will change things massively.
https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-profiles.new_vector_limited.dc4a183b6aa1b44f286393c47faf4410.html
This is also all with the support of the core people behind matrix and element, so if anything was nefarious it would be stuffed either way as the team would be corrupt.
https://matrix.org/blog/2021/07/27/element-raises-30-m-to-boost-matrix
Money is good as a function of our economy, but the issue you point out is concerning. It really depends on the conditions attached to the funding, like will it compromise the project somehow. The funding is just as likely to be from an intelligence agencies VC arm to alter the code for their benefit. I have seen mentions that Matrix is being used now in things that “can’t” be mentioned. Ideally open source should be able to circumvent such interference but not easily I think.