This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The Matrix.org Foundation is a non-profit and only relies on donations to operate. Its core mission is to maintain the Matrix Specification, but it does much more than that.
Non-profit… only relies on donations…
This was taken quite literally at the bottom of that article.
At some point donations become unsustainable. Like literally their options are to start charging or close up shop.
The smarter thing to do would be to rotate instances on sign-up to decentralize the Matrix-verse but it's probably too late now.
Ads win out in the end, more lucrative for the business model, and thats usually when enshittification occurs.
The context in the article is important. Similar to what FUTO preaches-- people don't donate. That's why corporate solutions usually win. Better to charge a bit of money so we can have nice things.
The same people that enshitified open source licences ?
People deserve to get paid on their work, and currently the best way to do that and survive in America is to work on completely closest source products that don't respect their users. Open source is probably the most respectful but doesn't work well as a business. We need something that works reliably for delivering real products that will achieve mass adoption. I think these source available licenses are that.
You know what else source-available licences do ?
Put restrictions like you cannot make money from the forks. Forks are the lifeblood of FOSS.
Not trying to be a dick but the Executive Director can take a fucking pay cut.
I found a reddit thread from 4 months ago where he said his salary was $170k/year. I'm not saying he is making obscene money, but if that's nearly 15% of all operating costs he can shave that down to $80k-$100k and still live comfortably if he's willing to accept a more austere standard of living.
I'm not saying he doesn't deserve to be paid well, but he's getting a damn sight better pay than moderators and community managers who seem to make up 50% of the budget for multiple people: the trust and safety team as well as the other employees at the foundation.
Yeah, it's all grifts for morons by scumbags.
Some idiots were really trying to peddle the lie that infosec.exchange costs $5000/month to host while of course providing no verifiable evidence, just "trust them bro." It's sad watching suckers lap it up without a second thought.
A fool and his money are soon parted.
Depends on what that title actually means. Viewing it as a pie chart skews it so you don't realize that $170k in USD is pretty mediocre for a Director of Engineering role. If the project dies without this person, and that's what they need in salary to make it worth it to keep them there, then that's what they get paid.
It's not like they're even making an obscene amount of money ffs. That's a middling engineering salary, and this person is running the whole show. You should see what other "director" jobs at much shittier companies get paid. I think twice this amount would be a weak guess. If this person was a prick, they'd be milking that goat and taking all the free money.
This is an open source project backed by a non-profit foundation, granted, but this person is taking a massive pay cut just by working this job. Think about how that might impact their life to make that choice while trying to have a family.
$170k salary still won't you a fucking house in this country unless you live in the middle of nowhere, and this person is almost certainly in a major tech hub city, so that money means diddly when trying to pay the bills. It's barely above the poverty line in Silicon Valley after taxes for reference.
Everyone in here complaining because they make half this and think it's a lot of money because they live in Bumfuck, Idaho has no idea what it costs to live in the larger tech hubs around the world.
If they have to pay their Executive Director that much as a non-profit and are failing to meet their funding goals as a non-profit the amount he gets paid has fuck-all to do with where he lives, and has everything to do with him failing at his job to secure funding.
So we're supposed to fund this guys lifestyle as people who donate to the project while the project itself twists in the wind? Give me a fucking break, dude. This is how you set your organization up for failure.
It's not like a bunch of his work couldn't be done remotely. Maybe he should move to bumfuck Idaho so he can afford to run this god damned foundation. But nooooo, he needs to live in some obscenely expensive area, right? Bull. Shit.
him failing at his job to secure funding
Is this thread not about a new attempt to secure funding?
Please don't be that person that runs in here, didn't read the thing, and writes multiple paragraphs of stupidity. Just don't do it.
You're not "funding this guy's lifestyle" (love how you assume it's a guy). You're paying a person a less than fair wage when they can be getting twice the money elsewhere for the same role.
This person is taking a drastic pay cut to run things AS THEIR JOB. It's how they pay for things, and have kids, and a life. You're making the assumption they are somehow bilking money out of this, and that's not the case from that dollar amount.
You also didn't seem to understand that because it's a non-profit custodial arm of the project, that they are the ones keeping it alive for people like to bitch about this person making a salary ffs. Jeebus, some people, how dare they.
That dollar amount is higher than what several presidents of European countries earn. I'm sorry but if a project is based on donations from around the globe, you can't then think of a salary that's one of the highest in the world.
I read all of the comment chain and I perfectly understand that in San Francisco or LA the rent is huge and that people earn those numbers. If I'll ever consider donating part of my Spanish salary, looking at that stupidly high number heavily disincentives me because what the fuck, living in one of the world's most expensive places and expecting for people that live with a third of that money (with a salary that's considered high!!) to donate is super entitled.
To be fair, Joshua R. Simmons has since changed their name to Robin Riley and now goes by they/them pronouns which I did not notice noted anywhere on the matrix.org website. They're still the same person who has been running the foundation for a long time, so I hope I can be forgiven for not realizing their updated pronoun status. So, you're correct that they are no longer going by he/him pronouns, but I really don't know much past that.
I mentioned in the original post that I found a reddit thread where they talked about their pay and the breakdown of finances. They pull in roughly a million a year for the whole foundation, and 50% roughly goes to staffing, which means with 8 other people in the organization, everyone else is making about $60k a year if we're going to talk about underpaying people for their jobs. That's all the other executives and the entire trust and safety team.
Once again, if they're failing at their job to keep the project funded, that's when you make sacrifices to make it work.
unconfortable but true
Maybe. But $170K isn’t what it used to be, even 5 years ago. Especially if you have kids.
Does that matter if he is failing to secure enough funding to run the non-profit? If they're risking shutting down major portions of what they do as the guiding foundation for the Matrix protocol, isn't that literally his fault since he's in charge? If the non-profit fails are all the people who donated their fucking money in hopes of it succeeding going to be happy that instead of being willing to take a haircut on pay to save the damn organization he was instead using their donated funds to fund his fucking lifestyle instead of, I don't know, living in a more modest area and doing more of the foundation business remotely?
Maybe someone shouldn't be taking on this kind of major risk and asking people for donations for the project if his kids are so fucking expensive. Nobody forced them to have those kids or live in a high cost of living area. Christ.
Not trying to be rude but they are not meeting their funding goals, which is his job. That's the entire point of the foundation existing, is to meet funding goals so they can continue to develop the protocol. If they aren't making enough money, should he take a paycut, or should they shut the whole thing down? It seems to me like they want to save the project he could take a modest pay cut, but that's just me.
I’m not saying he is making obscene money
Then I am: he is making obscene money. Converted that's like 125k GBP, you can buy a house for cash every 3 years in the UK from that much money O.o (Ok, every 6 years if you spend half of it one living costs.) It's almost 7 times the minimum wage here.
I make only slightly less than that in American dollars and I’m not at all close to running a company. I’m very solidly lower middle class I will also not be buying a hour for another 5-6 years.
That is a very modest amount of money for his role.
Now 9 wonder if there's a similar report for Mozilla
You can pull the form 990 for any non-profit in the US pretty easily. Here's Mozilla's: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200097189
Wish the homeserver portability would be worked on more. The ability to change homeserver would really allow people to more easily move on from matrix.org.
Myself included ;).
Optimally it would even allow the switch "after the fact", so after your original homeserver is down, assuming your client has a local copy of the server-side secret storage. It would need to be based on some cryptographic identity then, I suppose.
Yes, this would be a great feature - but it's a big issue to implement. It's talked about in this video, worth watching if you're curious about it.
As far as status go, this issue on the matrix spec is what you want to follow.
so ... Matrix Nitro?
We have been communicating on the lack of funds in the Foundation for a while now, the latest being here. And whilst we’ve been working hard to gather new members and are happy to see the number of logos increasing (thank you all for seeing the need for Matrix to stay independent and safe, and the value in supporting it!), none of the big players in the ecosystem have actually committed to one of the higher membership tiers, so we need to find other ways towards sustainability.
🤔
Sounds like that business plan isn't working out like you hoped...
And/Or not enough users care to use your product.
🤷♂️
$170k/year for 1 person is no joke.
This is just a grift to take advantage of morons.
Don't be one of them.
The plan was to rely on donations, which doesn't usually work for hosted products.
For just $19.95 a month you can talk to all your friends!
You can do that for free. But for that low, low price, you can talk to your friends with a Matrix Green checkmark next your name! #worthit
A green check!!!! Wow! Sign me up baby!
The alternative is to turn off the server, which we want to avoid doing.
The funnier and IMO better option
It's a load of bullshit and we shouldn't trust them.
It's a load of bullshit...
Based on what?
and the entire protcol with it, they just have better marketing than xmpp, and from what i read are even worse protocol.
xmpp is still the best, nobody's ever going to change my mind. jabber 4 lyfe!
From federated protocols yes! But I would like to see something really p2p to take over. So far no luck
Spoken like someone who didn't work with the xmpp protocol
