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.
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.
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.
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.
170k for running a company? Shit. I wouldn’t do that. You can make just as much being a halfway competent developer, and it’s way less stress.
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.
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
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
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.
Removed by mod
What’s with the “Trust and Safety” bit? And are the events really necessary?
Edit: okay, it and “Trust and Safety” has something to do with moderation. They could probably get volunteers to do a lot of that though.
Your solution to someone complaining that the boss is earning too much is to suggest they pay the other workers less (or not at all)?
I’m suggesting that their balance sheet looks off. Matrix should primarily be spending money on developers and infrastructure.
The boss earning what seems to be $170k isn’t a ton for that position, and it’s a fairly small piece of the pie. Even if the boss took no pay, they’re still spending a lot of money on non-development and hosting tasks. I would like to see “Other Staff” increase at the expense of everything except hosting costs.
Ah yes, exploit free labor. Capitalism’s favorite way to make money.
My understanding is that Matrix is a nonprofit.
Non-profit organizations still exist within the capitalist system. Just because they don’t pay out dividends to shareholders doesn’t mean they can’t be exploitative. If a non-profit makes a lot of money, the people who run it just increase their own salaries. Happens all the time. And yes, non-profits exploit labor all the time. Local arts councils are an easy example of this. Run an art show where the venue and food are donated. They take a fee at the door, ask for donations throughout, and require a cut of any art sold. If there’s a bar, they get a cut of that too. The artists who enabled the show to even exist did all their labor for free in exchange for exposure and maybe selling something. They see none of the take though. Sounds pretty capitalist to me.
I never said it wasn’t capitalist, just that being bad nonprofit should afford a little more leniency when it comes to “free labor.” Matrix is FOSS, the Matrix foundation exists to drive its development, and its whole point is to provide a replacement for exploitative products. Such an organization soliciting donations makes a ton of sense, and donations can take the form of code, money, or even free labor (moderation).
So yeah, I’m absolutely willing to give them a pass on asking for such donations, and I think they should replace some of the money they’re spending on moderation w/ more development time.
so … Matrix Nitro?
Matrix became the new Discord
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.
🤷♂️
The plan was to rely on donations, which doesn’t usually work for hosted products.
That’s not how non-profit foundations work.
😂
Still need users. And folks who like/want/use the product enough to care to donate.
If neither is happening, you’re business model is failing. Profit or nonprofit.
🤷♂️
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
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!
Spoken like someone who didn’t work with the xmpp protocol
Hehe. Then all those busy rooms will be ded. This would be a huge problem for matrix. Not really technically (since you could add additional rooms from other servers), but more like brand damage.
