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Following the example of GitLab and other VC-funded open source companies, @element goes 'open source almost everything' with "Synapse Pro";
"Synapse itself remains open source, and Element will continue to develop it proactively, just as it has for the last 10 years ... Available under a commercial license, Synapse Pro will help fund and accelerate the continued open source development of Synapse for the benefit of all of Matrix."
https://element.io/blog/synapse-pro-slashes-costs-for-running-nation-scale-matrix-deployments/
@strypey @element big sigh. Sad. Tom Preston-Werner's 'open source almost everything' https://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everything.html is one of the most depressingly self-serving things I ever read. It assumes that only proprietary software has value. Which is flat out wrong. My career attests to that.
@lightweight @strypey @element sure also the MIT license says a lot. It doesn't protect against Open Washing and that's exactly what they did with GitHub.
https://os-sci.com/blog/our-blog-posts-1/why-is-open-washing-a-thing-14
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@lightweight
> weak 'open source' (as opposed to Copyleft) license is essentially saying "we want the option of closing this codebase at some future point"
If I may copyright nerd for a moment;
As long as any outside contributors assign copyright to the company, the project license can't prevent that, even with a copyleft clause. The copyright owner doesn't need a license to use, so public license conditions don't bind them.
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What a weak license does is allow a company to sharemilk the goodwill associated with Open Source, while making their main product proprietary. Even before BorgSoft enshittification made it obvious, GritHub was *always* exactly that.
Ubuntu's scAmazon Lens scandal was only shocking because we thought they were on our side, not because the DataFarming was an uncommon business model, even then.
Copyright is not owned, as if it was it would never expire - copyright is held by a copyright holder.
The copyright holder cannot infringe their own license, but they cannot revoke say previously licensed GPLv3-or-later and typically what happens with actual free software projects is that the last free version is forked.
Many copyleft projects under say the GPLv3+ often import code from copyright holders under the GPLv3+, which is effective at preventing the project from legally being made proprietary.