Matrix and FreeDesktop are calling for help
Let's start with some brief context.
The Matrix Foundation is a community interest company founded in early 2019 that acts as a neutral custodian of the Matrix decentralized communication system.
This is distinct from Element, a for-profit company that builds "flagship products and services" built with Matrix. Element was set up by the creators of Matrix, and has been developing most of Matrix infrastructure for the last eight/nine years, and they sponsored the Foundation for a while too.
Just over a year ago, Element forked Synapse and Dendrite, two Matrix home servers, changed the license from Apache to AGPL v3, and continued development on them themselves, to speed up work. The Foundation, which retained the old Synapse and Dendrite, had announced that they did not have the resources needed to continue development on their own.
On top of that, the Foundation also explained at the same time that they had to abandon some project they had been working on:
We’ve had no choice but pause development on the majority of the core team’s next-generation Matrix projects. We had high hopes of being able to secure dedicated funding for Third Room, but the interested parties did not come through, and the team has now disbanded. Meanwhile, P2P Matrix and Low Bandwidth Matrix is on hiatus until there’s dedicated funding - and Account Portability work is also temporarily paused in favour of commercial Element work.
This follows directly from the previous year "distress signals" that the Foundation gave; to quote their 2022 holiday update:
On the other hand, only a handful of these initiatives have resulted in funding reaching the core Matrix team. This is directly putting core Matrix development at risk. We are witnessing a classic tragedy of the commons. We’ve released all the foundational code of Matrix as permissively-licensed open source and got it to the point that anyone can successfully run it at scale themselves. The network is expanding exponentially. But in return, it transpires that the vast majority of these commercial deployments fail to contribute financially to the Matrix Foundation.
And, even worse,
This is completely unsustainable, and Element is now literally unable to fund the entirety of the Matrix Foundation on behalf of everyone else - and has had to lay off some of the folks working on the core team as a result.
Both in their 2022 and 2023 blogposts, they asked individuals and companies alike to donate and sponsor the project so that they could resume longer-term projects, though it seems like these words have not had the impact the Foundation was hoping for.
We're now in early 2025, and the Matrix Foundation has published an article titled "We're at a crossroads".
They explain that the Foundation, previously entirely funded by Element, now has half of its budget covered by its funding members. Namely, these are: Element (obviously!), Automattic, and Futurewei, plus the ones that you see on your screen as Silver members.
However, as they mention, having half the budget covered by them means that half of the budget isn't, and they are burning through their reserves. What's the deadline? We're given one.
Either the situation changes by the end of March 2025, one month from now, or they will have to cut costs again. This time, they will be shutting down all remaining bridges hosted by the Foundation, and abandon their development.
They ask for $100k by then; however, this would only extend their runway by one additional month, which would give them time to work on "landing grants and new members". Last year, their revenue was $561k and expenses were $1.2M, a $639k deficit. This year they are expecting roughly the same deficit. As you can see, the $100k would only make a dent in the yearly budget – and yet, it's still a somewhat ambitious goal to reach in a short timeframe.
Talking about organizations and companies, they are asking for people to join a membership, which starts at just $2k/year and then scale up to $500k/year (only Element pays that much, right now).
I currently only count 11 entities in their membership list, which makes me think that they have not managed to find new ones yet. I have to admit I'm quite tempted to make LibreNews join with a Silver membership, but this channel also has a negative cash flow right now, so maybe that's not such a great idea.
However, the Foundation is also asking for individual donations to support the project. These are either Donorbox, Patreon, or LiberaPay donations, and we can publicly see how many they received.
On Donorbox, they have a $100k goal and have received 72% of it, though it's not clear in what period they achieved this.
Between Patreon and LiberaPay combined they receive a total of $26k yearly, something I would classify as "not much, honestly".
What's next for Matrix if they do manage to raise the funds that they need? Well, they want to resume the longer-term project that they've shut down over time, but the first area to see increased funding will be the Trust and Safety team. That's the current biggest expense, but they are still under-resourced: they are under a lot of pressure to deliver protocol improvements, better tooling for server admins, and more.
In the hope that I've now convinced you to help them out if you can, I'll now switch my focus to the situation around FreeDesktop. First, some context.
Freedesktop is not a company or an organization, but rather it's a project that aims to define various standards that should be respected between desktop environments and such.
It's been around since 24 years ago, which - by the way - is more than what I've been around, and it was founded by Pennington, a GNOME developer working for RedHat.
They now provide hosting for a variety of cross-desktop projects: from Wayland to Mesa 3D, Poppler, the X.Org server, …
…, D-Bus, libinput, PulseAudio, PipeWire, systemd, and many more.
Freedesktop does accept donations and sponsors, though the project has "no corporate backing or funding stream". To do so, they are part of the X.Org Foundation, but they're driven forward by volunteers only.
However, they recently had some significant issues concerning hosting. Their GitLab "burns through around 50TB of bandwidth per month", and though it was previously running on Google Cloud free credits, they ran out of them in 2020 and sought some other sponsor.
They found one: Equinix. They are "the largest global data center and colocation provider for enterprise network and cloud computing".
They hosted freedesktop.org's GitLab completely for free since 2020, but now they have decided to shut down the Equinix Metal team, which was hosting freedesktop. They have done so on somewhat short notice, meaning that freedesktop is now pressed to find a new home, and quickly so.
How much money are we talking about here? Well, the expenses on Equinix are $288k a year, but less expensive servers could probably bring that down to around $120k-180k.
Some further math brought that potentially down to $48k a year using Hetzner, even assuming no sponsorship from them.
After much discussion, Daniel Store announced that, and I quote,
We've made what we think is a good decision on hosting and network. We're just in the final stages of getting this fully arranged now, and are looking forward to announcing it - with a more concrete timeline - in hopefully the next couple of weeks.
Now, both the tentative date they want to transition by and what they have chosen as the host are publicly available on their GitLab. However, the issue specifically asks to "not advertise this a lot", so I think I'll just shut up and let you search for this information if you really really want it.
Now, I briefly mentioned earlier that this channel has a negative cash flow, but there are a few more words that are relevant to this story.
When building the LibreNews website, where you can find this video in article format, I needed some help, and blahaj.land reached out. They are not only hosting the website but also helped me build it. So, I think they deserve some of my money and a shoutout, so let me tell you what they do.
They offer all-in-one free services, from Nextcloud, to Git forge, to Matrix chat, secure file sharing, a well-federated fediverse instance, and much more.
They support multiple upload methods (like SFTP, private dashboard, Git integrations) so that hosting is as simple as possible regardless of the website you're running; and, their premium features are priced at just 1 euro a month (which includes custom domains, extra storage, and automated DNS management).
They are currently looking for contributors, so if you are a tech enthusiast you can go ahead and give them a hand build all of this – this isn't some random company, it's a community of very passion-driven individuals, I can safely attest that.
And, finally, they've just opened registration, so you can go ahead and create an account, all links in video description. They've helped me a lot to make the website, so they definitely deserve some love. Go give it to them.
Anyhow, freedesktop is in a bit of a better situation compared to the Matrix Foundation. However, do let me say a few words: I don't think it was by chance that we had two major open-source projects threaten to shut down unless given more resources, all in the same month.
I believe that this should probably prompt us to reflect on the bigger fundraising situation within the FOSS world. The open-source projects that are thriving seem to be those that are made to be for-profit, such as Nextcloud, and only few non-profits manage to raise enough to foster operations.
In the past few weeks, here at LibreNews, we've both covered individual project funding through donation campaigns, bringing KDE and Kdenlive as examples, and the idea of allowing payment to buy FOSS applications on Flathub. This article is another piece in the puzzle of the relationship between open-source and, well, capitalism.
Luca Bramè
Niccolò Venerandi
