I think that this is a good thing. If companies want to make money from FOSS, they also have to contribute, especially if they want to do it when using it for a closed source and proprietary product.

Sweet, keeps it FOSS while people that want to make closed source apps have to pay for it.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Element said that the cost of maintaining Matrix, to which it claims to make more than 95% of all code contributions, has forced it to rethink its strategy and create a “level playing field.” This comes at a time when decentralization and interoperability are becoming greater priorities for governments, enterprises and consumers across the board.

“It is hard for Element to innovate and adapt as quickly as companies whose business model is developing proprietary Matrix-based products and services without the responsibility and costs of maintaining the bulk of Matrix.

“I’m afraid we’re not going to name and shame the companies who are profiting from Matrix without contributing back — mainly because we’re currently politely trying to sort them out with alternative licensing so their forks can continue,” Hodgson explained.

For instance, back in 2021, the agency responsible for digitalizing Germany’s healthcare system started transitioning to Matrix, so that the thousands of individual entities from hospitals to insurance companies and clinics could all communicate with each other, irrespective of which Matrix-based app they used.

With Europe pushing ahead with new regulations stipulating that big tech platforms need to make their messaging apps play ball with each other, and the Twitter debacle shining a light on the need for social networks that don’t lock users in, this has positioned companies such as Element — and the Matrix protocol it develops — strongly.

The existing Synapse and Dendrite repositories will remain on the Matrix.org GitHub domain, raising the possibility that a third-party may decide to fork them and continue maintaining them under a similar open source license.

The original article contains 1,402 words, the summary contains 263 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Good. Plenty of companies just leach off FOSS projects and contribute nothing, if that’s the case they can either pay or make their derivative works also open source. Seems fair to me