I read this piece,, and wonder what the future is for Matrix.
In practice, the Foundation needs an additional $610K in revenue to break-even, but this $100K would extend our runway 1 month while we work on landing grants and new members. To put this in context, we nearly doubled our revenue in 2024, reaching $561K, but it was also the first year in which we carried the full cost of our operations: $1.2M. To make ends meet, we liquidated $283K worth of cryptocurrency donations and ended the year with a $356K deficit.
@neil I think Matrix will be fine, because big organisations are already building on it and they will not let it die.
For example the Swedish Social Insurance Agency builds their new things on matrix (see https://cfp.matrix.org/matrixconf2024/talk/NFCLDB/), that agency could alone easily cough up that kind of money, it would be cheap for them. And that's just one agency, in Sweden, add to that all others using matrix around the world. The value matrix provides is huge, costs like $610K are tiny compared to that.
@neil you are right that there is no guarantee. There needs to be better ways for money to make its way to where funding is needed.
Still my prediction is in this case that it will be fine. If not, I will personally send angry emails to Försäkringskassan 🙂
@eliasr
The value matrix provides is huge, costs like $610K are tiny compared to that.
That is true of a lot of Free software projects though, and many struggle for funding, even though organisations which use it could easily afford to do so?