XMPP/Matrix went the first way. Matrix ecosystem has one reference client/server with really good features but hardware requirements that place it out of ordinary folks' reach. Similarly, XMPP has some really good apps built on top (eg. Whatsapp) but the free-software clients (not servers) are lagging behind, though catching up quickly in the past years.
ActivityPub ecosystem went the other way with AGPL everywhere (Mastodon/Epicyon/Funkwhale/Peertube/PixelFed/Funkwhale/Mobilizon/WriteFreely/Lemmy/Plume) with the notable of bookwyrm who has the Anticapitalist Software license. As a consequence of the ecosystem tailoring to users/non-profits/cooperatives not corporations/governments, it's blooming into this amazing and friendly ecosystem where everybody contributes and interoperates. Hell, who would have thought three years ago selfhosting federated/p2p livestreaming video would be become so easy as Peertube?
Personally i'm more on Jabber/XMPP's side (i contribute to joinjabber.org project, and use Jabbber/XMPP daily) mostly for technical reasons (AP/matrix haven't yet caught up with XMPP in many regards) but in my view adopting loose licensing is what almost killed the XMPP ecosystem all these years ago when it had the exact same promises as matrix does today: one universal federated protocol to bridge to all others.
Define ordinary folks, please. Matrix isn't really that resource intensive for a small homeserver between family and friends.
Server-side, many smaller hosting coops went into matrix but later dropped it because of synapse using too much resources. I know individual selfhosters who were really sad to drop it because their raspberry pi didn't have enough RAM (512MB-1GB) for selfhosting synapse.
However someone said in another thread that synapse resource usage is really better these days. Would you recommend it on such low-end hardware? (ActivityPub/XMPP servers fare really well in such conditions)
I've heard of people running Synapse on a RPi 3 (see https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/g9h6au/matrixri... for instance) for such use cases. If you want to chat in large 1000+ member rooms, it probably won't be enough. However, even for such a use case, you don't need anything that is out of reach of a common person, just a few gigabytes of RAM. In general, it's hard to make it go over 3 GiB. My server hovers around 2 GiB and I'm in many large rooms, including the beast that is Matrix HQ.
So I would agree that Synapse is not usable on RPi-level hardware in all use cases, but you can definitely run it on such hardware for some use cases. Dendrite is also maturing really quickly and will be less resource hungry.
$ ldd `which element-desktop` | wc -l
102It's frustratingly slow and heavy, regardless of client.
If you grep the logs for state-res you will probably see that some room is consistently chewing resources (these days we explicitly log the worst offenders); easiest bet is to ask your users to leave that room or use the shutdown api to remove it from the server.
Otherwise, it may be that there’s so much data flying around due to the busy rooms that the in-memory caches are blowing out. This makes everything slow down as the DB gets hammered, and unintuitively uses more RAM as slow requests stack up. The solution is to increase the cache factor, much as you would on an overloaded db. We’re currently looking at autotuning caches do you don’t have to do this manually.
If it’s still slow, then there’s probably a bug or other weirdness (ancient Python?) - my personal server has about 5 users on a 4 core cpu and uses about 2GB of RAM without a dedicated DB node and is in thousands of rooms (including busy ones).
(Also it hopefully goes without saying that all bets are off if you aren’t on the latest Synapse release - we are constantly landing improvements currently; eg the auth chain cover algorithm eliminates most of the known perf edge cases on state resolution).
Sounds like I should tune some caches then - I have memory to spare if it turns out to make a difference.
BTW, I just noticed there is an option to add a Redis - would that be a significant improvement compared to just using the process caching?
Redis is only useful if you split the server into multiple worker processes, which you shouldn’t need to at that size (and even then, doesn’t provide shared caching yet, although there’s a PR in flight for it - we currently just use redis as a pubsub mechanism between the workers).
Highly recommend hooking up prometheus and grafana if you haven’t already, as it will likely show a smoking gun of whatever the failure mode is.
Are the logs stacking up with slow state-res warnings? Stuff like:
2021-02-25 23:15:26,408 - synapse.state.metrics - 705 - DEBUG - None - 1 biggest rooms for state-res by CPU time: ['!YynUnYHpqlHuoTAjsp:matrix.org (34.6265s)']
2021-02-25 23:15:26,411 - synapse.state.metrics - 705 - DEBUG - None - 1 biggest rooms for state-res by DB time: ['!YynUnYHpqlHuoTAjsp:matrix.org (148.6s)']Definitely not: https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed...
And having worked for the last 6 months in a French governmental agency, Tchap[1] is the only internal instant messaging solution I was made aware of. Most people still had an email+phone centred work-flow however.
Citation needed. The European Union Public License is copyleft and it's literally written by governmental bodies.
Even a government like france which is involved in strong open-washing campaign has serious Microsoft ties behind the scenes (education & military mostly) and despite all the promises for 100% OPEN, keeps on introducing closed-source algorithm which are paid for with millions of euros of public money and whose results are very sketchy to say the least (i'm looking at you ParcourSup).
So, when i said "less friendly to governments", i did not mean from a legal perspective. I meant AGPL is only one expression of a global approach to software development that is focused on user empowerment. Such software is usually less concerned with problems of big organizations (including governments), and less likely to try and reinforce governmental control (which is something most governments are looking for in a product). Does that make sense?
https://choosealicense.com/licenses/ provides a concise rundown of a few common ones
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html: a more detailed list
https://github.com/plibither8/licensed: a CLI tool to help choose licenses (we're on HN).
Generally I think MIT is a good default and you should only use a different license if you have a strong case for why MIT doesn't make sense for your project.
OP, if you see your project switching licenses down the road, you might as well look into CLAs, a whole other can of worms, or just stick with the least restrictive license that achieves your goals. I'd personally use LGPLv3.
For what it's worth, I think there's reasoning to consider it on a project-by-project basis. An example might be how XMPP more or less became a bunch of walled-garden forks for various messengers like Google Chat and Facebook. I think Linux thrived with the GPLv2's copyleft being a "sweet spot" for them.
I think you have a real product here and would caution you against releasing the source code.
If you do want to open source it, I highly recommend GPLv2 or 3.
This is solid advice for client software. However for software to run on the server side, AGPL providers better protections to ensure further developments remain free (copyleft).
The choice of license really depends on what the OP aims to achieve with his software.
That is simply not true. It may be true for huge corporations with legal counsel spreading FUD. But why should we care about these people ruining our lives? They're already destroying the planet and making sure millions of people are enslaved in the mines/factories across the third world, and we should provide free work for them?!
Interesting entities (libraries, schools, associations, workers coops) will not care about the software license.
I assure you, even "interesting" entities care about this. Hell, even public institutions I worked for did.
No: it's their choice, and if they choose not to use GPL software it is evidence that they do not care about user and developer software freedom. And that they don't want to contribute back.
Also, "some major institutions" is very unclear. Google is ok with GPLv2 but not with GPLv3. Apple has restrictions on their app store.
Both companies are extremely unlikely to support decentralized communities anyways - they outright compete against them.
This is still possible with GPL (and the AGPL, for that matter) by granting an exemption to the license for third-party extension software that is in the form of a plugin using a specific API.
It is worth noting that depending on the details of your (and the plugin's) implementation, such an exemption may not even be required.
This is probably a good place to start digging in to the topic: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins
But before anyone starts down this rabbit hole (the legal, social, and technical details of which I personally find fascinating, but YMMV), a maintainer should instead think about the things they want to allow, the things they want to forbid, and the things they want to be able to charge for. Also, which of the aforementioned things they want to provide strong guarantees for in the event of a change in ownership and/or a fork (eg. MySQL/Oracle, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, etc.).
But whatever the preferences are for a particular project, there almost certainly is a way to set those boundaries using a FLOSS license, and it is probably possible while using the GPL (but if you're leaning toward 'allow individuals and mega corps to do whatever they want', there isn't much sense in using the GPL as a starting point), though it is possible you might need a few additional tools for some scenarios (requiring a Contributor License Agreement or even copyright assignment for contributions, license exemptions for specific APIs, splitting out some shared libraries and releasing those under a different-but-compatible license, dual licensing, separate licensing for non-code assets, a nonprofit foundation, compatibility testing and associated badging & trademarks, etc.).
Anyway, there are a lot of tools available, and most of them can be grabbed when and as they're needed, if they ever are.
So, start with what you want in terms of permissions and boundaries, then ask for advice on enabling/enforcing that structure with a FLOSS license, and it can probably be done without too much complexity (assuming that it isn't incompatible with FLOSS, like 'This software cannot be used by the military or to support the creation of WMDs').
I don't know of any copy left license that prevents you from making JSON API calls from any source you want, so you can integrate something like matrix easily enough.