I don’t think there’s a bright line or litmus test, but I judge for myself.

Single standard organizations created by the dev group are just naturally biased certain ways.

I don’t think there’s a single perfect body, but it’s definitely curious to me why someone would start a stand-alone foundation rather than use w3c, ietf, or others that seem to work pretty well.

I also judge the number of different clients and servers implementing the spec for whether it’s real or just a controlled intermediary. Sun/Oracle seemed pretty bad about this back in the day with JSR stuff although I haven’t paid attention in 10 years.

Projects can make their own choices and set up foundations if they are willing to fund and monetize, etc. But that stuff isn’t as robust as IRC or protocols that have independent standards bodies.

Seems like there are lots of different clients [0] and a couple of different servers [1].

The idea of a single dev team being VC funded means that there’s a drive to monetize. That’s bad pressure on a protocol and one that doesn’t exist for IRC and other protocols. There’s multiple members in the matrix foundation and that helps but there’s just not much diversity of interests.

Again, not the end of the world, and the project seems to me to be going to great lengths to collaborate. But I feel the same way as if Microsoft started up an independent foundation to drive development of the Skype protocol. Good on them, but it’s not as robust as an independent protocol.

[0] https://matrix.org/clients/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol)