KDE now has its own Matrix infrastructure

[Eike Hein]

On 2/21/19 8:46 PM, Filipe Saraiva wrote:
> 2. What are the reasons to use a server owned by a company, not by us? I
> don't want to start a flamewar, just know the reasons and motivations.

Hosting a Matrix server currently requires a quite beefy box, and is 
also somewhat maintenance-intensive. I'll let the Sysadmin team speak 
for itself, but it's my understanding it's generally not opposed to 
making use of hosted services, if they're in principle self-hostable and 
free software. Going by the Sysadmin report at Akademy and the things 
currently in flight, especially at the current time I would imagine it's 
welcome not to increase the burden on our sysadmins.

In addition to getting the infrastructure to run it on (some of "our" 
servers are donated too, mind you) this donation by Matrix also includes 
their support - it's basically a commercial hosting service we're 
currently getting for free. During the launch days, several Matrix staff 
were engaged in giving KDErs chat support and doing hotfixe on the setup.

Of course part of the requirements for doing this was to make sure that 
sysadmin has access to pull full backups, so that if need be, we can 
move the service somewhere else in the future. In this sense it's quite 
similar to the agreement KDE e.V. has with Pling to run store.kde.org.

We've also been impressed that Matrix have stayed true to their plans 
laid out some years ago, of setting up a foundation to turn ownership of 
the Matrix specs over to. This appears in the final stages. Plus, if you 
followed the developments in the Matrix world, one of the first things 
they did after working their way out of a funding crisis a year or two 
ago was to put work into those specs again. Those actions leave at least 
me with the necessary degree of trust in them to stay in tune with KDE's 
values. This is, after all, also part of what makes Matrix compelling 
for KDE in the first place, and working together seems mutually beneficial.


Cheers,
Eike