Your solution to someone complaining that the boss is earning too much is to suggest they pay the other workers less (or not at all)?

Spoken like someone who didn't work with the xmpp protocol

Please don't be that person that runs in here, didn't read the thing, and writes multiple paragraphs of stupidity. Just don't do it.

You're not "funding this guy's lifestyle" (love how you assume it's a guy). You're paying a person a less than fair wage when they can be getting twice the money elsewhere for the same role.

This person is taking a drastic pay cut to run things AS THEIR JOB. It's how they pay for things, and have kids, and a life. You're making the assumption they are somehow bilking money out of this, and that's not the case from that dollar amount.

You also didn't seem to understand that because it's a non-profit custodial arm of the project, that they are the ones keeping it alive for people like to bitch about this person making a salary ffs. Jeebus, some people, how dare they.

That dollar amount is higher than what several presidents of European countries earn. I'm sorry but if a project is based on donations from around the globe, you can't then think of a salary that's one of the highest in the world.

I read all of the comment chain and I perfectly understand that in San Francisco or LA the rent is huge and that people earn those numbers. If I'll ever consider donating part of my Spanish salary, looking at that stupidly high number heavily disincentives me because what the fuck, living in one of the world's most expensive places and expecting for people that live with a third of that money (with a salary that's considered high!!) to donate is super entitled.

For just $19.95 a month you can talk to all your friends!

To be fair, Joshua R. Simmons has since changed their name to Robin Riley and now goes by they/them pronouns which I did not notice noted anywhere on the matrix.org website. They're still the same person who has been running the foundation for a long time, so I hope I can be forgiven for not realizing their updated pronoun status. So, you're correct that they are no longer going by he/him pronouns, but I really don't know much past that.

I mentioned in the original post that I found a reddit thread where they talked about their pay and the breakdown of finances. They pull in roughly a million a year for the whole foundation, and 50% roughly goes to staffing, which means with 8 other people in the organization, everyone else is making about $60k a year if we're going to talk about underpaying people for their jobs. That's all the other executives and the entire trust and safety team.

Once again, if they're failing at their job to keep the project funded, that's when you make sacrifices to make it work.

I'm suggesting that their balance sheet looks off. Matrix should primarily be spending money on developers and infrastructure.

The boss earning what seems to be $170k isn't a ton for that position, and it's a fairly small piece of the pie. Even if the boss took no pay, they're still spending a lot of money on non-development and hosting tasks. I would like to see "Other Staff" increase at the expense of everything except hosting costs.

Ah yes, exploit free labor. Capitalism's favorite way to make money.

Now 9 wonder if there's a similar report for Mozilla

Wish the homeserver portability would be worked on more. The ability to change homeserver would really allow people to more easily move on from matrix.org.

Myself included ;).

Optimally it would even allow the switch "after the fact", so after your original homeserver is down, assuming your client has a local copy of the server-side secret storage. It would need to be based on some cryptographic identity then, I suppose.

My understanding is that Matrix is a nonprofit.

The Matrix.org Foundation is a non-profit and only relies on donations to operate. Its core mission is to maintain the Matrix Specification, but it does much more than that.

Non-profit… only relies on donations…

This was taken quite literally at the bottom of that article.

The plan was to rely on donations, which doesn't usually work for hosted products.

You can do that for free. But for that low, low price, you can talk to your friends with a Matrix Green checkmark next your name! #worthit

The context in the article is important. Similar to what FUTO preaches-- people don't donate. That's why corporate solutions usually win. Better to charge a bit of money so we can have nice things.

A green check!!!! Wow! Sign me up baby!

170k for running a company? Shit. I wouldn't do that. You can make just as much being a halfway competent developer, and it's way less stress.

You can pull the form 990 for any non-profit in the US pretty easily. Here's Mozilla's: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200097189

Non-profit organizations still exist within the capitalist system. Just because they don't pay out dividends to shareholders doesn't mean they can't be exploitative. If a non-profit makes a lot of money, the people who run it just increase their own salaries. Happens all the time. And yes, non-profits exploit labor all the time. Local arts councils are an easy example of this. Run an art show where the venue and food are donated. They take a fee at the door, ask for donations throughout, and require a cut of any art sold. If there's a bar, they get a cut of that too. The artists who enabled the show to even exist did all their labor for free in exchange for exposure and maybe selling something. They see none of the take though. Sounds pretty capitalist to me.