Intro

Mike: Hello, and welcome to Open Source Underdogs! I’m your host Mike Schwartz, and this is episode 62 with Amandine Le Pape, Co-Founder and COO of Element, the software startup behind Matrix, an open standard for secure, decentralized real-time communication, which you can learn more about at Matrix.org.

This episode was recorded in early February at the inaugural State of Open Conference or SoCon, which was held in London at the QEII Center in Parliament Square.

SoCon was made possible by the inexorable tenacity of Amanda Brock, who leads an organization called OpenUK and is the editor of the 2022 Oxford University press book, Open Source, Law, Policy and Practice, (2^nd edition).

If you’re an open-source founder and you haven’t read this book, go to Amazon right now and order it. If you can travel to London next year, I hope to see you at SoCon 2024. If it’s half as fabulous as this year’s event, you definitely should not miss it. I guess that’s enough gushing about SoCon, let’s get on with the interview with Amandine.

Origin of Idea

Michael: Amandine, thank you so much for joining us.

Amandine: Thank you for having me.

Michael: As one of the founders, I have to ask what’s the origin story of Element? And at what point did you think about starting Matrix, the open-source repository and Matrix of protocol?

Amandine: So, it goes back to almost 9 years now, in 2014, where we were a team selling commercial messaging apps to Telco’s, incubated in a big corporation called Amdocs. After a while, we were really annoyed by the fact the whatever we did with our apps, WhatsApp would always win. WhatsApp would always be on the front page of the Telco’s website, next to the app we were building for them.

And this fragmentation even from a user perspective is really bad. For email, I can talk to anyone with my phone, and can send SMS and call people whatever phone they use, whatever network they are on, while on chat I have to actually install a new app every time someone wants to use a new one. So, we came to Amdocs and proposed them to actually try to fix this by creating an open standard for communication.

Having built on top of all the other existing standards before, we had learned a lot and thought that with the professional team, we would be able to truly bring something to the world, which was able to answer the needs that we had of interoperability for chat and messaging voice over IP.

Origin of Company / Project

Michael: That sort of answers my question, but you’re working at Amdocs and you’re thinking, “Well, wouldn’t it be great if we could federate these chat servers,”, but how does that lead to actually starting an open-source project and the founding of the company?

Amandine: So, what we do actually is create the open standard and open protocol – we set it up as an open-source project. So, within Amdocs, we set up completely something independent with a new brand, completely open-source. And we started working on it for three years, actually building the reference implementations, defining the spec, etc.

After three years, there were other companies building on top of Matrix and monetizing it, like Erickson for example, selling communication systems for banks in Sweden. Whilst the core team, we were still building the project and not funding it.

So, based on that, we thought that it would be better to actually set up an independent company and try to monetize Matrix on the side. So, that’s when we actually spent out of Amdocs, set up Element as the commercial company, which builds the flagship app itself – called Element – and selling services and proprietary product on top of Matrix. And we also set up the Matrix Foundation as an independent nonprofit, which is the custodian of the standard itself.

Project Contributions

Michael: The Matrix Foundation governs the protocol, but it also has some software in there. There’s a reference implementation, I think, in Python. Who contributes the code to that software project? Is it mostly Element or, are there community contributions?

Amandine:  Basically, Element contributes a lot of code towards reference implementations of servers and SDKs and some of the application services. And it’s literally donating the IP to the foundation, so that it’s completely independent from the commercial entity. But beyond that, Element contributes the reference implementation server Synapse, we also have another server called Dendrite – all the various SDKs for iOS, Android, etc.

But then, the community, on the other side, is actually building their own projects and building their own reference implementation servers, their own SDKs, Bridges, etc.

So, whilst Element contributes a lot to some of these projects, which are the ones which are often used in production by governments or enterprises. The community is very vibrant, and I think we’re close to 5,000 contributors across the entire Matrix project and the different repos.

Value Prop

Michael: So, there are a number of communications platforms out there, we’ve actually had Ian Ten from Mattermost and Gabriel Engel from Rocket. And there’s Slack, of course, is out there. What makes the Element commercial offering different, and why do we need another communication platform?

Amandine: So, if you’re just trying to have your own communication system that you can run yourself, then yes, you may want to just go to Mattermost or Rocket.chat. The difference with Element is the fact it’s built on the open standard – it means that once you run your Element and Matrix deployment, you can communicate to any other deployments out there. The same way that when you deploy your mail server, it federates with all the other email servers out there.

And actually, Rocket.chat built a bridge to Matrix, so now, Rocket.chat can communicate with Element without a problem. And the interesting thing is that was under the impression of the Swedish government, which brought all its vendors into one room and said, “Guys, we cannot use SaaS solutions for communications – we don’t want to designate one vendor for all the government, ministries should be able to choose the app they want to use. So, you have to federate, you have to interoperate – figure it out, find something.”

By the way, there is this standard called Matrix that should do the job, but that means that today, if you use Rocket.chat, you are able to participate in the Matrix network. So, the interesting thing is also that when you use Matrix for your communication, as for a government for example, it really solves the political problem.

Because different ministries will own their own communication, they will deploy their own servers, they run it wherever they want, under the security they want, but yet, they are able to participate in the wider network and the ownership of the discussion is shared between the two. So, you completely skip over the “Shall we use your system or my system” to come to work together on this project.

Building Matrix v. Element Brand?

Michael: So, here at the conference, I noticed that there’s a Matrix booth, but there’s no Element booth. Why did you feel that it was the right thing to do to promote Matrix and not the commercial company here?

Amandine: It felt more aligned with the idea of OpenUK in terms of building open source in the community side of things. Basically, the same way, this weekend we had the Matrix. It’s Matrix which is being most represented – we don’t even have an Element sticker or an Element banner out there. Even if Element is open source too, but really trying to grow the ecosystem in the community for Matrix.

Technical inspiration

Michael: This is a little bit of ancient history – but do you remember a platform called Diaspora? Were you thinking about Diaspora at all when you started Matrix?

Amandine: So, the thing is that we’re addressing very much the social network side of things whilst we wanted to go for the full communication, real-time communication system. In terms of whether we thought about them when we chose the decentralized structure, actually it’s more inspired from Git, and basically the idea of replicating the content of the conversation and the history of the conversation on every server.

Community Contributions

Michael: Let’s talk a little more about the community. What areas do you think the community makes the most contributions? Is it in Bridges, Bots or Widgets, which is, like how you extend the functionality? Or is it in the core server? Where do you see the most activity from the community?

Amandine: So, the way we built Matrix is to make sure that the development of clients was super easy. Because what we saw in the past is every time people wanting to add chat in their communication systems, everyone thinks it’s easy – it’s just sending a message. And then, if you want the actual features of history, etc., it’s tough. So, we wanted to provide an easy way for any web developer