Donations go to the Matrix.org Foundation and help pay for core team dev, but also are really useful for pointing bigger donors at to say “look, we get $4K/month on Patreon + Liberapay etc; this shows we are a good project to back; how about you match it?”
Buying hosting from Element however also funnels back to fund core Matrix dev - because almost all of Element’s work is donated (unilaterally, in an asset lock) to the Matrix.org Foundation. In other words, anything an Element employee commits into https://github.com/matrix-org automatically becomes the copyright assigned to the Foundation. This also has the separate multiplying factor that the more evidence there is to run a sustainable SaaS business on Matrix, the easier it is for Element to raise funds and keep going - and thus continue to support the core Matrix dev.
Sorry it’s so complicated, but funding FOSS is fiddly (as Mozilla demonstrates...)
Donations go to the Matrix.org Foundation and help pay for core team dev, but also are really useful for pointing bigger donors at to say “look, we get $4K/month on Patreon + Liberapay etc; this shows we are a good project to back; how about you match it?”
Buying hosting from Element however also funnels back to fund core Matrix dev - because almost all of Element’s work is donated (unilaterally, in an asset lock) to the Matrix.org Foundation. In other words, anything an Element employee commits into https://github.com/matrix-org automatically becomes the copyright assigned to the Foundation. This also has the separate multiplying factor that the more evidence there is to run a sustainable SaaS business on Matrix, the easier it is for Element to raise funds and keep going - and thus continue to support the core Matrix dev.
Sorry it’s so complicated, but funding FOSS is fiddly (as Mozilla demonstrates...)
P.S. thank you for donating!!