Be that as it may, the Beeper mini client wasn’t licensed under a FOSS license and they tried to monetize it with a monthly recurring subscription.
And by the looks of it, many of their matrix bridges were created by their, now Lead Architect, before they joined Beeper. Those are under GPL so Beeper doesn’t has much choice but to keep them open source.
So it’s kind of like me bragging about doing good for society by virtue of me paying my taxes.
Okay, so? Are you implying they would make the bridges closed source if they could? Then why do they still maintain the open source bridges instead of forking or writing their own, and why do they sponsor devs to make new open source bridges instead of contracting them to create closed source ones, and why do they dump a bunch of money into the matrix foundation with no immediate benefit to their business? Not sure why it's so hard to believe that people might try to support themselves while improving the open source ecosystem.
Yes, the clients (both beeper mini and beeper cloud) are closed source. That's their business model - open source bridges that anyone can run if they wanted, then they just make it more convenient if you use their services by hosting it all for you and giving a nice polished client. The comparison was to libpurple devs - bridges are the equivalent of libpurple. This is like if libpurple devs decided to write a closed source client based on libpurple and then charge for it. Sounds good to me if it lets them keep working on the open source stuff.
And by the looks of it, many of their matrix bridges were created by their, now Lead Architect, before they joined Beeper. Those are under GPL so Beeper doesn’t has much choice but to keep them open source.
So it’s kind of like me bragging about doing good for society by virtue of me paying my taxes.