![]() ![]() I'm also of the opinion that Synergy does way to little to make contributing easy. Splashing your page with prompts for donations, including message boxes every time you open the site, appealing to personal pity instead of technical aspects and matters, will not be very attractive to contributors. The Red Hat - Fedora - CentOS relationship is a great example. And why should they? If you analyze most companies that support and build open-source software successfully, you'll find they have freely available versions of their core product, even if as testing beds for what will come next on enterprise platforms. You need to have continuous real-world testing: in theory nightly builds would be enough, but in practice, the lions share of users will never use them. You cannot have a working feedback cycle with your project fully behind a paywall. Just because they try to appeal to enterprises doesn't mean they aren't working "as an open source project." They want to get paid, nothing wrong with it A paywall is a statement that you think your time is more valuable than everything else a community-based approach can bring. When you try to centralize all the development into your own trusted group, you severely narrow your views of how development should continue. Most successful large-scale projects have multiple interest groups and organizations working to 'scratch their own itch', and everybody benefits from it. I also personally think open-source has to be a two-way channel, but not necessarily with money flowing on one way, and code on the other. ![]() The feedback cycle will probably be severely imparted due to the lower number of users. External contributions were already few, and will likely be reduced even further, since many people are not interested in contributing for free for software behind a paywall. I specifically mentioned that I don't see any moral problem with it. And since then, I've been happy to use it for free, with great bug fixes in it. This software languished for years before this guy took it up and made an effort to get paid to work on it. The whole point of this is that no one cares enough to develop this project for free, so they are trying to get it done for money. Just because they try to appeal to enterprises doesn't mean they aren't working "as an open source project." They want to get paid, nothing wrong with it. They deliberately chose to direct the project as it's own company, on their own, then target enterprise users with a separate edition, instead of working as an open project, beyond the legal sense of the word. They are just trying to make a living, and having the developer's official downloads behind a paywall is a perfectly valid way to try for it, especially after donations failed.īut the project never really reached or took community feedback and work in any relevant fashion. Anyone can redistribute it for free if they like, and sudo apt-get install synergy will still work fine. I personally think the project will likely end up forked. But I find doing both a bit unfriendly to users: how can I know the project will keep my interests at heart instead of enterprise ones? Earlier, being a paying customer gave you more power in asking for features, but now that everyone has to pay, how will priorities be decided? I can understand going one way or the other: charging for your product and focusing completely on the consumers, or using the enterprise money to fund the open source version. But the project never really reached or took community feedback and work in any relevant fashion. The authors cite cost reasons and difficulty in keeping up with development without sufficient donations. This is allowed by the GPL, and there is nothing particularly immoral about, but I personally am a bit baffled. Now the downloads seem to be restricted by a paywall. It is GPL licensed, but as of recent years has been more and more preachy for donations. Synergy is currently the best multi-platform software for sharing input between multiple computers.
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