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Comment by shittyadmin | Hacker News Reader

Synergy used to be great, the original developers really knew what they were doing, but since then it's been taken over by a commercial developer that seems to have no interest in making a good product and far more interest in charging money for it and licensing - more bugs are introduced with every release, clipboard support is half-broken on Linux for years, the Synergy 2.0 release now causes my mouse to continuously leave my screen while gaming even when locked and random restarts of the service and jumping back to the middle of the screen are far too common. I have to revert back to a very specific version to make Synergy work acceptably and I'm reliant on it for my daily workflow.

Worst part is I actually paid them money for it hoping they'd have fixed it by now...

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Nick forked a dead project and wanted to keep developing it, but still needed to pay rent and eat (a common problem among programmers). In order to try to both continue paying for necessary life functions and work on Synergy, he began asking for money. This isn't evil. The project was abandoned when he came along. I'm not saying Nick Bolton has done everything right, he clearly had little to no business experience before taking this on and was far too optimistic, but he did something no one else was doing: work on Synergy.

I think you summed it up quite nicely.

I developed the original Mac port, I guess about 15 years ago now. I’m pretty conflicted as to what’s happened with Synergy recently, but not because I feel like there’s anything morally wrong in what Nick did. I’m more bummed out because it feels like a market failure, for lack of a better way of explaining it: how could a useful open source project, valued by many and (tbh) not terribly complex, require a pivot to a commercial license to remain viable?

I’m as guilty as any for not contributing anything beyond my initial port. But I’m still bummed it’s come to this.

I think he just put too many eggs in that basket too quickly. It's a great product, and the cross platform support is killer since Multiplicity from EdgeRunner/Stardock and Mouse without Borders are both Windows only. I think Nick Bolton saw an opportunity, but wasn't necessarily the most qualified person to handle the task. I'm not trying to insult him, but I was around when Synergy was waiting on Chris to release the fabled 2.0 and when Nick Bolton jumped in to try to make a business out of Synergy.

His twist towards a commercial license came from the fact that despite it being used by many people, few ever paid. He obviously felt he had to force the issue but clearly chose poorly. This is an itch many people feel, but clearly few wish to scratch. It's frustrating.

It is not evil to start charging for a open-source product. However, it IS evil, if you abuse the users money just to build paywall tech instead to improve the software. Look up the bug history and try avoiding the spider webs.

There was an open letter from the CEO just last week about re-staffing the team to be more engineering-oriented: https://symless.com/blog/open-letter-synergy-team

(Edited, thanks corpMaverick and stagger87)

So they did a commercial fork of a working v1 open source product, and produced a closed source buggy v2, which they then open sourced again.

Now they are keeping the key members responsible for the buggy v2 (CEO + Devs).

I loved v1. I am skeptical that they will produce a reliable v3...

Some context, the letter came only after months of the same guy dismissing openly or behind the scenes - e.g. not approving posts on the forum - any reported issues and calls from the users that v2 was of beta quality. So I'd say it was an OK move but for sure a forced one after all the negative feedback.

Yep I left after the v2 beta nonsense. He locked my account out from the forums when he didn’t like my feedback. ShareMouse is by far a better product. I feel sorry for the employees but it’ll be a good day when symless goes out of business.

Here’s a fine example of Nick Bolton addressing a longstanding bug:

https://github.com/symless/synergy-core/issues/5226

He deleted a bunch of comments, locked the conversation and then has the audacity to say this a rare issue. I would have gladly helped them debug this issue if he had behaved like an adult.

ShareMouse doesn't support Linux so it's not a 1to1 replacement. Plus I'm very satisfied with synergy v1 just commenting on the approach from the symless CEO here

I have had the exact same experience. Plus totally unacceptable tweets by Nick. Those have been deleted in the mean time for obvious good reasons.

Not everybody. They let go "all staff whose role is not purely hands-on Software Engineering"

I feel it is the right thing to do, so they can focus on improving the product.

Except it looks like Nick fired everyone except himself and one customer service person who is 'Rather excitingly, Sarah is also spending some of her time to improve her software engineering skills so she can help with developing Synergy' (https://symless.com/blog/open-letter-synergy-team)?

Seems like a really terrible plan, when you need to retrain CSRs to do your engineering.

Yep, and starting several months ago I was getting weekly emails asking if I'd be interested in moving to England to work for them as a software engineer. Except, I'm not a software engineer (I'm a hardware guy), just a customer of theirs from V1 days. They made it sound like an emergency situation where they had to stall development until they could recruit some more talent.

It got so bad I had to unsub from their mailing lists.

No software engineers were fired. There were 3 devs at Symless, including myself, and we left of our own accord for various reasons.

This certainly did create a bit of a crisis, because hiring C++ talent in small towns outside of London is hard.

Thanks for the insider update.

I don't understand, with the nature of the product (coming from open source) why is Symless doubling down so hard on centralizing this? Look for remote C++ developers across the world and get the tools to make remote work work well.

I was just talking with a coworker -- I used Synergy around 4-8 years ago, then my employment situation changed and I didn't use it for about 3 years. Have just started using it again, and it seems like it's actually worse than it was then. Anecdotal, obviously, but that's not a good trajectory.

Thanks for the info. Please note I never said anyone was fired, perhaps you meant to direct that to the comment above mine?

Reread the sentence, the parent commenter is correct.

To be more specific, most non-software developers were let go with the intent to be to hire more software developers and streamline other aspects of the business. (saw the edit)

Awesome - I wasn't aware of that, but after reading that post I'm greatly reassured. It sounds like they're doing the right things first, glad they've straightened out the priorities.

I really hope it can become a great product.

well that's not good. I use Synergy daily.

That's been my experience also. It's kind of surprising given that I was able to replicate 90% of the functionality (that I normally use) for a Raspberry Pi project using only netevent[1] and netcat. Obviously cross-platform and international support (+ handling edge cases) would complicate things, but even in the most basic scenarios, Synergy has been terribly unreliable for me lately.

[1] https://github.com/Blub/netevent

I thought of using something like this for switching input devices between 4 of my computers that have some kind of desktop interface. Out of desire for much better robustness I opted for a 4-way physical USB switch instead. Extremely cheap, and works even in u-boot, during early boot for FDE password entry, etc. Also has a clear visual indication of apushed in button of where the input is connected atm.

I had been using Synergy to control my work laptop from my home machine. I hadn't used it in a while (2+ years) and my computer would constantly run out of memory (I think it was in dwm.exe, if I remember correctly) and I would need to reboot. It wasn't until I read the Random ASCII article linked from here (https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2018/02/11/zombie-processe...) about zombie processes that I was able to track it down to Synergy and uninstall it.

> no interest in making a good product

This is a great, charitable interpretation of someone's work.

Actions betray intent.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. In Nick's case, lack of experience.

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