Clearskies (BitTorrent Sync alternative) fundraiser | Hacker News Reader

Clearskies (BitTorrent Sync alternative) fundraiser

bountysource.com

38 pointsvoltagex_23 comments

I've been bothered that Bittorrent Sync isn't opensource. Alternatives are always welcome.

What bothers me is that the fundraising site they use charges 10%. That's a lot. Are there not fundraising sites out there with less painful cuts or alternative revenue streams?

I didn't realise that. I think there are a few different options but BountySource has nice GitHub integration and seems to be well known in the OSS community.

Kickstarter is only 5%... though Amazon payments is also 3%-5%. I hope the 10% isn't before payment fees.

We have also a bitcoin address:

18QEEJuR2ACAunMVeAxZ46o4QprxFKyGkw

Pedro.

Actually if you have time and want to contribute to the project, it's better than donating money.

We need a review of the crypto, development, logo design, improve the documentation of the protocol, get more exposure, etc.

Would it not be more sensible for the authors to have a reasonably complete implementation for testing, and then request funding to polish it off with a nice UI and a security audit?

As it is at the moment, it seems quite risky to fund this.

Couldn't you look at it from the other direction? A complete implementation is more important than a pretty UI at the moment.

I really hope more people fund it.

Yes but there's no guarantee of a complete implementation, and as far as I can tell from looking at the website, no way of getting one's money back if the work is not done.

At least if there is already a working prototype, then that inspires confidence in those who might be interested in donating.

I don't see this as much different from any other donation to an open source project, but I can understand your concern.

There is a working prototype. Steven Jewel, the original author, wrote the spec and an initial prototype in Ruby. To support a wide variety of platforms, it was decided to rewrite that prototype in C++. The Ruby prototype, which I believe is no longer being maintained, can be found here:

https://github.com/jewel/clearskies-ruby

Thanks, I hadn't seen that. Looks like they've since updated their bountysource page with more information, including this link.

I sympathize with the attitude, but if people wait until the bulk of the work has already been done to donate to crowd fund open source projects, that means crowd funding is not a viable way to fund the bulk of open source projects. If true, that's a shame. I'm not sure how to fix it and mitigate the funder risk. Maybe have payment go through only after concrete milestones are delivered?

That would be much better, although it does raise the question of who would arbitrate on such milestones being reached.

Looks quite interesting.

To be completely honest, I've used Bittorrent Sync + my own server to roll my own in-house Dropbox like service between my machines and haven't had any issues at all.

Sure. I wish it was open source. Yes. I wish it had an open API (though, they currently have a beta version of their API http://www.bittorrent.com/sync/developers/api). At the end of the day though, I really don't feel like I really need to jump ship to an alternative.

Did you manage to get BTSync working without hitting BitTorrent Inc's tracker? That's the main issue I have.

I have. It works just fine. But you have to hard code the peer IP addresses or hostnames when not using a tracker server, as mentioned in the docs.

Fundraiser posts like this are not great for HN. That a cause wants money isn't intellectually interesting. If the project is new and significant, I guess it's ok. But it would be better to link to the most substantive page about the project, and mention the fundraiser in the thread.

Crowdfunding is a great thing, so I'm not sure exactly where to draw the line on this. What I'm sure of, though, is that posts entitled "Just 12 hours remaining to hit stretch goals" shouldn't be here. This post wasn't like that, but others have been.

I'm not casting doubt on the merit of any particular fundraiser, and especially not this one.

I couldn't find any background on the authors, so how can I tell if this is solid?

Good question. I know it's not that concrete, but Pedro Larroy has quite a lot of GitHub activity https://github.com/larroy, and so does Steven Jewel - https://github.com/jewel

There's a semi-active mailing list at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/clearskies-dev

That's all I've got for now.

SyncThing is another open-source implementation that's worth a look: https://github.com/calmh/syncthing

Is this better than Ori? http://ori.scs.stanford.edu/

I still want to look into Ori. What makes Clearskies interesting for me is the list of platforms it wants to support. Notably (missing in Ori for my use cases):

- Android

- Windows

Reference: Your site's claiming

We currently support Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD.

and

https://github.com/larroy/clearskies_core#supported-compiler... says

Our target is to support the following platforms in order of development effort: Linux, Android, Windows, Mac, iOS.

Yes, yes, and yes!

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