Synergy (GPL'd Software KVM) switches to paid downloads | Hacker News Reader

Synergy (GPL'd Software KVM) switches to paid downloads

synergy-project.org

33 pointsyincrash27 comments

Synergy has been a bit odd in recent years. It doesn't seem like a particularly large or complex piece of software, and many projects that seem to be of similar scope are things maintained in the spare time of a few developers. It has long been stable, and it isn't clear that drastic improvements in it have been made, or even need to be made.

Yet Synergy appears to have a corporation behind it (Synergy Si) that only appears to work on Synergy. They have an office, and apparently provide free meals, Google-style 20% projects, and a variety of other perks. They're apparently hiring. They even offer stock options, despite my being rather bewildered at where the opportunity for growth is.

I donated years ago, and found myself occasionally receiving emails that just didn't make sense, making the whole operation sound giant. If they were working on other projects, too, but it seems like all they do is work on Synergy.

I was under the impression it was just one guy. But if he can make a business model out of writing and supporting gpl code and hire employees, then more power too him.

From the user's perspective its easy to say: it looks simple, so why shouldn't it be simple to maintain? I don't think its reasonable to compare Synergy to other projects unless you've actually tried to develop the code.

I'm not really sure how we can come across as a large company, there's only 2 of us right now.

Your post baffles me.

As a premium user who has gotten a ton of mileage out of Synergy, I totally support this - keeping this software up to date and easy to use while improving its utility for complex computing setups can't be easy, and I don't know what I'd do without it. Keep up the great work!

This should be the norm for a couple of reasons:

* There are still people that believe free-of-cost software cannot be high quality, which is likely a result of the well known relationship between price and perceived quality.

* If open-source developers are paid for their work, there will be more open-source software.

Interesting recent discussion on reddit about this: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2hvtuc/dear_gnome_i_...

Unless "apt-get install" starts deducting BTC from your wallet.dat, charging money for open source software isn't worth it. The revenue collected is minuscule, yet it reduces adoption and fragments the community. People use free forks instead of the "official" version.

There are better ways to monetize open source software: Consulting/support contracts. Bounties for features. Paid SaaS features. "Enterprise" features, such as turning Synergy into a mass remote admin tool. (I bet this would be handy in schools.)

It took me 30 seconds to think of those monetization ideas. I'm sure Nick Bolton can come up with better ones.

> It took me 30 seconds to think of those

> The revenue collected is minuscule

I think it also took you 30 seconds to assume that. Also, the dev already was doing various ways to get income from businesses, including some which you posted.

Your argument doesn't address the parent's first point, that many customers hesitate or refuse to use free software. By having paid downloads from their main front, they can market to these people, and use them to generate a modest amount of revenue that would otherwise not exist.

So you offer those people a paid support contract upfront.

* Click here to download Synergy with support ($4.99)

* Click here to download Synergy with no support (free)

It's common to call the no-support option the "community" version.

We tried that a while ago. It turns out, around 90% of Synergy users are very technical (fellow Software Engineers and the like). Often technical people aren't that interested in support because they prefer to figure stuff out for themselves (because we find it fun). Synergy does have a private help desk that Synergy users can contact for troubleshooting, but users that contact the help desk are often less technical (when it comes to Synergy troubleshooting).

Most Synergy users don't use repos, or Linux for that matter, so this new model works for Synergy (though, it probably wouldn't so well for a Linux-only project). Also, repos tend to have much older versions (at least in Synergy's case).

I found out about this when installing Synergy on my fresh Windows box that I use mostly for gaming. I gladly coughed up the $5. Of course, I could have built the software myself but, it wasn't worth the hassle of recompiling on all my platforms and keeping the software up to date. I think this model of open source software makes quite a bit of sense. I hope they get enough funding from this to keep making Synergy... It is a very useful tool.

Likewise, I use it all the time and can't really say I begrudge them their one-off $5

from the page:

Founder & CEO of Synergy Si, Inc.

Many people believe that the spirit of GPL licensed software is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of your software. This is a misunderstanding. Read more about this in the gnu.org article, Selling Free Software by the Free Software Foundation (the principal organizational sponsor of the GNU Operating System).

With that in mind, I have made the decision to charge a small fee for access to the Synergy download page. This will allow us to hire more engineers and improve Synergy faster than ever before. It turns out that given the option, only 0.002% of users will choose to donate, which just isn't enough to fund the team size required to maintain the program. The old donation model was just not sustainable. Synergy is still open source and "free as in free speech" (to quote Richard Stallman), except that now there's a small fee to download the software. As with all GPL licensed software, you are free to run the program, change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes.

Thanks for your understanding. I hope you decide to buy Synergy and support the development of open source software. Nick Bolton Founder & CEO Synergy Si, Inc.

I coughed up the fee and I read this statement prior to doing so. I have used Synergy many times over the years and regularly over the last year. That said, I cannot say I see much improvement, it works with some weird bugs, like unable to cut from Firefox on Windows and paste on Linux desktop. I am not holding my breath on this type of bug getting fixed or the product being any more than what it currently is.

Someone else said it in this thread, over the years I have received strange emails that made it seem like Synergy was some sort of hip Google-like startup company, even a reference to a possible office in California. Yet Synergy seems to have been mostly the same as when I first ever used it and I do not see any other products from the company.

This is a bad thing for a lot of reasons. The biggest one is that Synergy is going to get the bad press when users Google "free synergy download" and download the first random binary they come across, which could contain anything. Those users are going to complain "Synergy gave me a virus" or "the installer crashes" or whatever else and hurt the reputation of the project. This is regardless of the fact that they didn't download the official Synergy binary.

The second is that this will hurt the discoverability of the software. There's no way to try it now and see what it does and PC users are used to having that ability. Throwing up a paywall is going to strangle the community, IMO.

Third, you've now stranded anybody who downloaded it free from getting updates. What if there's a security flaw? Charging people $5 for what will be perceived as fixing bugs in the software is going to create a lot of grouchy users, I imagine.

An additional one is that the idea of "we're charging because we can" is something that I think has bad optics; using an FSF essay as your primary justification for charging for "free" software is going to rub several people the wrong way. A low (percentage) donation rate doesn't translate to a low amount of income, and I find it disingenuous to try to conflate those numbers.

Sadly, downloading random shady binaries already happens to open source projects whether they charge or not, because the shady people spend effort on SEO and open source developers don't.

For updates, all Windows/Mac software should be self-updating by now. Requiring users to download updates by hand is basically the same as no updates.

Actually we're charging because we need to. Charging a small fee allows us to hire more programmers. We are not charging "just because we can". For the last 2 years we have made progress from donations, but not fast enough. Every new OS version introduces new bugs into Synergy, faster than we can fix them. The bottom line is, we need more software engineers and this is the only way to do that.

Having already donated ~$15 this is entirely reasonable imo. I expect to be paid for my work, just like I expect to pay others so they too can earn a living.

I hope this goes well for them and a higher percentage of their user base chips in, Synergy is good software that makes some painful stuff a whole lot better.

I don't think I've ever installed Synergy by downloading it from their website, so this won't affect me. I use a package manager to install nearly all the software I use.

I donated once, and all I get is spam and dramatic whining from the project author, begging for more donations, while major bugs go unfixed and progress is abysmal.

For what it's worth, the nightly builds seem freely available still (http://synergy-project.org/nightly/)

Hint: underlying download URLs aren't behind the paywall: http://synergy-project.org/files/packages/synergy-1.6.0-r241...

Hah, cool. I remember using Synergy a lot while I was working at SGI, to connect between a windows, linux, and irix box. I never imagined there'd be a company built around it.

SGI, you say! Then this page will be a blast from the past for you :) http://synergy-project.org/info/

I hope they post a follow-up in a couple months. I would find the numbers interesting.

Our downloads dropped to 25% (which is sad), but our income has doubled (allowing us to double our team size).

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