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Synergy-core: Open source core of Synergy, the keyboard and mouse sharing tool

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Re: Synergy-core: Open source core of Synergy, the keyboard and mouse sharing tool

#12

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 continuous…

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

Re: Synergy-core: Open source core of Synergy, the keyboard and mouse sharing tool

#13

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 continuous…

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)

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

Re: Synergy-core: Open source core of Synergy, the keyboard and mouse sharing tool

#14

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 continuous…

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)

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)

Re: Synergy-core: Open source core of Synergy, the keyboard and mouse sharing tool

#15

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 continuous…

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)

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.

Re: Synergy-core: Open source core of Synergy, the keyboard and mouse sharing tool

#16
post #8

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 continuous…

> no interest in making a good product This is a great, charitable interpretation of someone's work.

Actions betray intent.

Re: Synergy-core: Open source core of Synergy, the keyboard and mouse sharing tool

#17

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 continuous…

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)

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.

Re: Synergy-core: Open source core of Synergy, the keyboard and mouse sharing tool

#18
I'm really happy that they open sourced their core code! That's an awesome thing for a company that's making money from this code to do. I know they've had some issues going from 1.x to 2.x (see other comments) but this is a really brave step for them to take and I want to applaud them for moving to an open source model for a portion of their paid product. I hope this helps them turn around their 2.x version.

Re: Synergy-core: Open source core of Synergy, the keyboard and mouse sharing tool

#20
post #18

I'm really happy that they open sourced their core code! That's an awesome thing for a company that's making money from this code to do. I know they've had some issues going from 1.x to 2.x (see other comments) but this is a really brave step for them to take and I want to applaud them for moving to an open source model for a portion of their paid product. I hope this helps them turn around their 2.x version.

Synergy was originally fully open source, it came out of an open source project, what they actually did was close the frontend for 2.0.
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