[archived] Introducing Pulse, and ind.ie

I’d definitely like to see that, yes.

I think this works as justification, as well as anything. The rest is just up to execution.

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I hope this means that they re-use the software in some environment designed by them, instead of absoring the codebase into a way larger blob where everything is co-dependent on everything else.

That fear aside, cheers on the growth, both on developer base, and public image! I can’t wait to see syncthingPulse become the mainstream file-sync solution! :smiley:

Vimeo requires flash (or something alike, since on firefox it just states “This video can’t be played with your current setup.” for any video). That’s a bit of an irony in this context where we’re promoting freedoms and free software.

That sounds really windows-centric where everything is called a folder - directories are called folders, mailboxes are called folders, etc. I really think we should stick to a terms that are a bit more neutral.

Oh, I think it’s neutral enough. A folder is a collection of something, commonly files on computers.

Original discussion, short and sweet:

Hey Hugo,

Indeed. Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to host that particular talk on my site yet using our own video player built on top of video.js (I will do, hopefully this weekend, if I can get a chance.) However, you can find an earlier version of the talk talk I gave at the RSA a few months ago on my blog. That video is also hosted on Vimeo (on a Pro account that we pay for) and we built the custom player so that we wouldn’t have to use Vimeo’s own player which has third-party tracking (Google Analytics and Conviva).

This is exactly what we’re doing, yes. I see Pulse as a lean mean syncing engine and I’d hate to see it get unnecessarily bloated (and Jakob wouldn’t let that happen either, even if we tried, I’m sure.)

Thanks so much, Hugo. We’re very excited about it too. Here’s to that :smiley:

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Great to hear all this, thanks for your reply! :slight_smile:

I don’t care what it’s called as long as it continues to go from strength to strength as it has done.

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Thank you for such a thoughtful and detailed reply. You quite rightly say that the site is pretty much free of trackers. I’m glad to see this! It is heartening (no pun intended) to find that you have been pushing for independence in the face of the practical challenges it introduces.

+1

Having said that, I have some feedback for @aral. I believe you might want to consider examining your portfolio of “brand names”, and think about simplification. Ind.ie, stratosphere, Heartbeat,and pulse.Seems like a lot of labels for your community of users to remember. Of course I am completely wrong IF you intend to invest heavy in brand building - although it appears to go against the grain relative to your overall philosophical orientation.

Free advice from a former Fortune 500 marketing person. LOL - yeah I used to be a customer of the players who do surveillance and sell data.

I have to admit this worries me a bit. I’m starting to use syncthing on 22 remote computers. I just hope it sticks around. Changing the name now, then maybe again later or maybe back to syncthing seems risky. I guess I could learn how it works and fork it but that doesn’t seem like a lot of fun.

Was Syncthing not taking off as well as you all wanted it too? If so, it seems like you’re quiting 5 minutes before the miracle happens.

Love the software, hope it does well.

John in Medford OR

This sounds ambitious but is sorely needed. I m not thrilled about the name change simply because LinkedIn the owner of news aggregator app pulse is spinning theirs into a newsreader with social network features, so misunderstandings will abound for some time to come. Worst case would be LinkedIn trying to claim the name as happened with pocket and it’s open source alternative poche, now wallabag.

My question for @aral is: For your decentralised cloud with inbuilt social network to work, wouldn’t you need to ensure that issue #109 is addressed ( https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/109 ) so that people can have a server instance with encrypted data that is always online? Addressing that would make pulse a one stop sync, backup and sharing solution - there has been great interest in this feature and people have rallied to fund it via bounty source. Calmh has been hesitant about having features funded in the past but pointed to this collaboration as a possibility to fund features from now on. Whats your take on this?. Without this feature, I don’t see how your plan to offer the features you describe will work. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea, I get the metaphors behind the component names, I want it to work but I d like to hear a bit more about what exactly you plan to add in terms of features. What will the crowdfunded money (referring to your planned November campaign) be used for in terms of feature expansion for pulse?

I agree with other posters that the name Pulse is problematic due to existing projects with similar names. In particular, package manager and web searches about Pulse and Linux return results related to PulseAudio and its many utilities and libraries.

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Pulse more memorable than SyncThing? SyncThing isn’t clean and snazzy, but it’s descriptive. Dropbox, BitTorrent Sync, and OneDrive all have names that hint at what they do. “Pulse” doesn’t really have anything to do with file synchronization. A generic name is inescapably less memorable than a name which describes a function.

By picking a name that is less memorable, you’re optimizing for something other than humans. Press coverage, apparently.

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Pulse? Really? And that is really better (and more memorable) than Syncthing?

You know, the first thing I think about when I read/hear “Pulse” is the “LinkedIn Pulse” app (formerly known as just “Pulse”) for Android - I wouldn’t even dare to relate that to a file synchronization software. This rather sounds like “just the next fitness tracking datamine app”. :worried: I hope someone checked for possible trademark clashes.

Also, the projects enlisted on the ind.ie site look very… ambitious.

“Social Network”? Yet another attempt to bring down Facebook? Dispora already failed at that…

“Indie Smartphone”? And how would one resolve the plethora of patents around the GSM/UMTS/LTE standards? Just to start with the least headache involved there… hardware design and OS is just the next iceberg ahead, and in terms of OS there’s just the next landmine of patents. Sourcing hardware components to make it truly open is just the next challenge; Bunnie Huang already had a hard time pulling together chips for his Novena laptop project (public, unrestricted, hardware documentation and compatible with open source drivers).

While I applaud and welcome any effort into the direction of “taking control back” and “making open source software/hardware”, I’m curious to see more information about the enlisted projects. A goal like that with just four people listed on the “Team” roaster; looks a wee bit thin.

Anyhow, good to see that Syncthing… err… Pulse… facepalm… remains Free Open Source Software; I just started to fall in love with Syncthing.

It failed because it was confusing as all hell to use. joindiaspora.org was invite only, and no one explained the federation layer effectively so users saw all these separate pods and naturally thought they were all individual unlinked servers. It also failed because there wasn’t a concise marketing strategy.

It’s possible, you can base it off Android, Firefox OS, OpenWebOS or some other open source mobile OS and provide a script that will rip out the appropriate drivers for your device from its firmware and put them in your Indie ROM. Patents don’t really become an issue unless you’re involving distribution of hardware. Lawsuits over patenting software that’s independent of hardware distribution is rare.

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IIRC, Sailfish already uses Android drivers on non-Android platforms. That technology is open source, so they can re-use that.

Also meant as a reply to hobarrera.

And then there’s also CyanogenMod, OMNI, Paranoid Android, AOKP (Android Open Kang Project), (continue with even more AOSP forks), and the FSF’s backed Replicant (though this one is pretty useless as they stripped their Android port of any binary blobs to make it crawl and leave the better part of the hardware in a dysfunctional state because it won’t operate without the binary blobs).

Having a truly open OS for your smartphone, if you for a moment drop any negative stance towards binary firmware blobs, is already doable today; flash a custom recovery (given your smartphone SoC vendor was kind enough to provide the freedom by not encrypting the boot loader to lock you out), flash your favorite Android port (or compile it your own), leave out the “gapps” ZIP and you’re free of evil.

However, the teaser on ind.ie talks about a smartphone (which implies “hardware from scratch”) and not just “yet another Android fork because we need yet another one”. Like I said, I’m curious to learn more once their Kickstarter goes live… that could be interesting.

Anyway, better to leave it at this as we’re drifting somewhat off-topic (though the title also mentions “introducing ind.ie”)

EDIT: Oh, by the way hobarrera: Taking a known-to-work Android port (i.e. Sailfish to stick to your example) and using it as a base for your own smartphone design doesn’t mean you just cleared yourself from any patent ramifications. If you go “mass production” and “commercial sale” you have to satisfy patent licensing among a bag of other things. Once you sell stuff commercially to make a dime there are patent owners who want their piece of your cake.