Given yesterday’s announcement, I think such an organization just emerged. I’m not sure “donations” is the right model though when there’s a corporation on the other side. Bounties sound reasonable.
This is definitely something we can look into. I’m not sure what the overheads, etc., would be so — for the time being at least — it would probably be best to keep things going as is (as Audrius suggested, for example).
My one concern with a purely bounty-based system is that it could possibly lead to feature bloat so perhaps it would be good to have some core guidelines as to what should be in Pulse itself and what should be in apps that use pulse e.g., via the REST and events APIs. (I’d personally love to see Pulse remain as lean and mean a syncing machine as possible.) Thoughts, @calmh, et. al.?
So, it’s an open source project. For any feature or change to make it into the code, it needs to be pushed to the git repo. Currently the people who can do that are me and @AudriusButkevicius.
For most contributors, that means someone else needs to “sign off” on the change for it to get merged. If you’re considering a new feature, and all the existing committers say its a bad idea, then no amount of bounty will probably get it in there. Unless the bounty is large enough that you can effect significant bribes, I guess. But if a lot of people think it’s a good idea, and someone is willing to implement it, there is probably something to it that we should not ignore… So I think it’s self regulating. Not discussing it prior to silently coding in a basement for a month and presenting a code bomb would be a bad idea, though.
My process for promoting new committers is simple btw - if I’ve seen five-ten pull requests that are useful, nontrivial and can be pretty much merged directly without having to be extensively fixed first, you seem to be a great contributor and can be trusted to push code with your own judgement.
Anyway, if you’re contributing something good, I don’t really care if it’s to scratch an itch, for the peace of mind, for the fame, to win a bet, or because someone paid you to do it. Hence, if people want bounties, by all means go for it. 
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Hi
we still have the money collected for the clearskies native client, it’s not much around 200E this money was donated by people to have an open source file syncrhonization program. We proposed to channel the funds towards syncthing given that during the time the implementation advanced quite a lot plus the working android client.
I proposed this on the clearskies mailing list and nobody objected so from my POV these funds should be directed to syncthing, given that I don’t have time to keep working on the C++ client. It also doesn’t make sense to fragment the community given that syncthing has gained the most traction an all, which I think it’s great.
Do we have CI, servers infrastructure that would benefit of this money? otherwise we can use it for bounties for features / bugs…
Any thoughts?
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It’s your money, therefore it’s up to you how you allocate it and if you allocate it.
You can donate to support the infrastructure via Bitcoin to the wallet shown in syncthing.net, or can put up some bounties for the things you think are important.
I’ve been hosting that myself, for cheap, which is what the bitcoin donations are intended to cover. That’s cool so far - there have been a few small donations, and the costs are small. Obviously Ind.ie has now collected a whole bunch of donations, some of which are intended to go towards Pulse so there may be some synergies there.
Possibly the bounty thing is more direct?
Is there another way besides bitcoin to support the development? Bitcoin, honestly, is no option for me. Too much tech hassle.
I find Flattr to be quite useful for projects such as this, both as a receiver (covers hosting costs for a hobby project of mine several times) and a giver (subscription for every FLOSS project I use regularly).
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@submarine you can donate on bountysource I think. You can also put a bounty on a ticket you want solved.
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I would also appreciate another donation channel. Simplest for me would be Paypal (I understand that some people don’t like paypal). If a paypal button was there, I would have made a micro donation right away (10-20$) because I like the idea. Then if testing shows that people in our group can handle it (they need usability on dropbox level), we would probably donate something like 50-200$.
Don’t care how the money is used, as long as it helps making syncthing better/functional/stable. Don’t have the technical expertise to set bounties or something like that (mostly). Just a user. For my group, lots of value added is when usability is going towards dummy proof and if syncthing in syncthing folder would work.
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You can donate via Paypal if you go to the Bountysource website, register, and find the Syncthing project. You don’t have to use Bitcoin. I recently discovered this.
Thanks for guiding me to the right place! That did the trick.
For the record, it is now possible to donate using normal money using buttons at the bottom of the website. It could probably be done nicer (allowing an arbitrary amount and so on) but this will do to start with.
For tiny amounts the bitcoin way is still better as there is a certain overhead in terms of fees etc that makes micro donations by card less than optimally useful.
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I find Flattr is easy to make small donations, both single and recurring ones, because you can make multiple small donations but only have 1 transaction with Flattr to add funds.
Paypal is similar, but it has a history of arbitrarily freezing accounts and doing other bad stuff.
One public example is Wikileaks, it got banned from Paypal a while ago, when it still made responsible disclosure of secret documents. http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/paypal-bloque-le-financement-de-wikileaks-et-ecope-d-une-cyber-attaque-39756624.htm
If you take the time to create a Flattr account for syncthing’s development, I will do a recurring micro-donation.
I would rather be a customer of a premium edition, as I’d like to have premium support. I’m wary of relying on open-source projects as I’ve often been burned by bit-rot and abandonment issues in the past.
I just gave our global IT team a demo of Syncthing syncing directories in 3 offices within Europe. (Added a fourth during the demo)
The demo was a success and Syncthing covers every requirement we need. We can see Syncthing fulfilling a role in our company.
One criteria from management is corporate support. We want to throw money at you for this support. Or as Ben calls it premium support.
I see this is not supported right now, is there a plan for it? If so when?
Reality check: I think Syncthing’s approach to synchronization is unique and you would not have a problem creating a marketable product.
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Bare in mind this is coming from a grumpy people hating a-hole pessimist, but I don’t think it’s as easy as that. It’s hard to sell something thats already free, and I don’t think one or two coorporate support packages sold would be sufficient for someone to give up his main source of income to provide a support at the SLA a coorporate entity would expect (unless we opt in for a model where the support person you are in contact with knows less about the product than you do - which is not valuable but just ticks the box).
You could have a pro version with ldap or some other coorporate thing yet that would probably have to be closed source to make sense, and turn into exactly the same thing that BTSync is (hint hint if you want to pay for things).
On the other hand nginx and redhat started off somehow I guess…
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There are no plans for a commercial productization of Syncthing at the moment (that I’m aware of), and I think it’s important not to fragment Syncthing or suddenly start arbitrarily charging for things that have no intrinsic cost just because we can. You won’t see a five folder limit in the free edition, to be lifted by buying the pro subscription, etc. Syncthing is not going there, and I’m well aware that’s not what you’re asking for - I just want to clarify this for any other readers.
That said, there are possibilities for serious, corporate level support. I offer such through kastelo.net for example - please feel free to reach out to me offline.
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I constantly get "500 - Internal Server Error"s on the Bountysource website. Anybody here with the same problem? I hope it’s just a temporary problem, or because of my slow internet… Anyway, having Flattr as a second option for donating would be great - I live outside the US and don’t have a credit card; and bitcoins are such a big tech hassle. Just my two cent 
Hey, I just donated a bit. Would you consider setting up a system for me to donate automatically on a recurring basis? Thanks.
As far as Bountysource, @corny, their development seems to have stalled and so there seems to be a lot of issues with them right now. Hopefully someone steps up to fix it, but this is a common problem with the open-source model… let’s hope it never happens to Syncthing
@calmh - fyi, I noticed that Bountysource allows for recurring donations which is what I’ll use. It seems like a decent place to point people towards - they take a cut but it seems worthwhile to help support them as well since they’re struggling right now and they provide a service to this project with their bounties.
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