Ports to Java and Swift

Yes, sorry, wrong spot for unloading that really. Syncthing/Pulse looks awesome by the way.

No, I think itā€™s a fine and relevant discussion to have. Itā€™s just that thus far, syncthing is syncthing (or Pulse), and Ind.ie may be the new caretaker but what Ind.ie is doing in terms of other services isnā€™t really obvious yet. Iā€™m not personally 100% convinced that Ind.ieā€™s current communication style is optimal or entirely what I expected, but I think we need to give it a little time to crystallize.

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OK then. For what itā€™s worth, I think Ind.ie is already bringing more attention to the project. They also state in the (pre-launch) crowdfunding page that money is being raised for:

Specifically, we want a Go developer to work full-time on Pulse, a Mac and iOS developer to work alongside me on Heartbeat, a Node.js developer to work with me on Heartbeat and Waystone, and an Android developer to work fulltime on the Android port of Pulse and Heartbeat.

Oddly no mention of Pulse for iOS there. Although there is a port of Go for iOS, itā€™s not part of the main tree because thereā€™s no way to run a Go process in the background without jailbreaking. If you want to run in the background you have to be part of an app. You can do background downloads triggered by push notifications and also background fetch of smallish amounts of content on a regular basis (some efficient index updates or small files I guess). If itā€™s part of an app then it canā€™t be written in Go right now.

In case @aral does join this threadā€¦ on the communications front Iā€™d like to see much more positive messages. Direct attacks on tech giant founders and black and white thinking about something as complex as Google (every single thing they do must be evil because they make most of their money from targeted ads right now - not a very mature viewpoint) donā€™t put the movement in the best light. Open source apps designed for normal people to use with privacy protected - thatā€™s something I can support.

I could also live with a ā€œFree Softwareā€ version but given that weā€™re currently in an iOS & Android world for mobile computing and iOS is the option that is by far most aligned with privacy protection then it really needs to be considered in the licensing. Indeed Iā€™m sure the Mac App Store isnā€™t compatible with GPL distribution either and in the long run, if you want lots of normal people adopting these solutions you need to embrace the mainstream distribution channels.

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