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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 distribu

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.

irongeek 12y ago
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.

irongeek 12y ago

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.