Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by beaucollins 3601 days ago
The API is "open", the source code for the server running the simperium.com syncing service is not.

As far as I know, open sourcing the server is something Simperium wishes to do when it's feasible.

Simperium Syncing Protocol: https://github.com/Simperium/simperium-protocol/blob/master/...

1 comments

I understand that, but I am talking about now. There's no point (other than marketing and free labor purposes, which is what I'm criticizing) in open sourcing their client app when the server is not open source. What purpose does it serve? I mean, how do you expect to use this code other than hooking up to Simplenote?

I remember this company called Layer, they "open sourced" their "messaging UI framework", and I first thought it was something like JSQMessageViewController where you can just take the library and really build your own chat app, but turns out it's just a shell to connect to their layer.com server. Again, what's the point? I can't help but wonder what's going on in these people's minds when I think of all the time they would have taken to clean up code and prepare to announce their open source.

Someone might feel inclined to implement their own server that is compatible with the client.
Simperium Server: https://github.com/beaucollins/node-simperium-server It's in the proof-of-concept stage so it doesn't persist the data on the server.
Someone that motivated would be better off building their own client as well. In case of Simplenote, server is the most important part, client is just a thin wrapper.