Re: [GNUnet-developers] the bigger picture

[Daniel Golle]

Hi!

On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 11:23:47AM +0000, demos wrote:
> Hello hellekin,
> 
> > Hallo demos!
> > 
> > I would remove ind.ie from that picture: their decision to betray the
> > spirit of their crowdfunding campaign and reduce their scope to MacOSX
> > should clarify enough that they're not what they claim to be.

Claiming to be something you may or may not be when looking at you from
another angle is usually called 'marketing' and almost everyone has to
do that to some degree, either publicly or targetting a specific
audience (e.g. inside larger organizations).
Crowd-funding campains are a much more transparent method to acquire
resources than relying on government-controlled academic institutions
or just not talking about funding (which is what most FOSS projects do)
Obviously this comes at the price of having to market stuff...

> The choice of platform maybe surprising indeed.

There is work being done on a Linux implementation, apparently.
Supposedly for reasons not hard to guess they decided to come up with
the OS X client first, other platforms should follow later on.

> For me as a non apple user it is, but
> that does not necessarily mean that they cannot write helpful code.
> And since it is open source, p2p and aims at securing communication it
> fulfills our criteria of projects and modules to be looked at.

I fully agree.

On the first look, most of Ind.ie seems to be centered around the UI.
However, when looking at all the other projects, this is something not
taken very seriously by most of them.
Finding working visual concepts to integrate strong cryptography and
distributed communication tools into people's every-day conciousness
is just as much of a challenge as designing and implementing all the
low-level stuff. Even the best crypto algorithms aren't worth anything
if used wrongly or not at all due to the lack of a decent UI.

Yet I think it's worth pointing out that Ind.ie does some interesting
stuff on lower levels as well, see
https://source.ind.ie/project/pulse
or
https://source.ind.ie/project/phoenix
There also seem to be several developers reviewing and contributing to
those modules.

All the high-level code on ind.ie seems to be written by
https://source.ind.ie/u/aral
A random recently touched code sample:
https://source.ind.ie/project/heartbeat-node/blob/master/private/routes/all-friends.coffee


Cheers


Daniel