Joyent

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Connector and Slingshot Open-sourced and Free

By David Young 13 July 07

Today Joyent is releasing the source code for our Connector and Slingshot products under the GPL v2. You can get immediate access to the code through our developer portal here. SVN is here.

No longer will those of us committed to open source need to use products from companies that do not open their source. This is Bastille day for software on the web. The cracks in Windows dominance on the desktop are visible. Let’s not repeat the mistake of building monopolistic overlords on the internet. We are not interested in making some proprietary stack of applications the Windows of the Web. We hope you agree.

Want a better email client on the web? You can add those features to Joyent Connector Mail. Want to use the best web calendar? Help build Joyent Connector Calendar. And we even offer a free account so that you can contribute and use your code on Joyent’s hosted infrastructure. Let’s not wait for G***le or Y***o or M*N or someone else to give us the web we want. We can do that now. Does your mother have a feature request to make the calendar better? Now you can do it. And have your work used and appreciated by people around the world.

Connector and Slingshot. Better than free. Open.


  1. I’m sure I’m just being thick about this, but is there a way to grab the source as a tgz or SVN export? All I can find is the retrospectiva code browser — not much use for hacking. :)

    — Tammer Saleh    376 days ago    #

  2. Now we know why things have been so quiet lately. Big congratulations people, not just on the achievement but for the courage and vision.

    — andrew    376 days ago    #

  3. svn is at http://svn.joyent.com/opensource/

    — Jason Hoffman    376 days ago    #

  4. Awesome guys! I can’t wait to see some more documentation in the wiki about this.

    — Zach Hale    376 days ago    #

  5. This is stunning news which should make a lot of people happy.

    Hopefully it will get more people to use your Accelerator infrastructure because that’s the most brilliant and flexible platform ever. Using anything else is just dumb. :-)

    — Chris    376 days ago    #

  6. Congratulations, I really apreciate this step. Open sourcing some piece of great software is always a risk (so it seems falsely). Makes me feel I made the right step to host with TxD.

    — Bernd    376 days ago    #

  7. It’s really great. I love this cool piece of software. I hope you will write some docs about it, because I took the code and run in some troubles with the setup.

    — Sebastian    376 days ago    #

  8. Just put a dutch article about this news on our site here
    Congrats :)

    — mivaho    376 days ago    #

  9. I have put up some installation instructions to the point that it all falls apart for me.

    I’ve dumped the results in a ticket

    If you get past this step, please update the wiki + ticket.

    — Dr Nic    376 days ago    #

  10. Congrats on releasing the connector and slingshot code under a open source license.

    — Jacques Marneweck    375 days ago    #

  11. I’m running it with MySQL, seems to running fine on all controllers other than mail and calendar. I expected mail not to work, since I don’t have a maildir locally setup, but the Calendar error is unexpected. I’ll be posting more about my adventures here.

    — ActsAsFlinn    375 days ago    #

  12. This is awesome and truly amazing! I am compelled that you guys made the decision to do this. I can see so many benefits and the fact I’ve used connector since the early days.

    — Rob Morgan    375 days ago    #

  13. Has anyone tried checking out this code on a Windows computer? I’m seeing invalid file names.

    — Vince    375 days ago    #

  14. This is absolutely amazing. It’s great to see that there are people with true vision and commitment to OSS in this industry.

    — Michael Ströck    375 days ago    #

  15. thank you and congrats to all the Joyent staff.

    @ David Young: fyi, the “Free Sign Up” button on the http://joyent.com/connector/pricing/ webpage redirects to the https://customer.joyent.com/signup page. this page doesn’t contain any option to continue signing up for the free account.

    — David M. Besonen    374 days ago    #

  16. @Besonen: it shouldn’t. The next page is a page for collecting organization information. I believe it is correct.

    — David Young    374 days ago    #

  17. This is awesome!

    I have been waiting for this B-Day since the announcment back in June! Checking out joyent everyday since end of June and awaits for the announcement.

    Can’t wait to check this out!

    BTW, all the best to everyone in the joyent. I know it takes a lot of effort in getting to this spot. :)

    — ronnie    374 days ago    #

  18. @ David Young: cookies were blocked in the browser i was using. you might want to throw up some information about allowing/requiring cookies rather than silently failing.

    — David M. Besonen    374 days ago    #

  19. hi,

    Cheers for open sourcing :)

    after seeing AIR, google gears, silverlight and many others , I was longing for an open source implementation.

    I am on windows I am unable to do a checkout from SVN have tried tortoisesvn, svn and also on cygwin I get the following error

    svn: Can’t move ‘web\test\fixtures\mail_root\joyent.joyent.com\ian\Maildir\cur\1
    159907087.M423564P19340V01980007I0007607F_2.unknown,S=2358:2,FT.2.tmp’ to ‘web\t
    est\fixtures\mail_root\joyent.joyent.com\ian\Maildir\cur\1159907087.M423564P1934
    0V01980007I0007607F_2.unknown,S=2358:2,FT’: The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.

    regards
    Senthil

    — Senthil Nayagam    374 days ago    #

  20. just brilliant. Your vision and commitment is astonishing. It will be an honor hacking on this code base

    — teroz    374 days ago    #

  21. I’m gonna ask my mum for agenda features :)

    Furthermore I discovered Retrospectiva . It seems to be a cool development tool.

    — Benoit Caccinolo    374 days ago    #

  22. I tried now. The main page is loading, but when I try to access /home/calendar for example, I get an error message: NoMethodError in AuthenticatedController#home

    You have a nil object when you didn’t expect it!
    The error occurred while evaluating nil.match

    #{RAILS_ROOT}/app/controllers/authenticated_controller.rb:70:in `home’

    I don’t know, why it can’t ready the path.

    — Sebastian    374 days ago    #

  23. can we have a connector-dev mailing list?

    — David M. Besonen    374 days ago    #

  24. This is a good day

    — ynw    373 days ago    #

  25. Very nice move, Joyent Inc!

    Congrats :-)

    — Julio Santos Monteiro    373 days ago    #

  26. That’s great news! Congratulations and yet again, this is a demonstration that openness and collaboration work very well and are business friendly :) More reasons for me to keep on recommending Joyent to everyone I know.

    — Bruno Mattarollo    373 days ago    #

  27. +1 for a connector-dev mailing list

    — Luke Melia    373 days ago    #

  28. You can find the mailing list here.

    — Sebastian    373 days ago    #

  29. There is a list at http://lists.joyent.com/mailman/listinfo/dev

    — Jason A. Hoffman    373 days ago    #

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