syncthing

README

syncthing

This is the syncthing project. The following are the project goals:

1. Define a protocol for synchronization of a file repository between a number of collaborating nodes. The protocol should be well defined, unambigous, easily understood, free to use, efficient, secure and languange neutral. This is the Block Exchange Protocol.

2. Provide the reference implementation to demonstrate the usability of said protocol. This is the syncthing utility. It is the hope that alternative, compatible implementations of the protocol will come to exist.

The two are evolving together; the protocol is not to be considered stable until syncthing 1.0 is released, at which point it is locked down for incompatible changes.

Syncthing does not use the BitTorrent protocol. The reasons for this are

1. we don't know if BitTorrent Sync does either, so there's nothing to be compatible with, 2) BitTorrent includes a lot of functionality for making sure large swarms of selfish agents behave and somehow work towards a common goal. Here we have a much smaller swarm of cooperative agents and a simpler approach will suffice.

Documentation

The syncthing documentation is kept on the GitHub Wiki.

License

All documentation and protocol specifications are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

All code is licensed under the MIT License.