I’m happy to announce that the SparkleShare project will receive a grant from the NLnet Foundation ’s NGI0 Commons fund!

Sync files with Git

SparkleShare is a Free and Open Source collaboration app. It allows people who are not software developers or otherwise technical (designers, lawyers, students, academics, etc.) to work together and share files in projects that use the Git version control system .

SparkleShare provides an automatic sync algorithm and a friendly user interface to review changes and restore files from history.

What happened?

SparkleShare has been around since 2010 . I guess that makes it an “old” project now… Since then, the Mono/C# community active around that time has all but disbanded. The platform underneath slowly started to rot.

Eventually the app had to be removed from Flathub, also due to my own maintainer burnout. Providing maintenance and support next to a full-time job proved too much.

But that’s no longer an issue .

Now I have an opportunity to rebuild and address long-standing issues and feature requests. I have renewed energy to bring back the project better than ever!

The work

The funding proposal is to finish porting to Rust , bring SparkleShare in line with modern security and privacy practices, and design a fresh user interface informed by years worth of community feedback .

The goal is to get a Linux release back on Flathub . I’m planning to post frequent updates, so subscribe or follow me on GitHub or the Fediverse .