Today, we're joining the Open Source Pledge. In 2025, we had 2 developers (FTE) on our team and paid $7,450 to Open Source maintainers and foundations:

External contributors: $5,950

• $3,000 to Dustin Kaiser (@mrnicegyu11)
• $1,300 to Chris Rizzitello (@sithlord48)
• $750 to laz-001 (@laz-001)
• $500 to Denizhan Dakılır (@zelosleone)
• $200 to BMagnu (@BMagnu)
• $200 to Vamshi Maskuri (@varshith257)

Foundations: $1,500

• $1,000 to KDE e.V. (paid quarterly)
• $500 to GNOME Foundation (paid annually)

Our open source contributions

The Pledge only counts money paid externally, not internal engineering time. In 2025, our in-house team spent about 600 hours on open source work (roughly 30% of our development time), most of it on Deskflow and the libraries around it.

In Deskflow, we rewrote the IPC layer. It used to run over TCP; we migrated it to Qt local sockets, and implemented IPC between the Core and the GUI in Deskflow for the first time to replace the fragile log parsing. That work lands in Synergy 1 with the next beta, and then in Synergy 3 after that. On Windows, we overhauled the daemon. The watchdog is now a state machine completely rewritten with Qt.

Recently, a member of the open source community found a CVE in the new IPC code we wrote. We are working on the fix now. This is open source doing exactly what it should: extra eyes on the code, problems surfaced and fixed in public, which results in both the community and our customers being protected.

Alongside that, we landed a run of smaller but meaningful fixes. On Linux under Wayland, we improved the EI (libei) keyboard path: added Hyper key handling, disabled the meta modifier to fix a long-standing alt key bug, and switched to xkb_keymap_mod_get_mask where available so modifier masks are read from the user's real keymap instead of hard-coded assumptions. On the mouse and cursor side, we added a cursor visibility retry mechanism, a small delay on desk leave to stop the flicker that had been there for years, and enabled MouseKeys at screen setup so accessibility users stop getting their settings stomped.

Right now the only person on our team committing to Deskflow upstream is me. One person is not enough long term. In 2026 we are working to make budget available for a new developer whose main focus will be Deskflow, Synergy 1, and the libraries our product depends on.

KDE and GNOME

We also supported the ecosystems we build on. $1,000 to KDE e.V. and $500 to GNOME Foundation. Both are ongoing annual commitments.

When KDE e.V. asked for a quote for their annual report, we sent this:

KDE is part of our daily workflow. We test Synergy and Deskflow on it every day, so we rely on it being stable and well maintained. Supporting KDE is just backing something we use and depend on.

There is also a direct thread. Chris Rizzitello, a leading day to day Deskflow contributor, is a KDE member. At Chris' request, we support KDE so the community he contributes from stays healthy.

FOSDEM 2025

We were at FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels, catching up with the Qt, KDE, and GNOME folks and the wider community we fund. Being in the room with the people who build the software we depend on is part of how we decide where our money goes.

One of the highlights was a talk by Daniel Thompson-Yvetot, co-founder of Tauri, an open source Rust framework for building desktop and mobile apps with web frontends. His talk, "Compassionate Open Source Community Building", was especially touching, and we had the chance to meet him afterwards. One line that stuck with us was "don't ghost me bro", his shorthand for the idea that maintainers need to stay in daily contact with their open source community rather than disappearing between releases. We are carrying that lesson back into how we show up in the Deskflow community.

Our open source core

This ties directly to how we build Synergy. Synergy 1 is what we sell to businesses. It has business and enterprise features Synergy 3 does not yet, and for many IT teams it is the tried-and-trusted version they want running across their fleet. Synergy 1 is still maintained and under development (with no end of life planned). We continue to backport security fixes from Deskflow into Synergy 1 so customers on stable builds stay protected. We are preparing to re-fork from Deskflow to ship a new Synergy 1 beta, and we plan to keep doing this every year. That means customers on Synergy 1 get more than security patches. All the features, fixes, and platform improvements that landed in Deskflow across the year come with it.

None of this works without the wider Deskflow community either. Our paid developers spend real time reviewing and testing pull requests from outside the Synergy team, but contributors are still the ones writing a lot of that code. When Synergy 1 re-forks, their work lands in it too.

The engine inside Synergy 3 (we call it the Core) is Synergy 1 without the GUI, and we pull updates from Synergy 1 into it continuously. So most of Synergy 3 is open source, and improvements in Deskflow flow downstream into what customers run in production on an ongoing basis. The whole point is that money spent upstream comes back as working software for Synergy 1 and Synergy 3 customers alike.

Open source is the most critical part of our supply chain, and we pay for the parts we depend on so they do not break.