Synergy

History

The first incarnation of Synergy was CosmoSynergy, created by Richard Lee and Adam Feder then at Cosmo Software, Inc. (Silicon Valley), a subsidiary of SGI (Silicon Graphics, Inc.), at the end of 1996. They wrote it, and Chris Schoeneman contributed, to solve a problem: most of the engineers in Cosmo Software had both an Irix and a Windows box on their desks and switchboxes were expensive and annoying. CosmoSynergy was a great success but Cosmo Software declined to productize it and the company was later closed. Synergy is a from-scratch reimplementation of CosmoSynergy. It provides most of the features of the original and adds a few improvements.

Synergy+ (fork project) was started in 2009 by Sorin Sbârnea for the purpose of fixing bugs inherited from the original version. The original version of Synergy had not been updated for a notable length of time (as of 6 June 2010, the latest release was 2 April 2006). There was never official confirmation that the original Synergy project had been abandoned; however, there was public discussion providing speculation. In said discussion, Chris Schoeneman (the creator of Synergy) stated that instead of supporting a 1.3.x team, he intends on releasing version 2.0 of Synergy, and publicly announced on 27 Aug 2008 that he has been making progress on this version.

Nick Bolton joined the project in 2009 and lead the re-integration of Synergy+ back into the original Synergy project. Nick is now the project leader and primary developer responsible for all development (bug fixes, new features, project management, etc). Chris and Sorin still contribute to discussion on the mailing list ocassionally.