Today marks a milestone of sorts. It’s the first day of the new year and, as it also happens to be the first Tuesday of the month, it’s a Syncthing release day. Today is also almost Syncthing’s birthday; the first public release was “0.2” on December 30, 2013, five years and two days ago.

Given all of this I thought this would be a good day to let Syncthing graduate and become a 1.0 kind of thing.

Much like a black belt in martial art doesn’t indicate that you’ve learned all there is to know, a 1.0 version doesn’t mean Syncthing is done. There is a lot left to do and learn. At the same time we need to be aware that Syncthing is used “in production”. Syncthing gets roughly a million downloads of each stable release, just from Github, and syncs probably hundreds of terabytes of changes each day. Our users are entrusting precious data to Syncthing. We need to treat that trust with respect.

As much as a version number means anything at all, a “major zero” version number means that you can expect breakage. This is not what we want to communicate. Especially, it’s not the mindset that we should have towards our users. Hence Syncthing is now graduating from being in perpetual beta to being actual release software, yet the journey of development continues.

Seeing as this is a new major release Syncthing will also be granted a new code name. The Dysprosium Dragonfly took flight with 0.14.0 in July 2016. Now it morphs into the alphabetically adjacent Erbium Earthworm.

Anyway. Enjoy your regularly scheduled Syncthing release, thank you all for these five years, and we look forward to five more years of continued relevance and increasing stability.

For those who might wonder how this release relates to the 0.14.55-rc.2 release candidate, the answer is that it’s identical apart from the code name and version number.