From the homepage (https://www.spark.io/):

What if I don't want to connect through the Cloud?

That's okay! The Cloud is there to make the Core easier to work with, but if you'd rather do it yourself, that's no problem. The Core lets you do your own socket programming over TCP and UDP.

If you want the simplicity of the Cloud but you want it on your own server, we'll be releasing an open source version of the Cloud designed for quick and easy deployment.

Thanks, so the answer is no, as long as that open source version is vaporware.

The reason I asked is that once they get purchased by, say, Google or Facebook, their cloud services will probably get either shut down, or severely constrained. I'm not interested in sinking resources into a platform based on question marks.

(full disclaimer: I work at Spark, and am personally responsible for the local cloud)

We will definitely be releasing this, we consider it a promise we made to our Kickstarter backers.

How can we help?

Thank you for asking, much appreciated. :)

We'll probably do a small beta as we get the local cloud ready for release to make sure things are easy to use and work as expected. Since it'll be open source, I'm hoping the beta group can help find bugs and even send in pull requests if there are pieces they want added. The beta signup thread is here at the moment: https://community.spark.io/t/where-is-the-source-code-for-th...

Thanks, David

I think you missed this part:

> The Core lets you do your own socket programming over TCP and UDP.

There's nothing stopping you from writing your own TCP/UDP listener server and having the Spark write to a port on that.

Except for the fact that the TCPClient library that they provide is broken and causes the core to lockup within a few minutes.

Supposedly they are going to open source the cloud side of the software so you could setup your own. I would wait for this instead of writing my own tcp connection.