We are making our decision public. Hiitch is going to be open sourced. At the moment, we are working towards GNU GPL version 3 which should serve our objectives well. Now you can build your own private desktop social network using Hiitch without reinventing the wheel. With open source, you can hack on a complete desktop social networking platform like Hiitch to customize it to your own liking or build new and interesting features and contribute it back to the community. We are not just offering you a client software but an entire platform with total freedom. Whether you want to build a private network for your family, friends, company, lab or organization, Hiitch is what you want to try out.

For researchers who are interested to build on the Hiitch platform, you can use it to experiment with peer to peer (P2P) networking models, client and server models and etc. Unlike web based solutions, you will never be stuck with a client and server model. Hiitch will allow you to build a controlled environment for your classes and students to do more effective online social networking studies. We invite you to innovate and experiment with us to build new technologies for the social networking messes. Make Hiitch your preferred social networking platform today!

We estimate our complete move to open source Hiitch should take us about a month or so. But why wait, join our network now and see what you can do with Hiitch or find other developers to collaborate with or contact us directly. We are specially inviting all Linux + Gnome users to join our little social experiment with Hiitch. You can read more about our discussion with other Ubuntu users here.