About Us
Willow started as a minimalistic reimagining of Earthstar. Over time, we did a lot more reimagining, and a lot less minimalism.
The path / author / timestamp model at the heart of Willow was designed by our dear departed friend Cinnamon, without whom there would be no Willow. We miss you.
Willow was designed by Aljoscha Meyer and Sam Gwilym, who have been working together since 2022 as worm-blossom. Their first collaboration was a proof-of-concept implementation of range based set reconciliation. They have used Willow as the pretext for spinning out a macro processor, a sink / stream abstraction for Rust, and a new secure hash function.
Aljoscha is a computer scientist. He lives in Berlin.
Sam is a programmer and illustrator. She lives in The Hague.
Special Thanks
Nuh realised that Willow could use capability systems for authorisation. Thank you.
Frando has implemented, discussed, and improved several iterations of the Confidential Sync protocol. Thank you.
Marcelino Coll reported a critical error in an early draft of the Confidential Sync specification. Thank you.
Joakim pointed us to International Atomic Time as a better choice than UNIX time for how to interpret timestamps. Thank you.
Cade has been an inspiration and aspiration for Willow throughout its creation. Thank you.