It appears that distributed Erlang applications need all parts to be running on the same version of the Erlang interpreter, or they fail: http://www.erlang.org/faq/problems.html#id56230 We can't depend on every FreedomBox to be running the same version of the software (or even to be within two versions of each other). Erlang looks like it's better for distributed work in tightly controlled clusters. But keep thinking about good tools! John