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SparkleShare: Open Source Dropbox clone coming soon

sparkleshare.org

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Re: SparkleShare: Open Source Dropbox clone coming soon

#21

Post by neilc »

mixmax wrote: post #8
neilc wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Sparkleshare develops some momentum, you could easily see third-parties compete to offer Sparkleshare storage as a service, in a similar manner to how Dropbox works today.

You could. But you'd only introduce more variables for the enduser. All of a sudden you'd have to decide which third-party service to sign up for, and many of them might just be a guy in a basement running the service to pay for college tuition. You'd have to check up on this before you know for sure. The complete setup procedure for dropbox is as follows: 1) Navigate to dropbox.com 2) click download 3) doubleclick t…

Sure, but dropbox themselves aren't exactly a blue chip corporation with a long-established reputation. There's no need for additional third-party configuration, either: $X.com could easily host a custom build of SparkleShare configured for their site. Hence, the straightforward installation process you describe could work equally well with s/dropbox/$foo/g.

Re: SparkleShare: Open Source Dropbox clone coming soon

#22

Post by rlpb »

furyg3 wrote: post #16

I'm fairly excited about this, I hope it's "just works" appeal come's close to the DropBox experience. I run the IT shop for a non-profit, which has just started to expand globally. I've been brought in to help ease the pain. We've got nearly everything web-based, except for the damn "shared drive". We just can't afford to set up a permanent VPN connection to all of our new offices (and all of the road-warriors)... n…

Synctus (my startup: http://www.synctus.com) does something similar. It is an always-on hardware appliance for each office that Just Works - including NAT traversal. It presents an SMB/CIFS share that is the same regardless of which office you are at. Drop me a line if you think it could be useful for you.

Synctus is different from Dropbox and presumably SparkleShare because it focuses on emulating a single office SMB/CIFS share exactly, including locking so that synchronisation conflicts never happen - and this means that it needs each appliance to be usually-on (so road warriors still need to VPN in to access a particular share or use Dropbox or similar).

Re: SparkleShare: Open Source Dropbox clone coming soon

#24

Post by hyperbovine »

jwr wrote: post #17

I think it is sad that the "Open Source" Community (in quotes, because there is really no such thing and the term is inprecise) didn't come up with Dropbox on its own earlier. There was rsync, there was unison, but none of them worked as transparently and flawlessly as Dropbox does. And now — we copy the successful entrepreneurs. I somehow don't feel it is right — I would have loved for it to be the other way around.…

librsync, libbzip, and a host of other LGPLd libraries are what make Dropbox go. There would be no Dropbox without the ""Open Source"" community. Dropbox--along with a lot of other companies (namely, Apple)--derive a lot of their success from going the last mile, that is wiring all these powerful OSS technologies together in a package that is intuitive and easy to use. Engineers typically are either uninterested in doing this, and that is why an open source Dropbox never came along.

Re: SparkleShare: Open Source Dropbox clone coming soon

#25

Post by furyg3 »

codemechanic wrote: post #19
furyg3 wrote: post #16

I'm fairly excited about this, I hope it's "just works" appeal come's close to the DropBox experience. I run the IT shop for a non-profit, which has just started to expand globally. I've been brought in to help ease the pain. We've got nearly everything web-based, except for the damn "shared drive". We just can't afford to set up a permanent VPN connection to all of our new offices (and all of the road-warriors)... n…

Try http://www.tonido.com . It offers a remote drive feature. Will satisfy all your requirements listed here.

Hmm... interesting. Can you give user-specific logins to keep track of who's changed what?

Re: SparkleShare: Open Source Dropbox clone coming soon

#26

Post by furyg3 »

rlpb wrote: post #22
furyg3 wrote: post #16

I'm fairly excited about this, I hope it's "just works" appeal come's close to the DropBox experience. I run the IT shop for a non-profit, which has just started to expand globally. I've been brought in to help ease the pain. We've got nearly everything web-based, except for the damn "shared drive". We just can't afford to set up a permanent VPN connection to all of our new offices (and all of the road-warriors)... n…

Synctus (my startup: http://www.synctus.com ) does something similar. It is an always-on hardware appliance for each office that Just Works - including NAT traversal. It presents an SMB/CIFS share that is the same regardless of which office you are at. Drop me a line if you think it could be useful for you. Synctus is different from Dropbox and presumably SparkleShare because it focuses on emulating a single office S…

Neat product. This won't work for us since I'm trying to get away from CIFS (it's the transition that's hard), but I can imagine many situations where this would be very useful.

Sure beats fighting with windows replication, and has a lot of benefits over rsyncing.

Re: SparkleShare: Open Source Dropbox clone coming soon

#27

Post by strooltz »

This is cool. I think simple solutions will arise as well- companies can build platforms on top of the service and sell support packages- similar to what EY, heroku, and all the other EC2/S3 platforms already do or like red hat has been doing for years. There's a lot of cool potential for this...

Re: SparkleShare: Open Source Dropbox clone coming soon

#28

Post by brianobush »

neilc wrote: post #5
mixmax wrote: post #2

This isn't a threat to dropbox becaue (as I read it) you have to set up your own server, or maybe hook up on a friends server. While this is certainly a great feature that a lot of people will value, the beauty of dropbox is that it just works. Without you having to install a server. I see the following obstacles with installing a server for sparkleshare: 1) You need a server. This might be obvious, but normal people…

If Sparkleshare develops some momentum, you could easily see third-parties compete to offer Sparkleshare storage as a service, in a similar manner to how Dropbox works today.

Exactly, right now dropbox is 9.95/month for 2Gig and frankly overpriced. I would love to have that right now at 1.99/month. Maybe unreasonable... but I like competition.

Re: SparkleShare: Open Source Dropbox clone coming soon

#29

Post by JadeNB »

brlewis wrote: post #10

I'm curious what is in the Dropbox TOS that they dislike so much.

I don't know about them, but, as I mentioned at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1340242, I find the following passage very bothersome:

> You agree not to do any of the following while using the Site, Content, Files or Services:

> o Post, publish or transmit any text, graphics, or material that: (i) is false or misleading; (ii) is defamatory; (iii) invades another's privacy; (iv) is obscene, pornographic, or offensive; (v) promotes bigotry, racism, hatred or harm against any individual or group; (vi) infringes another's rights, including any intellectual property rights; or (vii) violates, or encourages any conduct that would violate, any applicable law or regulation or would give rise to civil liability;

It seems to me to require you to (a) ignore it or (b) think very, very carefully about what files it is OK to backup (is it OK to back up a work of fiction? Then what does it mean that you will not back up material that is ‘false or misleading’?). I wrote them about this, but never received a reply.

Re: SparkleShare: Open Source Dropbox clone coming soon

#30

Post by neurotech1 »

neilc wrote: post #21
mixmax wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could. But you'd only introduce more variables for the enduser. All of a sudden you'd have to decide which third-party service to sign up for, and many of them might just be a guy in a basement running the service to pay for college tuition. You'd have to check up on this before you know for sure. The complete setup procedure for dropbox is as follows: 1) Navigate to dropbox.com 2) click download 3) doubleclick t…

Sure, but dropbox themselves aren't exactly a blue chip corporation with a long-established reputation. There's no need for additional third-party configuration, either: $X.com could easily host a custom build of SparkleShare configured for their site. Hence, the straightforward installation process you describe could work equally well with s/dropbox/$foo/g.

It is a Y Combinator backed company, and has some reputation.
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