Live data from Hacker News

Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

razorfast.com

291–300 of 323 posts

Re: Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

#291
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, it won't make the nightly news. But, you obviously have no imagination either.

In order to disprove the statement "there is no such thing as negative publicity" one merely needs to produce a circumstance where there is indeed negative publicity. This is pretty trivial to do, and doesn't require imagination.

Disagreement aside, I'd be interesting to know how many signups they had yesterday compared to prior days.

Re: Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

#292
post #188

Second, dealing with piracy is the responsibility of Dropbox. It’s not the problem of an innocent hacker who wrote some useful code that could benefit legitimate users and advocates the use of his software for “sharing photos, videos, public datasets, git-like source control, or even as building block for wiki-like distributed databases." Could someone give me 1 example of a use case here? The only reason I can think…

Could someone elaborate on why I was downvoted here?

Re: Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

#293
post #292
post #188

Second, dealing with piracy is the responsibility of Dropbox. It’s not the problem of an innocent hacker who wrote some useful code that could benefit legitimate users and advocates the use of his software for “sharing photos, videos, public datasets, git-like source control, or even as building block for wiki-like distributed databases." Could someone give me 1 example of a use case here? The only reason I can think…

Could someone elaborate on why I was downvoted here?

I don't know because I thought your comment was insightful. But since this is one of the worst threads I have read since I joined HN, in terms of FUD and signal-to-noise ratio, it is not impossible that someone who misunderstood the situation downvoted you.

The fact that comments like "Man you guys are dumb." (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2482925) wasn't voted down is indicative of the health of this thread.

Re: Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We didn't file a takedown to github -- the author voluntarily took the code down

Someone complained that their fork on Github had been summarily deleted: http://razorfast.com/2011/04/25/dropbox-attempts-to-kill-ope...

Have you read the replies? No context, but insults. Plus the original forked repo on github is still available. Someone complaining means nothing.

Re: Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your comment does appear disingenuous, although I'm sure that's not deliberate. Neither false DMCA notifications nor github takedown requests are legitimate responses to "simple nerd-rage" when it's about MIT-licensed code. I don't think anything like that has really happened. There was no DMCA takedown notice, only the (false) message that Dropbox had received a notification from itself, issued when they blocked p…

I don't know what tptacek based his words on github takedown requests on; I'm basing mine specifically on the comment by 'R' to the blog post. You make a point elsewhere that the post's author's repository is live on github, but that's not the original one, which was removed by its author. The way I understood the comment by 'R' was that they forked the original repo, and the fork was silently deleted, perhaps due to…

> To be sure, it could be a misunderstanding, a technical glitch, or an attempt at trolling. The Dropbox folks aren't getting my benefit of the doubt on this, though.

They have mine.

Now where do we stand?

Re: Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

#297
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I downvoted you because you are discussing DropBox as though it is a public utility that you have a right to, and some form of due process needs to take place. In my mind, you are completely and absolutely missing the point. DropBox is a private company, whose behavior should be viewed based on what their ToS are, and how they stick to them. They don't have to prove anything - if one is engaging in behavior, or takin…

I understand your point, and it certainly ok for DropBox to defend its ToS. But behind this story, seeing how fast they reacted to a single json hack in their model, it shows that DropBox is currently fighting a lot against a strong trend, and moreover against their own users, which is not a good sign for them. Fear is a bad advisor.

Not sure I agree. What indication do you have that this is a "strong trend" or that a significant number of users want this feature? Maybe they see that a small number of users would have a disproportionate impact on their service.

Not supporting something that a small number of users want if it would make the service worse for other users is the sort of decision every web service makes every day. Why isn't this just another case of that?

Re: Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably if someone has reverse engineered Dropship¹ then we're not far off having an FOSS Dropbox-a-like to use it with? I'd have thought that is the problem Dropbox is most likely to be addressing? Run your own organisation-wide Dropbox? Yes please. Edit: ¹ I mean of course created Dropship by reverese engineering Dropbox's protocols.

> Presumably if someone has reverse engineered Dropship¹ then we're not far off having an FOSS Dropbox-a-like to use it with? That's a pretty big stretch. You believe the client-side code to trigger download of a file that doesn't exist on the system is "not far off from having an FOSS Dropbox-a-like"? That's like finding a hub cap in the woods, and deciding you've almost got all the parts needed to construct a car.…

iFolder seems to me very much like an open source Dropbox replacement.

Sadly, the server only runs on Linux, but to me this contradicts the assertion that an OSS Dropbox-like software has never been developed.

Re: Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

#299

drew from dropbox here. i hope you guys can give us the benefit of the doubt: when something pops up that encourages people to turn dropbox into the next rapidshare or equivalent (the title on HN was suggesting it could be the successor to torrents), you can imagine how that could ruin the service for everyone -- illegal file sharing has never been permitted and we take great pains to keep it off of dropbox. the inte…

Honestly, the title is very sensasionalistic.

It tries to make it sound like you tried to enforce patents on a Dropbox clone or something, while the truth is that the software was a parasitic service incapable of existing without Dropbox itself.

To me that last part makes irrelevant that the software was OSS or not.

Re: Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clearly a violation of ToS to use Dropship, however, it's less clear whether it's a violation to store code that has the potential to violate the ToS.

Presumably if someone has reverse engineered Dropship¹ then we're not far off having an FOSS Dropbox-a-like to use it with? I'd have thought that is the problem Dropbox is most likely to be addressing? Run your own organisation-wide Dropbox? Yes please. Edit: ¹ I mean of course created Dropship by reverese engineering Dropbox's protocols.

>...Run your own organisation-wide Dropbox? Yes please.

YAY!

this is how Dropbox should pursue an enterprise offering, selling a Dropbox Server as a VM, a set of client licenses and instructions on how to run an internal dropbox server.

With encryption. With additional security features...

Post reply on HN