<story><title>SparkleShare: Open Source Dropbox clone coming soon</title><url>http://www.sparkleshare.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mixmax</author><text>This isn&apos;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.&lt;p&gt;I see the following obstacles with installing a server for sparkleshare:&lt;p&gt;1) You need a server. This might be obvious, but normal people don&apos;t have one.&lt;p&gt;2) You need to monitor your server. If the architecture is anything like dropbox it doesn&apos;t need to have 100% uptime since synchronizing will just be delayed a bit, but you still need to check in every now and then to make sure everything is OK.&lt;p&gt;3) Installing a server has never been easy. There is always some sort of problem with port forwarding, IP adresses, proxies, etc. unless you have a server somewhere in the cloud which most people don&apos;t. Normal people are barely aware of what a server &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt;. See point 1.&lt;p&gt;4) Your backups are still your worry. What makes dropbox great is that I know that if they lose my data they have a serious business problem - they&apos;ll be held accountable. I&apos;ll write rants on my blog and everyone on HN will read it. They&apos;ll go through great lengths to prevent this. Besides their knowledge of backup procedures, RAID disks, redundancy and what have you is far far greater than mine. (At least I hope so :-)) If I host my files on my own server I&apos;m the one that&apos;s accountable.&lt;p&gt;I see this as a great service for companies that have some IT staff and aren&apos;t comfortable having all their company files hosted by another company, and hackers that prefer their own server. But it&apos;s not a threat to dropbox, which is getting popular among non-techies. My mom even has dropbox installed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>neilc</author><text>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.</text></comment>
<story><title>SparkleShare: Open Source Dropbox clone coming soon</title><url>http://www.sparkleshare.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mixmax</author><text>This isn&apos;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.&lt;p&gt;I see the following obstacles with installing a server for sparkleshare:&lt;p&gt;1) You need a server. This might be obvious, but normal people don&apos;t have one.&lt;p&gt;2) You need to monitor your server. If the architecture is anything like dropbox it doesn&apos;t need to have 100% uptime since synchronizing will just be delayed a bit, but you still need to check in every now and then to make sure everything is OK.&lt;p&gt;3) Installing a server has never been easy. There is always some sort of problem with port forwarding, IP adresses, proxies, etc. unless you have a server somewhere in the cloud which most people don&apos;t. Normal people are barely aware of what a server &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt;. See point 1.&lt;p&gt;4) Your backups are still your worry. What makes dropbox great is that I know that if they lose my data they have a serious business problem - they&apos;ll be held accountable. I&apos;ll write rants on my blog and everyone on HN will read it. They&apos;ll go through great lengths to prevent this. Besides their knowledge of backup procedures, RAID disks, redundancy and what have you is far far greater than mine. (At least I hope so :-)) If I host my files on my own server I&apos;m the one that&apos;s accountable.&lt;p&gt;I see this as a great service for companies that have some IT staff and aren&apos;t comfortable having all their company files hosted by another company, and hackers that prefer their own server. But it&apos;s not a threat to dropbox, which is getting popular among non-techies. My mom even has dropbox installed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mattmaroon</author><text>It depends what they define as a &quot;server&quot;. If you have to set up a Linux box somewhere with decent upstream, then yeah, I&apos;m not spending any time on that. And I&apos;m the sort of person who could do it.&lt;p&gt;However for what I use Dropbox for, I&apos;d be perfectly fine if the &quot;server&quot; was just an old Windows box running out of my basement. If there&apos;s nothing more onerous than a port-forward it might be useful.&lt;p&gt;But either way I doubt the guys at Dropbox have anything to worry about. To hurt them this doesn&apos;t have to appeal to the average Dropbox customer. It only has to appeal to the average paying Dropbox customer. There&apos;s a big difference there, but probably not big enough to matter.</text></comment>