Troubling that Ubuntu One wasn't already open source.
Can anyone explain to me why every cloud drive is using their own proprietary protocols to do the same thing? Why we have to install a different client for each vendor? That's one thing that annoys me greatly, and I'll never use Dropbox as long as its syncing tool is proprietary.
Does anyone else remember when companies were proud that they were the custodians of a file format? Once things went to the internet it seems like that stuff is no longer important to companies.
> Troubling that Ubuntu One wasn't already open source.
Why is that troubling? Why should a service provider open source the software that they use for providing the service? You're not 'receiving' the software code of the server parts -- providing the storage functionality -- but are just using that.
In this case, the Ubuntu One client software and protocol libraries were already open source, and their statement suggests that they will also be open sourcing the server software code shortly.
As another example and similar case -- server software code that implements the storage functionality not available as open source -- is this quote on Tarsnap:
> While the Tarsnap code is not distributed under an open source license, Tarsnap contributes back to the open source community via bug fixes and enhancements to [...]
In these cases, the storage parts implement the competitive advantages for the provider. Now that Ubuntu One is stopping to leverage that competitive advantage, it remains a classy move to open source their implementation.
Canonical provided an answer here: http://askubuntu.com/a/15295. I think the answer is interesting, and this could apply equally well to any other vendor.
That's a silly answer. The technology behind the syncing is not a competitive advantage. The existence of dozens of these services should tell you that. The way the companies can compete is by building services on top of the cloud syncing, and by providing integrations with other services you use. That stuff makes sense to be proprietary, but the syncing itself doesn't, imo.
> The technology behind the syncing is not a competitive advantage. The existence of dozens of these services should tell you that.
I'm not sure your argument applied at the time. As technology makes progress, today's competitive advantage is tomorrow's commodity.
In any case, consider the people who pay for Dropbox today. What proportion of these people don't use integrations or services on top of the basic sync service?
Proud custodians? Yes, they wrote the format and controlled it, but it was no different that a proprietary protocol; it was just a necessary way of allowing people to send data around. .DOC and .PSD in particular have always been proprietary messes that they wanted you to treat as a black box.
I was thinking more about OpenDocument, EPub, PNG. Things we take for granted today. It seems that once efforts transferred to the web companies simply have no desire to cooperate on their protocols. Even though cloud syncing is simple enough that dozens of companies have reinvented it, the companies don't feel any obligation (as I personally feel they have) to open up these protocols.
I don't think those examples were ever representative, and recent examples still exist: Google alone has WebP, WebM and KML, at least. And PNG didn't came from a company, it came from an ad-hoc group, and we definitively still have ad-hoc groups coming up with new standard formats.
Even though cloud syncing is simple enough that dozens of companies have reinvented it, the companies don't feel any obligation (as I personally feel they have) to open up these protocols.
I agree, but I don't agree that they used to. Most formats were and have always been proprietary. Open formats are and were an exception, and they were poorly supported by the industry at large. Yeah, we had Open Document, but the biggest Office suit didn't support them.
Similarly, ownCloud has an open protocol for syncing, but most vendors don't support it, just like they didn't used to support open formats unless they were forced to by their popularity. It's nothing new.
You may be right, I may be looking at the past with rose-colored glasses. But still, it feels worse these days. Those formats I mentioned might have been developed by groups, but they were groups made up of companies with expertise, right?
With cloud syncing we have a few open alternatives, you mentioned ownCloud, but there's also git annex, and clearskies (btsync clone).
But those are all community projects. No corporate support. At least in the OpenDocument days you had Sun as the corporate owners.
Why does DropBox not feel some responsibility to step in here, as the industry leader? This is a company that was launched on HackerNews. You are like us, why does this not bother you?
You may be right, I may be looking at the past with rose-colored glasses. But still, it feels worse these days. Those formats I mentioned might have been developed by groups, but they were groups made up of companies with expertise, right?
Yeah, but that still happens. There's the W3C and the WHATWG, of course, but also formats like Opus (Xiph.Org, Skype, Mozilla and others) and protocols like OData.
At least in the OpenDocument days you had Sun as the corporate owners. (...) Why does DropBox not feel some responsibility to step in here, as the industry leader? This is a company that was launched on HackerNews. You are like us, why does this not bother you?
I think you're being a little unfair to Dropbox here. You should remember that Sun was in a very different situation: they weren't market leaders, they were users and the main vendor (MS) was asking them so much to license Office, that it was cheaper to flat-out buy StarOffice. And then opening it up was certainly socially beneficial, but it was also a way of pulling some power from Microsoft's hands and making it easier for Sun to avoid licensing their suite.
Dropbox, on the other hand, has no clear business case for opening up. They'd be adding a lot of risk to their main and only product, and for what? Good will?
I'm not saying they shouldn't open up, but I don't think we should judge them too harshly.
By the way, I'm very doubtful of the idea that HN has a whole has an ethical position on opening up. I'd say the mainstream position here is "we like open source if and when it benefits us". Which is why you see plenty of open source libraries and programming tools, but very few open consumer software. Proprietary SaaS is the mantra around here, not FOSS applications.
Can anyone explain to me why every cloud drive is using their own proprietary protocols to do the same thing? Why we have to install a different client for each vendor? That's one thing that annoys me greatly, and I'll never use Dropbox as long as its syncing tool is proprietary.
Does anyone else remember when companies were proud that they were the custodians of a file format? Once things went to the internet it seems like that stuff is no longer important to companies.