Thanks for the link, it was really enlightening read. It is interesting to read the elaborated comments of some naysayers there who are stuck in their old ways and can't see the value of it yet.
One of them describes his solution with FUSE and FTP that 'basically achieves the same' and has doubts that anyone would want to use Dropbox if they can use FTP.
Though most of the comments are positive, it's only really BrandonM's comment which looks silly in hindsight. Quite a few valid questions and thoughts too, where is this stored, how are you handling locked down corp accounts, etc.
It's a pity they hide the vote numbers these days.
all of which are "merely" implementation details and polish. The analogy is that you've built a crude engine that can sit on a box in an axel to move rather than using an animal, but the nay-sayers ask how do you deal with the bad weather/water, and how do you brake and turn smoothly?
The idea is fundamentally good, and it takes someone with vision to see through the smog of implementation details and problems.
This is exactly what gives me hope when I post a sideproject here or on reddit and it is either met with radio silence or active resistance. I'm starting to suspect that horses don't actually like water.
According to the original comments "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."
> HN seldom seems to grasp that people are inherently lazy
I would dispute "inherently lazy" in favour of "have better things to spend their time on than crafting a personal solution to an already solved problem".
That guy still posts here. In one of his most recent comments [1] he says "it's not all that hard to file your own taxes the old-fashioned way" and that it takes him "a full 12-16 hours (a solid day or two on a weekend)" :D Is he a long gimmick?
Not sure about the code, but here's the original Demo Video Drew had on their getdropbox.com landing page. It presents the features in a very entertaining way :)
This video is really great. Lots of easter eggs - including the contents of the pictures and the Dropbox Trade Secrets folder (I laughed hard at "Pets.com Executive Summary.pdf").
One of them describes his solution with FUSE and FTP that 'basically achieves the same' and has doubts that anyone would want to use Dropbox if they can use FTP.
Same stuff surely happens here today.