| You know, I really don't understand the rage around this case, or more specifically that it's supposedly all coming from people who otherwise love Dropbox. So let's examine what you're (potentially) doing by forcing this issue and so on: (1) Calling down a streisand effect on Dropbox. Perhaps you believe that code is meant to be free to such an extent that this is part of your goal, so, sure. (2) They clearly have no intention of allowing DropShip to become a common use case. If your Streisand effect results in wide adoption by people who just latch onto your censorship angle, they will have to take rushed action to prevent further spread. (3) This rushed action could be a technical solution (maybe challenge-response, as mentioned) or a banhammer once they have narrowed down the use signature for dropship. -- (3a-technical) If it's the technical solution, as it was produced under rapid duress, is buggy. Suddenly, your beloved dropbox starts corrupting your files, or refusing to sync some in edge cases. Oops. Some [paying] users who never even heard about this 'censorship' issue notice this issue and take their business elsewhere, and of course it's less useful to you too as a tool until they fix it. (3a-technical alternative) It's not a buggy fix because they're supercoders. Still, their team had to put in an ungodly week to make and stress-test the fix; congratulations on ruining their quality of life for a week while still losing dropship. (3b-banhammer) Well, they figure out how to track people using dropship, and maybe institute a 3 strikes policy (2 emails, 1 ban.) So you stop using dropship after the first email, with a bit of simmering resentment at dropbox; still no dropship. Meanwhile, there are false positives because of course there are; this generates a second, far louder streisand effect, and dropbox again loses some paying customers. - In summary: sure, open-source code is meant to be free. But your actions don't exist in a vacuum. At the end of the day, Dropbox is clearly not going to tolerate dropship on its network. Consider whether you would rather keep using dropbox as it is, or shoehorn yourself into basically open war on dropbox unless you can dropship on it. (Tangentially: it was a neat enough hack, but it still doesn't seem any functionally different than sharing public URLs for the file, with the only differences being that you circumvent the bandwidth limits - again, congrats on fighting the TOS of a service you supposedly love.) |