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Seafile (seafile.com)
52 points by afics 4720 days ago
10 comments

> Seafile and its desktop and mobile clients are published under GPLv3 with one exception -- the seafile's logo of desktop and mobile clients must be kept when redistribution.

Uhh, that does make it impossible to fork the project under a new name? Also this isn't mentioned anywhere in License.tx which appears to be a run-of-the-mill GPLv3 license file.

Interestingly enough GPLv3 itself states the following:

> If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.

Does that mean that I can just ignore their logo requirement?

Yeah, that sounds like a bug. I filed it: https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/issues/299
With that exception clause that makes it non-GPL.
That only requires that you keep the logo file in the project, not necessarily that you use it.
Looks interesting, but as a side note; slow your homepage slider rotation down by a few seconds. It's way too fast to be able read it properly.
Or don't have a slider/carousel. Indeed, the website is pretty terrible, as is the icon/logo.
Given the name, I thought this would be a secure cloud storage service based off of Sealand. Alas, it’s a team in China.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/haven.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand

So they say it's open source, but there is no link we the source is hosted and how it is actually "verified by the community". In addition it feels somehow weird that they have a free community version and a pro version that has more features and non-open source code. So if I would choose the pro version for features I'm still on the dark side of the moon when it comes to trusting their source code...

edit: I found the source on github, but still missing the relation between pro and community...

I was also alarmed by the fact that they do not have a link to their source code on their website. I did some searching and found that they host their code publicly on Google Code [1]. They really should place a link to their source on their website. I was really confused when I clicked the "Open Source Edition" button only to be presented with binaries.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/seafile/

Accidentally found it by wandering around the Chinese version of the site: https://github.com/haiwen/seafile
The link to Github repo is under the "self-hosted server" section in the home page.
This looks a lot like Spideroak (https://spideroak.com/), which incidentally has a white label reseller program… https://spideroak.com/whitelabel/
You guys need to slow your carousel down!! I thought it was a spoof of http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/ at first.
"We are a small team in China".

I guess these days it's all about picking which government you prefer has premium access to your files.

The product looks great, though :-)

I'd like to see a system which stores a random string in one country, and the XOR of your data with that string in another.

Then the US and China would both have to collaborate to actually be able to get at the real data.

Funny idea :-) For most cases I doubt the US and China would have any problems exchanging strings :-)
Or, you know, encryption.
A few months ago I would have thought this sounds paranoid; but does encryption secure us against NSA intrusion?
Snowden claims that encryption works, and I have no reason not to believe him on that. There definitely is significant amount of people doing crypto research who are not (directly) affiliated with NSA, I'd suspect that they all collectively can not either have missed any intentional backdoors or been bought off by NSA.
Yes, if you have nothing of interest for the NSA. Otherwise almost every encryption could be subverted with an access to the servers and soldering gun - you just touch the body of the guy that has knowledge of the keys on the (im)proper places with it.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there aren't people out to get you.
Which seafile actually seems to have basic support for.
It's open source, you can easily run your own server.
Really cool that they have a RaspberryPi server download.
What is better, specifically?
Both the server and client are open source.
How does that make the service better?
That depends of what you want. Here we have a seafile server for internal use, you can't do that with dropbox.
"Seafile"... have we really run out of two-dictionary-word-concatenated-web-2.0 names?