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by jfb
4724 days ago
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I applaud this, and other similar efforts (OwnCloud et al) but for me the win with Dropbox is not system to system syncing (for which Unison or rsync works Well Enough for me) but rather as a synchronization service for my mobile devices. This is sadly enough an area where roll-your-own is not going to be able to compete. |
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(Disclaimer: I’m interaction designer on ownCloud.) With ownCloud Inc. we have a company, customers and full-time employees. There’s no reason for it to not be able to compete except time needed to catch up to par.
And also the code happens to be open source. In that respect it’s a challenge because we don’t have the one centralized reference server where everyone has an account. There are people running it on Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Windows Server, …, Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd, …, with MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Oracle, …, not to mention the different browsers people use it with (we support down to IE8) and operating systems the clients use.
Anyway, I digress. ownCloud is also a synchronization service for desktop and mobile devices. In fact we don’t have any system-to-system syncing built-in.
The mobile clients and especially the desktop client have gained a lot in stability in the last few weeks – if you’ve tried before, I encourage you to give it another shot. We’re also in the process of reworking the design for the mobile apps. Overall simplification, better visual design. Let me know if you have any specific feedback.