Open Source Alternative To Dropbox? 482
garry_g writes "While 'the cloud' may be one of the major buzzwords of the Internet industry, anybody concerned with security and privacy will most likely not touch it with a 10-foot pole. While I am guilty of using Dropbox for occasional data storage or quick picture snaps with my Android phone, I do watch out not to store anything important on there (or incriminating), no matter what the "privacy policy" may be. I was wondering: what useful alternative is there to Dropbox on the FOSS market, which will allow access by both windows/linux boxes, but also mobile devices (specifically Android). I know there are front-end add ons for Windows (and Linux tools of course) e.g. for SVN, but most likely no implementations for mobile use as far as I can tell... And, of course, the backend should run on a Linux box ;)"
rsync (Score:4, Interesting)
I believe that rsync is able to cover most of dropbox's features, if not all. By using rsync you aren't bound to any service provider or even internet access. You may not have the flashy web interface and flashy android/desktop client but it is somewhat trivial to implement a front-end to rsync that abstracts all implementation details. If you wish to have some sort of history log then you can always set your clients to implement some form of incremental backup of your repository.
Re:Sparkleshare (Score:3, Interesting)
By the time any of these open source projects push out anything worthwhile the world will have moved on and nobody will be looking for their clones. And even then they'll have none of the simplicity and ease of use of the originals, let alone the integration into other software. Seriously, when is the FOSS world going to take the lead on creating something cool for a change instead of rushing after the trend du jour ?
Re:Sparkleshare (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, you had Mozilla who had spent years rewriting their code only to push out a bloated hulk. Then Phoenix came along and basically wrote a light-weight shell on top of the browser engine and threw out all unnecessary non browser crap. Not very revolutionary (though a great browser at the time.) In facts the parts Mozilla pushed as being most revolutionary, like XUL, are the ones that really failed. I think if you look at real innovation in the browser space you'll find it either at the client side with AJAX, HTML5 (started by a consortium of Apple, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software), but especially Apple taking KHTML and using it to create webkit which spread everywhere. It's hard to imagine mobile browsing today without Webkit. So kudos to the KDE team for that.