Ubuntu One: interesting concept!

[Tommy Trussell]

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 6:54 AM, Marius Gedminas <marius at pov.lt> wrote:
> On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 08:05:26PM -0400, Brian McKee wrote:
>> UbuntuOne as I understand it (more research to do) is not fully open,
>> so has no inherent superiority over Dropbox
>
> Both the Dropbox client and the server are closed source.  (The shims
> integrating with Nautilus are open, but they rely on a closed source
> daemon running on your machine.)
>
> The UbuntuOne client is fully open source, AFAIU.
>
> So there is some slight superiority, for those who care about the
> freeness of the software.  (But they will still be unhappy about the
> UbuntuOne server being closed.)


For me the "killer feature" in Dropbox is automatic versioning; if I
doze off and blow away the file I'm working on I can always pull up a
previous version. The Ars Technica article in the original post said
"Ubuntu One lacks some of Dropbox's advanced features, such as support
for file versioning and history. Dropbox is also ahead in performance
and offers a few other unique advantages, like cross-platform
compatibility."

SO I hope some of that gets into a truly open solution. In the
meantime Dropbox is quite beguiling and satisfying despite not being
truly open.