[tahoe-dev] Free/Open alternatives to Dropbox

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

Here is a cool article in LWN about DVCS-Autosync.

http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/442841/8d47f92c9e298910/

A few other "Dropbox-ish" tools also get mentioned: SparkleShare,
git-annex, unison, ShareBox.

Also Wuala, although that is a proprietary system and therefore not as
interesting to me as the others.

One person mentions Tahoe-LAFS.

I would be very happy to see Tahoe-LAFS serve in this sort of use case.

One way to do that would be to write glue code to let Tahoe-LAFS serve
as a "back end" in some of these schemes. DVCS-Autosync, in
particular, was designed with git in mind but allegedly can use any
distributed revision control tool for its back end. That would provide
Tahoe-LAFS's provider-independent security (confidentiality and
integrity) properties to the users of the front-end scheme, but I
assume it would not provide them with Tahoe-LAFS's secure sharing and
access control.

Here is the part of DVCS-Autosync where they define the interface to
the back end:

http://gitorious.org/dvcs-autosync/dvcs-autosync/blobs/8a19c6da18067330a6ed8a11e704678b5b741b70/dvcs-autosync#line538

That reminds me that Jimmy Tang has successfully integrated Tahoe-LAFS
as a back end for git-annex. I wonder how that is working for him:

http://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2011-April/006313.html

See also ticket #601, which is either alternative or complementary to
this approach. :-)

http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/601# add 'tahoe sync'
command, for bidirectional synchronization

Regards,

Zooko