The company that I really hope doesn't sell out is Dropbox | Hacker News Reader

The company that I really hope doesn't sell out is Dropbox

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52 pointsidiginous12 comments

There's not a single good reason in this post why Dropbox shouldn't sell to anyone interested in paying, nor are there any reasons stated why Dropbox should open source.

Here's a good reason why Dropbox should never open source: Dropbox can never loose my files. Ever. If they do my trust in them is gone and I go elsewhere.

If Dropbox where to open source and then some dipshit provided a Dropbox based storage solution with a flakey backend, then Dropbox's brand trust is (almost) equally fucked.

"There's not a single good reason in this post why Dropbox shouldn't sell to anyone interested in paying, nor are there any reasons stated why Dropbox should open source."

Sure there is. "I hope they don't" and "I hope they do" respectively, for correct values of "I".

Well, I suppose you could argue about whether that's a "good" reason, but people are still allowed to hope people do things without rigorous analysis of whether or not it is in those people's best interests to do so with cited references to economic theories and the disputes swirling around said theories, yes?

It's a blog post. It's not a bad one, though I'm not sure why it's the #1 link on HN right now since it is literally just one person's "hopes".

The "dipshit" in question won't be naming it dropbox, releasing the code doesn't mean they would be forfeiting the trademark. But yes, Winer really didn't provide a good reason for dropbox not to sell to anyone willing to buy.

Warning: Content-free post.

Thanks. Interestingly, I cannot upmod you because I did not read it.

Twitter doesnt make much sense to me-exactly what is the gain there? One company he didnt mention which I think would make sense is Amazon-I beleive Dropbox runs entirely on the AWS stack already, and the service drives decent consumer growth for S3.

"If I were a Twitter board member I'd seriously consider merging with them."

can you explain this a little more?

First sensible comment about Facebook. All the outcry now is somewhat mystifying because who didn't expect Facebook to start monetizing the private information? How did we all expect them to make billions of dollars otherwise?

The right way to treat Facebook is strictly as a public billboard. If you woulnd't tack it to the board in a public square, don't put it on Facebook.

It would have been better had they been completely public from the very first day.

Does Dropbox depend on Amazon S3? How independent of that?

Dropbox has saved my arse multiple times.

And ESPECIALLY not to Microsoft. Please.

> On the other hand, the technology that Dropbox has mastered is so important that there should be an open source equivalent that we can all deploy, so we can have Dropboxes for sensitive info we don't want to share with them.

FTP?

Yes, I understand that Dropbox is a lot more than just FTP, and I love it, but if you're asking for a non-Dropbox dropbox... then you should just put an ftp server on an old box and be done with it.

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