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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Google released BSD-licensed Drive integration a decade ago. The only reason there isn't a "Linux Drive client" in the sense that you implied is the complete lack of initiative among open source developers.

If you want a mature, maintained Drive integration on Linux you can have it right now with ChromeOS.

https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...

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If open source developers were going to do all the work, why would they do it for Google's walled garden, rather than Syncthing?

And that's why we now have N open source third party syncthing interfaces and no clone of the GDrive client.

Exactly. Which is fine.

* Google doesn't see enough gain in supporting a Drive client for Linux

* Linux users don't see gain in feeding the beast

... so nobody dedicating their finite lives to solving this problem is win-win.

It is not reasonable to demand that open-source developers build a product for one of the world's largest companies because it is "too hard" for that company to ship a functioning product.

If the competitor offers https://www.dropbox.com/install-linux, developed in the open with a GPL license, is it reasonable to tell other people to take on the cost of building and maintaining a client for your paid service?

Which aspect of chromiumos drive integration and sync engine is not "developed in the open"? The dropbox source is distributed as a tarball and if you want to contribute to it "contact us". That doesn't meet my definition of "in the open".

I didn't claim that ChromiumOS's code wasn't developed in the open. The fact remains that Google neither supports nor provides a Google Drive client for Debian and its derivatives or Redhat and its derivatives, while its competitor does. It is reasonable for people to complain about this.

is it reasonable to tell other people to take on the cost of building and maintaining a client for your paid service?

Google barely squeaked by with $76 billion in revenue last year. It only has 156,500 employees.

You can't possibly expect something like that from a company this resource-constrained.

$480,000 per employee is quite decent, but hardly radical these days.

They're actually not even as "resource constrained" as this comment implies, as the numbers here are off.

Per https://abc.xyz/investor/, Alphabet made $75 billion in Revenue in Q4. They made $76 billion in net income for all of 2021.

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