Spacedrive is an open source cross-platform file explorer written in Rust
github.com
github.com
Only thing from the Roadmap in spacedrive I see, which looks really interesting, is encrypting on the fly using stored keys. A file Manager with built in truecrypt like functionality would be great, let's see how they implement it.
Workers also sounds nice, I would like to see multithreaded file operations. Maybe they can followup with wildcard operations on the filesystem.
But in general it feels like they are trying to cram a lot of (already existing) different tools into one. I am not rally seeing the value proposition here.
One, it's promising cross platform. Really really cross platform: Download for macOS Windows Linux iOS watchOS Android. That's a big audience that can make what they already do potentially better.
Second, it's cross system. It lets you work across your computers. I think this is one of the biggest gaps open source tends to have; it's not enough to make great single system software. The modern expectation is an ability to work a ross machines, to have on demand access to a variety of data.
So this both intends to be usable on a huge range of systems, and it intends to work across systems. $2m is still an incredible hell of a lot for open source to raise, just a wild amount of money, but these characteristics it has - that it has general appeal, that it is connective software - both to me explain some of the allure & contrast against what most open source software looks like.