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Comment by fit2rule | Hacker News Reader

I'm still not using Dropbox. I absolutely detest the idea that I'm relying on a 3rd party for a feature that I consider should be built into every modern Operating System. At the point when OS vendors relinquished to the Web 2.0 Cult their responsibilities for such features as easy filesharing, the world lost something.

Absolutely, its great that people can share files this way. But absolutely, its terrible that it requires fragments of an OS feature to be distributed among multiple, external, unreliable entities.

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I think the biggest OSes _have_ integrated something like this, but unfortunately they don't work well between operating systems. So if I'm on an Android phone, an iPad, and dual boot Windows and Ubuntu then it doesn't really help. Dropbox does allow me to backup and sync on all of those.

I would love a simple integrated file hosting solution built into OS X, where my computer is actually the host instead of iCloud.

I think, though, that the lack of high upload bandwidth for almost every Internet consumer makes this less useful today. However, if a big OS would actually develop and ship it, perhaps we'd have users demanding greater upload bandwidth and help push forward the idea of the "person as Internet producer", versus just the current "person as a consumer".

>I think, though, that the lack of high upload bandwidth for almost every Internet consumer makes this less useful today.

How do your files get uploaded at high speed to Dropbox right now?

And after all, upload bandwidth is quite arbitrary - again, its the marketing people in control when the technologists should be, actually.

Why should OS vendors also supply cloud storage?

Who would provide this cloud storage for Linux distributions?

I think the point is that your computer connected to the internet is your cloud storage. There's no reason why that functionality needs to be farmed off to a third party.

A cloud requires at least 2 computers to be online at the same time. This is not the common case for people.

Only because the feature is not in the OS. Were it actually in the OS, people would leave their computers on in order to share things. It makes sense.

Besides vectorjohn's point, which is completely true, there's also a point about upstream speeds. Considering that most of us have asymmetric connections, sharing a big file with multiple people would be a pain if I had to upload it over and over again, while with a intermediary I can just upload it once and let it push to clients at greater speeds (and in parallel).

skydrive, icloud, ubuntu one?

In fact, they all do.

Apple, Microsoft and Canonical all provides Cloud Storage and "syncing" tools. Be it iCloud, SkyDrive or UbuntuOne.

Umm .. because accessing such resources as files in a shared way is a duty of the OS, after all. Or, to put it another way, lets rephrase your question: "Why should OS vendors supply drivers for filesystem _X_?" "Why should OS vendors provide a way for users to share files, at all?" The answer: because it is the duty of the OS to provide such features.

Another thing: who says we need a Cloud model in order to deliver the same results as Dropbox? It could be just as easily possible to enable filesharing on a local workstation that is accessible to the public/chosen-users over the Internet, after all. The technology exists to implement these features entirely without relying on a Cloud at all: its called 'the computer in front of you'.

The "cloud" aspect of the feature is not actually necessary to deliver this kind of filesharing functionality - this is only a marketing gimmick that is used to justify 3rd-party, commercial access to ones information. Remember, if you're not paying for it you're not a customer: you're a product.

The features that Dropbox provide should already be in the OS. I create a Shared folder, I administer it with local OS features, I publish.

I believe that OS vendors were asleep at the wheel during this Web 2.0 cult phase, but I hope they wake up soon and relieve us of the security and privacy nightmare that is Web 2.0.

The thing that helped Dropbox take off (at least in my circles) was that it is on the cloud. I don't have to have a computer somewhere running all the time. In fact, I don't. Almost nobody I chat with regularly does.

Got a smartphone?

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