Gitdocs: Open-source Dropbox using Ruby + Git

This is a good effort and it's always good to see people using a SCM repository as a collaborative document store. Even better that it has such a nice simple command-line.<p>However, all four things that make Dropbox Dropbox for me are missing:<p>* A UI so straightforward that my technophobic mother-in-law (or even a project manager) can use it<p>* Block-level sync (in particular, the rsync algorithm) with server-side dedupe on binary files (git is suboptimal in my experience on large binaries, and it's unclear whether this project resolves the issue). Incidentally, integrating that with simple versioning behaviour is what lifts dropbox into the "Ooh, clever, I see what you did there" category for me.<p>* Local-area peer-to-peer sync.<p>* Click-to-share instant access granting.<p>Building an open-source tool that has all four is on my to-do list. Unfortunately it's quite far down that list. Anyone else having a crack at it?

From my perspective, the main Dropbox feature that all the "thin layer on top of VCS" clones miss is the conflict-resolution behavior of Dropbox. If both you and someone else edit a file called "stuff.txt" at the same time, you'll end up with two files: "stuff.txt" and "stuff.txt (other guy's version)". Neither person's changes are blown away, there's never any merge conflicts, and the history remains linear.<p>I'll have to see if Gitdocs does anything like that.

Git is terrible at dealing with big binary files and by terrible I mean very slow, it's optimized for text files only. Linus wrote about that a while ago, you can google it.

While I'm a big fan of open source in general and of using standard components yadda yadda yadda<p>For me the biggest draw of Dropbox is that it's not self hosted but that it's run by an entity that's 1) large enough to not go away any time soon, 2) fairly unscary (unlike, say, facebook), and 3) 100% dedicated to keeping the service running so I don't have to worry about my files anymore.<p>Self hosting only gets you 2).

For me the biggest misssing feature of all approaches to online folder synchronisation (including Dropbox, in a sad way) is secure backend encryption. For me, this includes an open source client and a free choice, where to store my files. Ideally I could have several decrypting clients to work with my files, while an arbitrary amount of encrypted clients would store my files on various backends, one of which could be a company offering this as service.

I would use this for my company if I were able to install something as an OS X app. I'm not comfortable on the command line, and I want contractors and new employees to come on board just as easy (I don't want to have to admin their machines.)<p>This is very interesting indeed. I wouldn't mind paying for an OS X app that would take care of this problem (the setting up on each machine).

Does this address any of the issues people have with SparkleShare? (Another dropbox clone based on git - <a href="http://www.sparkleshare.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.sparkleshare.org/</a>)

Hm, if I use this to store large files 50+ MB that don't compress well, won't the local repo grow out of proportion soon? Git will keep around the history. Or is this disabled?

How does this compare to lipsync in terms of binary files?<p><a href="https://github.com/philcryer/lipsync" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/philcryer/lipsync</a>

This is cool. A simple hack, but opens up many possibilites like versioning and remote backup of documents.