Dropbox (dropbox.com) has been getting a lot of attention in the open source community lately, mainly due to the fact that people think the client is open source.
Before i start, id like to say that i do think Dropbox is pretty neat and i also think close source has its place in the world, though i would always personally choose the open alternative.
Anyway… “Dropbox is not open?!?” you say, “But the source is available on their webpage?”. This is correct and very very wrong at the same time. The Nautilus plugin is open, but contrary to common belief, it is NOT the dropbox client. Once you’ve installed the Nautilus plugin (which is 66k) it will download 35megs of closed souce in the background into the folder ~/.dropbox-dist. Without asking permission.
The Nautilus plugin only does a few things like enabling the dropbox right-click menu, handling the icon-overlay in nautilus and so forth. Basically the Nautilus plugin only handles the “visual stuff”:
All the “real stuff”, network- and filewise, happens in a “small” 7.8meg (closed-source) daemon called“Dropboxd”.The plugin talks to the daemon through a named pipe (fifo pipe) located in ~/.dropbox/. Dropboxd itself is made in python and compiled into a binary.
It uses a lot of well known libraries like rsync, zlib, the bz2-lib, SDL, libfreetype, openssl, sqllite ect.ect, all downloaded in binary form through the before mentioned background process and saved to ~/.dropbox-dist.I havent checked the licenses of the libs used, but i assume they all allow for closed source distribution.
It doesnt bother me that people make closed source software using open source libraries* (except when Microsoft does it), but what does bother me, is the feeling of being tricked into installing a closed-source app on my open source system.
* when they give a little code back to the community. Imagine how fast open source would move if all proprietery projects gave back 5-10% code.
