Re:Congrats Dropbox
by jesseendahl on Saturday March 24, 2018 @06:04PM
(#16669266)
Dropbox is a lot more than a GUI on top of rsync. Even purely from an engineering standpoint (ignoring product & design) that's incorrect.
You might enjoy this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE4gwstWhmc
You mention a bunch of filesystems (some of which with much better scalability than Dropbox), but omit Rsync. Rsync works with any of these filesystems.
The most successful data distribution systems which predate these are from the '90s and before Usenet (esp volume with the binaries) and scene (or FXP). However, the former is mostly public data and the latter is inherently insecure.
Dropbox was nothing special. It was just the first popular one who had a GUI on top of Rsync, and who sold data storage within a package. Its essentially a lucky shot.
WebDAV works great for client-server, but it has a disadvantage: locking works terrible. OwnCloud/NextCloud uses WebDAV, btw.