Lucky for us it is open source? I was hoping to use it to replace Dropbox but they kept not taking my money... small wonder they went for the acquisition.

> it is open source

Not exactly. The clients are open source, but the central server isn't. See https://github.com/keybase/client/issues/6374. It might be possible to reverse engineer the server, but it would be a lot more involved than just forking the project.

That's unfortunate. I assume Zoom would have no interest in open sourcing the server software now that they've paid for the cryptographic expertise and code, but I think the previous owners might have been willing to... surprised they never did, maybe they decided they'd never get bought if they did.

A shame, it seemed to work really well. Maybe Zoom will be willing to take my money to be a DropBox end-to-end encrypted cloud sync service instead, they seem to be fairly on the ball with responding to complaints and that they decided it was worth buying Keybase to improve their service maybe they'll come out alright.

Wishful thinking maybe =)

The best scenario would be if this led to keybase open-sourcing the server as well. I have no idea how likely that is.

Is the server open source? I know that the client is, but I haven’t found sources for the backend.

It's not: https://github.com/keybase/client/issues/6374

What was the main difference with this a drop box though? It's encrypted?

The data is stored after encryption by client which are open source (and by using boring© crypto schemes).

While it's a cool tool, what exactly was the (commercial) potential Keybase had? I could never tell.

Ability to assign roles(groups) to heterogeneous users.

So imagine being able to add [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected] to cool-dev-group and them being to instantly be able to access the relevant chat rooms, git repos, shared folders, etc. If password/secret management had been added, then access to that too could have been allowed. If SSO/Oauth had been added, then any service could be covered by this sort of role-based-access-control-for-anyone.

So no user has been created, they're using their existing identity to access new resources. With some extra coding, triggers and events could have been added to do things like auto-sign public keys.

Secure filesharing and chat, for starters. Secure digital wallets tied to identity. It was a wallet platform I'd actually be interested in.

Encrypted git repos with ties to team chat...

That's what I've been using it for lately, it was becoming my main Git platform. I'm sad that this looks like the end of that.