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A comment on Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up. Parent comment

Re:Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up by sciurus on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @08:51PM (#9775366)
There's still no official google drive client you can install on linux. WHich is bizarre, considering chromebooks run linux and obviously sync with drive.
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Re:Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up by r00fus on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @09:19PM (#9775459)
That is not bizarre at all - it'd be like complaining about OSX apps not working on Mach BSD even though that's what OSX is built on top of.

When companies build on open source, they generally don't make it easy for you to use the base product without their extensions.

So for all intents and purposes in terms of a platform, OSX != BSD and ChromeOS != Linux.

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Re:Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up by Crito on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @09:28PM (#9775492)
Google has a history of acknowledging the existence of consumers on Linux, and has published Linux binaries for various closed source products in the past. I am writing this comment to you at this moment using one such piece of software.

Does Apple have a history of publishing applications built for non-Apple BSDs?

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Re:Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up by aruggirello on Thursday June 25, 2015 @03:57AM (#9776505)
Well, Apple gave us CUPS. Plus, recently they announced Swift will be supported on Linux, too. Now I'd be really happy if they also ported iTunes to Linux (I'm currently forced to run the Windows version in VirtualBox) - or at least make their iOS devices more Linux-friendly. IMHO there is hope.
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Re:Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up by dagw on Thursday June 25, 2015 @04:04AM (#9776518)
Apple gave us CUPS.

CUPS was first released in 1999 and was adopted by most Linux distros soon after. Apple first adopted CUPS in 2003. It wasn't until 2007 before they bought the rights to the source code, hired the main developer and took over the development.

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Re:Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up by cmurf on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @09:24PM (#9775478)
It's not a linux kernel issue, it's a distribution "no bundled libraries" and packaging issue. Google doesn't want to maintain dozens of binaries (and their respective packages) in order to support dozens of distributions. It may be that containers can sorta solve this, a single container that can run on any distro that has container support. But this is still not anywhere as straight forward as say OS X where DropBox (like many other applications) are simply drag and drop into /Applications to install, or uninstall.
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Re:Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up by rogerbinns on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @09:58PM (#9775565)
This is the same Google that has Chrome bundled for Linux? And Google Earth, Android SDKS/virtual machines, and who knows what else.

They can and have done packaged Linux software.

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Re:Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up by x0054 on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @09:50PM (#9775552)
If BTSync can support everything under the sun by statically linking their single binary, why can't Google.
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Re:Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up by bch on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @09:31PM (#9775503)
Google should punt and release a library and let application developers worry about working with distributions.

Edit: never mind. They have published specs. Are they not good/stable or have no devs stepped up yet? https://developers.google.com/drive/web/about-sdk

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Re:Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up by gecko on Thursday June 25, 2015 @11:26AM (#9778585)
Probably a mix of that and the fact that Drive supports a hybrid of traditional folders and tagging that you can't ignore (it would break things) and you can't cleanly implement on Linux (there's no real reliable mechanism to support tags that works on XFS, ext4, and Btrfs, which seems like the bare minimum today you'd need to cover).
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